FIGMO's Follies

It’s now been over a month since the Stafford Challenge started (on January 17th) and I’ve continued to write a poem every day. It’s an interesting exercise. I started out thinking in terms of writing poems related to the wreck of the Congressional Limited train in 1943. I did write 7 poems on that subject, but I quickly realized I have a lot more research to do before I can really get deeper into it. Leveraging off that, I wrote six other poems relating to trains (including the Washington metro, the Long Island Railroad, and Amtrak).

I’ve already posted titles of the poems I wrote for weeks 1 and 2. Here are the remaining titles of poems I’ve written so far.

Week 3:

31 January 2026 - Both Sides Now

1 February 2026 - A Eulogy for X. J. Kennedy

2 February 2026 - A Eulogy for X. J. Kennedy (revised)

3 February 2026 - With Reservations

4 February 2026 - Blackberry Jam

5 February 2026 - The Lily Jean

6 February 2026 - Amtrak Acela

Week 4:

7 February 2026 - Amtrak #2

8 February 2026 - Weather Woes

9 February 2026 - The Bicycle

10 February 2026 - Life Is

11 February 2026 - Sleeping in Hotels

12 February 2026 - Household Archaeology

13 February 2026 - Lucky or Not?

Week 5:

14 February 2026 - The Afghan Song (to the tune of The Garden Song)

15 February 2026 - Post Valentine’s Day

16 February 2026 - Presidents Day

17 February 2026 - Spectral Haiku

18 February 2026 - Cuddly

19 February 2026 - Seeking My Muse

20 February 2026 - The Idea Shop

A Brief Sample

I won’t post anything I might want to submit to a magazine/ journal / anthology someday, since most publications count things published on-line as prior publication and won’t accept it. But I’m pretty sure I won’t do anything with this one and it’s a good example of my fondness for turning lists into poems. I got the idea for this poem while walking back to my hotel after going to the cabaret show I saw recently in New York and thinking “life is a cabaret.” I crowd sourced phrases starting with “life is” via the hive mind (i.e. my Facebook friends) and this is what I came up with.

Life Is

Life is too short
Life is too long
Life is hard
Life is easy
Life is like a box of chocolates
Life is just a bowl of cherries
Life is what you make of it
Life is a song worth singing
Life is a highway
Life is a river
Life is strange
Life is funny
Life is a journey, not a destination
Life is a cabaret
Life is life

Community:

One of the main reasons for doing the Stafford Challenge is the community fostered by the cohort. There are roughly 1300 people doing it this year. There’s a private Facebook group. And there are monthly talks by guest poets. There is apparently going to be a conference in the summer, which I think will actually work with my schedule.

The other benefit of being part of the cohort is access to monthly guest poet talks. The January kick-off talk was by Kim Stafford, the son of the late William Stafford whose practice of writing a poem a day is behind the whole thing. I wasn’t able to make it to that one live, but I did listen to the recording and here are three takeaways from it:

1. ”Poetry is our native language.” We speak in units of breath.
   
   
2. Betty Sue Flowers wrote that the progress of the artistic process is Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge. I really like this concept. Your ideas can be completely wild, but then you have to make plans and do the work to construct the product from them. Then you can look at what you’ve done and assess whether or not it meets your goal and go through this whole process again to revise it.
   
   
3. The muse is the inner voice , waiting for an audience.
   
   

The second talk was Thursday night and was by Emmett Wheatfall. Here are my takeaways:

1. He presented a 7 point challenge, which didn’t particularly resonate with me because most of them seemed fairly obvious, e.g. “listen to the feedback of your readers.”
   
   
2. I did like his statement that Hemingway wrote down seven rules a day, but I’m not sure if those were the same rules or he came up with new ones every day. At any rate, seven is a number with a lot of mystical significance.
   
   
3. He said that a quote of poetry is called a “stretch.” I’ve never heard that before.
   
   

Three is also a mystical number. I don’t think I can find more than three takeaways in most hour-long presentations. I did also write down one snarky note. Namely, he quoted somebody talking about the artist, Edgar Degas. But he pronounced the surname as “DEE-gus” instead of “Day-GAH.” Aargh!

And Now

I need to find a topic for today’s poem.

I went up to New York a couple of weeks ago for a long weekend. (That was after several days of not going outside at all, due to what they called “snowcrete,” i.e. icy sleet on top of snow, which created a disgusting substance with the texture of concrete.) I had originally scheduled an evening Acela, which would have arrived about 9:30 p.m. but I was notified a couple of days in advance that it was canceled, so I took a train that was scheduled to get in about 5 p.m. I usually just take a northeast regional since the time difference from the Acela is minimal, but this was one of those rare times when the cost differences was minimal. In the end, my train was delayed about an hour, which was annoying mostly because they kept changing the time it was going to leave. And, several times, the text they sent claimed that the new time was the original time, despite what was being announced. It didn’t matter much to me, since I was still getting in quite a bit earlier than my original plans. And Amtrak did send me compensation, which will be helpful since I have 2 or 3 more Amtrak trips in the next couple of months.

I had enough time to grab takeout pizza before going to my hotel. I’d gotten a reasonable price at the Fairfield Inn & Suites right across the street from Moynihan Train Hall. I ate my pizza and watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, which annoyed me because of NBC’s overemphasis on Team USA. I wanted to know more about things like the sole competitor from Guinea Bissau. I was also following the Israeli bobsleigh team because their captain, A.J. Edelman is an MIT alumnus (and even course 2, like me and Senator Alex Pedilla!) He was the first Orthodox Jew to compete in the Winter Olympics (in Skeleton in 2018) and his brother is the comedian Alex Edelman, whose show Just For Us has to do with his experiences with a white supremacist group. And, by the way, one of the members of that Israeli bobsleigh team is Druze.

It was particularly windy and frigid out, which limited the amount of random walking around that I did. My plans were for a theatre day, so that wasn’t a huge issue. The first show I saw was the matinee performance of Buena Vista Social Club. This was an easy choice for me to make since I like Cuban music and have loved both the movie and CD for years. And it was, indeed, very enjoyable. The performances were heartfelt and I really appreciated the booklet about the songs that was included inside the Playbill. And the band was incredible, well deserving of the special Tony award they got. By the way, the real Omara Portuondo is still alive (in her mid 90’s) and has recorded an album as recently as 2023. Highly recommended.

Saturday night’s selection was Death Becomes Her. I didn’t know a lot about this musical going in and had chosen it largely because the reviews were good. The basic premise is that Viola Van Horn (played by Michelle Williams, who had started her career in Destiny’s Child) has access to a potion that promises eternal youth - and life. The actual story has to do with the rivalry between an actress named Madeline Ashton, and the friend (named Helen Sharp) who she abuses all her life, down to stealing her plastic surgeon fiance. And that’s exactly the problem I had with this show. The songs have amusing lyrics and there is plenty of funny material and the special effects are impressive. But do we really need a show that is based on two women attempting to sabotage one another?

By the way, how cold was it out? They were claiming the wind chill made it feel like -17 Fahrenheit. In more practical terms, I walked 4 blocks (to 43rd street) and got on the subway for the remaining 10 blocks because I just couldn’t handle the temperature any more. And I was wearing 3 layers of clothes, as well as my warmest jacket.

Sunday wasn’t much better, though I had the sense to add yet another layer to my clothes. I headed cross-town to meet up with a group of folks from FlyerTalk at the 2nd Avenue Deli. Josh organizes Deli Do a couple of times a year and there were about 20 attendees. I’ve been once or twice before and I’ve eaten at that deli lots of times, going all the way back to when it was actually on 2nd Avenue. I noticed that the menu no longer has hot open faced sandwiches, which used to be one of my go-to orders in my childhood. A tongue sandwich and a kasha knish is my most common deli order these days. But, given the cold weather, I thought that the soup and half sandwich option was a good idea. I got the mushroom barley soup and half a chopped liver sandwich. Both were quite good. And, of course, a Dr. Brown’s diet cream soda, since I never acquired the taste for cel-ray. Jewish soul food and talk about flying / travel - what better way to spend a long lunch? Several of us walked over to Blue Haven East afterwards for adult beverages and more conversation. I have a long standing quest for the best hot buttered rum in NYC and theirs was pretty good. And it was nice to be able to mingle and chat with people who had been sitting at the far end of the deli from the table I ended up at.

I took advantage of proximity to walk over to the Morgan Library, which had been on my list of places in New York that I had not been to before. I was particularly eager to get there since they have a Caravaggio painting temporarily on loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome. In addition to Boy with a Basket of Fruit, there were other naturalist works, mostly by contemporaries of Caravaggio and other painters influenced by his style. I’m mostly a modern art aficionado, but I was awestruck by Caravaggio’s use of color and light when I saw two of his paintings at Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta, Malta some 25 years ago and consider him the greatest painter of the late 16th / early 17th centuries.



It was also the last day of an exhibit of Renoir drawings. I’m not particularly keen on Renoir (or, frankly, the impressionists, in general). But a quick look through that exhibit left me impressed with Renoir’s skill as a draftsman.



But, of course, the real highlight of the Morgan Library is the actual library, which is spectacular.





Don’t forget to look up at the ceilings, too!



I wandered over to Grand Central Terminal for a bit, then headed back to the west side to go to a cabaret show. I had heard of Don’t Tell Mama from a couple of puzzle people, but had never been there before. I was impressed with the number of people who went there alone, which is a bit unusual in my past experience at cabaret venues. I had a lively and interesting conversation with the woman sitting at the table next to mine, who I found out at the end of the evening was a somewhat well-known actress, Neva Small. As for the actual show, it was called Jewish Caroling: The Music of Carole King, Carole Bayer-Sager and Carolyn Leigh. The performer, Deborah Zecher,is a singer, storyteller, and rabbi and she put together an interesting mix of songs by those three Jewish women. I hadn’t known this going in, but the proceeds from the show are being donated to Beth Israel, the synagogue in Mississippi that was burned down.

For women of my generation, Carole King’s Tapestry was a truly iconic album. I remember listening to it with my best friend in the bedroom of an older girl who lived on our block, who would go on to tell us that an orgasm is like a sneeze between the legs! And, yes, I do still have my own copy of it. Anyway, it was a very enjoyable show and I’ll check out the offerings at Don’t Tell Mama for future New York trips. By the way, the wind had died down and walking back to the hotel was tolerable.

I went down to the Lower East Side on Monday. Walking through Penn Station to get to the F train, I passed this interesting glass mosaic mural. It is called Garden of Circus Delights and was done by Eric Fischl. There is actually quite a lot of interesting art in the New York City subway system and it would be fun to spend most of a day exploring it.



My goal was seeing a temporary art exhibit, sponsored by Manischewitz in honor of a new line of bottled soups.





They also had some cute merchandise, e.g. aprons, baseball caps, and patches with various Yiddish slogans. But none of that is anything that I’d ever use. And neither my brother nor the gentleman with whom I’m conducting the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling ever wear any type of hat. They were also selling soup from a food truck nearby, but I had other intentions.

Specifically, I had lunch at Russ & Daughters. The “Super Heebster” consists of whitefish and baked salmon salad with horseradish-dill aream cheese and wasabi roe. I got it on a bialy, and it was very tasty. It also came with half sour pickles and, while I normally favor full sours, they worked well with the mild spiciness.



And I couldn’t resist their halvah ice cream. While I enjoyed it, I would have actually liked a smaller portion and I didn’t think the salted caramel topping added much to it.



The food was pricy, but worth it.

I spent a lazy afternoon catching up on some reading and puzzles, before heading uptown towards Lincoln Center, where the subway station had another attractive set of glass mosaics (but I didn’t photograph those). From there, it was a short walk to the Marjorie S. Dean Little Theatre to see Going Bacharach. This was (obviously) a tribute to Burt Bacharach, performed by three singers with a small band. All three singers were excellent. I was not thrilled by the musical arrangements, which lacked brass. The music director, Adrian Galante, was impressive on the clarinet, but the flamboyance of his piano playing annoyed me. I’d also have liked to actually learn something about Burt Bacharach as a person. One of the singers did talk a bit about his use of mixed meter, which I thought was interesting. But, overall, I found the show disappointing.

Speaking of disappointing, I ‘d stayed at that Fairfield several times before. While the rooms are comfortable, the breakfast offerings have deteriorated. The breakfast on the weekend was better, but on weekdays, they didn’t have salsa for the scrambled eggs (though they did have bottles of a few types of hot sauce) and they didn’t have pancakes or waffles. More egregiously, the only fresh fruit they had were bananas (yuk). On the weekend, they had salad, but not on weekdays. This is a minor annoyance as there are plenty of places to get a decent breakfast within easy walking distance. But there used to be more variety. Another issues is that one of the three elevators wouldn’t recognize my room key, nor those of several other people, and this did not get repaired during my stay. My biggest complaint is that the rate for Monday night was considerably higher than for the previous three nights and this was not clearly displayed when making the reservation on line. I’ll have to rethink whether or not to stay there in the future.

I didn’t have any issues with Amtrak going home on Tuesday morning. The metro also cooperated and I was able to get in a lovely afternoon nap, before catching up on some household chores.

I have a lot of catching up to do, starting with a trip I took to New York a couple of weeks ago. I’m also going through the clippings file, celebrity death watch, and my progress on the Stafford Challenge.

But the Shameless Self-Promotion Department comes first. The 6th annual Women’s Storytelling Festival is coming up in just about a month and today is the last day to get discount tickets. For a mere $35 you can get a virtual festival pass, while a full festival pass (which includes in-person performances in Fairfax, Virginia) is only $55. Both include access to the live stream and access to the videos through April 28th.

To take advantage of this fabulous deal, go to the WSF ticket page.