#was that i telling him which structures were part of the fairgrounds and where in the city he could still visit them etc

[neathyingenue]

i got to use my 1890s obsession for good today!! only one of my 4th graders was at school during my last lesson so we just read a few books he had, including one about the invention of the ferris wheel. that led him to ask about the chicago world's fair which i happen to know about because of kaz rowe's youtube video and also a poptropica game i played as a kid and also because it's the 1890s and of course i love that shit! so i basically just infodumped and he was actually interested? (this student usually is super checked out) then the great chicago fire came up so he asked about that and we talked about how the 'mrs. o'leary's cow' thing was anti-immigrant propaganda! never thought i'd ever use my 19th century weirdness in my k-4 literacy tutoring job but here we are and it made my day

[ironmandeficiency]

ren fair season

pairing: modern!pero tovar / reader

word count: 3223

summary: when his soulmate dyes their hair at the beginning of ren fair season, pero is less than pleased with the results. after all, who would possibly take a rainbow-haired swordsman seriously?

a/n: this was for my secret santa giftee @nolanell as part of @ohnopoe ‘s secret santa gift exchange so disregard that it’s four months late. thank you @pettyprocrastination for enjoying my dumbass ideas bc this only got accomplished bc i remembered one of our many conversations that centered around hot grumpy men

stepping outside in full garb, pero is appreciative of the warm breeze that greets him outside the door of his truck. it feels far too long since he’s been back to the seven acre plot in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by vendor’s tents and fun costumes and the smell of turkey legs lingering in the air.

even from the grassy area outside the gates that served as the parking lot, he could hear everything being set up for the bustling day that makes the fair worth all the organized chaos. the minstrels were practicing together, vendors were laying out their wares, and the knights were riding their horses through the grounds for a leisurely stroll before preparing for the 10 o’clock tournament, the first of three that would be had that day.

the joyful cacophony brings him peace, as much as it surprised him at first. he originally joined the local renaissance fair as payment for a bet lost to will five years ago (that night was a harsh reminder that will had a better poker face than he let on), but found that he rather enjoyed it. so he kept coming back ever since, running the dueling ring that was always set up next to the archery and axe throwing, both of which are run by will.

pero’s grandfather taught him to duel as early as possible. days spent training with him were the best highlights of pero’s childhood. spending his summers there, him and his grandfather would enjoy a big breakfast before going outside to duel for hours until lunch, then go right back at it again until dinner. as pero grew older, the swords changed from carved wood to steel, dull to sharp.

once the organizers were told (by will) of his skillset, it was only natural that pero be in charge of the arena where they offered “duels”. sure they may only be fighting with foam-ended staffs at the fair, but pero found it enjoyable to put an occasional asshole in their place after they cop an attitude.

so here he stands, for his sixth year, in his full garb with one of his favorite prop swords sheathed at his side. there was a chill in the air as he entered the fairgrounds, the kind of chill that forebodes a day where the hot cocoa flows with the same lack of inhibition as the mead.

there’s always been something special, daresay magical, about the ren fair. stepping through the threshold wipes you clean of the woes that plague you outside of the gates and lifts your spirits without breaking a sweat. he can see it in the eyes of many of the fair goers and even his fellow workers, that innocent childlike wonder that comes with the fantasy world built by everyone around.

from the knights at the jousts to the woman reading fortunes behind the belly dancers’ stage, everyone has a hand in making the fair what it is. in all his years he’s never felt anything but a peaceful camaraderie with his fellow cast mates. with surprisingly few cast changes through the years it’s easy to find a sense of familiarity. there’s structure in a strong cast, and where there’s structure, there’s routine.

that’s why he’s taken aback when one of the knights, lord andrew, makes a comment about his hair, of all things.

“aye pero! nice hair!”

he can tell andrew is being genuine, the man has never been anything but kind and amicable in the four years he’s been a cast member. with that in mind, why in the world would he give such a ridiculous compliment?

pero never changed his hair outside of regular maintenance. it’s stayed the same style for years, occasionally getting a little shaggy but easily trimmed back down. he’s never dyed it either; he just let it be however it decides to on its own. he doesn’t think anything has changed, but then that wouldn’t explain the strikingly odd compliment.

all pero could do was thank the man as if he knew what was happening and continue his trek to the dueling grounds.

“pero, i love your hair!”

“those colors look really good on you!”

“lookin’ good, tovar!”

the confusion has his mind in a chokehold by the time he arrives at the dueling grounds where will is perched atop one of the axe throwing targets. upon seeing pero, the man’s face immediately shifts from nonchalance to barely contained glee.

“my friend,” will begins as he hops from his perch and starts to walk rather quickly towards pero, “your hair looks—“

“i’ve gotten no less than ten comments about my hair since i arrived five minutes ago! if you dare speak a word about my hair, your fate will not be pleasant!” he’s so damn tired of this already. was this a scheme set up by everyone to bother him specifically? there had to be something up with everyone to cause such an uproar about his appearance.

will takes note of his friend’s frustration and confusion, even though he’s confused himself. how could pero not know why everyone’s been talking about his hair? it looks holographic, for crying out loud!

now he knows his friend well enough to be confident in the fact that he didn’t do this to himself. rainbows were never really pero’s thing, to be honest. but was his friend really daft enough to pretend people wouldn’t definitely say something about his silver and rainbow hair?

for all the things pero was, a fool was not one of them. so will had only one possible hypothesis for why pero caught an attitude: he simply didn’t know.

“when was the last time you looked in a mirror?”

will wasn’t shocked when his friend had to put actual thought into when he had last used a mirror. the only ones he used even relatively often were attached to his truck, and even then, the man drove with too much trust in fate.

“… three days ago.”

will can’t find it in him to be exasperated any more than he already is. without a word, he pulls his phone from the hidden compartment inside his vest and opens the camera, pointing it towards the spaniard.

oh how he wishes he had pressed record before handing his phone to the rainbow-haired duelist. it would be one of his biggest regrets in life because everyone deserved to see the pure shock on pero’s face as his brain registered his rainbow hair.

he wanted the rainbow gone, and he wanted it gone now. but there was nothing he could do now; he was already at the fair and the gates would open to guests in less than an hour. he was stuck as the rainbow duelist for the day, and he was not happy.

“who goes to a renaissance fair in the winter?! it’s unheard of!” you lamented to your cousin. ren fairs were summertime events! you’re supposed to put on your layered costume to spite the heat of the sun and cool down with the help of strong mead! but ally, your stubborn cousin, would not be deterred by your attempts to sway her opinion, sticking to her guns and emphasizing how grand of a time you’ll have not sweating buckets.

wearing the extravagant layered costumes out of necessity rubbed you the wrong way, so you took your summertime fae costume and made some modifications to gear it more towards autumn and called it a day. simply by changing some of the greens in your outfit to warm sienna and mahogany and gold (and adding sleeves and a new pair of orange tights), you were now a personification of autumn in fae form.

“this fair has been happening in winter here for nearly a decade and you didn’t know about it?! and to think you call yourself a fair junkie!” you couldn’t really argue with that. your cousin, who you hadn’t seen in years prior to her current visit, found this fair with a mere facebook search without even visiting your town. the fact you’ve lived here for several years but had yet to attend this fair, or even know about it, was in fact rather appalling.

“plus,” she adds with a wink, “this is a great chance to show off my handiwork from yesterday!”

you do concede that it’s a fair point. your top-of-her-class beauty school graduate cousin dyed your hair in what she calls holographic colors yesterday afternoon; for free, no less. your childhood summers were spent being her guinea pig for whatever style she cooked up that day (they weren’t always this stellar though) and she has more than outdone herself this time.

she’s currently wearing what looks to be one of the heaviest gowns you’ve ever seen with a hooded cloak to match. it’s absolutely gorgeous, but nothing you would willingly force yourself into. looks like at least someone is gonna sweat at the fair today despite the cold.

she emerges from the bathroom, hands fidgeting with dazzling earrings she bought at the last fair you went to together. “and you’re driving us there! i already told you what happened the last time i drove while wearing three petticoats!”

you chuckle lightly as you help her put on the earrings. “how can i forget about you backing into a state trooper at a stop light because you couldn’t tell which pedal was which? it’s a classic!”

ally huffs and swats your shoulder on the way out the door. “don’t judge me till you’ve tried it! now hurry up so we can get a good parking spot!”

you’ve never gotten so many compliments on your hair in your life as you have today. fellow attendees and cast members alike have told you in various ways how magical it looks, and you never hesitate to give ally the credit for her work. two members of the royal court even told you that the lights strung in the nearby trees made you glow.

through the entire day, your cousin never failed to remind you of how right she was in suggesting you both come to the fair.

spotting a row of benches next to one of the concession stands, you and ally plop down onto the antiquated wood. after taking a break from visiting vendors by watching the jester’s improv show and the jousting tournament (lord andrew gave ally a red rose that matched his colors shortly before he won), there was a pleasant buzzing ache in your bones.

“are you exhausted already? we still have so much to do!” you’re unsure as to where she finds all this energy, but you’re going to have to ask her who her supplier is. it’s cold and foggy, and if you hadn’t been consistently drinking cocoa you would have frozen stiff long before now.

she reaches into her corset and pulls out the itinerary they hand out at the front gate, which she folded neatly before tucking it into her cleavage. after perusing it for a moment, she continues. “the belly dancers haven’t had their next show yet, and we haven’t even visited the far side of the grounds! there’s no telling what we’d find!”

the grounds were fairly large, a good several acres if you had to guess, and you haven’t seen everything yet. and truthfully, very seldom does anyone want to leave the fair after a fun day, even if it was colder than you would normally be comfortable in with your lack of layers.

“fine,” you relent. “after we watch the belly dancers, we can see what’s on the far end of the grounds. then we leave. deal?”

she’s clapping giddily after getting her way, feeling proud that she convinced you to stay a little longer. “deal! their next show starts in ten minutes, which gives us time to look at a couple of the stores close by their stage before we’ll need to get a good seat!”

in a flash she’s off the bench and taking your hand, most likely about to drag you towards the bazaar, the biggest vendor location in the entire fair that just happens to be mere feet from the belly dancers’ stage.

“wait! you, with the rainbow hair! please stop for a moment!”

you don’t know the voice but you turn when you recognize the sound of hooves accompanying it. ally notices you stopping once she’s jerked away from her pursuit of the bazaar, confused why you paused when you just agreed to follow her lead.

lord andrew dismounts from hemingway (you learned his horse’s name when you both fed him carrots after the tournament) and the look in his eye is one you can’t quite place. all you know is that whatever he has on his mind is urgent, and you hope everything is okay. either he’s a fabulous actor or there’s something genuinely serious on his mind.

ally must think he’s still in character because she addresses him with the chirpy cadence she carries when in costume, seemingly blind to the intensity behind the man’s eyes.

he doesn’t have a single thought to spare towards your cousin, which is strange considering the heart eyes he had for her earlier. his question is aimed at you without a moment’s hesitation. “forgive my interruption, but have you been to visit the duelist and the archer at the far end of the grounds yet?”

you find it a peculiar question, but you answer it earnestly. “if it’s at the far end of the grounds, we planned on visiting after watching the belly dancers. is there something important there?”

“i strongly insist you hurry there now. they both leave in fifteen minutes and there’s someon-thing i think you really need to see there before you miss the chance.” he paused briefly to take a breath before continuing. “i know this is peculiar, but i promise it is important.”

you and ally exchange confused looks. there is no malice behind his eyes or words, and he was very friendly in your conversations before and after the tournament. but above all that, intuition was telling you to hurry to the far end without any further hesitation. “we can head there now, right ally?”

you phrased it as a question, even though you would have gone with or without her. nothing had ever felt more true in your gut than this, which caught you slightly off guard.

she must have seen something in your eyes that told her that you had to do this. “yes of course. thank you lord andrew for delivering such important information.”

you’re already starting to lead ally the same way she was going to moments before. there had to be something important there, you could feel it. you shouted a goodbye to the knight over your shoulder as you departed. “thank you, lord andrew! you and hemingway have a great afternoon! we hope to see you again soon!”

he waves with a smile, seemingly elated at your eagerness to follow his advice. “thank you! enjoy the rest of your day as well!”

“i have to admit,” pero smirked, twirling the fake sword around like a baton in the dueling ring. “it’s a little bit more gratifying to defeat smug fools with rainbow hair than it is without it.”

will immediately latches into the admission. “i told you the hair would grow on you! i called it!” the pride swells into his entire demeanor as he joins his friend in the ring.

the past twenty minutes have been a ghost town. it would frequently happen like this: several minutes of nothing, not another soul to be seen, but then a swarm will arrive and the lines will be bizarrely long. only one thing thus far has cured their shared boredom in these lulls in activity, and that is a good duel.

pero has dueled will dozens of times, and the spaniard has won every single one. it’s a matter of pride at this point. his friend is indeed a formidable opponent, but not once has he bested pero’s lifelong skill. he’s gotta give it to the blond though; he puts up a fight every time with almost unwarranted enthusiasm.

“you may have,” pero smirks, “but can you call who will win our next match?” he snags the other staff from where it leaned against a stump, tossing it in the air towards will as an invitation.

will catches the staff mid-flight and once it’s comfortable in his hands, he immediately lunges for his friend with a smile.

will’s offensive maneuvers were expertly deflected by pero’s impenetrable defense. the sound of staff against staff echoed along the north wind, neither man holding back.

their knowledge of each other’s tactics run deep into their veins, what every look in the eyes and shuffling of the feet translates to in the ring. years of duels and teaming up during occasional brawls when getting drinks ends up more than the two bargained for.

that’s why the archer was rightfully worried when he got through pero’s defenses and landed a winning jab to the kidney. the spaniard didn’t even flinch at the impact, too distracted (will didn’t know pero could get distracted) by… something.

“pero, what-“

“cállate!”

taken aback by the abrupt change in attitude, will followed his friend’s gaze. and there, walking towards their stations, were two people — one of them with holographic hair.

he locked eyes with the other person, shock mirrored on their face. she too must have noticed the two with matching hair.

as you’re walking towards the dueling grounds, ally suddenly begins to swat your shoulder a little too hard to be comfortable. “ow! ally, why are you- oh.”

that was when you saw him.

he was in full dress with a sword on his hip, the staff he was using moments earlier with such precision hanging limply from his hand more akin to a wet noodle.

pero was stock still, watching your approach with hyper vigilance. the chances that two strangers at the ren fair would have the same holographic hair? slim to none. the chances of meeting his soulmate here? microscopic (or so he thought). because there you are in full garb walking towards him.

the air is thick with tension and excitement, electricity building up the closer you get to the man in front of you. he’s making no sudden movements, almost as though he doesn’t want to frighten you away with the slightest twitch.

by the time you’ve approached the ropes that section off the dueling ring, it feels like hours have passed. it’s once you’re mere feet away from him that he moves to approach you, arms dangling over the top rope.

he seems to be contemplating his words very carefully, judging by the furrow of his brow and the gleam of caution in his eyes. seeing him up close is enchanting, from the rich chocolate of his eyes to the scar on his eye he’s got you ensnared without even trying.

you’re at a loss for words. how did you convince the universe to give you a soulmate this ruggedly and insanely handsome, even with rainbow hair that didn’t suit his aesthetic?

at long last your soulmate finds his tongue and you nearly collapse on the spot from the liquid gold that fills your ears. “would you like to duel, mi querida hada?”

[novaviis]

Snaibsel Renaissance Fair AU

Read Part One

Part Two

So the next day Artemis arrives at the fair before opening, just as all the other employees are shuffling in for the day. She’s not the only newbie, thank fuck, so she doesn’t feel completely out of place, but she is the only new Knight, so there’s that. There’s a set of tents and temporary structures at the very back of the fairgrounds, shielded off from the main fair, where the employees can change and take breaks and generally be “out of character”. She heads back there to get into her costume for the first time.

There’s a tunic, a pair of tights, and leather boots and belts that she’d given to wear for most of the day. A little heavy but not too bad. They even give her a side bag to hide her radio and a flask for water. These people have thought of everything. She’s already sweating at that point, just standing in the tent and pulling her hair back off her neck – but then she’s given her armour. Actually fucking armour. It’s not a full suit or anything, but it’s chainmail, a gorget, greaves, plated armguards and gloves, and a helmet. By the time she’s helped into it, she can barely move let alone ride a horse, and suddenly she’s thinking twice about this whole thing.

Artemis is given a while to get used to it, try walking around, but not long after she’s been dragged off to the stable with the other Knights to set up. She’s told she’ll be shadowing some asshole called the Grey Knight at first, just until she’s learned how everything works and gets some practice in on the tournaments. She only gets a brief glimpse of the guy, already in full armour and practicing sword work on a straw dummy. No big, she figures. Once she gets used to the armour, she’ll have this in the bag. She didn’t go through years of fencing and martial arts to look like an idiot around a bunch of renaissance nerds.

She spends the morning getting used to riding her horse, a gorgeous paint named Alice. After a bit of practice, she gets a little more comfortable, and no longer feels like one turn on her steed is going to send her toppling off. She even manages to knick the hoops set up on the training course with her lance – though it falls out of her hand every time. That Grey Knight jackass laughs from the sidelines every time, but at least he’s offering advice (most of which Artemis pretends to ignore with a heated glare). Still, by the time she’s finished for the morning and is allowed to take a break from the armour, she’s completely soaked with sweat and every step feels too light, like she’s been wearing weight all day – which, of course, she has.

So, she’s getting use to how things work around here. Great. She’s sent off to explore and get familiar with the grounds. The place is basically set up on an obscenely large plot of land surrounded by forest with a small lake in the middle. Marquis tents, large wooden buildings, and a mildly convincing Castle have all been set up around the perimeter, the other laneways patches of greenery winding through. Artemis hadn’t gotten a very good look at it the day before, but it really did look like a full medieval village. They had a marketplace surrounding a wide square, and the stables and tournament area across a small field where visitors were setting up picnics.

This wasn’t exactly her scene. Artemis hadn’t applied for the job because she loved this kind of thing. She wasn’t a history buff, definitely wasn’t into LARPing, and had no other interest in the renaissance. To be honest, she hadn’t really applied for the job at all. Artemis had been in and out of Juvie as a teenager, and likely would have ended up in Prison by now had it not been for things taking a different course. Her mother won custody of her at 17, and although it hadn’t changed things overnight, she had definitely turned out better than she would have with her father. After a few more brushes with the law, she was given a choice, back to Juvie, where her sentence would have been long enough to transfer her to an adult facility, or she could take a shorter sentence and then be sent to a correction and therapy program. Naturally, she took the latter option.

The facility had been a ranch, where she’d learned some hard truths and got her ass kicked by reality more than a few times. She was all the better for it, though. Artemis still remembered the night she’d left, her mother holding her hands in her lap with tears in her eyes, begging her to give this a chance before she ended up like her older sister. Jade was already in Prison, having left her newborn daughter with her Ex. Artemis had vowed then and there that she was going to put the work in to turn her life around. It hadn’t been easy, and she’d wanted to give up more than a few times, but she was nothing if not stubborn. She made it through the program, took online classes to finish school, and had been working to catch up ever since.

One of the driving influences through all of this, aside from her mother, was oddly enough her Parole Officer. Even once she’d been released from the program, Artemis had been on a strict probation. She couldn’t so much as jay-walk without landing her ass back in jail. Dinah Lance had assigned to her even before Artemis had moved in with her mom, and had been calm and understanding while taking absolutely none of her attitude. She’d been the first woman Artemis had really looked up to.

Dinah and her husband Oliver were actually old school Renaissance Fair veterans themselves. They came every summer as volunteers, as a sort of Robin Hood/Lady Marion duo that was always a hit with the crowd. When Dinah had learned that Artemis was looking for a job for the summer, and with her obvious qualifications in fighting and horseback riding, she’d suggested her to the head of the Fair committee.

So, now here she is. Artemis knows that this isn’t just Dinah trying to keep an eye on her, waiting for her to mess up, but she has enough trust issues that the doubt is a lingering voice in the back of her mind. She’s determined not to fuck it up this time, though. She’s not a stupid teenager anymore, she’s a young woman in her 20’s and she’s got something to prove.

Artemis takes her time, wandering around the fairgrounds before heading to the stalls for lunch. She passes through a shaded lane just off the marketplace, and passes a shack that smells so strongly of herbs and incense that it immediately draws her attention.

The fair’s esteemed Sorceress, as she understood from orientation, runs a little shop during the week where she sells “spells”, herbal teas, and other “magical” novelties. She also does tarot, palm, and tealeaf readings, and entertained with magic tricks. From what Artemis had heard, she’s a pretty popular attraction, but the shop doesn’t look busy and – fuck it, she’s still curious. So, she walks in.

Zatanna is just wrapping up with a customer when Artemis walks in, placing some crystals in a small bag and handing it to a little girl who’s there with her dad. The whole vibe of the place seems to be leaning far into all that new-agey bullshit, but she gets points for having an actual cauldron in the room (holding what appears to be spiced lemonade).

The moment Artemis walks in, Zatanna smiles and points her out to the little girl. “Well, look who’s come to visit! It’s our newest, bravest night, Dame Artemis!”

As the little girl turns around to see Artemis, just in her tunic, tights, and chainmail, she completely lights up. Artemis is a little awkward, but she’s plenty used to being around kids like her niece, so she gives her a wave but doesn’t quite play along as enthusiastically as Artemis. The girl’s dad eventually coaxes her out of the shop, leaving Artemis and Zatanna alone.

Artemis reaches into her side pouch, and hands Zatanna the Queen of Swords card. “Figured you might want this back.”

“Keep it,” Zatanna smiles as she rounds the other side of her little counter. “Consider it payment for me dragging you out into my show last night. I didn’t embarrass you too much, did I?”

“Nah, not at all,” Artemis lies. She pauses for a second, slipping the card back into her pouch before crossing her arms. “So, how’d you do it?”

Zatanna mirrors her and crosses her arm, leaning back against her counter. “Really? You’re gonna go with that question? Have you never heard of a Magician before?”

Artemis narrows her eyes. “You had someone plant it while I was at orientation.”

Zatanna shrugs. “In your sock? Not unless you’re that unobservant, and you don’t strike me as oblivious.”

“Sleight of hand while I was walking on stage.”

“You saw my hands the entire time.”

“So, what was it?”

Zatanna grins and leans in, cupping her hand around Artemis’ ear. “It was real magic.”

Artemis pulls back and rolls her eyes. “Yeah,” she says sarcastically, “okay.”

“How about this,” Zatanna laughs. “I might tell you how I did it if…” she pauses, looking somewhere over Artemis’ shoulder, before her smile widens. “If you defeat the Grey Knight in the tournament by the end of the summer.”

“What,” Artemis scoffs, “that douchebag who never takes off his helmet?”

Zatanna snickers. “No, the douchebag standing right behind you.”

By the time Artemis spins around, nearly knocking over a jar of Mugwort in the process, the Grey Knight himself is clamouring into the shack. Artemis steadies the jar, already glaring at Zatanna for laughing, before turning back to the other Knight. She tries to stammer out an excuse, or to play it off like she hadn’t said anything, but before she can say a word, the Knight cuts in.

“In my defense,” the Knight begins as he reaches up to his helmet. “I was only doing it today to fuck with you.” He takes off the helmet, and standing before her is a model of a man. Anyone despite their preferences, can agree that this guy looks like he was taken straight out of a Vogue cover. Thick, dark hair, stunning blue eyes, chiselled jawline. Artemis isn’t even attracted to him and she’s attracted to him. However, there’s something unmistakably familiar about him that she can’t quite place until he smiles at her…

“Holy shi- Grayson?!”

She went to middle school with this kid. He’s a year younger than her and had been such a little dweeb. Puberty had obviously been kind to him.

Dick bursts into obnoxious laughter, with Zatanna echoing him behind her. He sets his helmet down on a nearby table and slips his gloves off so he can shake his hair out. “Long time no see, Arty.”

“Arty here,” Zatanna places her hands on Artemis’ shoulders from behind, resting her chin on her knuckles, “was just telling me how she’s going to completely obliterate you in the tournaments.”

“That so?” Dick raises a brow.

Now, Artemis could deny it. She could be honest and say she’d never agreed to that – but fuck it. “Please,” she scoffs. “I used to take your lunch money. I could still hand you your ass.”

Dick grins. “Looking forward to it, then. But, since you mentioned it, I think you owe me a Turkey leg.”

“…Fair enough.”

[thebrewstorian]

“Maybe you’ve heard of her husband? Finding Louisa Weinhard.” The Zoom 2020 PCB-AHA presentation.

Last week I was supposed to give a presentation for the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association conference. That didn't work out... For the COVID-19 reasons. But we did make it work a week later on Zoom and it was terrific!

My talk focused on Louisa Weinhard. Here’s what I said. 

I started OHBA in 2013, the first of its kind in the country. 2013 is also when I met Peter Kopp [see photo above left bottom - Kopp is the author of Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon's Willamette Valley] and we’re old hats at presenting together. Though usually we are in the same room. This talk, “Maybe you’ve heard of her husband? Finding Louisa Weinhard,” is based on an article for the Oregon Historical Quarterly I’m working on revisions for right now. I’m going to talk about women in brewing in Oregon, but first I want to talk about silence.

Archives and records repositories are filled with voices. We visit them to learn about our families, past actions of governments, and the activities of private organizations. But they are also spaces that reflect power and document the dominant narrative. Decisions are made by creators, by archivists, and by researchers about what to include and who to exclude – the result can be distortion, omission, and erasure. And so, for all the voices recorded in an archive, there are also many that have been silenced.

As anyone who has done historical research on women knows, their stories weren’t actually hidden, more often they were simply not recorded. The history of nineteenth century women’s work is often told through the story of husbands and sons. They were categorized as wives and mothers rather than business partners or owners. One issue I always cite when talking about researching women is the complications surrounding names: if their first name was recorded in newspapers (not just “Mrs.”), actually finding a maiden name to track genealogy often feels like luck.

Most (all) brewers in nineteenth century Oregon were men, but as I explored beer history more, I found the stories of early Oregon women and their work in brewing fascinating. In my research I found most women linked to breweries weren’t making beer, but I suspected they played an essential role in the businesses success (for example in running the household, child-minding, doing the books, participating in community events, etc.), and I knew that several ran the brewery for a time after their husband died.

I was preparing for an oral history in 2016 with Dana Garves, owner of BrewLab and former brewing chemist at Ninkasi, and I found a blog post she’d written called “Oregon’s First Women Brewers [1879-1908],” which included names and locations. I have since found photos of three of these women: Left to right is Fredericka Wetterer from Jacksonville, Mary Allen from Monument, and Marie Kienlen from southern Oregon. Garves also wrote about Theresa O’Brien from the north coast and Mary Mehl from the south coast. I added names of own, including Catherine Stahl and Frances Kastner from eastern Oregon; Margaret Beck from Capital Brewing in Salem, and Louisa Kiefer from Albany – she’s also Fredericka Wetterer’s sister.

But is there a way to determine the jobs they did or the role they played? I did a lot of online newspaper searching and onsite research in the places these women lived, and the short answer is no. Variables in terms of family structure, geographic location, brewery size, and available documentation make generalizations and specifics quite difficult. 

But Henry Weinhard? His is a pretty familiar name and his business was extremely successful. And I was certain researching his wife would be a snap. An easy win and good practice for future work on the other women I’d identified.

I was wrong.

It turned out records for the Weinhards are scant, mostly limited to newspaper articles and ads, government records, lawsuits, and, for Henry, glowing biographies in “books about great men.”

And so I dug.

This is Louisa, who had that very famous husband. Although she was famous in her own right for generosity, as well as her involvement in local church and aid societies, her legacy is marked by both details and silences.

Not to jump to the end of the story first, but the fact that I have this picture is a true testament to my Googling superpowers. I scoured archival collections, newspapers, and books looking for a picture of her, only to fail. Finally, using a string of search terms I can’t remember, I found a 2015 reference to a portrait in an article about the Portland Community College remodel. Days before I finished the first draft of my article, I emailed their Community Relations manager and she sent me a picture of the portrait. It sat on my desk and I saved it on my phone to show people who I was writing about. We have signed the paperwork to have this transferred to the collections at OSU – I was due to pick it up the week everything closed…

Luise Wagenblast was born in Germany in 1832. She lost her mother when she was four, traveled to Missouri at fifteen, arrived in the Northwest at twenty-three, and married a man who would become famous when she was twenty-seven. By the time she died at aged eighty-five, she’d buried her husband and four of her five children.

Through online genealogy sites and local history sources, I pieced together details about Louisa’s family’s move from Waldrems, Germany, a small town about 300 miles southwest of Berlin, to Missouri to Oregon. Although she travelled to Oregon by ship, her brother Gottlieb journeyed with the 1855 wagon train led by Dr. Wilhelm Keil, founder of Christian communal settlements in Bethel (Missouri) and Aurora (Oregon) – thanks to Peter’s dad James for his work on utopian communities in Oregon because it helped me tease out whether they were part of the colony or not. They weren’t.

Through government records, I learned when she was married to Henry and when her children were born. Census records and newspapers documented the family’s moves back and forth across the Oregon / Washington border. Through the census, I also learned about her neighbors, the ages of her children, and if she had servants living in her home. While dates and names are recorded, what isn’t is the scope of her loss, which feels immense. Her son Christian Henry died in 1863 at two years old and daughter Emma Augusta in 1864 at 18 months. Her daughter Bertha Carolina (Bettie) died in 1882 of acute appendicitis at 13. Henry died in 1904 of kidney disease. Just over a year later, daughter Louise Wagner died of heart disease at thirty-two. Only daughter Anna Wessinger, who lived to 87, survived Louisa.

However, mentions in newspaper articles gave me a significant, and somewhat intimate, glimpse into her life through her community activities. She sent roses to the 1903 Portland Rose Society annual rose show and thirty pounds of sugar to support unemployed men at the Gipsy Smith Tabernacle. She donated $100 to a benefit fund to purchase artificial legs for Marjorie Mahr, an actress who lost both legs in a railway accident. When thirteen-year-old Ervilla Smith arrived at the Weinhard house in the middle of the night in 1905 after being assaulted near the Lewis & Clark Exposition fairgrounds and left on the street by a saloon; the family welcomed her, called the doctor and the police, while “Mrs. Weinhard got her something to eat and made her comfortable for the night.” She was a member of the Portland Women's Union and sent money to the Louise Home for Unmarried Mothers and Albertina Kerr Nursery Home. And during the last weeks of her life, she offered money to a woman whose husband was in prison in California so she could visit him.

I have lots of stories that could expand and fill the rest of my time: things I found out about Louisa’s siblings; brewery owners, saloon keepers, gambling, prostitution, and vice; women’s clubs in Portland; or family real estate acquisitions. But since it’s where I found the most detail, I’m going to tell you about how Louisa used that wealth and her position at the end of her life.

In the years following Henry and Louise’s deaths, it is difficult to determine how involved Louisa was in the brewery and family estate business, perhaps no more than in name as an executrix of the estate. What is clear is that she continued to support her German community. The most significant was her donation of a twenty-acre lot in Southeast Portland, worth $30,000, to build a retirement facility for elderly Germans to spend their final years “among their own people.” The Altenheim was to be the “most important of its kind in the U.S.” Newspapers reported that she wanted residents to take advantage of fresh air, good water, and rich soil; and because she valued work, also wanted “helpful occupations for charges” and imagined the home would be partially self-supporting through farming. On August 6, 1911, with 2,000 people present, the cornerstone was laid, which contained pictures of Henry and Louisa, as well as copies of Portland’s German and other daily newspapers. Louisa’s great-grandson talking later about a picture in the newspaper of Louisa at the May 1912 dedication, in an open carriage with the mayor of Portland, described her as looking like queen Victoria, “very short and very fat.” That’s the picture you see here – a find made possible by the University of Oregon’s Historic Oregon Newspapers site. I learned more about Louisa from the news coverage for the Altenheim than in most previous articles about Henry or the business. Beyond a tone-deaf comment about her appearance, I learned that she valued work, self-sufficiency, and cultural traditions, but also that she was part of a community that felt isolated from the rest of Portland. What we don’t hear are her words – in all the press coverage regarding the Altenheim there isn’t a single quote from Louisa.

The Altenheim was closed in 2003 and the building housed the German American Society offices until the property was sold to Portland Community College in 2010. And that’s where her portrait is waiting for me!

Louisa died in Portland on April 23, 1918 and was buried at the River View Cemetery. She was eighty-five years old, had been in America for seventy-one years and Portland for sixty-three. News of her death was carried in several papers.

W.G. Maclaren, General Superintendent Pacific Coast Rescue and Protective Society, wrote a letter to the editor that was an unfettered tribute to her good works and the hidden nature of her charity. He said that during the hard times of 1907, she bought $100 worth of tickets for the Portland Commons, and distributed them among “men who were out of work and in need of food and lodging.” He went on “She gave me orders that I was not to allow any unfortunate person to go away hungry and agreed to meet the expenses of feeding them.” He continued, “there never was a case of a mother or child in sickness or distress that Mrs. Weinhard knew of where she would not give assistance” and concluded she was a “good woman with one of the best hearts where human suffering was concerned that I have ever known. I believe that the people of Portland should know something of what she did during her long residence in this city for the benefit of Humanity.”

This last sentence feels like a final reminder that she gave freely to charitable causes and individual people, not for personal recognition (and maybe not for our historical record) but for the purpose of bettering others.

In researching Louisa, I found a handful of touchingly personal details that I couldn’t verify. The Weinhards supposedly had a house in Astoria and a farm of 620 acres in Yamhill County. An Oregonian article, written in 1954 when Louise Weinhard Wagner's home was being demolished, noted a 4-foot stained glass window with a woman sipping from a wine glass, said to have been installed by Louisa Weinhard as a gift with the house. The names Henry and Louise/a are handed down to subsequent generations in their family. And Louisa herself was immortalized in Brewery Block Two, a 242-unit high-rise residential building built on the location of the original Weinhard brewery in Portland.

But the last bit of sparkle to this story is a connection I made with one of her descendants on ancestry.com. I found Lizzie Hart, her great+ granddaughter, which had pictures of Louisa’s granddaughter and Lizzie’s grandmother. I wrote her and said “I’m an archivist. I have this picture of your relative and I’ve written this article about her, would you like either?” Fortunately, she wasn’t creeped out by this... 

Instead, through our ongoing correspondence she has given me a more personal perspective on the Weinhard family and validated my work in this area. My research has added a dimension both the story of the women in her family and in her own personal understanding of how she fits into it. Her family story was the story of men. 

I can’t end with a quote from Louisa, but I can end with one from Lizzie “What you are doing in your work -- the recovery of women's stories, painstaking as it may be to grapple in the dark room of the dominant narrative -- is such an important task to undertake on behalf of our futures.”

***

For more on archival silence, see 

Carter, Rodney G.S. 2006. “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence”. Archivaria 61 (September), 215-33. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12541.

[lailaliquorice]

all the kingdom lights shine

The fifth of the seven anon prompts: “Are we on a date right now?” with parrlyn.

alternate title: local useless gay cathy parr is a local useless gay. but here’s 2k words of pure unadulterated fluff with these two soft babies. they both love each other so hard and it gives me feelings. aragon and kat are the best wingwomen and i love jane’s mum spidey senses so much. and much love to the folks on the discord for the moral support while i finish this thing up at 3am!!

Anne Boleyn was many things, but organised was certainly not one of them. She liked to tell Aragon and Jane that she lived in a state of semi-ordered chaos; everything she owned was all over the place, she hardly ever wrote any plans down, but somehow she always made it to every engagement with one minute to spare. As much as the mum-friends despaired over her, she liked her ability to live life without structure and still manage to be a semi-functioning adult.

But when it came to planning her and Cathy’s first date, Anne knew that she wanted it to be perfect.

The first hurdle was that she had no idea what people did on dates in the twenty first century, so she took to the internet to find some local events that they might both be interested. For a long while it looked like a book fair at Cathy’s favourite bookstore was the best bet, until she saw an advert for a fairground in one of London’s parks that caught her eye immediately. She knew it was a cliché from the teenage romance novels she’d developed a taste for since her reincarnation, but she was too excited by the idea not to use it.

Telling Cathy not to make any plans for their next free day was the easy part, since Cathy seemed happy enough to let Anne keep her idea a secret. What was slightly harder was making sure that Cathy was dressed for the occasion without letting on what said occasion was. After failing to come up with an idea herself she decided to enlist Aragon’s help, who then dragged Kat in too since she would cause the least suspicion. Kat was sent off to guide Cathy’s clothing choices that morning while Aragon tore through Anne’s wardrobe like a hurricane, and after much criticism of Anne’s very conflicting dress sense she handed her a pair of cropped jeans and a black crop top.

After checking she knew the Underground directions at least five times and re-doing her hair twice, Anne gave herself a nervous grin in the mirror before she headed downstairs. Cathy was waiting for her by the front door, and Anne almost missed a step when she saw how pretty she looked. Kat had picked out a mustard yellow vest top tucked into pair of blue patterned culottes, and her hair was down but secured behind a yellow bandanna.

Cathy looked up abruptly at the sound of Anne almost falling down the stairs, and Anne just shot her a grin from where she was desperately clinging onto the bannister. “I’m fine!” she yelled down before Cathy had a chance to say anything, hoping that her cheeks weren’t blushing scarlet as she approached of her girlfriend. In the back of her mind she made a mental note to buy Kat something pink and fluffy from the fairground as a token of thanks.

“As long as you’re sure,” Cathy laughed at Anne’s antics, opening the front door as she asked “Are you ready to go?”

Anne nodded, shouting her customary goodbye to the rest of the queens that probably made the foundations shake before she and Cathy left.

Anne’s heart was racing as they walked down the road towards the nearest Underground station, both due to nervousness that the day might not go perfectly and the fact that Cathy was holding her hand. She didn’t realise just how much she was stressing until they had to change trains halfway through the journey, and Cathy pulled her into a quiet corner of the station from where she’d been about to shove through the crowd towards the platform.

“Hey, just stop and breathe for a second,” she said before Anne could protest. “Is everything ok? You seem really nervous and I can’t work out why.”

Ducking her head a little out of embarrassment, Anne just shrugged for a moment before she could find her words. “I just want it to be a good day, that’s all!” she said, trying to come across as breezy as she could. “I’ve been excited about this for ages.”

Cathy smiled, and Anne sighed internally with relief that she wasn’t suspicious. “I can tell,” she replied with a note of laughter in her voice, letting Anne lead her back in the direction they needed to go.

The secret was impossible to keep hidden any longer when they stepped foot into the park, where the colours of the fairground were glowing brightly under the midday sun. “A fairground!” Cathy gasped aloud, looking around with a look of childish wonderment on her face that Anne didn’t think she’d ever seen before. “Now I can see why you were excited! Come on, let’s go!”

They both took off running then, too eager to enjoy the fair to care that they were meant to be the adults in a place full of children with their families. As Anne paid for a few ride tokens, Cathy said “I remember once my mother took me to a fair back in the 1520s. I wasn’t allowed to play much but it was still nice to be there and enjoy the atmosphere.”

“We didn’t have anything like this at the French court. There were banquets and entertainment but nothing as makeshift as this,” Anne said, smiling as Cathy recounted a tale from her youth. It always made a nice change whenever one of them told a pleasant story from their old lives since everything from their marriages onwards tended to be much more solemn.

Cathy shrugged. “I suppose you wouldn’t. I think that’s what I like so much about it though, there’s no expectations to behave like you have to in court so you can just have fun.”

Anne hummed in agreement, looking around and spotting a merry-go-round in the distance. “Come on then, let’s go have that fun!”

After two turns on the merry-go-round and a few runs on some faster rides where Anne ended up clinging to Cathy’s hand out of terror, they opted to try their luck on the many claw machines filled with various stuffed toys. Cathy’s attempts involved a lot of over-analysing which always ended in failure, whereas Anne somehow managed a lot better and came out with two prizes to Cathy’s amazement. One of them was a little dog which fit the ‘pink and fluffy’ requirement to be Kat’s thank you gift; the other was a smiley star which she held out to her girlfriend and asked “Gold star for Cathy Parr?”

Cathy’s laughter made Anne’s sheepish smile turn into a beaming grin, and despite her little exasperated sigh she took the star and tucked him safely into her rucksack. “Very good, very good. What’s next?” she asked.

“Food?” Anne suggested. When Cathy nodded, Anne lead her towards over to the food area and then made a sudden diversion when a sweet stall caught her eye. “Yes, this food,” she said, already picturing the disapproving look on Jane’s face at her choice in lunch.

A few minutes later they were sat down at a free table, Cathy munching through a bag of popcorn while Anne brandished a very large cloud of candyfloss. “I think that definitely exceeds your sugar allowance for the day,” Cathy pointed out with a laugh.

Anne pulled a face. “Whatever, everyone’s just gonna have to put up with me later,” she said, giving Cathy a wink. After Cathy laughed again, her expression sobered a little as she asked nervously “Was this alright? Did I do ok?”

“With what?” Cathy asked, head tilted in confusion.

Gesturing around her, Anne added “With this, y’know, was it what you were imagining?”

Cathy paused suddenly with a handful of popcorn halfway to her mouth. “Wait, wait a second. Are we on a date right now?”

Anne could only drop her head to rest on the tabletop and groan. With all the preparation and stress she’d put into making sure the day was perfect, she’d only gone and forgotten to tell Cathy that they were actually going on a date.

She heard the sound of movement around her just as Cathy sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. “Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry,” she said, a mixture of guilt and amusement in her voice. “Of course, that’s why you were nervous earlier! I thought you just wanted to show me the funfair. But it’s a perfect first date, I couldn’t have hoped for anything more.”

“Really?” Anne asked hopefully, lifting her head to look at her girlfriend.

“Of course,” Cathy said, leaning over to kiss her deeply. “I can literally taste the sugar on your lips,” she murmured as they broke apart, giving her one more quick kiss before she sat back. “So, what were you planning on doing after you finish all that candyfloss?”

Anne hummed thoughtfully for a moment, looking around the fair for inspiration. “Well,” she started almost shyly. “I kinda wanted to ride the ferris wheel at sunset. Other than that I’m not sure.”

“We could always ride it twice?”

Her eyes lit up at Cathy’s suggestion, holding tight to the stick of her candy floss with one hand and grabbing Cathy’s hand with the other.

The line for the ferris wheel was fairly long, being one of the more popular rides at the fair, so both the candyfloss and the popcorn were gone by the time Anne and Cathy sat down in their seat. Anne took Cathy’s hand and laced their fingers together as the ferris wheel started to turn, lifting them high above London where they immediately set about trying to find where their theatre was.

Anne’s romantic side had been planning on kissing Cathy when they were on the ferris wheel as sunset, but her girlfriend’s voice in her head reminded her that there was nothing from stopping her doing it twice. As Cathy rambled about the landmarks they could see from their vantage point, Anne gently tugged on Cathy’s hand to make her look around at her. Cathy fell silent as she did so, and Anne took the opportunity to place a gentle hand on Cathy’s jaw as she leaned to kiss her.

Just as the skies opened above them.

~~~

An hour or so later, Jane would say that she’d known the exact moment that the two were suddenly drowning at the top of a ferris wheel. She’d been sat in the living room with the other queens, everyone quiet as they occupied themselves, when she sat up abruptly and dislodged Kat who had been snuggled into her side.

“What?” asked Aragon, looking concerned.

Anna jumped in before Jane could respond. “I know that look, her mum senses are going off,” she said with a slight snigger. “Come on, what trouble have the lovebirds just found themselves in!”

Jane didn’t reply immediately, just glanced over at the window and the light summer drizzle outside. It didn’t take ‘mum senses’ or anything of that sort to guess what was happening across London at that moment. So with a great deal of effort she rallied the others and was ready with several blankets and hot water bottles when Anne and Cathy stumbled through the door looking very worse for wear.

Immediately Jane sent them upstairs to change out of their sodden clothes, then bundled them onto the sofa together as Anna and Kat attempted to dry their hair. Aragon arrived in the living room with two mugs of steaming hot chocolate topped with marshmallows which they took eagerly, glad to be in the warm and dry as the rainstorm raged outside.

“I shall expect both of you to come down with colds within the next 48 hours then,” Jane said brightly as they sipped on their warm drinks, but then her expression softened as she sat down on the other sofa beside Aragon. “Did you both have a good time though?”

Cathy just about managed to glance sideways at Anne while Anna worked on towelling her curls dry. Somehow, even with her hair hanging in sodden rattails and her face pale with cold, when she smiled at Cathy it was still the sweetest sight she’d ever seen. “It was perfect,” she said, her hand burrowing through the blankets until she found Anne’s cold fingers and gave them a reassuring squeeze.

Later on, when they were both curled up together in Anne’s bed trying to chase away the chill that still lingered in their bones, Cathy held Anne close as she whispered “I meant what I said, it was still perfect even with the rain. It was a first date I’ll always remember.”

She could just about see Anne smile through the darkness. “Love you,” she murmured sleepily, and Cathy kissed her cheek before giving herself into exhaustion.

[ryanmeft]

Movie Review: The Aeronauts

Much like The Current War, another of this year’s movies about very adventurous times in history, The Aeronauts becomes too wrapped up in the inherent wonder of its subject to deliver the kind of movie that subject deserves. It concerns a record-breaking balloon ride of 1862, and glories in the kind of lavish attention to detail often taken when technicolor was the great new technology. It focuses on this much more than story or character, which are both shortchanged as a result.

It begins with a child running through crowds to find himself at a fairground, where a balloon painted in whites and blues and reds is anchored. There, James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) is taking readings, then re-taking them and re-re-taking them. His friend John (Himesh Patel) thinks he is being overly cautious, but you can hardly blame him: he aims to break the record for how far up in the air a person has ever gone. His partner is late. This is Amelia (Felicity Jones), who at present is heavily rouged, in a large, showy dress, and standing atop a carriage galloping through the streets. She’s the pilot, he’s the scientist. She swings onto the dirigible’s platform on a rope from horseback; he rolls his eyes and returns to his measurements. They must not only break the record, she insists. They must impress the audience.

That is, of course, the entire mantra of film, especially the Golden Age of Hollywood epics this movie clearly seeks to capture the spirit of. It is also emblematic of both the film’s strengths and its flaws. Other than flashbacks, in which Glaisher’s colleagues at the Royal Society haughtily laugh off his claims of being able to use balloons to predict the weather and we learn why Amelia mourns her husband (Vincent Perez), we spend most of the rest of the movie in the air. Once the need to impress the audience is dispensed with, the pair argue in the proper way of the British. It transpires that the reason Glaisher is so careful with readings is that he is far more obsessed with breaking the record than Amelia is. They rise beyond the previous highest recorded point---23,000 feet---but Glaisher insists they keep going, and eventually their instruments stop working. They begin to freeze. The balloon is in serious danger of not making it.

At this point what we have is for all intents and purposes a survival film. The key to a good survival film is minimalism: you must be right there in the moment with the people trying to survive, feeling their peril as they feel it, locked in with them. Take as an example All is Lost, in which Robert Redford is alone on a sinking boat, and we get no relief from his predicament. Director Tom Harper is understandably lured away from this approach. The temptation for action shots taking place in the rigging, on the sides and eventually on top of the balloon itself are just too great, and when Glaisher becomes unable to act, Amelia eventually finds herself in a situation most superheroes would balk at. These scenes are melodramatic, but could also be effective if they were cut with some patience and care. Instead, the cameras, manned by George Steel, jump constantly, shift regularly, and generally are not content to simply settle on a shot and let us absorb the terror of it. This is only heightened by the flashbacks, which take us out of the moment. I am not a fan of flashbacks in general. They have their uses, but are most often used lazily, to fill in information rather than play with the story structure. Here, they rip us out of the parts of the film we want to be in.

Amelia in particular ends up feeling more like an action star than a real person in real peril. This was, per the filmmakers, done to have an empowering female hero, which is also why Amelia exists at all. James Glaisher was a real person, one of two men who actually broke the record. The other was Henry Coxwell, who has been edited out of the story entirely. I have my doubts that he performed the mid-air acrobatics pulled off by Amelia, his replacement, as they seem designed to heighten the low thrills of the film. To be clear, I have no complaints with either female heroes, something of which I am actually a big booster, or historical revisionism; if I objected to the latter, I would never go to the movies. Yet the fact that Amelia has been invented by screenwriter Jack Thorne is reflected in her portrayal. Simply put, at no point during the film does she feel like a real person who existed. She comes off more like Jack Sparrow, a collection of tropes surrounding a romantic historical stock type---in this case, the daring aviatrix---than a person with doubts and fears. She feels like she isn’t really there, maybe because she isn’t. Glaisher doesn’t fare a whole lot better, but he feels more existent.

The movie only manages to draw us into the plight of the characters when they are descending, which becomes a close-quarters, face-to-face bout with imminent death. Jones and Redmayne, among the finest actors we currently have, give this their all, shivering as ice forms on their skin, panicking as they realize they can’t make it back to earth as they are, and forming a bond that tries as mightily as it can to overcome the thin characterization. These closing scenes hint at the promise the movie as a whole has not quite delivered.  

It is easy to forget the history of flight does not consist of humanity being one day without it, then it suddenly existing at Kitty Hawk. Glaisher and Amelia cannot measure with broken instruments, but they are eventually thought to have reached 38,000 feet, roughly the maximum altitude of most modern airplanes. Much like the battle for electric power, this is a historical story that is both in need of telling and especially suited for film. It is also one that is sadly shortchanged by the treatment it has gotten.

 Verdict: Average

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

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 All images are property of the people what own the movie.

[seenashwrite]

Step Right Up (Part One)

Status: Part 1 of 4 Word Count: 4.5K Category: Mini-Series; Behind-the-scenes canon compliant; Mystery; On-the-case Rating: Teen & Up Character(s): Sam, Dean, various circus folk, special guest star Warnings: None Author’s Note: Post-story  Overall Summary: Sam is trapped in what’s left of a burnt-down circus while attempting to assist a tormented soul, when a mysterious ringmaster arrives.

* ~ * Series Master Post * ~ *

The fog had turned to smoke, the kind that filled every crack in a head, so thick that he was able to brush it away from his face in bulky clumps. No brushing away the thoughts it conjured, though; Sam never had been able to get the picture of his first hunter’s funeral out of his mind. Not the sight, not the smell, not the feel of the wood, not the sparks that would pop away and hit his skin. There was plenty of time to make the memory; it took a while to burn a body to dust.

The clouds cleared after he walked out of the trees and into the open field, much of the grass brittle black, then he saw the source: a quite large, still smoldering, partially collapsed tent.

"Dean!" he hissed, moving forward, but in a slight crouch, gun out and at the ready. He received no reply, instead being startled by the sound of a horse's gallop, prompting him to turn in a full circle, scanning his surroundings - there was nothing. No brother. No horses. No signs of life. Nor - interestingly - death.

But now, as he went on, that gray returned, not as thick, though it had morphed into an obstructive wall of ash in flight. It stung his eyes, and he stopped his progression, blinking, rubbing, and coughing as it turned tornado, oozed around him, then after a swirl or two, quickly flew away. And when he felt it leave and raised himself tall, he momentarily forgot to raise his gun because of what he saw.

Sam now found he was in a thoroughfare of sorts, standing in between rotted wooden wagons with cracked axles, their surfaces barely hanging on to ribbons of chipped paint. He walked on, in the direction of his intended target, the edges of the collapsed tent now just barely visible in the distance, despite the shabby passage being lined with precisely spaced poles, strings of small round bulbs connecting them, most of them lit, lazily swaying in a nonexistent breeze. The gray remained, though it was staying a polite distance ahead of him, and a peek over his shoulder revealed it was also keeping pace from behind. And his pace, understandably, was more creep than walk.

Broken popcorn stands rested on their sides, streamers from what must have been thousands of balloons littered the ground here and there, kept company by fallen bunting, yellowed, wrinkled tickets, and the glass from all the other quaint booths, all the customary fairground attractions. It crunched under his boots with every step, and that was another hair-raising thing: no footprints beyond his own. Not a trace, neither animal nor human, no indication this place - whatever or wherever this place was - had ever been inhabited, evidence to the contrary be damned.

Blocking his way was what was left of the strength test, the gauge stuck fast by the bell, and as he stepped over it, he mumbled, "Least there's no clowns."

And that was when he saw her.

She was perched on the unlatched tailgate of an ancient truck, the deflated tires allowing the rims to sink into the soft ground, her posture just as sunken, her head turned from him, looking in the direction of the tent. She wore a skirted costume, singed and smeared with black here and there, and Sam could imagine it was once a pristine white. The ruffled collar was ripped and pooled around her shoulders, and as he drew closer he saw that some of the smudges along the sheer sleeves torn at the elbows and the tights torn at the knees were actually part of a faded harlequin print. And even closer still, noted how one of her shoes dangled from her toes, the strap of the dainty ballet-like slipper nowhere to be found.

Sam couldn't say why he kept approaching, as he was feeling slightly drowsy and perhaps a touch nauseated, but nevertheless he was drawn, a definite pull, and was almost within reach when she spoke in a faintly accented voice.

"Are you are here for the job? I cannot think you would be an under-stander."

"Understand what?" he asked, brow furrowing, grip on the gun tightening.

Still turned from him, she replied, her tone flat but confident. "You are too big. The pyramid would be uneven. I would fall."

"I don't---"

"I could put in a word. You would be good for banquine. I love going high."

Her voice was easily one of the saddest Sam had ever heard, even here, speaking of something she loved. "Going high," he repeated. "Are you an acrobat?"

No answer.

"Are you hurt?" he tried.

Nothing.

"Where is everyone else? The ticket-takers? The animals? The cl... the other performers?"

That got a response - one of sorts, since she began to turn her head in his direction, into the light, slowly enough to where he could take in the streaky greasepaint, the smeared red on her lips and cheeks, the dark shadow around the entirety of her eyes, and before all that, the deep, concave wound surrounded by clotted, matted hair just behind her ear which the frayed bow around her once tightly-wound bun could not conceal.

"I am not sure," she said, eyes now focused directly in front of her, on a mostly-charred shack of a structure, the half-burnt banner stretched across what was left of the doorframe telling Sam it once read FORTUNE TELLER. Turning her head further, they were finally face to face. "Can you help me find them?"

Sam stared at the spirit for more than a few beats of silence before he lowered the gun and answered.

"I can try."

The big tent was still far off, but along the way familiarity struck her, and so into a smaller tent they went. It was stuffy, the air acrid, and Sam knew at least a few people had died in there - even if the smell hadn't told him, the human-shaped scorches on what was left of the tarp which covered the ground would have. But she didn't appear to notice; instead she meandered, taking in the space, and so he did the same. The fire had only done its work at one end; at the other, a rack of costumes remained mostly intact, excepting the soot. Clown gear, he knew that instinctively, and his lip curled out of reflex. They weren't the sort he was used to - they were more formal, somehow. He moved a few to get a better look, the metal of the hangers screeching across the bar and, suddenly, she was at his side.

"Grimaldi," she said softly. "It was Grimaldi's funeral."

"Is that... that a friend? Someone you worked with?" Sam asked.

"No. Grimaldi died long ago." She seemed to recall something, reaching for the garments, but her hand didn't quite land; didn't move through them, either, only succeeded in displacing the air, causing a sleeve or two to flutter. She dropped her arm, went completely still.

"I got it," Sam told her, reaching up.

"Move them all - something is behind here," she instructed, and he did so.

The rack had obstructed from view a modest vanity, not but one or two drawers on either side of the patchwork tuffet squeezed into the open space, the top covered with combs and pans of make-up. The mirror seemed too large, almost so disproportionate that it could've tipped the whole thing over, tall enough that taking a few steps back would've revealed the entirety of one's outfit. Well, most - Sam would've needed to back away for quite some time; had he been there on the night of, likely right into the flames.

The frame of the mirror held so many pictures Sam thought they must've accounted for a lifetime, and turned out he wasn't altogether wrong. They weren't accumulated over a lifetime; they held a lifetime - hers. Across the top she was young, a baby held tightly in the arms of a grinning couple, costumed in tights and cropped jumpsuits. Acrobats, Sam confirmed to himself. Then there was another tucked next to it, of her as a girl in a stiff, pleated skirt, a tiny ballerina caught mid-pirouette.

She'd immediately extended an arm, fingers out and ready to grab as they'd stepped through the rack, but just before contact, she remembered. She looked up at Sam with sad eyes, though they were dry and bloodshot, the tiny drawing on her cheek the only tear possible. He followed those eyes as they left his, down her arm, to the fingers that had turned to a singular point, at one area of the photographs, in the lower right corner.

"You want me to get those?" he asked, and she nodded.

He moved a portion of the objects on the dresser to the ground, spread out the photos so she could see them clearly. The couple from the first photo were nowhere to be seen, the girl now surrounded by, embraced by, riding the shoulders of, laughing with a small group of clowns - and, oddly, Sam was more solemn than scared. All he could see - feel - from the typically shudder-inducing was love. It wasn't faux cheer; the painted-on smiles could've been rubbed off, the whole gimmick stripped away, because it would've been obvious to anyone seeing these captured memories that it was far from an act. She had been loved, and dearly.

But he had a thought, and he asked the question before his mind had time to catch up with his mouth. "What happened to your parents?"

If she was offended by his nosiness, she didn't show it, answering, "They left me here. When I was a child." Once more, she pointed to the happy faces staring back at them. "This is my family."

Another photo caught Sam's eye, and he pulled it from the frame, laid it atop the others. "And who's this?"

She was the age she appeared to be at her death, or a least somewhere close - same costume, matter of fact - and was standing next to a man outfitted as ringmaster. He was older than her, Sam observed, but still young: he could see the lack of wrinkles despite the impressive handlebar mustache, and the head full of solid black hair, given that the hand not holding hers was occupied with a tall top hat. Sam glanced from the photograph to her - she was swaying slightly and her eyes had gone a little wide. She abruptly moved away, would've stumbled over the bottom bar of the rack except she sailed clean through it without realizing, kept up the retreat til Sam followed, held up both hands, gesturing for her to stop.

"Whoa, whoa - hang on. What is it? Who is he?"

"I think he did something bad," she whispered, trembling.

"What do you remem----"

"I think I did something bad!" she cried, then bolted from the tent.

When Sam chased after, he emerged from the tent to find nothing. Not her, not the light poles, not the ruined booths and wagons - everything was gone. Looking behind him, the dressing tent had disappeared. Looking to his right, there was no trace of the big top.  Not even the fog had hung around; all that remained was that wide, open field in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere.

"Dean!" Sam called out, bringing his hands up to cup his mouth. "DEAN! CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

"He cannot, I'm afraid."

Sam whipped his gun from his waistband as he whipped himself around, finding a man in a modern-style suit walking in his direction. The steady pace didn't waver, despite being in the line of fire, and as the man approached, he removed a cap from his head, gave Sam a small, polite bow of acknowledgement when he came to a stop about twenty paces out. A trace of a smile floated under his modest - but impressive - mustache.

"It was good of you to come, Mr. Winchester. I appreciate your attendance more than I can say. Thank you for accepting the invitation."

"What invitation?" Sam asked. His eyes narrowed. There was something familiar about the man - the way he stood, the glint in his eye - then it hit him. "I know you. You're the ringmaster."

The man nodded. "Yes. And I believe if you check your pocket, you'll find the invitation to which I refer." A pause. "I also believe you're aware that pistol of yours won't be needed, true?"

The ragged flyer that was faded and worn, the one that had started Dean and Sam on the hunt, now emerged as intact as the day it was printed. What they'd known prior had been fairly sparse - the general area, the off-and-on reports over the decades of the smells of pretzels and peanuts, claims of hearing calliope music or an elephant’s trumpet or a crowd's cheers, seeing strings of lights in the woods, sometimes a girl who seemed to walk in mid-air, and all for one night only. One night, each year, stretching back to the early 1940s, somewhere on a spot of land in what was now a reserve. Good thing, too - it smacked of a trapped spirit caught in some sort of loop, and the brothers could only imagine what havoc such a thing would've brought upon excavators and construction crews.

"So let 'em have their circus til we have something better to go on," Dean had commented. "Nobody's gotten hurt, right? Sounds like a great party."

Sam had given him a *look*.

And Dean had chuckled. "Hey, if Bozo RSVPs this year? You can keep the car running, I can handle it."

But there were no RSVPs in that year, nor the next, so the lead was officially tucked away in Sam's TO BE MONITORED files, and it lived there for several more, largely forgotten in and amongst their other trials and tribulations. When things slowed down, though, Sam would dig through his files, refresh his memory, keep himself sharp for when he'd scan the news and the blogs, so any potential connections could be made. And in the fall of this year, as it so happened, the connection found them.

In their P.O. box, an ordinary envelope held the neatly folded relic - no accompanying note or return address, naturally - and it was enough to tell Sam that something was amiss. The occurrence wasn't due until the early summer. He'd immediately gotten a chill that had nothing to do with the October air.      

Now as Sam looked it over, he said, "Then this was meant for us  - not just any hunters?"

"Meant for you," the ringmaster clarified. "My former employer mentioned that between the fire and the clowns, you'd fit the bill nicely."

"Yeah. Nice."

"He was quite complimentary of you. Of your forbearance, your way with people, living or otherwise. He wasn't complimentary often."

Sam wasn't paying attention to the flattery, instead taking in the new details. There was the circus company's name in festive typography, tiny drawings of the wagons and the lion tamers and trapeze artists and sword-swallowers and the ringmaster, himself, skirted the edges, but the bulk of the paper was saved for illustrations of the company's clown contingent and the details of this clearly special event. Now the date and time - May 31st at eight o'clock sharp - as well as the location were specific, directing would-be attendants past commercial landmarks that no longer existed, then instructing them to continue on foot to the clearing, following the trail of lights. It was not open to the public - this was a celebration for clowns, and clowns alone, from harlequin to mime, traditional to modern, all to honor the anniversary of the death of Joseph Grimaldi.

"It was our responsibility to host - not everyone had escaped the Depression so well...." The man paused, let out a scant huff. "Not that we did, but we were better off than most. To tell truth, I wouldn't have done it, I come from a long line of misers, but she... she wanted it so badly. They - the clown troupe, that is - sent invitations to all four corners of the state, any fair or carnival or theater that may've held their brethren. It was to be a lovely night."

She was running. There was no thought to the how or the where, it was just GO. She hadn't cried like this for years, not since the day her parents abandoned her at the circus, a note pinned to her sweater saying she was talented, she could dance, earn her keep as long as they kept her in decent shoes, and nothing beyond this - no reason, no explanation, no Tell her we love her, no Tell her we're coming back. At least they were kind enough not to make promises they couldn't keep.

"Oh honey, you are so very nervous!"

"The show is starting soon, cheer up!"

"No need to cry, they will be on their feet screaming!"

"Here, now, let me fix your make-up!"

She'd run headlong into them, the last people on earth she’d have wanted to see her in such a state, and she let them go on assuming it was simply stage fright.

"Our Butterfly has the butterflies!"

"You will still be one of us, no matter how high you go, you know."

"Your parents would be so proud of you - *we* are so proud of you."

Then she let them fuss over her, let them pretty her up, let them lead her to the tent, and they waited with her behind the curtains just to the side of the ring, rubbing her shoulders, holding her hands, making her giggle with the same old silly gags they'd used to cheer her since the day she became theirs.

"Because what do we say, Butterfly?"

She forced a smile and joined in on the group chorus.  

"The show must go on!"

Sam returned the flyer to his pocket, faced the ringmaster with a stony expression, gun still in hand, albeit at his side. "She's seven months to the day early - is that why you all of a sudden need help?"

"It has been cycling with more regularity, her walks through the past. I imagine fewer persons have noticed, as this area is largely unoccupied now."

“You mentioned a boss.”

"Yes. I am tasked with watching over her... I have been watching over her, looking for signs that she'll take her leave, or if.... if she'll lash out."

"Lash out?" Sam repeated.

"She can be quite emotional."

"Yeah, I believe it - she jumped like she'd been shot when she saw your picture. She said you did something bad, and that she did something bad - is she the one who lit the circus after she died? I saw her head----"

The ringmaster winced.

"----so I'm betting she didn't die in the fire, did she? Was she angry about it? Wanted to take the rest of you with her? Or was she already angry about whatever it is you did?"

"It was my fault. I should never have allowed her to even entertain the thought that she should take her dancing and tumbling to the high wire. I can only imagine the rage she felt toward me as she fell, when the safety net failed."

"What does ‘failed’ mean?"

"I told you - I'm not proud of how miserly I was. If I could turn back time, I'd feed them more, pay them more, have better equipment at their disposal." He hung his head now. "And I should have evacuated the moment the fire leapt from my trailer to others nearby. I was more concerned about loss of investment than loss of life."

"So you let all those people die----"

"Not all," he corrected. "There were enough to stamp out the worst of the flames. The smoke took some. But I'm well aware I ruined the few who lived. It wasn't a time to be unemployed. They were already hand-to-mouth. I wonder sometimes if the ones who perished actually drew the long straw."

"They didn't," Sam shot back, and coldly.

The ringmaster looked away for a few moments, squeezed the brim of the hat off-and-on, be it from agitation or simply fidgeting, Sam didn't know - that is, until their gazes met again, and all the charm the ringmaster had carefully cultivated over his lifetime had fallen away, tears rolling over his no longer rosy cheeks.

"I've been punished, you know. For my carelessness, my stupidity. It should be more, I'd think, but it has been difficult. Watching her suffer. To be tasked with reaping her soul, and being unable to communicate with her - I thought for many years, if only I were able, despite her anger toward me, I could remind her of the love we shared, convince her to leave the mortal coil."

"Reap.... you're a reaper!?" Sam asked, shocked. "It's in the job description to talk to the---- that's---- you have to convince her! The longer you wait, the harder it's going to be! I honestly can't believe she's stayed in one spot, that she hasn't burned this whole forest to the ground, or chased down the clowns who took her in, or----"

"They were among the ones who perished. I think somewhere, deep down, she knows they are no longer with her. So where else is she to go? Everything and everyone she ever loved met their end here."

The moon was bright, but Sam still took a several steps forward, to make certain the irritation all over his face was seen. "If you're so sure she knows, then it won't be as much of a shock! So talk to her, convince her there’s nothing left for her here!"

"I am trying to tell you: I am prevented from talking with her - that's our punishment for the fire. I cannot rest until she does, and she cannot rest unless I reap her soul."

"Call on another reaper! Hell, I could probably call for----"

"Listen to me, man!" the ringmaster shouted, closing the distance between them, snatching Sam's lapels and giving him a stronger shake than would have seemed probable. "She is my only assignment, and I am the only reaper assigned to her. There is no other option!"

Sam shoved him away, straightened his jacket, saying, "Except me, right? The psychotic clown whisperer?"

“As I said, my former employer spoke quite highly. And you are the only loophole to the rules, as it were. I am at my absolute most desperate, Mr. Winchester.” 

Sam sighed, ran a hand through his hair. "I could use my brother's help, it'd make this go quicker, you know. Assuming I can figure out how to talk her into it. Which is gonna be hard, seeing as how she's not here anymore."

The ringmaster grinned, and it wasn't altogether comforting to Sam. "I can draw her back," he said. Returning his hat to his head, he clasped his hands behind himself and began to sing under his breath as he strolled away leisurely, a gentle serpentine pattern across the field.

“They asked me how I knew - My true love was true - I of course replied -Something here inside cannot be denied...”

The further he drifted from Sam, the softer the song, and the denser the air as the fog slowly began to accumulate once more, rolling in from all sides, the ringmaster's form gradually disappearing, the tiny, hazy points of light from the the bulbs beginning to fade in.

And this time when Sam approached her, she was sitting up straight, swinging her legs back and forth, humming the same tune, though it slipped away as she turned her head in his direction. She smiled. “Are you are here for the job? I cannot think you would be an under-stander.”

"I, uh.... no. Not here for a job."

“Just as well - you are too big! The pyramid would be uneven. I would fall. But I could put in a word. You would be good for banquine." She hopped off the tailgate, then paused for a contented sigh, closed her eyes as she added, "I love going high.”

“I do have a job to do, though,” Sam said carefully - and then even more carefully - “Your... the ringmaster asked me to talk with you.”

She opened her eyes slowly, and gone was the happy countenance - but she hadn’t reverted to the sadness from before. This time there was something frigid, unreadable about her, and it made Sam gulp, take a small step back. She lowered her gaze, began smoothing out the ruined costume.

“Have you come to ask me about the fire?” she asked in a low voice.

“Yes.”

She met his eye. “No.”

They stood in silence for some time, Sam didn’t know how long, but he knew he had to be the one to break it. “Then can you tell me about the celebration? Grimaldi’s funeral?”

Now the smile returned, her entire demeanor near-bubbly. “Oh, yes!” she exclaimed, turning and gesturing for him to follow her. “Come! This way!” She took off, launching into a near-sprint.

Sam found himself rushing to keep up, in spite of his longer strides. “Where are we going?”

“To the big top!” she called over her shoulder. “And I will introduce you to my family!”

Sam slowed momentarily, muttering to himself. “Dean, where the hell are you?”

Dean threw his phone into the car, where it crashed into the console, cracking the screen. His battery was officially dead. He’d called Sam countless times as he walked through the trees, even climbed one part way to get a better signal. He’d covered every inch of the field, the place where Sam was supposed to be, and Dean was furious that he’d wandered off; it was between furious and fearful, so the choice was obvious.

Dean slammed the door, flopped back against it, rubbed a hand over his face, trying to decide on his next move when a smooth voice came from the rear of the Impala.

“What’s shakin’?”

Dean jumped, whirled around. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded. Then he blanched. “Where’s Sam?”

Billie was the picture of calm as she walked around the car. “What’s got you all out of sorts, Dean? Sam’s a big boy.”

Dean gave her a look. “I dunno, we’re on a hunt, my brother’s missing, then Death shows up - gee, you’re right, nothing about that’s worth getting worried over, are you kidding me?!”

Billie chuckled. “No need to worry about Sam. He’s not on my schedule. Not yet, at least.”

Now Dean frowned. “What do you mean?”

Billie looked at Dean, studied his face for a moment to make sure she had his complete focus. “Sam’s gotten himself into a bit of a time shift. And he’s trapped.”

“So how do we----”

“The trapped he can handle, that’s not what you should be worried about.”

“Then I should be worried, great, that’s-----”

“It’s not that he’s trapped, Dean. It’s who he’s trapped with.”

Author’s Note: Part two tomorrow! It’s too long for one sitting, methinks, so I split ‘er up.

ETA: It hit me that today (the aforementioned “tomorrow”) is Thursday - show day! - so let’s put Pt. 2 off til Friday or Saturday, yeah? Kewl. 🤡

See Nash Write : Master  /  See Nash Write : Mobile

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[thewidowstanton]

Tessa Blackman, hand-to-hand and acrobalance artist, Josh & Tess, Living Room Circus

American circus artist Tessa Blackman – who is from Chicago – trained as a dancer from the age of five. She specialised in classical ballet at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and also did tap, jazz and contemporary. She went on train at Chicago’s Second City and has also studied holistic energy and worked with InVision, a school of psychic abilities.

In 2016 she graduated from the National Centre for Circus Arts in London with her hand-to-hand partner Joshua Frazer. As Josh & Tess, their acts are an enticing fusion of ballet and circus. They are members of Living Room Circus and appear in its show The Penguin and I from 29 June – 2 July at The Dairy at Springhill Farm, in Forest Row, Sussex. It runs again on 25 July at Jacksons Lane in London, and the duo appear in Simple Cypher’s Cypher Stories on 26 July at the same venue during its Postcards 2017 season. Tessa chats to Liz Arratoon.

The Widow Stanton: Any there any other performers in your family? Tessa Blackman: Yes. My mum, Suzanne Lek, was a prima ballerina. My great, great uncle was Nicolas Legat, who was a really famous Russian dancer. He was kind of like in the beginning of the whole Vaganova technique. Back in the day there was the Legat School of Ballet and the Royal Ballet and they were kind of rivals. So my mum went there from ten to 18. But then Legat got shut down. She worked for the London Festival Ballet and then moved to Yugoslavia and worked in a company there. She also worked at Pineapple Dance Studio and then actually first brought Pineapple to New York. My dad isn’t a performer but he loves the arts.

Is your mother Russian? No. Our familly line is Russian but she’s actually Welsh… well, it’s all mxed up because my grandparents lived in Holland but when the Nazis invaded they moved to Wales, cos we’re Jewish. My dad is from Chicago, born and bred.

Did you always want to be a dancer? Yes. When I was five my mother was teaching and I said, ‘Please can I come and take some classes with you?’. There was never pressure. She never pushed me to dance but it was kind of, ‘If you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it well.’ Then she pushed me pretty hard, but in a good way. It was tough at times and I danced from five years old up until 19. I went to North Carolina School of the Arts boarding school for ballet and yeah, I always wanted to be a dancer. That was my thing.

So why aren’t you a dancer? Yes, exactly. When I was 18, I had a really bad back injury; I had a herniated disc and that was the end of my ballet career. I kind of took about four years out. All the doctors wanted me to have surgery but there was something instinctual in me that told me not to do it, and I said I didn’t want it. I did holistic therapies and everything I could and essentially healed myself over time. During that time I went to art school, started painting, did a lot of energy work…

Did you do acting at Second City? Isn’t it an improv place? Yeah, they have a five-level improvisational programme and I did that for a year right after NCSA.

What made you move on to circus? Basically when I was living in Chicago and doing all these crazy things, I started getting romantically involved with a Circus du Soleil performer, who was a dancer in Dralion. [Laughs] I was like, ‘This is awesome!’. I was going to all his different shows around the States and he took me backstage one day and I got to meet all the performers. I was talking to them and was like, ‘How do you do this? This looks insane!’ They were like: “Well, you can train your muscles just like you train your muscles for dance.” They gave me this conditioning programme that I started doing on my own. 

Then because I have a UK passport, I decided that I was gonna buy a one-way ticket and move to England. I did that – it worked with our relationship because he was travelling everywhere too – and I researched where I could take circus classes. I found Circus Space, which the National Centre for Circus Arts was at the time. It said, ‘Degree auditons in four weeks’. So I was like, ‘Maybe I should do this’. [Laughs] I trained for four weeks and I got in, which I still can’t believe. I couldn’t believe it happened because I had only really been physically training hard and getting back into shape since my injury probably for six months prior to the audition. I did a dance performance for my audition piece; I’d never done any circus before, I couldn’t even do a handstand. [Laughs]

This is marvellous, almost like running away with the circus… Yeah, I always describe circus to people as like one of those claw machines at fairgrounds that pick up toys. [Makes a claw hand motion] Circus just sort of picks you up and you’re like, ‘Oh, how did I get here?’. Everyone’s story is just completely different. What made you choose hand-to-hand? I was trying a bunch of disciplines and because I had no gymnastics background I had zero upper-body strength. I found aerial quite challenging. Then I started doing acrobalance and me and Josh paired up and started working together. It was really interesting, because we were similar in size and I was basing him a lot and he was basing me, and I realised that actually hand-to-hand was closer to dance than I thought and it felt really good. And we were dating, so it seems as if my romantic life takes me in the direction of my art forms [laughs]. We just dove into it together and started training and we loved it.

Your degree piece, Bound, was so distinctive and really impressive. How would you describe your style? Where we started is kind of like gender neutrality and not being confined to our genders in the way we express ourselves as artists. So we wanted to bring in a fluid movement quality and not have that be distinctly feminine and bring in a raw quality and not have that just be male; how we can both move in-between that language together and display a woman strongly and maybe display a man femininely.

Since our devised piece we’ve developing a lot with the knotted ropes – Shibari – moving more towards this raw, more aggressive style at the minute. I’m seeing that Shibari is getting more incorporated into circus now, which is really cool [see our interview with Hanna Moisala]; the whole self-suspension thing, having it be an aerial apparatus. We haven’t explored that as much but we’ve been using more the harness work.

Would you agree there has been quite a move to having women as bases? Is there a point to prove? Yeah, absolutely. I think for years we’ve been in that space as women of trying to prove a point, but for me I like to think of it, in respect to the feminist movement, that we’re not trying to be men, it’s more that we’re trying to display our strengths. The difficulty is that people are going: “Oh, you’re just trying to do the man’s job.” But it’s like, ‘No, actually these jobs are equal and we’re trying to show you that we are strong as well, that we are just as strong, we are built to do things like that, too’. It’s like: “Female bases, what’s this?” But it’s super-exciting to see and everyone loves to see it. I think it’s amazing that it’s happening.

How hard is your ‘iron-jaw’ move? [Laughs] I think that like with every circus trick, it’s an illusion to a certain extent; you have the strength but there are ways of making it safe for your body. I would say it’s probably more like a neck hang than it is genuinely from my jaw.

You might be interested in the aerialist Miss La La… but tell us about Josh and why you like working with him? A lot of reasons. We’re basically best friends. We’re not together any more in a relationship so that’s been a difficult transition but the fact is that when you work so close with someone you become best friends. We were living together for three years, we saw each other 24 hours a day so I think my relationship with him is unlike any other I’ve had with anybody. It’s probably one of the most special relationships I’ve had.

The way I kind of describe our creative process sometimes is at times I throw up on the table and then he cleans it up [laughs, a lot]. I’m kind of like, ‘Wah, wah, wah, here it is, this idea, this idea’, and he’s like: “OK, but how can we make that all work and structure it together.” It feels like a good balance.

I’ve always loved adagio and hand-to-hand with the woman in pointe shoes. You support Josh on your shoulders while on pointe. It’s stunning but what does it do to your feet… [Laughs] It requires a lot of training with my legs. The strength isn’t all coming from my ankles, it’s coming from my entire leg, so I have to keep up on my physio with my ankles and then also the strength of my inner thighs and glute muscles so that the whole leg is working to lift the body rather than just my feet.

I’ve never really understood pointe shoes. Is the inside shaped to cushion your foot? Not really. It’s a really close fit but they’re made of papier maché and have wood around the block part. You mostly wear toe pads inside. Most people use cotton or little gels, so sometimes there’s a little bit of foam at the tip of the shoe.

What have you done since graduation? I’ve mostly been working with the Living Room Circus, which is run by Elinor Harvey. She won the Deutsche Bank Business Plan Award in our year at NCCA. We did our first performance together last summer in a yurt in Forest Row in Sussex. We’re coining ourselves right now as an immersive experimental circus company. We mix circus, dance, live music and physical theatre, with an emphasis on audience interaction and involvement. We’re working on The Penguin and I, which Jason Dupree is directing.

Tell us a bit about the show… We’ve been creating a series of scenes that we can then adapt into whatever space we’re going into. For the new show we have this bespoke sofa that we can use in different ways, to balance on, to hang from. We actually got the money to make it from a Kickstarter campaign, which was great. This coming week we are performing in a dairy farm again in Forest Row. We have the scenes all laid out and we’re going to see what we can do with the space. It’s going to be really, really cool. It’s Eli’s home town and it’s kind of like our starting place.

Can you pick out a career highlight or two so far? Right off the bat, I’d say how much Josh and I have travelled so far. We’ve been to Corsica, Israel, Belgium and around the UK, and that alone is pretty awesome and exciting. Then just working with the Living Room Circus has been amazing because it feels just like a circus family. It feels like we’re a bunch of kids making a company, because we haven’t really had that much outside help. We’ve had help funding-wise but yeah, we’ve created this family together and we’re trying to make it work and see what happens.

The Penguin and I runs from 29 June – 2 July at The Dairy, Springhill Farm, in Forest Row, Sussex and again on 25 July at Jacksons Lane in London. Josh and Tess also appear in Simple Cypher’s Cypher Stories on 26 July at the same venue during its Postcards 2017 season.

Picture credits: Tessa’s headshot, Nizaad Photography; Josh on shoulders/iron jaw, Bertil Nilsson; The Penguin, Miriam Strong

For tickets for The Penguin and I at The Dairy and at Jacksons Lane, and for  Cypher Stories. click the links

Twitter: @LRCircus @jacksons_lane @SimpleCypher

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

Click the links to read our interviews with Simple Cypher’s Kieran Warner and Christopher Thomas

[takebackthedream]

The Sad Story of Public Education in St. Louis by Jeff Bryant

“This is a disaster.”

Walker Gaffney and I were at the entry of Cleveland High School in St. Louis. Broken glass speckles the floor. Black mold crawls up the sides of the stone walls. Rotted plaster hangs from the high arched ceiling.

“It’s worse every time I come here,” said Gaffney, who is the school district’s real estate director. “I once found a dog-fighting operation in one of these old schools.”

Gaffney led the way, first to the majestic swimming pool with its ornate tiled walls smeared with graffiti – the Olympic-size pool shrunk to a black, fetid puddle in the deep end. Next stop, the cavernous auditorium whose darkened mezzanine and decorative chandeliers are barely visible in the motes of daylight piercing through holes in the high ceiling. Then on to the gymnasium, its hardwood floors now warped and buckled from rot. In what was once the library, a carpet of green mold has sprouted.

From 1915 to 2006, between 1,200 to 1,800 students attended Cleveland High every year, according to Gaffney. The school’s specialty was career and vocational curricula, celebrated in a series of Art Deco depictions of various trades on the front of the building.

Along with Cleveland High, St. Louis Public Schools lists 16 closed schools as “surplus properties,” but over 40 closed schools litter the city.

Many of these schools, like Cleveland High, are grand structures, built a hundred years ago or more, in a style that features intricate brick and stone exteriors with turrets and arches and spacious interiors with vaulted ceilings and sunlit classrooms.

But the story of St. Louis’s schools is about so much more than the buildings themselves. It’s a story about an American ideal and what and who gutted that ideal.

It’s also a story that merits important attention today as prominent education policy leaders, such as U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, contend conversations about education should not even include the subjects of buildings and systems.

Today’s current thinking that learning can “occur anyplace, anytime” prompts entrepreneurs to create networks of online schools and charter school operators to open schools in retail storefronts and abandoned warehouses.

But the grand schools St. Louis built for its children caution that the permanency of schools as buildings and institutions is worth defending.

ELLIOT SCHOOL AND WILLIAM ITTNER

More than a century ago, St. Louis embarked on a revolution in education that made the city’s schools the jewel of the Midwest and a model for urban school districts around the nation.

I was recently standing in at one of the places where the revolution started: Elliot School at 4242 Grove St. It was padlocked with a graffiti-covered “For Sale” sign out front. The district closed the school in 2004.

Elliot was one of the first schools in the city designed and built by architect William Ittner, the man most integral to revolutionizing St. Louis’s schools and transforming urban schools across the nation. Most of the abandoned school buildings in the city today, including Cleveland High, are Ittner designs.

City leaders hired Ittner as the school district’s first commissioner of school buildings in 1897 and tasked him to design and build scores of new schools for the booming city. Elliott was erected in 1898.

Ittner grew up in the St. Louis public school system and knew all too well the condition of urban schools in the late decades of the  19th Century. Urban schools at that time were usually crammed into narrow city blocks, with little to no landscaping or playgrounds. The buildings were frequently unheated, dimly lit, unsanitary, and unsafe.

Elliot, even in its current padlocked state, exhibits Ittner’s new vision. The school has a broad green lawn across the front, an impressive brick façade, and high arching windows to light the interior.

“Ittner’s designs were intentionally formulated to inspire students and parents,” Andrew Weil told me. Weil is the executive director of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis and teaches historic preservation at Washington University.

Over beers at a local watering hole, Weil tells me that Ittner schools were the first in St. Louis to have indoor plumbing, heating, adequate ventilation, and fire proofing. Not content to just build functional structures, Ittner was also “very interested in creating spaces conducive to learning,” Weill said.

The son of a brick maker, Ittner became a master of what became known as the “open plan.” The open plan used E-, U-, or H- shaped floor layouts and flanks of windows to allow sunlight to fill common areas and classrooms. The designs emphasized large, open classrooms where teachers had more flexibility to arrange learning activities. Students moved through sunlit hallways from classrooms to libraries and specialty rooms for art and music. Building exteriors frequently featured stone carvings, towers, cupolas, and grand entryways designed to create an impression of schools as civic monuments rather than just utilitarian structures.

Ittner designed 50 schools in St. Louis – 48 are still standing –  and eventually designed over 430 more schools around the country.

“These schools are enduring investments made by and for the people of St. Louis,” Weil contends, and he points to the presence of Ittner schools in all parts of the city, not just in the neighborhoods of the well to do.

“Ittner spared no expense in designing schools for the north side,” Weil states, referring to the part of the city where, historically, African Americans lived.

SYSTEMIC RACISM

Elliot is in the Fairground neighborhood, named for a park bearing the same name. On June 21, 1949, a race riot broke out there when city officials integrated the park’s swimming pool.

Today, the neighborhood is a poster of urban decay, with boarded-up houses and abandoned store fronts. Its population is 97 percent black.

“Missouri’s birth as a state was quite literally a compromise between Northern and Southern political economies,” writes Nicholas J. Eastman, a doctoral student at Georgia University. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, that allowed the state to enter the union as a slave state, left Missouri divided on slavery. When war broke out, Missouri became a border state that took neither side.

Following the war, St. Louis was a magnet for industrialists, immigrants, and former slaves while the rest of the state remained mostly rural, agrarian, and not particularly hospitable to blacks.

The city’s isolation worsened when, “in an effort to wrest control over what was becoming an economic powerhouse,” Eastman writes, “St. Louis political and business elites established home rule in 1876, which erected a political and geographic barrier between the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County.”

Locking the city into its original footprint may have protected it from political outsiders, but it also encouraged suburban St. Louis to blossom. By the early decades of the 20th century, white flight from St. Louis to the suburbs was well under way. By the 1950s, there were over 80 incorporated municipalities bunched around St. Louis. Today there are 90.

While suburban sprawl promoted white flight, business and civic leaders in the city actively encouraged segregation within its boundaries. As a series of maps created by Colin Gordon at the University of Iowa show, during the 1940s and 50s, white and black populations coalesced in different parts of the city.

Gordon’s research correlates that increased racial segregation to “a tangle of local, state, and federal policies that explicitly and decisively sorted the city’s growing population by race.” Various realtor agreements and neighborhood covenants restricted where African Americans could live.

Policies made by the federal government further incentivized segregation.

In a report for the Economic Policy Institute, economist Richard Rothstein draws a direct line from residential housing policies made by the federal government to the isolation of low-income black children in American cities, including St. Louis.

In an interview with a St. Louis reporter, Rothstein points to integrated neighborhoods in the city, such as Desoto-Carr, that were transformed into single race communities through federal housing programs.

In the heart of Desoto-Carr sits the dilapidated remains of Carr School, a school Ittner built in 1908 and the city closed in 1983.

For decades Carr School served the overwhelmingly high-poverty households in what city developers and local reporters called the “slum collar” surrounding the central business district. In the 1960s, a collusion of city officials, real estate developers, and business leaders, aided by federal programs, clear cut blocks of homes to make way for high-rise apartments that concentrated housing for low-income black families. By the mid 1970s, the housing project was deemed a complete failure, and the city demolished the high-rises.

The destructive pattern of urban renewal motivated black families to flee the area too, leaving Carr School behind.

A SEPARATE, UNEQUAL SYSTEM

The consequences of racial segregation in St. Louis were devastating to black students, said Mary Armstrong. “It was a separate and unequal system,” she told me in a conversation at the headquarters of the American Federation of Teachers, Local 420, where she has served as president since 2003. (She retired on June 30.)

Armstrong grew up in the segregated St. Louis school system, then spent most of her 47-year career as a teacher in St. Louis Public Schools during the district’s historic desegregation effort. St. Louis’s desegregation program, the longest-running and largest one in the nation, bussed over 70,000 inner-city black students to predominantly white schools in the suburbs. The court oversight of the program lifted in 1999, and the program is due to end in 2019.

Armstrong recalls what it was like to grow up in a segregated school system. “We were told that we had to compete with white kids even though we knew we didn’t have the same resources they had,” she recalls. “If we don’t have the same resources, we can’t be competitive.”

Even after court-enforced desegregation started in the early 1980s, “there was never an effort to give schools black children attended the same resources that schools white kids attended got,” she tells me.

The resource disparities were especially obvious when, in her third year of teaching, Armstrong was transferred from a school on the north side serving exclusively black students to an elementary school on the south side – Shenandoah –  with a mostly white student population.

Armstrong was astonished the school had a supply room for teachers. “We could walk in and take whatever we wanted,” she recalls. “We didn’t have that on the north side.”

The abundance of resources had a direct impact on student learning opportunities in her science and math classes. “Projects I could do in my school on the south side, I could never have done on the north side,” she recalls.

Shenandoah was also an openly racist school community.

There were separate lounges for black and white teachers. One morning there was a noose hung in the black teachers’ lounge with the sign, “The KKK was here.”

“White parents would double park to block the black teachers’ cars in,” Armstrong says. “They complained about our clothes. Students would ask me, ‘Why did Africans make black people slaves?’”

The longer Armstrong taught at Shenandoah, the less white it became. Eventually she moved back to a school on the north side, taking with her some of the valuable supplies her south side school had afforded.

By segregating housing and education, St. Louis’s civic leadership doomed many of the district’s schools to chronic low academic performance, Rothstein argues.

Schools with high proportions of disadvantaged children, he writes, often have fewer and less-experienced teachers, higher concentrations of students whose learning is often impeded by the stress of poverty, and parents who lack the time and capacity to help their children’s academic development. “It is inconceivable that significant gains can be made in the achievement of black children who are so severely isolated,” he concludes.

Today, Shenandoah Elementary is overwhelmingly African American and struggles with low academic proficiency ratings on state exams.

In 2009, the district targeted Shenandoah to be torn down and replaced by a new building that would merge its students with those from two other closing schools – Mann elementary and Sherman elementary, both of which are Ittner designs.

Because all three schools were labeled low-performing, the demolition and new construction would have further concentrated and isolated black, struggling students. Only an outpouring of protest from local residents, preservationists, and city officials saved Shenandoah.

ECONOMIC UPROOTING

When St. Louis schools weren’t being undermined by racial segregation, they were under assault by a changing economic order.

As Brian Feldman wrote for the Washington Monthly, St. Louis once had a deep economic base to make the city, and its schools, thrive. “A quarter century ago, St. Louis was already …. a hub of many of the post-industrial industries that have gone on to experience the fastest growth, from pharmaceuticals, to finance, to food processing,” he writes.

But since then, the city has experienced an “economic uprooting,” Feldman argues, carried out by “presidents and lawmakers in both parties” who “quietly altered federal competition policies, antitrust laws, and enforcement measures over a period of 30 years.”

Legislation passed in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s deregulating a number of key industries – including airlines and banking – put large St. Louis employers at a disadvantage. Then, new laws lifting anti-trust enforcement, passed during the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton presidential administrations, subjected St. Louis’s leading industries to corporate takeover or rendered them uncompetitive.

Consequently, St. Louis went from hosting 23 Fortune 500 headquarters in 1980 to hosting just nine in 2015.

While deregulation hollowed out St. Louis’s economy, Missouri state lawmakers attacked the city’s school funding.

Since at least 1995, St. Louis’s schools have been seriously shorted by the state, wrote Bruce Baker, Rutgers University professor and school finance whiz. The trend of financial inequity is worsening, he argues.

A recent analysis by EdBuild found that St. Louis schools have a cost-adjusted revenue per student that is 9 percent below Missouri’s average. The district gets only 35 percent of its revenue from the state even though the district is challenged to educate a student population in which 68 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measurement of poverty.

While racism, economic upheaval, and underfunding took their toll, the next wave to hit St. Louis schools was arguably even more destructive.

THE REFORMERS

From Elliot School, I drove south on N. Florissant Ave., and at the corner of Salisbury St., I came upon a new school of a different kind.

“New Free Charter School,” the sign read. The new school is The Arch Community School, a charter school opening a mere six blocks away from shuttered Elliot.

Charter schools, which currently enroll over 30 percent of students in the district, are the most prominent and lasting result of an agenda of “education reform” that transformed St. Louis schools.

Missouri passed legislation in 1998 to allow charter schools to open in the state, but originally confined them to Kansas City and St. Louis.

The mayor of St. Louis at that time, Clarence Harmon, welcomed them providing a keynote address, “Preparing for Charter Schools,” at an event hosted by the politically-conservative Heartland Institute. Heartland is funded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire owners of Koch industries, and right-wing private foundations.

Harmon, an African American, was elected in 1997 as a result of a contentious primary in which he received 94 percent of the city’s white vote in defeating the popular black mayor Freeman Bosely. The New York Times reported, Harmon, who had never before held political office, was accused by many in the black community of being “propped up by business and white voters.”

Under Harmon’s leadership, St. Louis’s first charter school opened in 2000.

In the 2001 mayoral election, Harmon and Bosely split the black vote, which buoyed the election of Francis Slay, a white man, who would eventually serve four consecutive terms.

Slay became known as “a recruiter of charter schools,” and under his watch, from 2008 to 2015, charters boomed.

Also under Slay, “St. Louis embarked on a unique experiment in public education to operate the school system like a business,” wrote local historian and former school board member Peter Downs.

At a Panera Bread, a national franchise based in a St. Louis suburb, Downs told me how a 2002 fiscal crisis – triggered when the state cut off funding for court-ordered desegregation – provided campaign fodder for a slate of candidates backed by Slay to take over the board.

Slay and his team set about quickly to remake St. Louis schools from the public institutions Ittner and his contemporaries had conceived into a corporate-like enterprise that would emphasize fiscal efficiency and a belief in the superiority of private operators.

Slay and this team attended training on how to remodel the district along business lines provided by the Broad Foundation, a private foundation that has long been a powerful advocate of charter schools. The district also contracted with corporate “turnaround” firm Alvarez & Marsal. Alvarez & Marsal made William Roberti, a former CEO of the Brooks Brothers chain of clothing stores, acting superintendent. None of these outsiders had any education expertise.

“They quickly ran the district into the ground,” Downs told me. In addition to ramping up more charter schools, Roberti and his associates were intent on outsourcing school services and attacking “cost centers” in the district.

Roberti outsourced the district’s school lunch program, computer education program, and buildings maintenance to private firms. He cut funds to the district’s special education services, curriculum development staff, teacher professional development programs, school counselors and social workers, and the district’s school buildings oversight.

With $750,000 in private donations and $50,000 from the district, Slay brought in Teach For America, which recruits recent college graduates and others to commit to two years of teaching after a short training period.

Roberti also proposed closing 16 elementary schools, 15 of them in majority African-American neighborhoods. Among Roberti’s criteria for closing a school was age– over 45 years old – which made Ittner’s famed schools a target. The age requirement made little sense, Downs argues, because the Ittner schools, with their high ceilings and open spaces, were easier to renovate. Also, many had recently been upgraded with new air conditioning.

By 2004, at the end Roberti’s temporary tenure, St. Louis had closed 21 schools and laid off over 1,000 employees. The negative effects made national headlines.

“Student enrollment continues to decline, teachers complain about poor morale and low pay, parents are unhappy about school closures, and voters are up in arms about high salaries paid to top administrators,” reported The Washington Post.

A business approach didn’t help school finances either. “The school system was in worse shape financially than Roberti had predicted it would be if he did nothing,” Downs maintains. While the operating deficit had indeed been reduced to $38.2 million, Roberti did it by borrowing $49.5 million from the state’s desegregation program, a loan that would have to be paid back over the next five years. The district’s $73 million debt was actually increased to $87.7 million.

An electoral backlash to Roberti led to the defeat of four of Slay’s school board team. But financial problems the turnover artists never truly solved became the primary excuse for the state to take over the district in 2007, install an appointed school board, and strip the district of its accreditation.

“Roberti was supposed to be a solution and he was such a failure,” Downs says. “The idea that business people can do a better job running schools than educators died in St. Louis.”

Downs may be right, but charter schools appear to be something here to stay.

A LEGACY OF REFORM

Missouri imposes a significant revenue penalty on districts where charters locate, Baker wrote in one of his studies on school finance. When the state allots money to charters, the amount is based on what the schools in the host district would have received in both state and local revenues. Then the state reduces the host district’s aid by the same amounts, so a district like St. Louis, which funds its schools mostly by local property taxes, loses that revenue as well as their state aid.

It’s not clear what academic benefits St. Louis gets in return for this financial sacrifice.

The academic performance of St. Louis’s charter schools is mixed at best, with a few of the schools performing better than the district’s average and more performing worse.

Confluence Academies, a chain of five schools, is the largest and longest operating charter in the city with a 14-year history. The schools have chronically lagged behind state averages on standardized tests, yet Missouri’s Board of Education grudgingly renewed the charter recently, because state laws give the board relatively little oversight authority. “We’re tired of having to approve something that obviously shouldn’t be going on,” a board member told a St. Louis news reporter.

More successful St. Louis charters, such as City Montessori, have student populations that don’t resemble the demographics of the city’s students.

The business of charter schooling in St. Louis is inextricably intertwined with real estate, and charter advocates have long wanted the district to let them take over the city’s abandoned buildings, including those designed by Ittner.

One charter, the Paideia charter school, was so intent on occupying a vacant city school that it announced it had moved to Lyon School, an Ittner designed school, when in fact, the charter never signed a lease agreement with the district.

The charter even ran an ad campaign featuring its CEO in radio spots and television ads encouraging parents to enroll their children in the school. When the school failed to open, over 500 students who had applied were stranded.

Months later, an investigation of the school found over half a million dollars in taxpayer money was missing from the school’s financials. Eventually, the school’s board chairman was arrested for embezzling more than $250,000 of public money from the school and paying himself $150,000 for a no-show job.

In 2007, Imagine Schools, a for-profit chain of 69 schools currently operating in 12 states, moved into the city and opened four new charters. By 201, Imagine had six schools enrolling nearly 4,000 students, over 10 percent of the district’s student population.

District officials and local reporters noted Imagine’s students performed consistently worse than city and state averages on standardized tests, yet the company was reaping huge profits from its real estate business.

In addition to charging its schools a 12 percent management fee, which the district paid, Imagine also has an associated real estate business, Schoolhouse Finance.

Once Imagine acquired a school building, the company quickly sold the property to Schoolhouse. Schoolhouse then leased the building back to Imagine at significantly higher costs.

Annual lease payments from Imagine charter schools in St. Louis were topping 20 percent of total outlays, while lease payments for other charters were in single digits.

This financial arrangement was further complicated by a real estate investment trust that ultimately owns all the buildings and reaps tens of millions of dollars annually from the charter leases. Investments in St. Louis charters operated by Imagine were seeing rates of financial return that were almost 10 times the original investment within 3-4 years, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Imagine’s creative financial practices are not unusual in the charter school industry, where the line between providing a public good, like education, and operating a private business often is blurred by lack of regulation and the essentially free hand charters have.

Missouri state officials, alarmed at Imagine’s fiscal stunts and persistently low performance, closed all six schools in 2012.

Gaffney recalls how the district quickly had to absorb over 3,800 returning students from closed Imagine schools, the largest single closing of charter schools ever in the nation. The district responded by reopening three closed schools which Gaffney tells me cost millions to upgrade and outfit with new equipment.

“Fortunately, we had the buildings,” he said.

THE RESURRECTION OF SHERMAN SCHOOL

Charter school operators aren’t the only entrepreneurs with eyes on St. Louis school district real estate.

Gaffney has sold 10 district properties so far, many to developers seeking to turn the historic schools into retail space, office buildings, or residential apartments.

Gaffney took me to one of these works in progress, a conversion of Sherman School in the Shaw neighborhood into apartments. The Ittner-designed school was built in 1898 and closed in 2013.

Advertisements for the project’s 38 new apartments boast of one- and two-bedroom “high end loft style units that feature beautiful refinished Maple floors, polished interior concrete floor in the bathroom, stainless steel appliances, [and] quartz counter tops.”

Representatives of the Advantes Group, including developer Brian Minges, met us in front of the building, eager to take us on a tour of the still incomplete renovation (units became available August 1).

Minges points out the many historic features of Ittner’s design the new construction is retaining, including the 13-foot ceilings, 10-foot windows, and solid oak bookcases. The spacious classrooms Ittner designed provide the classic loft look of the units.

Advantes purchased Sherman from the district for $750,000 and will rent one-bedroom units for $1,050 and two-bedrooms (one bath) for $1,295, which is competitive in the Shaw neighborhood but considerably above St. Louis average rents.

Under the terms of the financing, which was provided with the help of federal and state historic tax credits, the rental apartments could convert to condominium sales in seven years, according to Gaffney.

Advantes Development also received a 10-year tax abatement as an incentive to invest $4.6 million into the project.

These types of incentives have become controversial in the city. “Between 2000 and 2014, [tax] abatements amounted to $307.5 million,” wrote Jeannette Cooperman in a scathing critique of these arrangements. “The St. Louis Public Schools would have received well over half of that money.”

Cooperman points to evidence that much of the abatement has gone to incentivize development that benefits private businesses and luxury residential housing for singles and young couples. City leaders have freely admitted they consider families with public school-age children a “cost” the city is increasingly unwilling to bear.

It’s true the city benefits from retail sales and user fees that result from this new development, but because the city’s public schools are funded overwhelmingly by property taxes, they largely lose out in the deal.

Despite the negative consequences to the city schools, Gaffney and Weil argue the financial incentives are necessary to preserve the legacy of Ittner’s architecture and stimulate revitalization of St. Louis neighborhoods.

“At least someone is putting money into the community,” Weil says.

THE COLLEGIATE APPROACH

It would be a disservice to St. Louis Schools not to mention the strides the district has taken recently.

In 2012, the district extended free, all-day pre-kindergarten education to all 3- to 5-year-olds in the city and staffed the programs with certified early childhood education teachers.

In 2014, SLPS regained its accreditation. From its depth in 2004 – with a 56 percent graduation rate, a bloated deficit, and a string of six superintendents in five years –  the district had improved to a 72 percent graduation rate, 95 percent attendance rate, a $19.2 million surplus, and steadily improving test scores.

In 2015, St. Louis Public Schools achieved its best performance in more than a decade on state exams, and the city’s neighborhood schools were primary drivers of the gains.

More recently, there have been discussions about abandoning the appointed board and moving to an elected one.

Yet the district’s return to full accreditation came about in part from a state Supreme Court ruling that would have saddled fully accredited districts with the cost of receiving student transfers from St. Louis’s unaccredited schools, Eastman points out. Also, full accreditation was in some sense a reward for the district’s decision to pay off debt with money reserved for desegregation and improving infrastructure.

And the district is still closing Ittner’s schools, most recently Cote Brilliante Elementary built in 1904.

Nevertheless, many Ittner-designed schools continue to thrive, especially those that have been converted to magnet schools.

In the final stop of my tour of St. Louis schools, Gaffney took me to one of these schools, the Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience on S. Theresa Ave. The school opened in 2013, quickly outgrew its building, and then moved to a renovated Wyman Elementary, a school Ittner designed and built in 1901.

Collegiate is one of 13 selective-admission magnet schools in the city that now make up the fastest-growing segment of schools under the district’s purview. These schools are designed for students labeled “gifted and talented” and draw from students who live in wealthier neighborhoods, including those in St. Louis County suburbs, though not in large numbers yet.

Principal Frederick Steele showed me and Gaffney a group portrait of the first graduating class from the school in May 2017 – a racially and ethnically diverse mix of 44 students, all of whom have been accepted into colleges and 39 into four-year institutions. Its newest enrollment class of ninth graders is the school’s largest ever: 75 students.

Collegiate’s program is a rigorous four-year medical professions preparation, making use of its close proximity to St. Louis University Hospital.

When I asked Steele if his school is known as a school for nerds, he replies, “Absolutely!”

Steele is upfront about his school not being for every student. The percent of applicants turned away is two-thirds. He admits, students designated as needing special education or English as a second language services are in very low percentages compared to district averages. A significant portion of the students – 18 percent Steele says, “the highest in the district” – is drawn to the school from St. Louis County suburbs.

The school’s program is impressive. Students in their senior year must complete capstone projects, equivalent to a high-level internship. The school offers ten Advanced Placement courses that are college equivalent, and every student has to take, at minimum, the Science AP course. The district pays the full cost of AP course enrollment and testing.

“We sometimes get accused of being like a charter school,” Steele says. “Half of the students we get come from charter, private, parochial, and other magnet schools. But our students do well when they get here. We don’t counsel anyone out,” he says, referring to a practice charters are accused of when they persuade difficult students to leave the school.

When I ask Steele whether individual school successes like his are indicative of whether the whole system is doing better, he replied, “Well, we weren’t doing so well as a system.”

WHO CARES ABOUT BUILDINGS?

While St. Louis schools may have resembled much of what is commonly now called “a failed system,” the legacy of Ittner and his buildings proves the failure wasn’t by design.

It’s certainly imaginable that what Ittner and his contemporaries envisioned could have succeeded had the city’s leaders not deliberately segregated races, had state lawmakers not intentionally under-funded the district, had the federal government not promoted policies that concentrated poverty and undermined local industries, and had business-minded reform advocates not dismantled and sold off the district’s assets.

Today’s education theorists may regard Ittner’s vision of schools, as special places for learning and as icons of community identity and pride, as a relic.

But the lesson from St. Louis is that the promise of a neighborhood school for every child that would uphold great education and serve as an anchor of community identity did not fail us. We failed it.

Correction: An earlier version said that Shenandoah School was designed by Ittner. It was designed by his successor and protege Rockwell Milligan.

[Originally published at the Washington Post.]

[czechthisshitout]

Vienna Trip Recap: 3.30.17-4.2.17

We arrived back in Prague late last night, after a pam-jacked three day trip to Vienna. But, it is only after a long day of unpacking, grocery shopping, laundry, writing an ad hoc application and struggling to write a concise reflection paper, that I am finally able to document my first study-abroad, trip abroad! (Try saying that ten times fast...)

We arrived to Vienna around noon on Thursday, checked into our hostel and grabbed some quick falafel at the outdoor market. Before hopping on the metro (a.k.a.) the subway and going on a walking tour of the historic Ringstrasse, the ring shaped boulevard that that serves as the barrier of the historic district at the center of the city. The Ringstrasse district is incredibly beautiful, with its large 17th and 18th Neo-classicial buildings that house many theaters, museums and ministries. It was honestly a bit overwhelming, the large scale, high cleanliness and the nearly perfect symmetry, was enough to make anyone feel insignificant and a bit unnerved. As part of the walking tour we also viewed the Jewish memorial, an imposing concrete structure in the middle of a small plaza, that look like a locked library with all the books turned inward, so that the titles are unreadable. Me and most of my peers actually missed the monument until Vera pointed it out to us,  I felt a little guilty for not noticing it on my own. This also raises interesting questions about how the Austrian government views the importance of the Jewish holocaust in the public’s memory. On a lighter note, we also briefly toured St Stephen’s Cathedral (though we didn’t have to tour the spire =/ ). The Cathedral is gorgeous and ornate, thought a bit overwhelmed with tours and tour guides dressed like Mozart, which was distracting. After the working tour, we got the opportunity to tour the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and received a talk from a State department official. They gave us fancy bottled water, which was a bit bougie but nice. The talk was informative, but overly niche in someplace, considering there are only a few JSIS and poli-sci majors, you can tell the official was trying very hard not to bad mouth Trump. Following the OSCE tour, we went for a group dinner at the Cafe Central, a historic cafe in ornate Art Nouveau style, where Hitler, Freud, Tolstoy and Lenin all were regulars (though not interacting with each other). It was really nice to just talk and bond with everybody on the trip in a more relaxed context, the food was really good and I ate my self silly. Dinner went rather late, and we didn’t return to the Hostel until 10:00ish. Me and all my roommates were all exhausting, so we had an earlier night, turning in around 11ish. 

Next morning, after drinking a ridiculous amount of coffee, curtsey of the free hostel breakfast, we had start our day at a very reasonable 9:30am, before hoping on the tram to the city’s outskirt to visit, the Schoebrunn Palace and Gardens, which served as the summer palace for the Habsburg empire. I had an audio guide for the museum, and since I fucking love museums I spent too long in the interior of the museum looking at the beautiful parlors, dining rooms and personal rooms of the Habsburgs, so I was late to arrive at our group meeting point. The meeting point was the Gloriette, a structure composed of Classical styles arches at the top of the hill in the gardens behind the palace, so in the 75 degree weather, I had to run up this giant hill in converse and skinny jeans. Needless to say, I nearly died. Luckily, Kieran, another dude in our group was actually 30 minutes later than I was, so my lateness slipped by relatively unnoticed. We spent some time walking through the sprawling gardens and parks surrounding the palace, filled with antique fountains, before catching a tram, grabbing a quick lunch of spanakopita, and then after, another metro ride, we arrived at the Vienna United Nations. It was breathtaking to see the circle of flags fluttering in the breeze. The tour was interesting, we got to see various offices, meeting rooms, learning about diplomacy goals for 2030 and see a moon rock, though I think our perky tour guide was disappointed in us for not asking enough questions.... oh, well. We were done with the tour in the late afternoon and then had the rest of day free. Me, Francesca, Courtney and Maddy, walked down by the canal, just people watching and looking at the diverse street art and graffiti (also taking some photos like the obnoxious American tourists we are). We also discovered a ‘beach’ bar, equipped with fake sand and enjoyed a drink as watch the sun set over the city. Later in the evening, we ventured to the outdoor market to grab some dinner, we actually found a very decent “Pan-Asian” place, and I had some pretty good miso noodle soup (as well as all the mushroom from Kristina’s curry, since somehow she hates mushrooms). Later that evening a lot of the us went out and enjoyed the local night life for a bit, before navigating the metro without the aid of google maps, and returning back to the hostel. 

Saturday morning, we met promptly at 10am and metroed to Hofburg Palace, which included the Sisi Museum (commemorating the tragic and mysterious Empress Elizabeth). The first part of the Hofburg was the ‘Royal Silver Collection’ and I was fascinated by the sheer amount of cutlery, plates and other settings, made of painted porcelain, bronze, silver and gold. It was an impossible amount to take in. The second part of the museum was very similar to the Schoebrunn Palace, with private living quarters of the royals laid out, apparently Franz Joseph I lived a very “spartan” lifestyle, yet have a personal servant help dress him every day... Interesting. The Sisi Museum went very deep into the life and personal struggles of Empress Sophia, it was equal parts fascinating, sympathetic and dramatic, with lots of dramatic poetry quotes and dark lighting. Yet again I was a few minutes late to the meet-up point, which everyone arrived to 20 minutes early, so Mike had to come and retrieve me like a small child. Really, I am 21, I swear. Afterward we went to the Kunsthaus Wien, a building designed by and serving as a memorial to Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a Viennan artist who art is bright, childlike and oddly capturing. We were lucky to have a tour, but really I just wanted to wander around and stare at the pieces at my own pace, I grabbed a few postcards of my favorite pieces in the gift shop. Then I grabbed some surprisingly good spinach pizza at a food stand, before we head to a bike rental down by the river for our three hour bike trip. I was a little nervous, as I hadn’t really ridden in the last year or so, and they gave one of the tallest types of bike, but after a wobbly start I recovered quickly. During the bike tour lead by Vera, we stop by Freud’s house, the Church where Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth got married in, and a Soviet memorial the Red Army. But that short list fails to capture the magnitude of the city we traveled, including many of the small public parks and much of the canal (which were very crowded and thus a real challenge to pick through). It was simply amazing. After the bike ride, which went to 6:30pm, me and a few others went to the nearby fairgrounds where I actually enjoyed a beer and few over-priced rides (included one that flung you into the sky like slingshot, needless to say, I screamed “FUCK” the whole time). After returning to the hostel, me, Fran, Courtney, Maddy and Kristina met up with Kristina’s friend Ann who’s a nanny in Vienna, at a board-game cafe, before calling it a night at 11pm. (I did wander into the hostel bar and was goaded into playing beer pong, which I royally blew at). 

Sunday morning I woke up early, well 8ish, to pack up my stuff and enjoy a leisurely breakfast. The group met up at 10:40, metroed, then bused to the hills on the outskirts of the city, to explore the Viennese countryside and go to a wine tasting at the Grinzing Vineyard. (We also briefly stopped at the Karl Marx Hox, a notable public housing development). The 20 minutes bus-ride up the hill was very crowded, but I managed not to elbow anybody in the face, so it was a success. We spent a 30 minutes at the lookout point at the top of the hills, and I got a really good apple cake, the apple was super fresh and cake was super light. We then spent a little over an hour hiking through the Viennese countryside, which was beautiful, I felt that I stumbled into somewhere far removed from 2017. Unfortunately the hills were rather steep, and it was rather hot, so I was ‘glistening’ by the end of the hike, to say the least. We arrived at the Grinzing Vineyards, which is small winery that has been family owned for 4 generations, at around 1:30pm. In the afternoon flew by in a haze of delicious wine, bread, fancy cheese, much laughter and many selfies. We sadly left the Winery, after struggling to figure out to split the bill, grabbed our bags at the hostel and arrived at the train-station with 5 minutes to spare before our train left. I spend the train ride back discussing an ad hoc project with Vera, getting a head start on the week’s reading and watching Francesca and Mike tease each other over the rival Olympia high schools they attended. 

And that, is the end of my *brief* stay in Vienna, I may add another post with more details on the last two days if I have time/energy to do so, but I will definitely add a post with pictures in the next day or so. 

Czeching out, 

                -Kate