DC

We took off early from Charlottesville in order to make it to Washington DC in time for a matinee production there of “Taming of the Shrew” with a traditional all male cast.

 I had mixed feelings about the production as a whole, but Maulik Pancho’s performance was outstanding. You may remember him as Alec Baldwin's secretary in 30 Rock

I enjoyed the use of the turntable set which gave cinematic flow to the action.

Walking back to the theater we popped into the National Portrait Gallery and had a snack in the atrium, which is an amazing bit of architecture. The whole central courtyard is covered by huge steel and glass creation that allows you to feel you are outside and yet not have to deal with the mid Atlantic States weather.

You never know who is going to be added to the portrait gallery. This new portrait of Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood seemed especially apropos for the DC Museum.
I continued to be fascinated by California WPA artwork. Golden Gate Bridge in progress and Bunker Hill before urban renewal.

Millard Sheets

On to the big apple.

Charlottesville

We left Asheville early Wednesday morning. 

We stopped in Charlotte to see our friend Myra. She claims to be the only Jew in Charlotte. I don't know about that, but Myra has always had fabulously edgy taste in clothing and an eye for Asian art. When we went for lunch at a restaurant the place was packed with aging southern belles. John and I were the only men there. Mayra looked nothing like these steel magnolias and I’m sure her home decor looks nothing like theirs either.

We arrived late into Charlottesville. 

Thursday we had a quiet day around the house. Ellen was working. We went shopping for Saturday’s dinner. We had dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in town. 

Friday morning we went to Richmond. 

We met up with Cynthia from John Bassett's EFM group. She gave us the quick grand tour.

Richmond is a city with lots of history that I can't begin to cover here, But Cynthia knew it all.

Monument Avenue is a boulevard of stately homes. At each intersection is a statue of former Richmond residents that we Yankees we're surprised to see immortalized.

Jefferson Davis                                                                                                      Robert E. Lee

Stonewall Jackson. Arthur Ashe end of the road facing the opposite direction of all the other stashes. Can we say tokenism.

Jefferson Hotel

We met up with Kay and Elsa for lunch. We were having such a good time chatting and eating that I forgot to take pictures. 

That evening, back in Charlottesville, we had been invited to dinner at Ellen's friend Fatima and her husband Nassar's house. It was Ramadan and they are Muslim, so they had invited some students of Ellen’s, also Muslim, who were there for an African symposium, to break their fast with us.

At dinner Nasser mentioned that he was Shiite. One of the young men, who was Sunni, look stunned. "I have never meant a Shiite before." There were several tense moments but Nasar handled the whole situation with great diplomacy. This is exactly the sort of experience the symposium was created for.
Saturday evening we were invited to another professors' house. The Africans this time we're not Muslim, so we ate before sunset and most everyone had a glass or two of wine.

One of the women at the party had obviously singled me out. She asked me many questions about John Bassett. She finally asked how long I had known him. I mustard up my courage, not knowing what the reaction I would get from this African woman, and told her that John and I were married. Her voice became very low and she told me that she was the head of the LBGT group where she lived in Africa. She had not come out to anyone in her group here. She left the room for a moment and came back with several pins from the first gay pride parade they had just had in her hometown and gave them to me. 

 

We leave tomorrow morning first thing.

Biltmore

There are basically two reasons to visit this part of North Carolina. One is to hike around Great Smoky National Park. And the other is to see Biltmore, the estate of George Washington Vanderbilt, the largest private home in the United States. Biltmore is one of the grandest monuments of what Mark Twain called “The Gilded Age.” Twain’s phrase was not a panegyric to his era. Twain felt that there was not only something tasteless about the displays of wealth in the late nineteenth century but that it was false and inauthentic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst. And some part of all of that can be seen at Biltmore.

As was typical for the homes of the wealthy during this time, it was built to look like one of ancestral residences of European nobility. Using the architectural vocabulary of the past was not simply a lack of imagination on the part of nineteenth century builders. It was also a ploy to make the wealth of the owners more legitimate. And in the case of the Vanderbilts, who had made their fortune through ruthlessly undercutting competitors in ferry and steamship operations before establishing a near monopoly on railroads in the mid-Atlantic states, the fantasy of legitimate wealth was particularly important. 

The house was built by George Washington Vanderbilt II, the youngest son of William Vanderbilt, the heir to the railroad fortune. George was one of those classic “sickly" Victorian children. He had a lifetime of various pulmonary ailments, and doctors were certain that the pure air of the mountains, as opposed to the fetid vapors of the city, could cure tuberculosis and other ailments. He looks not only unhealthy but vaguely evil in John Singer Sargent’s portrait.

Vanderbilt and his mother came to Asheville in the winter of 1888. He was 26 and had inherited a little over 10 million dollars after the deaths of his grandfather and his father. The young Vanderbilt had no interest in the transportation empires his forefathers had created. Rather, he decided that with his fortune, quite a large one by the standards of the time, he could transform himself into a European aristocrat. Using a variety of agents and concealed identities, he bought up 144 square miles of forest and farm land just south and west of Asheville. Vanderbilt was certain that he could make such a grand mass of land pay for the upkeep of a great manor house. It never did. 

But the great manor house was built, the biggest private home ever constructed before or after in the United States. Vanderbilt hired William Morris Hunt, the celebrated New York architect to design the home. Vanderbilt and Hunt traveled across Europe looking for examples, and finally settled on a design drawing principally from the Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley. But in place of François I’s circular towers, conical roofs, and Renaissance details, Hunt made the whole thing vaguely Gothic. Biltmore is unmistakably nineteenth-century architecture. 

For the grounds and the design of his agricultural schemes, Vanderbilt chose the aged Frederick Law Olmstead, famed for his work creating New York’s Central Park. Law recognized the fact that most of the land had minimal agricultural value, and convinced Vanderbilt that reforesting the area for commercial logging was the best use of this massive amount of acreage. Law also decided to create that he would create formal gardens in the French and Italian style close to the house, a wilder landscaped garden in the style of Capability Brown further out, and then allow this to merge with the forest beyond. 

Some of the acreage not far from the house, near the French Broad River, would be used for fruit, vegetable, and dairy farms. 

The first floor rooms are predictably grand. The “winter garden” would have been one of the first things that visitors to the house would have seen.

The dining room seats a couple dozen people comfortably. The enormous room is complete with a two manual E. M. Skinner pipe organ.

The “breakfast room” was nearly as impressive. Remember this was for informal morning dining. 

Vanderbilt was particularly proud of his library of 20,000 volumes. He regarded himself as a intellectual and hosted luminaries such as Henry James and Edith Wharton. 

John liked this bas relief and thought it should be on the door of my new attic office when it is finished later this year. 

John also liked the loggia with its panoramic views of the Mount Pisgah and the Smoky Mountains.

We passed on the winery tour and decided to return to the hotel. In the evening we managed to get a table at Curate (that’s KOOH rah tay, as in “take care of yourself” in Spanish), Asheville’s most celebrated restaurant. 

Approaching Asheville

We left out bed and breakfast not long after getting out of bed and having breakfast.We were determined to find the most scenic way to Asheville through Smoky Mountains National Park. Google Maps, however, had other ideas. While I normally appreciate how my phone helpfully directs me to a destination without every chastising me for making a wrong turn, sometimes I actually have a route in mind that I want to take and I would like to do so. Instead, my GSP was determined to send us on the fastest route to Asheville by Interstate highway. The result was over an hour of me driving where I thought I wanted to go and discovering that my sense of north and south is far from infallible. But along the way we did get to see some of the most hideous stretches of this generally depressing part of East Tennessee. Pigeon Forge exceeds Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim for kitsch, and could just possibly rival the Las Vegas Strip.

And let’s not forget the near life-size reproduction of the RMS Titanic complete with a fiberglass iceberg. 

But this only touches on some of the aesthetic horrors that you can find here.You will just have to visit Sevier County to see all of them yourselves. 

Still, after about an hour of calling down vaguely biblical curses on my iPhone, we somehow made it into the national park. Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park in the country. I suspect that has to do with the fact that you pretty much have to go through some part of it to get from Tennessee to North Carolina as well as the fact that the Appalachian Trail, the American equivalent of the Camino for the Columbian sportswear crowd, goes through it. Despite the overuse, it still remains remarkably lovely. 

John and I stopped to admire the view a few times along the road. I am in favor of pure nature photographs, but John thinks it is important to show the world that we really have visited a place. I get that, but think that there probably should be a federal law against taking selfies after the age of thirty. 

Our most significant stop along the way was to go to the top of Clingman’s Dome, the highest peak in Tennessee and the third highest peak in the park. We were able to drive most of the way up, but there was a half mile hike up a paved trail to the observation tower. From the moaning and groaning of the people on the trail, you might have thought it was the Bataan Death March. Whenever I feel bad about being overweight, I could just take a trip to the South where I am rather on the thin side. We did have a group of Mennonites who had the grace to neither complain now be perturbed at how all the obese Baptists were staring at them.

Once we were out of the park, Google Maps again tried to persuade us to take the fastest route to Asheville. But we decided that we wanted to take the Blue Ridge Parkway for at least part of the way. It ended up being about 70 miles of the parkway, however, which was probably too much of a good thing, particularly as the gas gauge grew closer and closer to empty while we went down this nearly empty road. 

Asheville appears to be a cute town, but we have just settled in. We are staying at the Reynolds Bed and Breakfast on the north side of the city. Our innkeeper is this gay guy who is apparently obsessed with Dark Shadows. He has a picture of Jonathan-what’s-his-name, the vampire, on the walls of the office. The house belongs to the same family that brought the world Reynolds Tobacco, and not surprisingly it was built by slaves. Maybe the aura of evil on the office walls is deserved. 

Once out in the country, the mansion is now surrounded by suburban condos and other development. Still, the evening view from the veranda was lovely. 

 

Dollywood

We set off for the heart of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains, Gatlinburg, which is just a hop, skip and a jump from Dollywood. We were practically to our bed-and-breakfast, The Eight Gables Inn, and I just couldn't wait anymore. John pulled over and sent me running into a store called Knife World to use the restroom. The store was packed with tourists and Tennessee mountain folk all shopping on a Sunday afternoon. Not only does the store carry a large variety of knives but, it had every kind of armament you might need from bazookas to crossbows. I couldn't find the facility as I went up and down the crowded aisles. Finally, a kind young man pointed me in the right direction.

The parking lot of Dollywood filled us with trepidation.

But, inside it was all American, and was pretty much like a Six Flags or Knott’s Berry Farm. Despite the expressions on our faces we actually had a pretty good time.

There was a section of the park devoted to Dolly history. Instead of Mr. Lincoln they had antamatronic gospel singers who I'm sure were quite famous if you were familiar with that scene.

There was a show in which Dolly starred on video while members of her real family traded stories and sang songs with her. The family was live. Dolly was on tape, a good way to keep good family relations.

The rest of the park, green and lush and well landscaped, was a collection of restaurants and the usual games and rides. Here and there were tucked little oddities like a weeping piano and a hot dog. The less said the better about the hot dog. 

At closing time it was the obligatory fireworks display as Dolly sang about her Tennessee family on recording. I'm a sucker for fireworks. Then off to the Eight Gables.