Seeking Love in “Cosmic Crap Shoot”
On Valentine’s Day I took much pleasure and selfish interest in Eric Goldscheider’s revealing take on his online dating story, “Lilac, Where Are You?” (February 9, 2012). His awkward and honest look at how his real-life connections melded with online dating and social networking was disturbingly funny and well told—and all the more interesting because I share his 50-ish age range and am in the midst of working on an art installation with a related theme called My Potential Dates.
Though I’m currently very happily married (no, we didn’t meet on line), this exhibit is based on a period of time in 2009 when I was single and dipped my toe in the dating cyberpool. The ability to participate in this on-line human connectivity and its results was strange and amazing territory. For this show I created paintings that directly reference the actual website’s potential date photos, which I received by clicking info like my age and location (Holyoke). None of the portraits in this show are of men I actually went out with. This brings up much more to contemplate than just the incredible photo representations of themselves the guys chose to woo a date, but also issues of privacy, truth and illusion, who you are on line versus who you “really” are, and how this information goes out into the world.
The luck of the draw in any relationship, and what makes a match happen, are up to the whims of fate and the vagaries of destiny. How lucky any of us are to find in this cosmic crap shoot a person we would want to share our life with! I wish you much luck, Eric Goldscheider, and if you are around, come to my show. It opens February 26th at the UMass Hampden Gallery Incubator Space.
Amy Johnquest
Holyoke
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Casino No Pot of Gold for Palmer
Yes, Mohegan Sun is in deep trouble with a $1.6 billion debt and $21 million interest due Feb.15 on $250 million in bonds due in April [“Casino Company Not Recession-Proof,” February 2, 2012], according to Bloomberg News. I’m from Palmer, and this warms the cockles of my heart. I run into people all the time here who feel just as I do.
Yes, Palmer desperately needs businesses that provide jobs. Like the rest of the Pioneer Valley, Palmer has been robbed of many of its small businesses by the dimwitted, greed-motivated, bipartisan free trade agreements that have given China our economy on a silver platter, and have left us hung out to dry. Casinos are not a business that makes anything. They take what precious little discretionary money is left in the economy and ship much of it overseas to their well-heeled multinational investors.
Casino speculators love to create the perception that town folk are just salivating at the opportunity to have a casino in their community. Getting off at the Palmer exit, one is met by large signs on the property leased by Mohegan Sun, touting the benefits of hosting a Mohegan Sun casino. I’ve heard folks tell me that’s how they got this impression. What people don’t know is that it is forbidden in town to have lawn signs without permission from the town council, and that when given permission for a short “No Casino!” campaign, most of our signs were disappeared.
Polls run by casino advocate Clyde Barrow of UMass, known for his slanted studies mostly funded by pro-casino interests, always show a majority in favor. The last poll was financed by Northeast Realty, which leases to Mohegan. I’ve read how an overwhelming majority of voters in Palmer voted on a nonbinding referendum for a casino. Truth be known, the vote was 49 percent to 51 percent in favor, a near tie. Holyoke voted for a casino, too, on such a referendum. But when facing the reality of losing their spectacular vista of Mt. Tom and of gaining a host of social and economic problems, guess what Holyokers did? They voted in a 23-year old anti-casino mayor and booted out the pro-casino city councilors.
If Palmer “wins” the casino, life in Palmer will never be the same, and many folks know this. We’ll have to deal with gridlock traffic, a rise in crime, the spread of urban sprawl, a drop in property values, an epidemic of gambling addiction, harm to other existing businesses, and huge costs to the town in infrastructure and services that could total as much as $150 million one time and $40 million annually. The biggest loss will be the loss of our quality of life in lovely, rural Western Mass.
Companies that took over the old mills like Wrights and Tambrands, and many of our small industries that were lured out of town by the prospect of cheap “slave” labor abroad, were perfect in scale for our area.
With all the enabling of the financial industry to gamble away our economy, it’s easy to see how our state government would collaborate with a disreputable “industry” whose job it is to con, shake down and squeeze the poor and working class with their addictive slot machines for revenues and profits. Lately I don’t see much difference between our government and organized crime.
We do have one weapon, though. Town by town, city by city, we can tell these addiction factories and their Statehouse sponsors where to go and send them packing back to Las Vegas. I just hope the folks of this state refuse to listen to lies and slogans such as, “It’s a done deal,” “There’s nothing you can do, they have too much money,” and do just that. Holyoke did. Foxboro did. So can Brimfield, Palmer and Springfield.
Charlotte Burns
Palmer
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“Defective Drama”
Danny Eaton’s The Island Lily successfully drew audiences for a recent run at West Springfield’s Majestic Theater, but surely it was defective drama. Facing financial loss, his two main characters’ fortunes change only when one of them chances to learn she has inherited a valuable piece of property. What Eaton should have learned in school is that serious writers must write their way to solve their character’s problems and not stoop to melodrama—to deus ex machina, the use of some artificial device to achieve resolution of their plot. If Majestic’s next offering, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, is well staged and performed, audiences will experience a playwright who wrote at the height of his powers.
Carl Doerner
Conway
