DigBoston 3.28.19

DIGBOSTON.COM 03.28.19 - 04.04.19

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BOWERY BOSTON WWW.BOWERYBOSTON.COM VOL 21 + ISSUE 13

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MAR 28, 2019 - APR 04, 2019 BUSINESS PUBLISHER John Loftus

DEAR READER

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERS Chris Faraone Jason Pramas

A MAN NAMED DUKAKIS

SALES EXECUTIVES Victoria Botana Derick Freire Nate Homan Nicole Howe

I don’t apologize for the lack of Dig content about popular national stories du jour. I’m not a major fan of sites that flex like every twist and turn in the saga of Donald Trump is Watergate, but even if I did enjoy binge- or hate-watching pundits on cable, that wouldn’t change the fact that we are proudly local, not to mention, speaking for myself, admittedly unqualified to comment intelligently on topics like Russian intelligence.

With that said, I’m nearly three-quarters human. So I think about these things. And since this week’s issue of the Dig is jam-packed with thoughtful and historically informed reporting on the storied past and bright future of our region, I thought that I could use my reader note to briefly riff on some national news items that are far less promising and in a fashion that is less, well, enlightened than we generally strive for around here.

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EDITORIAL EDITOR IN CHIEF Chris Faraone EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jason Pramas MANAGING EDITOR Mitchell Dewar MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan THEATER EDITOR Christopher Ehlers COMEDY EDITOR Dennis Maler STAFF WRITER Haley Hamilton CONTRIBUTORS G. Valentino Ball, Sarah Betancourt, Tim Bugbee, Patrick Cochran, Mike Crawford, Britni de la Cretaz, Kori Feener, Eoin Higgins, Zack Huffman, Marc Hurwitz, Marcus Johnson-Smith, C. Shardae Jobson, Heather Kapplow, Derek Kouyoumjian, Dan McCarthy, Rev. Irene Monroe, Peter Roberge, Maya Shaffer, Citizen Strain, M.J. Tidwell, Miriam Wasser, Dave Wedge, Baynard Woods INTERNS Casey Campbell, Morgan Hume, Jillian Kravatz, Olivia Mastrosimone, Juan A. Ramirez, Jacob Schick, Sydney B. Wertheim

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ON THE COVER EPIC BEARD MEN POSTER ART

BY CHRIS ESCOBAR. READ CHRIS FARAONE’S INTERVIEW WITH SAGE FRANCIS AND B. DOLAN IN THIS WEEK’S MUSIC SECTION.

©2019 DIGBOSTON IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION CAN BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT. DIG MEDIA GROUP INC. CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS. ONE COPY OF DIGBOSTON IS AVAILABLE FREE TO MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS AND VISITORS EACH WEEK. ANYONE REMOVING PAPERS IN BULK WILL BE PROSECUTED ON THEFT CHARGES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

ROYALE

Trump’s Dukakis insult I don’t go to bat for many politicians. But in all of the history-minded reporting we do around here, it often seems like former Massachusetts Gov. and one-time Democratic nominee for President of the United States Michael Dukakis was in certain situations among the few elected officials who legitimately cared about the people of the Commonwealth. And so while I typically don’t jump on every “Fuck Trump” bandwagon that scrolls across my screen, I did find it appalling last week when, emerging from a puddle of Lee Greenwood’s urine with his necktie dragging through his legs, the POTUS leveled criticism at a man who has more talent in his pinky than Trump does in his entire swollen carcass.

“This is some tank plant,” Trump told the crowd in Ohio. “You really know what you’re doing … They just gave me a little briefing on one of those tanks.

I really want to get in one, but then I remembered when a man named Dukakis got into the tank. And I remember he tanked when he got into the tank.

He tanked; I never saw anybody tank like that. But I’m a little bigger than him. I think things would work out, okay. How would I look in a tank? The helmet was bigger than he was, I’m just saying.”

Mueller’s day off If you think I’m going to waste more time than it takes to write this sentence trying to bend any findings in or in relation to the work of Special Counsel Robert Muller in a fashion that will possibly persuade anyone to change their minds about anything, then you probably stopped reading this column a ’graph ago so you could update your most toxic Twitter feed.

Aven-naughty Here’s what’s in the headlines about Trump foe Michael Avenatti, best known for representing Stormy Daniels through some of the greatest political sex scandals in American history, at the time of this writing: “Michael Avenatti arrested on federal charges of wire fraud and extortion”; “Michael Avenatti charged with trying to extort Nike.” There’s really very little I can add to that which you haven’t already heard from every other lefty on your timeline. Conspiracy, etc.

Like I said, we’re a whole lot better when it comes to local coverage.

CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Need more Dig? Sign up for the Daily Dig @ tiny.cc/DailyDig

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NEWS US GRAVE ENCOUNTER NEWS TO US

A quest around dead ends to learn how a Kentucky tombstone wound up in an Allston basement

BY KEVIN WONG Old washing machines. Garden tools. Overworked water heaters.

These are some things that one might expect to find in the basement of an average multifamily unit in a place like Allston-Brighton. I was born and spent most of my life in the Boston neighborhood, and I’ve been in more than a couple of cellars. None of which prepared me for what I stumbled upon on a fall night last September.

While moving friends into a unit of the Allston home I’ve spent the past four years in, I came to find a crawl space to a closet tucked under a staircase in a section of the basement once occupied by former tenants. Out of curiosity, I opened the door and discovered what looked like an excellent Halloween prop for the upcoming season. After taking a closer look, though, the find proved to be far more interesting. Sitting on top of an old bag of concrete was the tombstone of a child who lived from 1889-1893. The inscriptions on the stone featured a resting lamb at the top and read: CLAUDIE T. Son of T.N. & I.C. FEEZOR BORN Feb. 7, 1889 DIED Aug. 30, 1893.

After setting aside my initial amazement, I began researching former homeowners and city records of past residents.

Interestingly, I found that the house I live in was not approved for construction until 1905—12 years after Claudie’s passing.

With no record that a Feezor ever owned the place, and a discrepancy in dates, I started searching on ancestry sites.

Hours of searching led to a man named Thomas N. Feezor, who married one Ida C. Waldrop in the 1880s just outside of Paducah, Kentucky. Though the initials T.N. and I.C. could have been a coincidence, I dug deeper. Listed descendants of Thomas and Ida were Elgie, Ivy, Odus, James, and Rubie, but no Claudie.

Initially disheartened by an apparent dead end, I began searching for records of the listed children of Thomas and Ida. From there I discovered that all of their children died young, leading me to believe that there still may be a link to my basement.

Continued searches yielded photographs of the burial sites of the Feezor children located in a small cemetery in Graves County, Kentucky. To my amazement, I found family stones that were identical to the stone in my basement—right down to the engraved lamb.

With a fair degree of certainty, I continued to research this particular Feezor family—poring over census records, pulling death certificates, contacting historical societies.

To my amazement, I found family stones that were identical to the stone in my basement– right down to the engraved lamb.

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As I expected would happen, most people were skeptical of my asking about a tombstone found over a thousand miles from the speculated burial site.

In an effort to link Claudie to Thomas and Ida, I tried pulling the 1890 census records for Graves County, the only such public report he would have appeared in. To my disappointment, the 1890 Graves County census was destroyed in a fire in 1921. Dead ends continued to arise.

On a whim, while discussing progress in my mission with a friend, I joked that I should go to feezor.com to find the source of the stone. Following a hunch, I found that the domain was unclaimed. Yet to my amazement, feezor. org was not.

The website featured an extensive list of descendants—two of which were Thomas N. and his spouse, Ida C. Unlike the initial research from ancestry sites, this family tree listed Claudie as having been a son of Thomas and Ida, the first such link to the family I had been researching.

I reached out to the creators of the website, but inquiries went unreturned. Countless emails and Facebook messages were sent to possible family members, all of whom I tried to assure that my outreach was not ill-willed or nefarious.

In time, I was finally able to make contact with a Feezor family member—a woman named Linda who had done some research on her ancestral history. Several calls with Linda helped to shed light on her family, and most importantly, led to the discovery of the likely location of Claudie’s burial site.

With questions still open about how and when a tombstone from a Kentucky made it out to Allston and into a basement, some of the surface mysteries were coming to a close. In our conversation, Linda detailed a visit she took in 2007 to a private family cemetery. It was the first time she had been there in decades, and while looking over the stones of her relatives, she took special notice of the graves of several Feezor children who passed at a young age. At the end of a particular row of

those graves, she said, was the base of a stone where a headstone had clearly been removed. Given the visible aging of the other monuments, Linda assumed that the missing piece had deteriorated.

As a result of our discussion, Linda now believes this is the location of Claudie’s burial site. And there’s much more background: Linda’s grandfather was Thomas N. Feezor, the father of Claudie. In 1912, Ida passed away, leaving Thomas widowed along with two children—Ivy (15) and Odus (9). Shortly after Ida’s death, Thomas married Mary Kelly, Linda’s grandmother. Thomas and Mary had two children who lived into old age and themselves raised families just outside of Paducah.

In addition to identifying the likely location of Claudie’s burial site, Linda also shared that in her extended family’s possession is a Feezor family bible handed down from Thomas. Scrawled on a page in the book is a list of Thomas’ ancestors and descendants.

Claudie is listed as having passed in 1893.

While I am relieved to have identified the location of Claudie’s burial site, I’m still perplexed as to how his headstone wound up in my basement. After months of researching, calling experts, and finally speaking with a member of the family, I was able to mail the stone back to Kentucky, where it was returned to Linda. She plans to have it reaffixed to the base when the weather warms up.

Though the whole backstory may never be known, I’m still obsessed with the travels of the sacred slab. I’ve spent more time than I care to admit researching it already, from looking into the origins of my house and scouring each and every inch of the basement for additional clues, to taking days off from work to check old city records at the BPL with the hopes of finding links to Kentucky.

Was it the result of a college prank? Something more sinister? It’s possible that nobody will ever find out how a 19th-century child’s tombstone would up in my Allston basement. For now, I’m just glad that it’s back home where it belongs.

RETORT FOR AMERICA MEDIA FARM

Why is no one questioning the program that countless communities, foundations, and media makers are banking on to rescue local investigative journalism?

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1

I was working as a part-time editor in Boston and still freelancing in 2014 when I first harnessed the mighty force of crowdfunding. Looking to explore a wild tip into a corrupt county in mountainous southern Oregon and unable to do the story on the budgets offered by a few New York-based outlets, I raised $8,500; hired a researcher, fact-checker, and copy support; and booked a flight. Despite only having as much funding to complete my whole project as a major might spend in a single afternoon on an investigative dive, my ad hoc squad unearthed thousands of documents, connected dots, and exposed a web of scoundrels behind an elaborate mortgage scam.

At the tail end of my second fact-finding trip out West, I rolled south to San Francisco, where I spent two days in 2015 at a conference for my newspaper’s trade organization, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN). That year our legion linked up with the Media Consortium (TMC), a since-defunct alliance of diverse progressive publications ranging from issue-based outfits like Rethinking Schools to bigger general ops like the Nation.

With the Oregon experience still heavy on my mind, I was motivated by the possibilities of reporting funded in alternative ways. So in California, while listening to knowledgeable voices from seasoned nonprofits extol their creative strategies, I hatched an idea for an incubator that boosts local news and journalists. I named it the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, or BINJ for short, and right away recruited partners to help build a replicable system.

As I would come to learn, at roughly the same time, another team was forming around a proposal that, at least in some respects, appeared similar to the BINJ concept. But as both of our babies have matured into beacons of hope, to varying degrees, on an increasingly barren landscape, I’ve come to realize just how different they are and what that difference means for how the greater journalism apparatus should be retooled for sustainability.

on his Medium page on July 9, 2015, with a summary run

by Columbia Journalism Review the following week, the Report For America (RFA) white paper made a significant splash.

In addition to relationships that Waldman already had in the startup, service, and nonprofit worlds, early on in his endeavor he linked with esteemed media thinker Charles Sennott, a Boston Globe alum who founded Global Post and the GroundTruth Project, both of which have germinated loads of journalism in the dryest news deserts worldwide. With Sennott signed on as a cofounder and RFA pulled under the GroundTruth umbrella at WGBH, a PBS powerhouse in Boston, Waldman attracted many of the most sought-after backers in technology and media, from the Google News Lab to the Knight Foundation. So much momentum snowballed in the past two years, and in 2019 RFA will place 60 reporters in newsrooms across the United States by holding “annual national competitions, recruiting both reporters and news organizations from around the country,” and placing the winning reporters in various news rooms for one-year stints that could stretch into two.

This all sounds like great news, and indeed much of it is. But this is not another injudicious celebration of Waldman and Sennott’s genius. Because instead of any fair, honest, or obvious criticism of RFA, there has been a coronation and rush by some of the wealthiest foundations to blindly throw money at the program, which aims to train and place more than 1,000 reporters in its first five years.

In his June 2015 RFA breakdown on Medium, Waldman wrote [emphasis his], “Report for America should foster controversy.” He’s specifically referring to integrity and independence, and why public interest journalism shouldn’t be funded by states, cities, or taxpayers. But I think it is time for the concept to itself spur some controversy, or at least conversation, since RFA has been co-signed by innumerable well-respected media entities—from J-schools to trade pubs to the New York Times—without facing any serious public skepticism.

THEIR WAY While my crew was still brainstorming, Steve Waldman, an accomplished researcher and former journalist for US News and World Report whose extrareportorial stints have included advising and writing a book on AmeriCorps, was putting the finishing touches on “a new model for saving local journalism, borrowing from national and community service programs.” Published

NO REPORTER LEFT BEHIND There are any number of reports, opinions, articles, and spreadsheets that can be leveraged to praise or prey on service initiatives like AmeriCorps and Teach For America, both of which have guiding principles and practices that Waldman drew from in designing RFA. On the positive side of that spectrum, there are individual success stories galore. On the damning end,

there are embarrassing organizational blunders, takedowns by those who view TFA as antiunion, and a popular sentiment encapsulated in a 2018 headline in the Onion: “Teach For America Celebrates 3 Decades Of Helping Recent Graduates Pad Out Law School Applications.”

Between the cautionary tales and open jokes about the value of such programs, one might imagine that an enormous proposal based on some of its key elements would raise eyebrows.

Instead, the funders backing Report For America seem to have not looked beyond Waldman’s account. A former senior advisor to the CEO of the Corporation for National Service, the RFA cofounder concedes, “There has been some criticism of Teach for America and other youth service programs that they rely too much on on-the-job training,” and writes, “There is surprisingly little research, alas, on whether this has actually led to sustainability .” But ultimately offers more hunches than numbers.

Like other top-down fix-it formulas before it, RFA pits struggling outlets against one another.

The tactic follows in the philosophical footsteps of programs like No Child Left Behind that reward winners and penalize losers. It’s tough love in this meritocracy, and according to its gospel: “Report for America will provide half the cost of the reporter’s annual salary, the local news organization will provide one quarter, and a quarter will come from a local supporter (individual donor, university, family trust or foundation). If the corps member continues for a second year, the funding formula shifts so the local news organization pays a somewhat larger share.”

Those familiar with the finances of typical small newspapers will explain that it can be impossible to secure an additional 20-or-so grand on top of a dwindling budget. Especially for a true independent, or a nonprofit in a struggling city. Yet in the tournament for RFA funding, such hardship applicants face off against National Public Radio affiliates and outlets owned by some of the same mega clusters that are strangling our industry.

Meanwhile, as of last year, incubators modeled in the BINJ mold in cities including Santa Fe (New Mexico Fund for Public Interest Journalism), Baltimore (Baltimore Institute for Nonprofit Journalism), and Little Rock (Arkansas Nonprofit News Network) are crowdfunding and reporting, as are startups closer to our home that we’ve consulted, like the Shoestring in Northampton, Massachusetts. While RFA is shipping cod across the country, we are teaching people how to fish. Whereas we are putting power in the hands of local news organizations, Waldman and Sennott have established yet another competition conduit for foundations that want to say they fund front-line reporting but are afraid to dirty their hands.

Since there is no referee in sight, and because I think RFA should be checked before it diverts too much more funding that should go straight to doers on the ground, I’m throwing down the gauntlet. There are lots of editors and publishers who have similar feelings, and while they’re evidently smart enough to avoid angering the pooh-bahs who direct the lion’s share of journalism funding, I’m more interested in nudging those stubborn bastards to water the grassroots from the ground up.

Learn more about the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism at binjonline.org and support independent reporting at givetobinj.org.

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APPARENT HORIZON

IT’S TIME TO BRING BACK RENT CONTROL IN MASSACHUSETTS Some cause for hope in new tenant protection legislation being filed at the State House

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

Yesterday, I saw some good news in the local press. A rarity to be sure. The Boston Globe reported that Rep. Mike Connolly and a coalition of other state legislators are about to file a rent control bill. However, during a quick chat with the Cambridge politician, he explained that the new initiative—currently using the placeholder docket number HD.1100—is actually slated to be an omnibus tenant protection bill when its full text is filed in a few weeks.

But it’s true that, among other great things, the proposed legislation will allow municipalities to adopt rent control ordinances without approval from the State House. Effectively ending the statewide prohibition on the pro-tenant reform that has been on the books since November 1994. When the real estate industry outspent housing advocates seven to one in a referendum campaign that it won by a slim margin of 51 to 49 percent. Eliminating rent control in the three cities—Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge—that had still had it. The Somerville Board of Aldermen having already eliminated that city’s rent control system in 1979, according to the Harvard Crimson. Boston had partial rent control for most of the years from the passage of the state’s enabling law for cities over 50,000 residents in 1970 until its defeat by referendum. And Brookline and Cambridge had so-called “full” rent control (which, as readers will see, didn’t cover most rental units).

I lived through that fight. That vicious, dirty fight. Where the real estate industry blanketed the Commonwealth with an ad campaign that completely misrepresented rent control to suburban communities with no direct experience with the reform. Because that industry had been previously unable to dislodge it in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge—where rent control, defined as the ability of a government to limit what landlords are able to charge for some rental housing units, enjoyed solid support among renters and broadly left-leaning homeowners alike.

All three communities voted to keep the tenant protection in place by significant majorities in the fateful referendum. Tenants rallied in the streets and gave impassioned testimony in every government body that 6

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held a hearing on rent control. Yet they were all overruled by conservative bedroom communities with no skin in the game in question.

In 1994, I was a 27-year-old with no college degree, struggling to produce the first issues of a small national periodical (As We Are: the magazine for working young people) and running the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 as its half-time director.

Although my magazine was technically for-profit, I was only able to pay myself a tiny sporadic stipend for the 40plus hours I worked on top of my poorly paid “job job”… that I sometimes supplemented with contract and temp gigs on the side. All told I made about $18,000 a year at the time. Which was equivalent to $31,000 and change in today’s money, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator.

I was able to work both jobs out of a small Cambridge office building owned by a wealthy couple who liked my union and were supportive when I told them I was starting a magazine. They took out ads in the publication, but more importantly let me use more space than I had negotiated for when I moved the union office there the previous fall. Having commuted to work from Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood to Cambridge between September 1993 and June 1994, I was relieved to get a sublet deal for a rent-controlled apartment very close to my office for $250 a month from a friendly union member who was going away for the summer.

And in August 1994, I was absolutely over the moon to score a rent-controlled “SRO” (Single Room Occupancy) unit with a shared bathroom down the hall in an old Cambridge rooming house right near my sublet and my office. With days to spare before I would have had to grab whatever housing situation I could find wherever I could find it. The rent? $275 a month including heat and utilities. Or $473.85 a month in today’s money. Meaning I was able to live in Cambridge with a rent under 20 percent of my average monthly income of $1,500 (or $2,584.62 today).

It may have been a crappy space with a month-bymonth “at will” lease—the smell of pesticide and roach droppings embedded in the innumerable layers of cheap

off-white paint that had been repeatedly slathered over every surface (including the communal shower) in the century since its construction. A barely functional hot plate and tiny sink being its only amenities. But to me, it was paradise. It allowed me to be a creative person in the city of my choice and to pursue projects that I would have not been able to manage otherwise. So, I couldn’t believe my luck.

Because, like most young people in Boston, Brookline, or Cambridge who very much wanted to get into a rentcontrolled apartment at that time, I had been unable to find one previously. One flaw of the system that I agree needed to be fixed was that some of the young working people and students that moved into the first rent-controlled units when the reform was introduced in 1970 were still holding onto them through the mid-1980s and early 1990s—despite having become successful professionals in the interim. While I was bouncing from bad housing situation to bad housing situation, including a few months of homelessness in 1987. Although most people I met with rent-controlled apartments in that period were working poor.

The National Bureau of Economic Research working paper “Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts” echoes my subjective experience, stating: “While there was no formal mechanism to allocate controlled units to low-income households, limited quantitative evidence indicates that less affluent residents and students were overrepresented in controlled units—though a significant number of units were also occupied by wealthy professionals.” Meaning that even though rent control was doing what it was supposed to do in 1994—enabling working-class people to live across much of Cambridge, outside of scarce public housing—there were definitely professionals staying in units that they should have relinquished.

So, many young working people like me remained at the mercy of the regular rental market. Which the NBER paper makes clear still controlled over 60 percent of the available units. As “non-owner occupied rental houses, condominiums, or apartments built prior to 1969” were

covered by rent control. Accounting for only about a third of available units. While “units built after 1968, older non-residential units converted to residential status, and owneroccupied units faced no threat of rent control.”

Far from the “socialism” decried by real estate industry propagandists to this day when attacking any legislation at any level of government even smacking of rent control, such regulations in practice were a minor capitalist reform that allowed landlords to continue making profits throughout its existence. And didn’t affect most rental units anyway.

What the minority of landlords that were affected didn’t get to do was make the super profits that have become so common since. Which is exactly what I and every other tenant activist fighting to keep rent control a quarter century ago predicted.

In 1994, industry flacks told a credulous corporate media—that was busily sucking up the fat advertising checks the real estate industry paymasters shoveled at it—and every ill-informed suburban voter who would listen that it was evil government-sponsored rent control and those dastardly tenants’ unions themselves that were to blame for blocking the weak and helpless real estate industry from building lots of low- and middle-income housing in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge.

Which was nonsense. The rich and politically powerful real estate industry wanted to kill as many housing regulations as possible so they could make as much money as possible. Every tenant activist and ally knew it, and said so… loudly. Literally screaming in landlords’ faces at a couple of crazy Cambridge City Council hearings I can remember. But we got outspent and lost.

And what happened when the referendum took effect in January 1995—a mere two months after it was passed? Many working-class tenants in rent- controlled apartments were totally screwed.

In my case, the hammer dropped in September 1995. The month my landlord jacked the rents in my building by something like 20 percent. In response, I organized a tenant’s union. A group, to be clear, of largely working poor people. All of us, like every rent control tenant I’ve spoken to since, were completely shocked by the defeat of the housing reform that allowed so many of us to live with some modicum of dignity in an already expensive region. In which there was never even close to enough public housing to handle the demand.

We wrote a petition to the landlord asking him to agree to reasonable rent increases and were rebuffed. We met with a longtime tenant activist to decide what to do next and agreed to start a rent strike until our demands were met. We held out for months, but ultimately people started fleeing as the landlord prepared to take legal action.

The moment rent control was dead, our fates were sealed. We were crushed, as so many tenants like us were crushed. A few old people and people with medical conditions or other extenuating circumstances were given extensions to keep their former rents for a bit longer. But ultimately, everyone was thrown to the wolves of the real estate market of the “go-go ’90s.”

Greedy bottom-feeding landlords jacked the rents around the region, and thus began our gradual descent to the Boston real estate bubble of 2019. Where wildly expensive rental and housing stock is the order of the day. Capitalists from all over the world buy up property here, push prices even higher, and leave many units empty as places to park their often ill-gotten cash. Huge developers build “luxury” condo towers on any available scrap of land. And working- and middle-class people can no longer afford to live in cities that once had a place for us—the people that built them.

Just as many people driven out of Cambridge fled to Somerville in the early days of this process, a ripple effect has occurred that has seen ever-increasing rental and housing costs spread outward from the urban core into the near suburbs and beyond.

Now, working- and middle-class people who don’t already own their own homes are being driven from Somerville to Everett, Medford, Malden, and Woburn. The same thing is happening all around Boston. The farther out people go in search of slightly more affordable housing, the worse public transportation service gets. Forcing people to get cars or use Uber, Lyft, and cabs to get around—if they can afford either option. Worsening traffic and pollution problems, and stealing people’s time by doubling or even tripling their commutes to jobs in the city.

As for me, after an initial sojourn in Somerville I ended up back in Cambridge as my income increased somewhat. Fifteen years ago, I landed in a small subterranean twobedroom in the very same neighborhood where I had once lived in two rent-controlled apartments. The landlord of my building complex is a decent enough guy. He doesn’t force the few older tenants like myself and my partner to pay market rate—making his money from the fresh crop of wealthy international students that arrive every September.

But my share of the rent and utilities is about to go up a few percent, as it does every year without fail. And I’ll be paying about $1,400 a month on the same block I once paid $473.85 a month in 2019 dollars for a share of living space that, while nicer, is only marginally larger than the big room I had in 1994. Which, despite my being the good little capitalist owner of a commercial metro weekly newspaper and the head of its affiliated nonprofit, is almost 50 percent of my take-home pay. Or, put another way, about a 30 percent larger slice of my income than I was paying to live in the same area 25 years ago.

That is the legacy that the real estate industry has left the working people of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, and every city and town around the state suffering from ever-increasing rents. And that is why I strongly support the rebirth of rent control in Massachusetts… and suggest that you all do the same.

Once it’s filed, I’ll take a detailed look at the full text of the omnibus tenant protection bill HD.1100 in part two of this column.

Afro Flow Yoga

Stop by after work and enjoy Afro Flow Yoga®, a unique yoga experience that promotes healing, balance, and peace in a non-judgmental and safe environment created

by Leslie Salmon Jones and Jeff W. Jones.

April 11 & 25 | May 9 & 23 | June 13 & 27 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM | Northeastern Crossing 1175 Tremont Street, Roxbury Please bring a yoga mat and water!

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For more information, please call 617-373-2555

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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

7

EIGHT GREAT TAKE(AWAY)S TALKING JOINTS MEMO

From trick flames to organic games, everything we need to know we learned at NECANN

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON It was a major week for cannabis in Mass and Greater Boston in particular, and not only because thousands of enthusiasts flocked to the Hynes for the fifth annual New England Cannabis Convention, or NECANN. On Saturday, New England Treatment Access (NETA) opened its picturesque steampunk vaults in the former Brookline bank it has occupied as a medical dispensary for years in order to welcome recreational customers, generating the expected coverage of heads queuing and traffic caused. All while the Boston Globe dropped a Spotlight investigation on “companies [that are] testing the limit” of how many pot shops they can own.

As we are still recovering from NECANN, while the subjects of the Globe report are likely licking deeper wounds, it seems like a proper time to focus on the positive side of the booming legal weed economy.

It’s critical to keep an eye on the big players, but what we also saw this weekend was a thriving small biz ecosystem in which inventors and entrepreneurs from various corners of cannabis are making a go for it.

Here are some quick notes on some of the great initiatives and products we encountered, along with tidbits on what we learned from our interaction with their spokespeople and owners. For videos of our full interviews with these subjects, please visit facebook.com/talkingjointsmemo.

Cannabis Radio Network (North Shore, Massachusetts) WHAT WE LEARNED: “We got into the industry two and a half years ago, and it’s been evolving and evolving step by step ever since … Everything cannabis-related. I do a show called Your Average Joe Grow, showing people step by step how to grow from home. We have The Barrett Report happening, which is everything cannabis-related for the week. We also have a show, Straight Talk with Dr. Dale, that’s everything medical in the industry, and then we have a new comedy show coming up called Breaking Balls.”

More info: cannabisradionetwork.com Down to Earth All Natural Fertilizers (Eugene, Oregon) WHAT WE LEARNED: “We manufacture all of our fertilizers. All our boxes are compostable, our bags are recyclable, we are truly 100 percent natural. Everyone talks about organics—this is the real thing. … What we’re seeing [in some states] is that only 50 percent of your product has to be natural in order to list organic [on the packaging]. … We are 100 percent natural.”

More info: downtoearthfertilizer.com

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Flkrwrld (Boston, Massachusetts) WHAT WE LEARNED: “Everybody loves to play with their lighters [so we made a lighter that is also like a fidget spinner]. We have a patent on the lighter, and on a [lighter] sleeve too so people can use it with interchangeable lighters. We’re launching a Kickstarter soon.”

More info: @flkrwrld on Instagram

not going through a couple hundred pairs every few weeks. … They originally came out of the frustration of dealing with hash oil and how sticky it was. … After I started making them, I realized they were excellent for trimming weed. You grab a plant and it literally repels the trichomes.”

More info: siligloves.org

Purient (Boston, Massachusetts) WHAT WE LEARNED: “We were in the inaugural class of the Sira Naturals Accelerator program, and this is the first product to come out of the Sira program. We have one of the first pre-foreplay cannabis-infused personal lubricants in the East Coast market. We’re in three stores right now—the Cambridge, Somerville, and Needham [Sira] locations. … It’s the secret to mind-blowing sex. I’ve been running a private cannabis club for years, and one of the products that we developed years ago for members of the club was Purient. … The accelerator program helped us walk through every step to get our product on the shelves.”

More info: siranaturals.org/purient-bedroom-cannabis

Student Marijuana Alliance for Research & Transparency (Providence, Rhode Island) WHAT WE LEARNED: “SMART is a national college cannabis organization meant to bridge the gap for millennials who are looking to get into the industry and help legitimize everything we’re doing [at NECANN] through academia. SMART has a network of students at over 25 different universities.”

More info: facebook.com/studentmmj

Secure Energy (East Longmeadow, Massachusetts) WHAT WE LEARNED: “Cannabis cultivators have options to manage their energy. It’s the second largest expense they have, it’s the most controllable, and no one knows it. They get an energy bill from National Grid or Eversource and they just pay it. … We can come in, get you a low fixed rate, lock you into that, and help save you some money. … You can start budgeting and allocating your expenses accordingly.”

More info: seenergy.org Sili Gloves (Boston, Massachusetts) WHAT WE LEARNED: “These are nonstick silicone trim and gardening gloves. They’re reusable, they’re completely nonstick, and unlike with latex, you’re

Vermont Pre-Rolls (Vermont) WHAT WE LEARNED: “We do only CBD pre-rolls, so less than .3 percent CBD. … The joke I always think of is the movies where people have to eat the bag of weed, or the plant, and a half an hour later they’re high. THCA is the acid form. It’s in the plant.

You can’t get high from it—unless you burn it, vape it, or heat it. Then it turns into THC and you get messed up. The law is confusing. The Farm Bill of 2018 talks about Delta-9 THC of less than .3 percent, but there is flower available that is 18 percent THCA. You can smoke the flower, and it has more like 1 percent THC when it smokes. But when it’s tested, it’s listed as less than .3 percent.”

More info: vermontprerolls.com

You can’t get high from it–unless you burn it, vape it, or heat it.

VOL 14

Saturday • April 6 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Grove Hall Branch of the Boston Public Library 41 Geneva Ave • Dorchester 02121

Comics In Color is a safe space where you can come and nerd out about illustrated stories by and about people of color.

THIS MONTH! Art by JAMSketch

Join us to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the for the Grove Hall Branch Library!

Discussion: What had been the impact of Black Panther?

• All-levels comics making activity • Samples of Black Comics • SNACKS! All are welcome but this is an event focused on comics by and about people of color.

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9

MISSING JIMMY’S DIRTY OLD BOSTON

Before there was a South Boston waterfront, these legendary spots set the stage

BY JIM BOTTICELLI OF DIRTY OLD BOSTON conflict being conflict, Jimmy’s—and then Anthony’s, though with different specifics—closed in the crosshairs of a Massachusetts Port Authority bent on redeveloping the Boston Fish Pier and the surrounding areas.

Meanwhile, if venturing over the Northern Avenue Bridge back in the day was an adventure you’d only dare to embark on for lobster and scrod, these days there are literally tourist traps and high-end eateries connecting Atlantic Avenue to the old gravel pits.

At any rate, much of the South Boston waterfront property where Jimmy’s was located was owned by the Pritzker family from Chicago. For years, they were in the middle of arguments over how best to develop the area. Very little got done. Until the Moakley Courthouse opened, followed by the ICA, followed by dozens of liquor licenses that magically appeared in a city where there are only so many such permits available. New corporate ownership, land swaps, and so on.

Jimmy’s, which would have turned 95 this year, closed in 2005. Legal Seafoods, once a tiny one-off that reawakened Cambridge in the early ’70s, opened a successful spot in its place.

Looking back, at least anecdotally speaking, locals seem to teeter in Jimmy’s favor. Perhaps it’s the name, or that Anthony stayed past his place’s natural expiration, while Jimmy knew when to call it a day.

PHOTO OF JIMMY’S HARBORSIDE COURTESY OF BILL WAYLAND

With the Atlantic Beer Garden and Whiskey Park torn down on the South Boston waterfront and more glamour and glass moving into their place, it’s important to look back at the establishments that paved the way for dining in this area, fine and otherwise. As P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, “Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.”

When Jimmy Doulos first opened Jimmy’s Harborside restaurant in 1924, he probably wasn’t thinking that the lots around him would be used as gravel pits and parking parcels for the next several decades. Most likely he was thinking that having a seafood restaurant on the South Boston waterfront—the first of its style and kind—was a good idea and perhaps that it would spur others to move

in next door in no time.

In many ways Doulos was right. Or at least he would be in the long term. Jimmy’s, which first opened as the Liberty Cafe and was eventually renamed after its owner, had little competition until 1963, when Anthony’s Pier 4 was opened by restaurateur Anthony Athanas. Jimmy’s stayed open for business for 70 years, and everybody seemed to know about it—from celebrities to customers from nearby Southie—despite the surrounding desolation, but perhaps due to its proximity to downtown Boston, Anthony’s eventually became the restaurant of choice on the waterfront. At one point, it was said to be the highest grossing joint in the country.

Boston being Boston, politics being politics, and Boston folklore goes like this: It was the end of the 1800s when Martin Lomasney, already a mover and shaker in Boston political circles for decades, won a coveted seat on the strength of voters in Ward 8, now more or less the South End and Roxbury.

The resulting cocktail, the story goes, was allegedly first stirred and served at Lomasney’s victory dinner. As the famed political writer R.W. Apple Jr. wrote in a 2002 New York Times piece praising Locke-Ober:

THE WARD 8

A cocktail from Boston, for Bostonians Pore through the pages of any cocktail history tome and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a distinctive contribution to the art that is Boston’s and Boston’s alone. The Ward 8, however, is a drink that did originate here, specifically at the long-gone Locke-Ober restaurant on Winter Place (in the spot currently known as Yvonne’s).

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From the start, it became a hangout for politicians; the State House is only a couple of blocks away. Martin Lomasney, a legendary local boss between the world wars, is reputed to have favored the place, and the Ward 8 cocktail—a whiskey sour with a few dashes of grenadine added—was invented at Locke’s for some of his henchmen one lively night before an election.

The Ward 8 is still served, but the preferred drink at Locke’s over the years has been the dry martini, served in ample measure, which the Boston-based novelist George V. Higgins, a longtime habitué, christened “loud-mouth soup.”

The drink became a local fixture and in 1934 earned a spot on Esquire magazine’s Top Ten Cocktails of the Year chart. The Ward 8, the magazine reported, “is a fine

Parts of this throwback have been previously published by Dirty Old Boston.

This Dirty Old Boston feature is a collaboration between DigBoston, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and Dirty Old Boston. For more local history visit binjonline.org and dirtyoldboston.com.

drink, dry and refreshing. But it’s not a cocktail that will alter your drinking habits, nor is it a shortcut to bliss. It is a drink that offers solace to a scorched palate if made properly.”

Generations later, in 2008, local cocktail maven Brother Cleve remixed the Ward 8, honoring more recent history from out of state in doing so. The Ninth Ward, as Cleve coined the spinoff, was created for the annual Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans. The Ninth Ward, of course, was the section of the city most damaged

by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“I wanted to create a drink for the event that would have some sort of New Orleans and Boston connection,” Cleve said at the time. “My idea was to take the Ward 8, the best-known drink created in Boston, and turn it into a tropical cocktail for New Orleans.”

The Ninth Ward: 1 1/2 oz Bourbon (Eagle Rare 10 Year) 3/4 oz Falernum (Velvet) 3/4 oz Lime Juice 1/2 oz St. Germain 2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Original calls for Bulleit Bourbon and Fee’s Falernum.

This product contains zero THC

VERY FUNNY SHOWS.

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11

AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE DIG: EPISODE 4 FEATURE

Hunter S. Thompson sends the Weekly Dig a really mean fax

BY BARRY THOMPSON

his letters, so I said, “I’m going to go do that! I’m going to express the same confidence!” The one issue was I couldn’t write.

BONNI: There was a fake wall behind Jeff’s desk, and it led to a freight elevator. I had previously lived in that same building, and based on that experience, I imagine it was a fake wall you could hide a mattress in just in case you ever needed to say, “We’re not living here!” But it was also big enough to go back there and just hang out.

LAWRENCE: We used to look over Moon Villa, which I think is still open in Chinatown. That’s the place that’s famous for “cold tea” after 2 am. For years you could go in there at three in the morning and order “cold tea,” which was beer. We thought they were fucking with their liquor license and everything. I found out years later talking to the owner that they just sold nonalcoholic beer to every drunk who came in after 2 am. Fuckin’ genius. And boy, did that “cold tea” ever make it feel like you were still drinking.

The ’90z - 2003 (cont.)

Since the start of this verbal record, the Weekly Dig ascended from ziney origins to become a legit voice from the underground amongst the cluttered, otherwise risk-averse landscape of Boston print media. But success enhances ambitions, ambitions lead to stress, and stress makes everybody cranky. Cranky, and the opposite of sober.

Pay cuts, placebos, and ass shovels JOE BONNI (founding EiC): Jeff was so good at finding money and keeping us afloat, I just assumed he always could. And given the last 17 years, that appears absolutely true. But it was frightening at times. I remember taking a 50 percent pay cut so we could hire another ad sales person. And I had just gotten married. I didn’t even discuss this with my now ex-wife. Jeff said, “This is what we gotta do,” and I said, “All right.” I went home and she’s like, “You didn’t talk to me about this?” And I said, “It has to be done. Jeff said so.”

JEFF LAWRENCE (founding publisher): Did he take a pay cut? He might’ve. I’m honestly not sure what he’s talking about, but we all took pay cuts.

LUKE O’NEIL (writer): I was pretty hated in the Boston music scene. I was in a band at the time, and I thought my band was hot shit. I was super into covering British rock and emo back then, but the people who were angry about the Dig’s music coverage then are still the people who think they’re the Boston music scene. They were old and washed up then, and even more so now.

J. BENNETT (music editor): I had Luke interview Noel Gallagher at one point when Oasis played at Great Woods [currently known as the Xfinity Center]. I interviewed a bunch of people: Ted Nugent, Rob Halford, Kool Keith, I tracked down Lemmy.

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O’NEIL: We used to always fight with the Noise Board.

That was sort of a proto, pre-social media time, although I think Friendster was around. But the Noise Board was this huge Boston music scene deal on the web, and everyone was on it constantly and complaining about the stuff we covered. It was really, like, training for the social media that we have now, in terms of everybody fighting and being pissed off at all times.

CRAIG TERLINO (distribution manager): I got in the door at the Dig because I told them I was in the process of getting an interview with Hunter S. Thompson. I don’t know why they believed me, but they did. I’ve read everything Hunter S. Thompson ever wrote, even all

BENNETT: Bonni was a very scatterbrained, very disorganized person, and fond of calling meetings, which I despised. Every time we had a meeting I’d say, “Why are we talking about working when we could be working?”

After a while I just stopped going to meetings. Those were for Joe’s benefit, really, so he could get caught up and organized, but I was already organized, so I didn’t need to waste two hours with that.

BONNI: I had been very vocal about not giving a shit about the publishing side. Like, “Yay, let’s have an insert for ski lodges in New England!” I just didn’t want to be involved in shit like that. I didn’t care if we didn’t get Budweiser to advertise. But Jeff did, and he had to. And to be honest, I didn’t want to care in the perfect sense of the word. I wanted to make sure we were pursuing our stories and our shit. But it was too small; we were too tight.

Everyone’s shit was everyone’s else’s shit.

TERLINO: I was trying to be very profound with Hunter S. Thompson, and I’m sure people like me were a dime a dozen bothering him all the time telling him shit like, “Yeah, I’m a journalist!

I identify with you! I’m going to carry on your legacy of gonzo journalism!”

BONNI: When you start going for the Live Nation advertising, when you start figuring out how to get the Budweiser dollars, when you start moving in those directions, you’re becoming far more reliant on a handful of big contracts than you are, in my opinion, spreading out your income throughout smaller, local businesses.

TERLINO: It’s so embarrassing looking back on the letter I sent him now, but I keep it because it’s the first time someone handed me my ass, and it was my literary hero. He sent back that notorious fax telling me to fuck off; “You write like a bullfruit whore with a shovel up her ass.

Good luck in Sicily.” I don’t think my last name is Sicilian. Maybe it is?

Next episode: The Dig gets political(er), begins its somewhat lucrative but also uncomfortable relationship with the sex industry, and absolutely never tries to contact Hunter S. Thompson (RIP) ever again.

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13

WORLD’S END IN HINGHAM GTFO

Where Downeast Maine meets the Emerald Necklace—15 miles from Boston WORDS AND PHOTOS BY MARC HURWITZ @HIDDENBOSTON

Face it—if you like dramatic ocean scenery complete with rocky ledges, windswept headlands, and trails that seem to teeter above the water, there are few places better than the coast of Maine. The problem is, the coast of Maine— especially the part where it gets really rocky and remote—is pretty far away, with some areas impossible to do in a day trip unless you like getting home after midnight (which technically wouldn’t be a day trip, by the way).

Instead of hitting faraway places like Acadia National Park, Camden, and the Harpswells, where can you go that’s, say, 100-200 miles closer to Boston but has the same feel to it? A few spots do exist, with one of the closest to the city being a pretty magical one in Hingham called World’s End, which is so close to downtown Boston that you can literally see it, and while it can be just a slight pain to get to if you don’t have a car, it’s really not that bad if you plan it right.

World’s End is a 250-acre Trustees property that sits at the end of a peninsula in Hingham Bay, which is connected to the southern section of Boston Harbor and is protected in part by Hull and Peddocks Island. The park is weirdly shaped, with the bottom part looking like a baseball glove and the top piece being smaller and consisting of two oval hills called drumlins (the lower part also has two drumlins, one of which has spectacular views). The combination of hills, large treeless areas, and carriage paths designed by legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted make for scenery that really can’t be found in too many places; Olstead also designed the Arnold Arboretum, Boston Common, the Fens, and more (including Central Park in New York), so think of World’s End as having a bit of a city park feel in a somewhat isolated seaside space.

Getting to World’s End by car is pretty simple—you drive down Route 3A from Quincy and Weymouth, then continue straight on Summer Street at the rotary just outside of Hingham Center, take a left on Martins Lane after about a half-mile, and take it to the end where there’s a gate for the place. For those without cars, you can take the Greenbush Line to Nantasket Station and then walk north on Summer Street where, after a quarter-mile, it crosses

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Summer Street and becomes Martins Lane. However you get there, once you enter the World’s End parking area, one of the best routes is the one described here, which is mostly a clockwise hike and follows along much of the shoreline.

(Make sure you get a map, which will make things much easier.)

One of the carriage trails starts right from the parking area; Weir River Road cuts through a mix of deep forest and marshland with the ocean soon showing up on the right.

A tidal marsh runs along the left side and there are trails here and there that you can take to get a better view of it, including one about a half-mile in that leads to a rock outcropping with remarkable views of the marsh and the meadows. You can continue on this trail to Barnes Road (or reverse back and continue on Weir River Road to Barnes) where you will find yourself on a classic Olmstead walkway complete with towering old trees, grasslands to the right, and the marsh on your left. A spur trail eventually goes off to the left, which leads to an elevated boardwalk and a “bird blind”—basically a shelter where you can watch birds and other wildlife. This is one of those truly peaceful places where you could spend an hour or two, and it’s a good place to have the camera ready not just for birds but also for the bucolic scenes all around.

Eventually, you’ll need to leave the marsh, returning to Barnes Road where it soon ends at another carriage road and a bridge to the left that goes over the inflow/outflow of the tidal marsh—and yes, if you didn’t find yourself paying at the gate, just past the bridge is where you’ll need to pay depending on the setup on the given day. (As of this writing, it’s $8 per person.) On the northern edge of the bridge you’ll take a narrow trail that goes left to the ocean, then jogs right and follows the water far below. This is a relatively short path that turns right after about a quarter-mile and returns to the carriage road, but the scenery is mesmerizing from start to finish—and if it’s really windy, you’ll feel it here because it’s so exposed, but well worth dealing with for the water views.

Taking a left on the carriage path, you’ll quickly encounter a fork just after Pine Hill (one of the four drumlins); take a left on Brewer Road, which keeps the ocean on the left and which skirts Planters Hill before dropping down to the windswept causeway and sandbar connecting the top and bottom sections of World’s End. This is one of the few spots where you get ocean views to both the left and right, and if it’s not too windy (which is almost never), a place to take a break and soak in the salt air and the scenery.

Once you leave the causeway and are on the upper section—which is technically considered the World’s End

part of World’s End, if that makes any sense—you’ll come to another fork where you’ll take a left and start climbing along the edge of one of the drumlins. Keep to the left on this pathway for another quarter-mile and be on the lookout for another spur trail that heads left toward the water. This trail more or less ends on a bluff overlooking the ocean and is another great place for a break, as the views of the Boston skyline, the Blue Hills in the distance, and the water all around are something special—and there are often bird sightings in this area as well, so don’t be surprised to see a hawk or two while you’re out there. Once you return to the carriage road, go left and continue to stay to the left, eventually entering some deep woods where you may just encounter a deer, then do a clockwise mini-loop at the very tip of World’s End where you’ll see the very end of Hull through the trees. Soon you’ll start heading south after leaving the tip, and you’ll find another intersection where, once again, you take a left. This will bring you back to the causeway and the bottom part of the park.

From the causeway, take a right to return to Brewer Road, climbing the path with the ocean now to the right, and at the next intersection near the top of Planters Hill, take a sharp left, which will take you to the summit where there are benches, grasslands, views of Boston Harbor and much of the Hull peninsula, and the open ocean further back.

Planters Hill is the highest point in the park, and it certainly feels like it, especially the trail dropping down through the open fields looking toward the causeway in the distance.

Carefully descend this trail (it can be dicey when wet), which will bring you almost back to the causeway, but take a sharp right just before it, which will have the ocean (and Hull) off to the left. After another quarter-mile you’ll come to a left turn back on Weir River Road but instead of heading back to the entrance, take another quick left on a narrow trail which leads to a part of the reservation that’s much, much different from what you’ve seen so far.

Rocky Neck is the “thumb” of the baseball glove, and it’s mostly separate from the rest of World’s End, not only geographically, but as just mentioned, in overall feel as well.

Doing a little clockwise loop along the water here, you’ll feel like you’ve entered the aforementioned Acadia National Park, with dark and pointy coniferous trees giving a distinct Northwoods vibe to the area. A number of trails go here and there in this part of World’s End, but by keeping the ocean to your left at all times, you’ll get some of the best views, including a few spectacular ones of the Weir River and parts of Hull and Hingham. Eventually, the trail returns to Weir River Road where you’ll be back at the parking area in about 15 or 20 minutes.

Hingham is one of the most charming towns in the Greater Boston area, and its seaside areas are particularly nice, with World’s End perhaps being the highlight. It may not be the wilds of Downeast Maine, but if you only have a few hours to burn and want to feel like you’re far, far away from everything, you can do a lot worse than this absolutely gorgeous preservation area.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT THETRUSTEES.ORG/PLACESTO-VISIT/SOUTH-OF-BOSTON/WORLDS-END.HTML

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15

EPIC BEARD MEN MUSIC

B. Dolan and Sage Francis want you to stop being assholes to people, even Vanilla Ice

BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1

IMAGE BY SAM GEHRKE NATALIE FLETCHER Long before they became peers and co-conspirators as Epic Beard Men, Rhode Island word artists B. Dolan and Sage Francis met as student and teacher, respectively.

“I was the slam master of [Dolan’s] high school slam team at Smithfield Senior High School,” Francis says. The storied underground MC is one of hip-hop’s smartest artists and a major New England-style ballbuster, though it seems like he’s telling the truth about their backstory. He continues: “I love doing work with the youth there and trying to make sure these kids don’t get into bullshit. If they have problems at home, if they’re dealing with emotional issues, don’t be a bully, don’t take heroin, fucking talk about it in peace and hopefully you can win the slam at the county fair every year. “[Dolan] got a lot of attention because he is very anti-

‘Are we going to throw bricks through windows or what?’

authority. We didn’t gel. That was not the time for us to gel. But later, when Bush won his second [term], he came to me like, ‘Are we going to throw bricks through windows or what?’”

“That really happened,” Dolan confirms. “The night of the election I actually drove to [Francis’s house]. I almost forgot about that.”

Both concerned about the world around them beyond music, Francis and Dolan moved to dent Dubya with documents.

“We had to find a way to deal that wasn’t just with words but that was with actual actions, and that’s what knowmore. org was birthed from,” Francis says, referring to the corporate information database that his Strange Famous Records supported and pushed relentlessly.

“We collaborated, but it wasn’t Epic Beard Men at first.

[Knowmore.org] was [Dolan’s] conception, and that’s what he put endless time into over the next several years.”

Starting around 2013, Dolan and Francis started recording the occasional track as a unit, often dipping into protest realms that both are used to navigating. On the backs of cuts like “You Can’t Win” and “War on Christmas” (the latter of which coincided with the announcement of their forming a united front during the 2017 holiday season), things became much more official.

“Part of [the name] is related to the Epic Beard Man viral meme, where an old dude on a bus gets into a scuffle with a younger dude,” Francis recalls. “Right around when

>> EPIC BEARD MEN W/ OPEN MIKE EAGLE, SAMMUS, VOCKAH REDU, DJ ZOLE. THU 4.4 AT SONIA, 10 BROOKLINE ST., CAMBRIDGE. 16

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that happened, it popped into my mind that it could be a good concept. I knew at the time it was a really awful name, but I also knew that a group’s name is what you make of it. It doesn’t matter, you can have any name. If it’s good, people will accept the name. It’s the battle we were destined for.”

“There was a concerted effort, like, ‘Now we’re gonna make an album,’” Dolan says. “We both have time between solo projects now, so from the time we started doing that we’ve made about 24 songs—what’s about to be released, and what was released last year. … I think the approach was basically, Don’t be mean to people. Don’t be a piece of shit.”

“Considering how much B and I tour together and everything that we experience on the road and talk about, I feel like that’s the spirit of Epic Beard Men,” Francis adds.

“As solo artists we tackle a lot of heavy topics, and as a group I felt we could have more fun. That did happen for a lot of the songs, and then the longer you’re together you just get into the heavy shit again.

“For the most part, when we tour we’re in cars, side by side, just kind of shooting the shit, and that’s how the songs came about. In the midst of long-ass rides and talking about random bullshit. That’s always where you get a great concept that most people would just throw away, but if it was fun or funny in the moment, you can find a way to grow that into something other people can appreciate.”

The resulting project, This Was Supposed To Be Fun, is a demented joyride that rings as a hardcore hip-hop album on the beat side and flies into superhero territory in the theme department. Very little is predictable, from Slug (of Atmosphere) and Blue Raspberry (of Wu-Tang Clan acclaim) showing up on a song about America’s most degenerate tour manager, to expected knocks on dirty cops but with the unique twist of a free-wheeling buddy dramedy.

“The question was, How can this be different from our solo shit? And the group name kind of pulled it in that direction,” Dolan says.

“Because I had never done a half-and-half lyrics album like this I was interested in all the ways we could play off of [each other]. … We’re able to play opposing characters, we’re able to have a conversation, and to fight.”

“There’s only one song that was scrapped from the album, and it’s about Vanilla Ice,” Francis says. The Miami gimmick rapper is in all fathomable ways anathema to Epic Beard Men—appearance-obsessed, questionably gifted, well-groomed. Their message on the matter, however, is admirably contrarian, and classic Epic Beard Men. “This dude laid down the tracks for a lot of the people who America celebrates, and he has taken all of the brunt of the negativity,” Francis says. “I mean, tell me that Justin Bieber is not a fucking product of Vanilla Ice. Tell me that fucking Macklemore isn’t Vanilla Ice in a different incarnation. These motherfuckers get away with it, and [Vanilla Ice] is just the butt of the joke?

“Nah, he’s a fucking god, that’s all I’m saying. As a person I’m not going to champion him, but he fought the battle that so many people are basking in the victory of.”

NEWS TO US

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GENERATION WRECKS FILM

On Mope, Tone-Deaf, and Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore at the 21st Boston Underground Film Festival

BY KRISTOFER JENSON

IMAGE FROM MOPE, COURTESY PARKSIDE PICTURES “I suck at the thing I love,” shouts Tom Dong (Kelly Sry) at Steve Driver (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) near the end of Mope, which made its East Coast premiere at the 2019 iteration of the Boston Underground Film Festival. Tom makes this declaration with an unusual confidence and clarity (both for the character and for anyone who has ever pursued their dream). For him, this is liberation, a way of freeing himself from Steve’s increasingly far-fetched and even unsettling tactics for achieving superstardom. Tom hopes his friend will see the light as well—because at this point Steve is strange, detached, manic, and unable to separate fiction from reality. He should be thankful for what little they have: Someone is paying and housing both men to live out some portion of their dream, even though neither is particularly gifted.

The key point left out of the above description is that the two are at the bottom rung of the porn industry, performing the most humiliating work for the least pay and virtually no recognition. But anyone who has ever pursued their passion will identify with Tom’s expression, beyond the particulars of his situation. What if I suck?

And even if I don’t suck, what if someone else who’s less passionate is better than me? What if I do get my chance only to learn that I never had it in me to be good enough in the first place? “I suck at the thing I love” is a profoundly sincere statement, and one that marks Mope’s transition from a gross-out comedy about the world of ballbusting and cuckolding into a study of alienation—from sex, from work, from friendship, and from one another.

By way of either serendipity or zeitgeist, another of this year’s BUFF selections also revolves around a character who is objectively bad at their dream job. Tone-Deaf, this year’s offering from festival veteran Richard Bates Jr., uses the premise of a cat-and-mouse game with a spree killer to explore intergenerational conflict and the absurdity of finding happiness in the hollow shells of other people’s expectations. Single and unemployed, Olive (Amanda Crew) follows her friends’ advice to escape the chaos of Los Angeles and rents a house in the country owned by the recently widowed Harvey (Robert Patrick). Delivered amid the immediate madness of Harvey’s increasing psychopathic behavior and monologuing about the standard Boomer vs Millennial talking points is the story of Olive’s piano playing. She loves playing piano more than anything and is frequently encouraged by her 18

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friends and mother. The only problem is that she might be the worst pianist alive; she’s not only unskilled, but aggressively terrible. With passion and grace she plays chords and scales that make no sense to even the most untrained ear. How do you tell someone they are awful at the thing they love most when they’re not able to figure it out for themselves?

Aside from being an appropriately direct reference to the film’s title—she is tone-deaf to music, Harvey is tonedeaf to the world—Olive’s disastrous piano playing points to one of the larger ideas of the film: Does any of the stuff we gripe about actually matter? Is any of this real? What exactly are we all doing with our time that’s so important that we’d willingly define ourselves by it? The entire structure of Olive’s life was ready to crack at any moment: Her relationship was so strained it ended over a parking ticket and the timing of a pork chop dinner. Her boss fired her to preserve his ego after his creepy behavior was called out. Her self-care weekend, an escape to the country, boils down to paying money to do nothing in particular in someone else’s house in a town where everyone is on autopilot out of sheer boredom (or a murdering psychopath).

Bates contrasts the issues facing both generations without resorting to vulgar equation or bothsidesism.

When Olive finally gets to vent to Harvey about his generation’s failures—the economy, the environment, and other very real but admittedly well-trodden talking points—it comes after he reacts in disgust to her playing.

Here they are, bloody and bruised, only one of them going to survive this gambit. The least important fact has now come to light, and only Olive recognizes that being good at piano is not as important as basic survival. Playing piano is Olive’s dream, but like everything else, it’s just a way of filling up the time between birth and death. Anyone could have told her at any time and she would have been fine, but it’s been elevated to this life-or-death by her friends and family. It doesn’t actually matter to her that she’s bad.

***

An artist’s drive to improve their craft is a good impulse, but when it comes to appraisal and criticism, technical mastery is far too narrow a way to appreciate inherent worth. It’s too easy to identify a cut didn’t work or sound that wasn’t clear as a substitute for addressing what the

filmmaker is working to convey. One of the virtues of BUFF, and underground cinema as a whole, is that artistry is not judged solely by craftsmanship. A film of small scale and meager resources can have tremendous scope, and a production with rough edges that resonates on some level will have a longer life than a hollower one, no matter how slick.

For instance, this year’s BUFF also featured a screening of the digital restoration of Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore (1997), by the late underground legend Sarah Jacobson. It’s a triumph of passion and sincerity, using limited resources for maximum impact. Mary Jane ia raw yet sensitive look at a young woman coming of age, learning the facts of sex at the same time as its emotional component, good and bad.

It’s a notable contrast to most teen sex comedies where the act alone is the goal, as well as to the maleoriented gabfests that boil down to elaborate punchlines about dicks. Yet according to some contemporary reviews, it was a “hopelessly amateurish GenX comedy suffused with the self-satisfied air of something made by and for a small group of friends” (Joe Leydon, Variety), or an “overly long, exceedingly talky, preachy film, something between a bad after-school special and a feminist version of Clerks” (Film Threat). Leydon also criticized the audio syncing in Mary Jane, specifically during Jello Biafra’s end-credits cameo, as evidence of its generally low quality.

But to call Mary Jane “amateurish” overlooks the artistry it takes to make limited resources go such a long way. It also fails to recognize the influence of zine culture and the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s, and the relation those traditions have with Jacobson’s feature. A ’90s zine made no effort to conceal the way it was constructed, with scissor and tape marks aplenty, and many even found value in these supposed faults. It was as though the message was too important to be slowed down—that the revolution depended on this issue reaching people in time.

Yes, the audio of Jacobson’s film is often out of sync, but the meaning is never lost. Yes, Mary Jane was made by a group of friends, but it was meant to reach those who need to hear what it has to say. Anyway, what the hell is so wrong with a “feminist Clerks”? Jacobson creatively distinguishes the mechanics of sex with how pleasure feels. She can get as explicit as the rest of them, in dialogue and imagery, but her work’s focus is far beyond puerile fascination.

Fans of outsider cinema are used to seeing festival favorites get trashed or misunderstood on wider release, and usually for similar reasons to the ones leveled against Mary Jane—knocks on “low-quality” filmmaking, in cases where those supposed deficiencies are either unrelated to what the movie does well or are in the eyes of many actually important aesthetic choices. Honesty is a far more interesting metric for artistic merit—and one which can be applied equally to all genres and budgets. Slick, largebudget productions can be a lot of fun—who doesn’t love a good explosion, space battle, or dinosaur chase? But is that music swell aiding the story, or is it distracting from a fatal flaw? Is the film covering up for having nothing to say by saying it loudly? Is that music swell meant to mask that there’s been no real character growth? There’s no inherent virtue in the size of your budget, but there is a unique beauty to films that don’t have the safety net of spectacle.

The fun doesn’t stop once the trophies are given. BUFF’s Dispatches series, featuring favorites from years past, runs year-round. For more information, visit https:// bostonunderground.org/dispatches.

Tickets available at DIGBOXOFFICE.COM

NEWS TO US

FEATURE

DEPT. OF COMMERCE

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IMAGE COURTESY OF LAST CALL

ALLEGED LESBIAN ACTIVITIES OPENS A LESBIAN BAR ON STAGE PERFORMING ARTS

In the face of increasingly fewer lesbian and dyke bars in Boston, the show recreates the rare space with the help of community elders.

BY JACOB SCHICK @SCHICK_JACOB First in New Orleans, Last Call’s Alleged Lesbian Activities comes to Boston to examine the closing of lesbian bars through theater. DigBoston spoke with the co-directors of the show, Indee Mitchell and Bonnie Gabel, and Evelyn Francis, the artistic director of the Theater Offensive, the organization that commissioned the work in Boston.

How would you describe Alleged Lesbian Activities?

BG: We call it a cabaret musical for disappearing dyke bars. The show has three parts. One is this modern-day storyline about Frankie’s—the fictionalized last dyke bar in New Orleans that also is a traveling bar, so it’ll be in Boston.

The bar is about to shut down, so we’re in the bar on what may be one of its last nights. And there are cabaret acts that happen and act as portals that bring us backward in time to the ’70s and ’80s. That’s when we see stories from that time reenacted in order to look at the parallels between that time and now.

What does Alleged Lesbian Activities accomplish as a show?

IM: It does a lot. It creates a bar. So part of the work

is helping to provide that space. The show also feels important in that we’re giving to our community, starting these conversations or continuing these conversations around spaces disappearing and what kind of spaces we need. And what does it mean to hold space and have spaces for queer women, lesbians, dykes, fems, trans women, and trans people? I think that this work also feels like a service to the folks that we interview. So we are also part oral history project. So we do interviews with different elders and communities which started in New Orleans. And we interviewed a bunch of lesbians, the older dykes who went to bars, and then that’s been part of our research in Boston as well, as we’re bringing the show there and to other places, to do interviews with these different folks in those communities. I think there’s a lot of power and value in holding and collecting these stories and then being able to translate them onto the stage.

EF: So I think, for the lesbian community and folks who love women in the queer community, that this is such a powerful piece of work. It shows how there’s a lot of ways in which these queer-owned and -operated spaces for

>> ALLEGED LESBIAN ACTIVITIES. 4.4 THROUGH 4.7 AT JACQUES CABERET, 79 BROADWAY., BOSTON. JACQUES-CABERET.COM. 20

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lesbians, for people who love women, how those spaces in the queer community are disappearing. You can’t find the space where you can share these stories. And so I think that it is an amazing moment to come back to be in a room with elders is such a beautiful thing. But then for them to be able to share their stories on stage will be a beautiful moment for this community to come together and realize how important these spaces are, and hopefully will motivate folks to create these spaces more often.

Why are the lesbian bars in Boston closing?

IM: Well, I think there’s a lot of different theories around this like, you know, “Oh, queer people are more accepted in the world, so we don’t need safe spaces like that,” which I would say is not true. But also economics, money. Women don’t make as much money as men, generally speaking. So having to sustain a women’s-only space or fem’s-only space in this economy is hard. And I think also there’s something about the way the language and identity has shifted to change over time as well.

Is there anything you’d like to tell the audience?

EF: If you are an ally to the women-identified community, if you want to be an ally to women of color, if you want to be an ally to queer and trans women of color, and to those stories and that history, this is the show you need to come see.

BG: Revel in it. Have fun being in a lesbian bar, just for a night.

IM: Realize how rare it is, for a lot of people, to be in a lesbian bar for a night.

THEATER REVIEWS PERFORMING ARTS

BY MAGGIE BRADY @MAGGIEBRADY413 AND JACOB SCHICK @SCHICK_JACOB

FLAT EARTH THEATRE’S NOT MEDEA BLURS LINE BETWEEN ACTORS AND AUDIENCE

Note: Due to a miscommunication between editors and talent, we are now pleased to offer you, the reading public, the second of two reviews of Not Medea. And both three stars, too. Because we’re funny like that.

Audience participation is a dangerous game for a play.

You run the risk of audiences getting way too into it, or refusing to get into it at all. At best, your show continues smoothly; at worst, you’re bombing on stage. It’s a test of sorts for theatrical productions. Flat Earth Theatre’s Not Medea, now running at the Mosesian Center for the Arts, passes with flying colors. The trick? They cheat a little bit.

Not Medea starts before you know it, quite literally.

As the audience settles into their seats around the small thrust stage, the house manager takes a few moments to go over some information. The play is 105 minutes, no intermission, turn off your cell phones, strobe effect, etc. But one of the theater-goers arrives just a bit late, harried by the storm outside, holding too many things and talking on the phone. Passing her stuff off to the house manager, she apologetically addresses the rest of us and looks around for a seat to take. Between riffs on theater tropes, she moves around the space speaking directly to audience members—a brief aside: Telling the guy with a notepad out that his shirt makes his eyes pop is a great way to get a good review. When she realizes that the play she has come to see is Medea, the Greek tragedy of a scorned mother’s murder of her children, she is distraught. It’s clear that there’s something more to her story, but the play takes its time easing out the details.

And as such, Not Medea has begun extremely organically.

There is no dramatic drawing back of the curtains, or a dimming of the lights. The audience slides into the show, smoothing the transition from reality to fantasy.

It is this transition, the stepping back and forth between narratives, that Not Medea excels at. Allison Gregory’s mise en abyme-like play doubles the story of the woman (Juliet Bowler). At once she is one of us, watching the tragedy play out, and she is Medea, caught in a whirlwind of love and loss, forcing her to the classic play’s ultimate conclusion. Bowler’s fluidity in her roles is quite admirable, in her change of tone and speech—she speaks frankly when addressing her fellow audience members, but switches seamlessly to an elevated diction when delivering the lines of Medea.

Bowler’s fellow actors—who shift between realities with much less frequency than she—are Jason (Gene Dante) and the Chorus (Cassandra Meyer). Both give great performances. Dante’s haughty yet oblivious Jason is a necessarily frustrating foil. Medea is blamed for her actions and their consequences, but it is Jason’s neglect and adultery that drives her to commit them. Meyer’s Chorus provides the perfect balance of reason, giving voice to the audience’s misgivings with her opposal to both Medea and Jason.

The direction on Not Medea, by Elizabeth Yvette Ramirez, is also wonderful. The actors interact with each other and with the set and the props in such a way that the entire crew of Not Medea deserves a round of applause at curtain close. The show is very fluid, as the cast changes costume and scenery, stage placement and prop use, so often that you hardly notice it. And yet, as all of this runs by in front of your eyes, Not Medea deliberately suspends you just above absolute disbelief.

Rather than fully losing itself in the play, the audience is asked to consider its own place in the show. This purposeful distancing is an extremely provocative choice by the show. With such a dissolved barrier between watcher and watched, Not Medea can explore ideas that

other plays cannot.

There are points of friction, however. As Not Medea works to find its rhythm, it contrives a few too many reasons or lines of dialogue to keep Bowler’s character from simply leaving the theater. But this is easily forgiven and forgotten by the end of the show, as Not Medea closes as organically as it began.

NOT MEDEA. THROUGH 3.30 AT FLAT EARTH THEATRE AT THE MOSESIAN CENTER FOR THE ARTS, 321 ARSENAL ST., WATERTOWN. FLATEARTHTHEATRE.COM -Schick

REVISING HISTORY: PHOTOGRAPH 51 AT CENTRAL SQUARE THEATER

Shattering the glass ceiling, a phrase often inundating the media to praise women blazing a trail in their field— and a phrase decades out from its coining to describe situations just like Rosalind Franklin’s getting shafted in the accreditation of the discovery of the DNA double helix—perfectly describes Central Square Theater’s spring show.

Anna Zeigler’s award-winning production Photograph 51, directed by Rebecca Bradshaw, zeroes in on Franklin’s struggle to make herself heard in the science community of the early 1950s, continually overshadowed by men who were all too eager to theorize yet unwilling to give a woman colleague any credit for her contribution to their work. Impeccably cast and thoughtfully staged, Stacy Fischer captures Franklin’s often trampled-on expertise and understated femininity as she stared down condescension in a lab she was quietly unwelcome in.

Ziegler allows little room for misinterpretation: The sexism and towering egos of her fellow scientists held Franklin back, despite her best efforts to shut out their criticisms. The names on the Nobel Prize, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, belong to the three men upholding the

longstanding tradition of science as a boys’ club. Depicted as spending far less time in the lab than Franklin did, the men were more interested in being the first to publish what they thought the structure of DNA was than they were with the discovery itself—a trait that led to many of their disputes with Franklin.

In Ziegler’s production, they are portrayed as devious: When they aren’t lurking in the shadows just offstage, they can be heard mocking both Franklin’s appearance and perseverance, reducing her to just a feminine form.

Watson (Michael Underhill), referring to her as “a cypher where a woman should be,” avoids addressing his fear of failure. And his relationship with Crick (John Tracey) makes for an odd duo reminiscent of a tyrannical Abbott and Costello.

Though this show covers one historical event, the story is far from one-note. Ziegler speaks to a larger societal problem, one that the #MeToo movement has only scratched the surface of. Peppered throughout the production are references to the eternal struggles of women, reflected in Franklin’s personal battle to define herself as a scientist—not first, but in tandem with her womanhood.

Her struggle as a woman in a male-dominated field drove her to isolate herself, so much so that it left her vulnerable to the thievery of the misdirected Watson and Crick: their infamous model based on her uncredited X-ray image of the DNA sample. Her need for perfection and avoidance of the underdeveloped hypotheses of her antagonists are seen as her downfall by those same men in the lab, but her idiosyncratic mind is what got her singularly closer to discovering the structure of DNA than anyone ever had been.

The cast, set design, and thoughtful dialogue work flawlessly to convey a poignant and powerful message of regret, opportunity, and unbridled strength.

PHOTOGRAPH 51. THROUGH 4.15 AT THE NORA THEATRE COMPANY AT CENTRAL SQUARE THEATRE, 450 MASS. AVE., CAMBRIDGE. CENTRALSQUARETHEATRE.ORG -Brady

JOSH GLUCK AND STACY FISCHER IN PHOTOGRAPH 51. PHOTO BY MAGGIE HALL. NEWS TO US

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QUICKIES

SAVAGE LOVE

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET Savage Love Live stormed into Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. Comedian Corina Lucas absolutely killed it before our sold-out crowd, singer-songwriter Elisabeth PixleyFink performed an amazing set, and two lovely couples competed in our first (and most likely last) Mama Bird Cupcake Eating Contest. I wasn’t able to get to all of the audiencesubmitted questions, so I’m going to power through as many as I can in this week’s column.

How do you handle it if your partner constantly apologizes during sex? “Sorry, sorry, sorry…”

With sensitivity, tact, and compassion—and if none of that shit works, try duct tape.

Should I continue to have casual sex with someone I’m in love with?

If it’s casual for them and not casual for you, and they’ve made it clear it will never be anything other than casual for them, you’re going to get hurt—which I suspect you know. Now, if you think the pain of going without sex with them will be greater than the pain you’ll feel when they inevitably meet someone else and move on, by all means keep fucking them. (Spoiler: the pain of the latter > the pain of the former.)

Best tricks for a quick female orgasm & how to keep yourself from overthinking it?

My female friends swear by a little legal weed, where available (or a little illegal weed, where necessary), and a nice, big, powerful vibrator..

My five-year relationship ended abruptly. Is there a time frame for getting over it?

Studies vary. Some have found it takes the average person 11 weeks, some have found it takes half the length of the relationship itself, some have found it takes longer if it was a marriage that ended. But don’t wait until you’re completely over it to get out there—because getting out there can help you get over it.

OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

Besides a fiber-rich diet, what are your tips for a newbie to anal play? Size is a BIG factor and it’s creating a HUGE mental block whenever anything goes near my hole.

Start small, e.g., lubed-up fingers and small toys. And don’t graduate from tongues/ fingers/toys to someone’s big ol’ dick in a single session. Start small and stay small until your hole’s dread at the thought of taking something HUGE is replaced by a sincerely held, quasi-religious belief in the absolute necessity of taking something huge.

What is the formula for getting comfortable farting in front of a partner?

Same as comedy: tragedy + time.

In the era of online dating, how do you navigate the people who think the grass will always be greener and have difficulty committing to truly building a relationship?

The expression “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” has its roots in a Latin proverb first translated into English in 1545—which means the sentiment predates dating apps by, oh, roughly half a millennium. But the “paradox of choice,” or the idea that people have a hard time choosing when presented with too many options, has certainly complicated modern dating. But too many options beats too few, in my opinion, and it certainly beats no options at all, e.g., deserted islands, compulsory heterosexuality, unhappy arranged marriages, etc.

RUTHERFORD

BY DON KUSS DONKUSS@DIGBOSTON.COM

Any advice for a 22-year-old woman who meets only sad boys who need a mom?

Your handwriting is such that I thought you wrote “sub boys,” and I was going to respond, “Enjoy.” But then I reread your question: sad boys, not sub boys. Okay, if you’re meeting only one type of person or all the people you’re meeting have a certain character flaw, either you’re seeking that type of person out—consciously or subconsciously—or you’re projecting your own shit onto that person. This is a case where the best people to ask for a gut/reality check are your actual friends, not your friendly sex-advice columnist.

Will you be my sperm donor?

Well, that depends. Are you male, between the ages of 25 and 55, and (my entirely subjective notion about what is) hot? Then sure!

On the Lovecast, Dan chats with comedian Kate Willett: savagelovecast.com.

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“we’d like to start with a couple of houseplants”

SPRING BROKEN SPORTS+HUMOR

COMING SOON Godfrey

Telling jokes in Red Sox Nation South

World’s Dumbest, Comedy Central Presents Apr 4-6

BY WILL NOONAN Life in Boston can feel like a seriously tumultuous relationship. After the whirlwind romances of summer filled with outdoor dining and public consumption of joints on front stoops, you move into the comforting snuggle of fall only to get clobbered by the winter. It’s a common tale.

When the honeymoon is over, the realities begin to rear their ugliness. You still love Boston, but what the hell is going on? Every time you step outside, the cold air breaks at your face and constant wind invades any and all vulnerabilities. Every now and then, the Hub gets dark for days at a time, while parking one’s car can activate adrenal glands formerly reserved for Neanderthals about to fight to the death for a lizard carcass. You look around and realize, I’m still in love, but this is more work than it used to be.

Fortunately, just as you begin to get a wandering eye and Googling spots like Las Vegas, something happens. You’re walking down the street and glance inside a bar, and on the flat-screens, instead of showing breathless wide-eyed idiot reporters standing next to large piles of snow, it’s showing guys from the Red Sox playing baseball.

Suddenly, the green grass strikes you. It’s beautiful. The amount of sun shining on players and casting long shadows seems familiar; you may even shake your head a little.

You’ve been here before, and as a result you feel hopeful as you pass by and stare through the dead branches of trees. The sky is getting clearer.

As spring training signals the end of a Boston winter, it also summons baseball optimism. We spend the rest of the year criticizing every player, but in the spring we can dream. Prospects are vastly overrated, and insanely unrealistic hopes can be placed upon the most random of players. But that’s the fun of it. Also, if anything looks bad or doesn’t make you feel good, you can always just say, It’s only spring training. It doesn’t matter.

So when Jimmy Dunn (the comedian) and Sam Adams (the beer) called and offered me the chance to head south to Fort Myers, Florida, where the Red Sox have held spring training since 1993, and do a 16-night stretch of comedy shows near the ballpark, I immediately agreed without hesitation and began buying shorts.

As soon as I got off the plane in Fort Myers, I braced for cold air out of habit, only to feel the unfamiliar breath of humidity. A newly cured ex-vampire, upon stepping outside for a moment and seeing the green grass and bushes, I took a selfie for a “rub it in” Instagram post before even retrieving my bags. They actually had a little area that I believe was designated for the making of such posts.

Prior to arriving, I had some childish ideas about how my trip would unfold. Basically, I thought that it would be like camp, with me squarely in the midst of all these Red Sox people, all of us casually running into each other and hanging out. And that’s the beauty of baseball—it’s a child’s game, and sometimes childish ideas come true.

I casually ran into ex-MLB manager and current Red Sox Vice President of Baseball Operations Tony La Russa in a hotel lobby and handed him a flyer for our comedy show. I was chatting with NESN Director Michael Naracci about how his dog was having a hard time adjusting to Florida, not long after which former Sox catcher and current broadcaster Jarrod Saltalamacchia walked up and, like some sort of dog whisperer, got down on one knee and poured water into the palm of his hand for the dog to drink out of. Sports anchor Tom Caron gave me a tour of JetBlue Park, and iconic announcer Joe Castiglione told me how much he respected comedians. Seriously. He said that.

I even made friends with Wally the Green Monster. I felt like I had climbed inside my own flat-screen and was living on NESN. If Charlie Moore jumped out of the water and asked if I wanted to fish, I would have grabbed my rod.

By day, we arrived at the ballpark early before the fans were let in. I’d watch the visiting squad warm up from 10 feet away; when you’re starved for baseball, just watching guys play catch is amazing. After that, I watched games from a tunnel behind home plate and talked baseball with an usher named Ken who has worked for the Sox for 13 years and originally lived on the South Shore.

At night, we did it up. The great Jimmy Dunn hosted, while cameramen, television hosts, MLB scouts, ex-ballplayers, radio guys, general Boston bigwigs and their families, and others came to drink beer. It was a little bit of back home in a strange and foreign land.

Because despite the beautiful weather, we all missed home.

Florida is just not Boston. The grass really is greener and sure, Boston can be difficult and moody. But Boston’s personality makes up for the hard times. Florida feels like flirting with a coworker: It’s fun, and you may even think of them from time to time when you’re not there, but Boston is who you are married to, and sometimes they are warm and loving.

The trees are beginning to look less dead. And the Red Sox are about to return, hopefully with enough magic to last the whole season.

Just like that, the spark is back.

Will Noonan is a stand-up comedian living in Boston. To find out more about his adventures and upcoming performances, visit willnoonan.com.

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