WHO, WHAT, WHEN
MAN OF THE HOUR? Who’s at the center of this crush? Where and when was his visit, and what do you recall about him or similar guests on campus? Tell us your answers at 518-580-5747,
srosenbe@skidmore.edu, or Scope c/o Skidmore College. We’ll report answers, and run a new quiz, in the upcoming Scope magazine.
FROM LAST TIME
Lena Spencer and who? Loretta Quigley ’70 couldn’t ID the student in this 1960 photo, but she sent an evocative per- sonal essay about her times at Caffe Lena, adapted here: Loners, misfits, yearners, users, givers, the poseurs and the real thing climbed Caffe Lena’s creaky stairs and found a haven. That late 1960s scene brought Skiddies together with townies, grifters with innocents, acolytes with their gods. I slipped in, night after night, a shadow on the wall. Lena Spencer, redolent of tobacco, sweat, and authority, alarmed me, but the man I was with, voluptous and lithe, seduced Lena into his orbit like a moon around Jupiter, allowing me to pass unseen. Late nights at the Caffe, Tom would play fiddle and banjo and tin whistle in jam sessions, until the dawn scattered us. Becoming known at the Caffe gave me a place between the time my mother died, pre- cipitating my family’s disinte- gration, and the time I gradu- ated and had to fabricate my own place in the world. Even- tually Tom went off to France, and the Caffe became a fraying memory for me. A decade later, soon after I had married Walt, the love of
my life, I saw a handbill on the Caffe’s door, advertising a per- formance of my first love. No vows could have held me home that night. As I sat through the sets, anticipating a glance of recognition, nothing in his look across the footlights acknowl- edged me. When I stepped past him to leave, he said nothing and neither did I. Closure at last. Well into middle age, after Walt’s sudden death, I returned to the Caffe, trying to piece myself together. Like a mendicant begging shelter, like a lost child looking for comfort in a long- cherished place, I approached the familiar door. The creak and turn in the stairs, however, were the only authentic elements left. After Lena had died, the Caffe’s preservers had turned the place into an homage to itself and gentled its rawness. Now politics sparked little fire in the lyrics of the singers. Tepid banter fell from uninspired lips. The kitchen didn’t ex- plode with unbridled profani- ty. Gone were the broken, slat- ted shutters that had let in the occasional star or sliver of moon. And in the audience, markedly missing hippies and rapt adolescents, I didn’t see a shadow of myself.
SPRING 2014
SCOPE 23
MARK MCCARTY
JOE ALPER PHOTO COLLECTION
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56