Healthy Influence Blog

My sincere regrets at this unconscionable delay. We attended the ECA Annual Conference in Providence last April (yes, 2007) and I’m just now posting on it. Been busy . . . getting old . . . feeling better! Really.

Let’s start with business. Melanie organized a panel on humor and communication. She included several serious people who actually study humor and try to explain it. And then try to be funny. The panel was well attended (usually academic conferences feature panels with more presenters than audience members) and everyone had a rocking good time. I took many furtive pictures, trying desperately not to look like Melanie’s proud relative at graduation. Almost all the shots were blurred, shaky, or out-of-frame, except for this one with Melanie and her colleague, friend, and former doc student, Melissa Wanzer.

Melissa is at Canisius University where she is a campus star and continuing source of fun, delight, and professional skill. She’s also just plain funny. Melanie had many other responsibilities because she’s a Big Shot and a former President of this Association. She has so many ribbons and tags that she looks like General Grant on the Fourth of July. I’ll try to get a picture of that sometime. It’s quite impressive. I don’t know whether to salute or . . .

While she’s handling her profession, I like to visit art galleries and museums. The fabulous Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is located near downtown Providence, just a short walk from our hotel, the Westin. They’re doing a major renovation of the place and here’s what you’ll see now.

It’s quite a nice building for something that is so accessible and cozy in the neighborhood. You feel like it’s your place rather than a national monument. Luckily for me, they were holding an exhibition of rare Japanese prints featuring Hiroshige. They let you take pictures as long as you didn’t use flash. Here’s the Opening Poster:

I tend to go on and on over pieces I see in museums and it drives Melanie crazy. She says, correctly, that its like listening to someone’s travel movie. So, I’ll be polite and just show a couple of shots, including my last one in this exhibition.

You’ll note the flash reflection in the glass. A nice docent struck me on the head with a rolled up “Notes on an Exhibition of Hiroshige” catalog, pinned my arms behind my back, and confiscated my Canon SureShot camera. I did not protest. I did not have proper control over all the many wonderous and confusing features of this modern piece of technology and I’d been warned a couple of times before about flashing . . . seriously, they scowled at me and rightfully so, and I put the damn camera away. Until I got to another part of the museum and saw this:

One of the coolest art moments of my life. They were (obviously) setting up for a major new display that opened a couple of days after we left town. Perhaps they’d heard about me and my flashing? The blue of the room is gorgeous, just one of my alltime favorite tones. And, all that excellent art from many different artists hanging in one large, well lit room is just a gas. Beauty, grace, just great fun to stand and stare. It was like those study visits I’ve had at the Metropolitan in New York, the Fogg at Harvard, and the Freer in DC where I’d go “backstage” and handle and view original masterpieces in study rooms. (I’ll blog on those experiences sometime.)

The RISD is one of the great art surprises of my life. It holds an oustanding range of work in a pretty, sophisticated, and comfortable space. This place alone warrants a visit to Providence.

And, so do the restaurants! Man, Providence is one great eating town and Melanie and I give it two Big Thumbs Up! You could almost get me to consult anywhere in Providence for just expenses. Big expenses. As brief overview we ate at Mill’s Tavern, Chez Pascal, Cafe Nuovo, and a nice place in Federal Hill. All were really good. And right now I’m blanking on the correct name of the Italian place in Federal Hill; my travel notes show scratchings that look like “Panne and Vino” but that can’t be right - sounds like the show name “Martin and Lewis” used before “Martin and Lewis.” If you’re a foodie, please help me before I defame again.

John, from the Westin, toured us around town and taxied us on two occasions to our dinners in the English cab. The vehicle is quite nice. Roomy, great sight lines, and easy for well dressed women to enter and exit without putting on a floor show for passersby. John gave us a great travelog and town history on our drives. If you stay at the Westin, take the English cab and ask for John, too. Please extend our regards.

Here’s Melanie in Little Italy, or Federal Hill as it is known locally. We almost didn’t make to our restaurant. So many delights in the window displays and food fragrances wafting onto the street through open doors. It’s a long and tempting walk to get to your destination.

We forgot to bring the camera along to Cafe Nuovo and I regret that. We also forgot to bring two umbrellas and to trust my sense of direction. Melanie planned this one and knew decisively that it would not rain on our walk and where the place was located. After 30 years, you’d think I’d know better, but love is blind, stupid, and unteachable. We wandered all over Providence in a steady rain with one small umbrella (I love, but don’t always trust) for 30 minutes before I dragged us into a dry cleaners to get directions. We only missed by a mile or less. Melanie considered it a victory for her sense of direction while I was really happy to have shared a small umbrella with a curvy babe for 30 minutes.

Nuovo has (had?) one of the great chefs we’ve tasted anywhere. Had a great server, too, who connected with our style immediately and provided excellent recommendations all night. I had a serving of raw oysters with a glass of champagne, then a main dish of veal and shrimp served on fettucini. The chef’s touch with everything was great. All the key tastes came through simply and clearly, yet played well with everything else in the dish. Cafe Nuovo is one of the best restaurants I’ve eaten in and I hope it’s still going.

Chez Pascal is close competition, but in a more romantic, bistro style. I had to touch up the photo due to poor lighting effects (need to read the damn manual again), but this shot gives you a sense of the place.

Champagne again with a three cheese appetizer, then a pinot noir with a roasted chicken dish in the line of coque au vin, closed with a fabulous custard desert and I’m not really a fan of custard. Just that nice neighborhood Frenchy joint. After dinner we walked into the night waiting for John and the English cab. People were out on the street just walking around enjoying the night. We talked with a young couple about Chez Pascal and sang its praises. Then a nice fella out walking his dog chatted us up about food, Providence, and dogs. He raises pure breds and let us have a Ken and Barbie picture.

Fun moments like this happen on all of our travels. Strangers are nice to us and share fun events and point our interesting features. They like Melanie a lot I think and most of the time if I take a picture of them with her, they’ll take a picture of me with her, too. I tend to be somewhat wary in a strange city (imagine that, plus I got robbed and mugged at gunpoint in a city when I was a young man), so I keep a careful eye out, yet nice folks still find us. We tend to stick out so that everyone skips the obvious, “You’re not from around here, are you” line and gets to the fun right away.

Once we were hustling out of a nice Baltimore restaurant at the Inner Harbor on a cold night getting into our taxi when a slightly, but clearly, drunk man ran over to us like a dog on the hunt, began shaking my hand and telling me that he recognized me and told the taxi driver to be careful with this ride because he was carrying a famous cargo. This was many years ago when I was wearing extremely long hair. Like this.

I ran into Janet Reno and her body guard on the street in the Federal Triangle in DC looking something like this. The body guard stepped between Janet and me, then saw Melanie and took his hand out from under his jacket. Then in a little-known hallway in a DC hotel I got backstage while President Bill Clinton was speaking, scaring the hell out of the Secret Service contingent. Had many people think I was Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman scouting out locations or else the lead singer in either a rock or nuvo country band. Then I got a hair cut, went to work for the Fed, and everyone just hands me the check.

I’m really quite mysterious, aren’t I?