On Friday, Jim Waggener and I bounced around several sites in Occoquan Regional Park and nearby. I found a new (to me) garden spider in the Giles Run/Laurel Hill pollinator garden, Argiope trifasciata. Just a handful of butterflies and dragonflies around for last call.
The Cradle Will Rock
INSeries’s captures some of the gist of the original, improvised presentation of Marc Bltizstein’s juicy, polemical The Cradle Will Rock, with a solo upright piano on stage and actors singing from the aisles of the house for a couple of numbers. Headgear is important here: the eight members of the liberty committee chorus are achieved with four singers, each wearing a hat on their hands; Mr. Mister (Rob McGinness, doubling Reverend Salvation) has a tiny silver top hat attached to the side of his head—maybe it was liberated from a Monopoly set?
Lighting in the Baltimore Theatre Project on Thursday’s opening night was dodgy, with dark spots and flickers that were unlikely to be expressionist choices.
- The Cradle Will Rock, text and music by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Shanara Gabrielle, music direction by Emily Baltzer, INSeries, Baltimore Theatre Project, Baltimore
Some news can be made to order. —Mr. Mister
A mystery: 29: solved
Chris Staecker explains the dingus I saw in southwest Virginia last year. It’s more properly called a sector.
Some links: 104
- Wheels up! Fleetwood Mac Sound Engineer Sues Stereophonic Playwright. That didn’t take very long. The New Yorker piece. My review of the show.
- Tidy takedown of Ayn Rand, by Gary Saul Morson. “No one could explain to Rand that tautologies can’t be used to prove anything about the real world.” (via Arts & Letters Daily)
- Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App, by Ian Bogost. Looking at you, Walter Kerr Theatre and the Hadestown producers.
Clearwater Nature Center mushrooms
Saturday, Megan Romberg and Georgie Hardesty led a collecting foray for mycologists of various experience levels at Cosca Regional Park’s Clearwater Nature Center. The building itself, perched on a rise, has an attractive series of walk-ups/ramps leading to it, with a water feature. Most interesting finds (to me) were a nifty bolete, Retiboletus ornatipes (pending iNat confirmation) and a wee scatter of Fenugreek Stalkball (Phleogena faginea).
Julie J. Metz Neabsco Creek Wetlands Preserve
Another Friday, another butterfly/dragonfly/everything survey with Jim Waggener and his posse, this time to the Julie Metz Wetlands. I added a new dragonfly to my list, Blue-faced Meadowhawk (Sympetrum ambiguum). I got an up-close look at a White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis) hackin’ and whackin’ on an acorn with some tasty worms inside it.
The Comeuppance
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new play The Comeuppance is a bit too topical, a bit too on-the-nose, and one wonders how well it will age. Set in 2022, the text name-checks nearly every conflagration that has beset the United States in the past 20 years, from 9/11 to 1/6, without engaging too deeply with any of them—burgeoning gun violence perhaps being the exception. It takes place on the front porch of Ursula, one of five friends and enemies meeting up before their twentieth high school reunion, the porch well realized by a minimal set designed by Jian Jung. The show is heavily expository in roughly its first half; call it, maybe, a multi-ethnic Return of the Secaucus 5.
Jacobs-Jenkins, himself approaching middle age, confronts the prospect of death head on with this work. The turning-40s is the age when many of us realize that we’re not actually going to live forever. He brings Death on stage by a tidy maneuver, one easier done than described. The (what—spirit? mojo? voice?) quintessence of Death passes among the five players, who each from time to time break character and address the audience directly as Death—starting with Emilio (expressive Jordan Bellow), who may serve as the playwright’s voice. Emilio is a conceptual/sound/installation artist working in Berlin; he has abandoned his early work in photography, saying that he had become “tired of mimesis.”
Emerging from the high-energy agita and decades-old recriminations, Kristina (TayshaMarie Canales) has a lovely monologue in which she questions the turns that her life has taken.
The title of the play is a bit of a tease, or perhaps a misdirection, or maybe a suspension.
- The Comeuppance, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Morgan Green, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Wilma Theater, Washington
VNPS 2024: Maple Flat and Cowbane Prairie
Two field trips for this year’s annual meeting, both of them in the vicinity of Stuarts Draft on the western slope of the Blue Ridge.
Gary Fleming led the walk to several sinkhole ponds in the Maple Flat area of the George Washington/Jefferson National Forest. Limestone/dolostone account for the sinkholes, but unlike the karst landscape of Lee County, here the soft stone is overlaid by alluvium/colluvium and a layer of clay. One of the specialties of this site is Boltonia montana, only recently scientifically described.
Nate Miller was our guide to Cowbane Prairie NAP, a wet meadow. I would have done well to bring my LaCrosse boots. I didn’t get great images of any of the specialties here (and they were not in flower, anyway). The group enjoyed multiple plants of Bottle Gentian (Gentiana clausa). On a goldenrod, a Spotted Cucumber Beetle (Diabrotica undecimpunctata) made for a nice image, after cropping. It’s probably time for me to start paying more attention to orthopterans.
Seven Bends State Park
Continuing my chase for the 30-park pin, I stopped at Seven Bends State Park on my way down to Harrisonburg and the Virginia Native Plant Society annual meeting. This park lies within oxbows of the Shenandoah River, and is perhaps of more interest to paddlers than hikers. The Gokotta Trail is bordered by nearly a mile of Yellow Crownbeard; the bees kept in hives near the interpretive area appreciate it. A Groundhog (Marmota monax) was a little shy; a Blue-ringed Dancer (Argia sedula) held still for longer.
Alexandria NABA Butterfly Count 2024
The Alexandria count in 2023 at Huntley Meadows Park was pretty much washed out. Scouting for this year indicated that there wasn’t much in bloom on the boardwalk side, so I was reassigned to the hike-bike trail side and trip leader Ana. Oh, what a difference! Huge swaths of Bidens, full of skippers, including Ocola Skipper (Panoquina ocola) (new to me this count week) and Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus).
We did take an hour on the boardwalk as well: the highlight of this side was a thistle with a half dozen Great Spangled Fritillaries (Speyeria cybele) nectaring on it.
And snakes and spiders and shorebirds and more wildflowers and more butterflies.
Calvert County birding
As we were introducing ourselves for today’s bus trip to look for birds in Calvert County, Maryland, I made an offhand remark that I stopped to look for tiger beetles, too.
We birded the pier at North Beach, found some nice gulls, had some lunch, and were starting to pack up. I was leaning against a rail looking down at a patch of sandy beach. And I looked for a minute or two—doesn’t hurt to look, right? And holy cow! My life Bronzed Tiger Beetle (Cicindela repanda) showed up.
Pocahontas State Park
Before returning home, I stayed over an extra day to bag one more state park under the Trail Quest program. Pocahontas State Park was rather quiet on a weekday. I rambled on the yellow-marked Forest Exploration trail in my backup car sneakers (as my usual sneakers were still drying out). Pocahontas has a network of trails designated and graded for mountain bikes, but the Forest Exploration trail is designated for foot traffic only. Much of the walking was on sandy substrate, with plentiful bits of isinglass scattered about. Gunfire, alas, from nearby private land was regularly audible. Not too much in bloom, but I found a solitary Indian Tobacco (Lobelia inflata) in flower and fruit.
Richmond the River City
Genevieve Wall led a two-day foray to several sites along the James River in Richmond and environs. We took a short walk in the area known as Pony Pasture, along the upper reaches of the whitewater that courses through the city. A fine Tawny Emperor (Asterocampa clyton) made an appearance. At a second site downriver, we crossed the humpty-backed footbridge to Belle Isle; the bridge is suspended from the Route 301 bridge.
The next day, now fully in the Coastal Plain, as we waited for the ferry to Presquile National Wildlife Refuge, some of us spotted an Atlantic Sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus) breaching. The refuge is now a grownup island, as long ago a channel was cut across the base of its peninsula to facilitate river barge traffic (the Turkey Island Cutoff). Meadows in the refuge are relatively clear of most non-native invasives; however, the management plan calls for letting natural succession to take place, which is expected to clear out the infestation of Clematis terniflora. Heavy morning dew on the mown paths plus poor planning on my part resulted in soggy feet for most of the day. An interesting ode caught our attention, but she turned out to be “just” a Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis). We wrapped up the day with a contemplative paddle in canoes from Deep Bottom Park.
Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve
The Grass Bunch met, in scattered fashion, at Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve, after waiting out a passing thundershower. In the past, field trips to Dyke Marsh (say, for birding) have usually petered out at about the point where the trail turns east. but this time, C and I walked the length of the trail, to the end of the boardwalk. There are some pleasant views from this point.
After scooting through the non-natives near the trailhead, we turned up a couple plants in flower that I had not recorded before, Cutleaf Coneflower (Rudbeckia lacinata) and Biennial Beeblossom (Oenothera gaura).
On Metro North
One follow-up to my New York trip that I overlooked: Metro North names some of their passenger cars to recognize people, places, and things. On my trip back from Beacon, I had the honor of riding in car #6163, Thelonious Monk.
Where can I find a list of all the cars’ names?