Sea Street

COFFEE OR TEA-SARAH'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG

There's a place in Yunnan Province, an area called Pu'en, a place of tea plantations where the locals pick jungle tea-tea from wild tea trees. These tea trees are the original source of the world's tea. In ancient times this tea was picked for the Emperor. The people are Lahu Chinese and they use young girls as pickers. The tea is naturally sweet and the fragrance varies from place to place. Tea from high up in the hills smells and tastes different than tea from the valleys.

This is why the world of coffee and tea is forever separated in time and space and place. A cup of pekoe sharing a saucer with a scone and the tea-time violinist at Harrods is a world away from the Brazilian beans that have passed northward through the Yucatan only to be boiled in the blue/white speckled coffeepots of Texan cowboys. The aroma of this, doubled with that of fried fatback, cornbread and beans has its own elegance. One as great as all the Schubert played on all the Stradivariuses of the world. The chords that befit these scenes are strangely similar. The D Major of Schubert's Serenade and the D Major of Down in the Valley.

My mother has been a tea drinker all her life, mostly iced tea in the midday and hot, creamy tea on the peripheries. Whole families of Indian Coolies have derived their livelihood from this slight woman. She never drinks coffee; coffee is not the drink of a "southern" lady. Coffee does not go with tuna salad sandwiches on white bread. Coffee never goes with cucumber sandwiches cut in wedges, free of crust and splayed with pickled mayonnaise sprinkled with paprika and pepper. The setting is important here-screened-in-porches on the backs of riverside homes.

The men of these women do not drink coffee either. My stepfather transitioned from tall glasses of iced tea to longneck beers but never to coffee; while my father, on the other hand, loved the aromatic rhythms of Kanuba. He could follow Xavier Cugat down a Conga line of coffee swillers. How strange, looking back, that these two desiccated groups should evolve into political forces. |

Finally, coffee and tea have become political. It was not a Starbucks crowd that gathered in Nashville Saturday night to hear Sarah Palin speak. No, it was the so-called Tea Party, a group that has been coalescing since last summer.

Some of you can remember a blog called The Golden Ass Café in which I drew parallels between the customers of the Golden Ass Café (circa 1960's) and the current political world. Friday night was the Jazz And Poetry Diversity Crowd, Obama's natural milieu, but as the previous year passed by, I began to feel that the folk crowd-the Wednesday and Saturday Folk Crowd-was beginning to feel some alienation. The reasons were all around us. These people joined to White Hispanics comprised 80% of the country population and yet their representation on television and in the media is rapidly diminishing. This all came to a head during the August Congressional recess and the so-called "Town Hall Meetings". The froth on the head appeared Saturday night in Nashville. Sarah Palin finding a new "Ticket to Ride" appeared as the keynote speaker of the so-called Tea Party Convention. It was vintage Palin all the way. Little gratuitous remarks, "Let's hear it for the Veterans in our audience" and little and slightly larger patronizing remarks, "Let's hear it for all those who love America."

Sarah's speech, in all, was a well-crafted professional speech with highs and lows-valleys and mountaintops, but while it may have fooled most of the audience in Nashville, it did not fool me. I was reminded of my days in acting school at Desilu Studios when Laura Rose, the instructor, would turn to the crowd after an exercise or improvisation and ask the question, "Did you believe them?"

Bad acting brings on disbelief and Sarah Palin was not believable as a formulator of Tea Party politics; she was quite believable as an opportunist in a designer dress that covered cheap underwear.
P.S. All day on this day past, people have been asking me my opinion of Peyton Manning and the Colts. There seems to be less interest in the Saints; all that changed when Tracy Porter pointed his way to victory; Peyton Manning's face looked like the crashing of the Hindenburg.

Frankly, I must say that I'm not much of a sports fan; but when it comes to football, there's only one team for me and that's the Patriots. Part of this is because some years back I interviewed Myra Kraft, Robert Kraft's wife. Sitting in her drawing room, I was struck by her extraordinary graciousness. On another occasion, I played a concert in Pembroke on Robert Kraft's birthday.

People like the Krafts are unique in the world of professional sports. They are philanthropists who collect art and, in the case of Mrs. Kraft, support the transition of Central Asian families to Israel. "They have never seen a light switch," she told me. All of this started when, as a young girl, she went door-to-door collecting funds for other charities. She was, after all, the daughter of philanthropist Jacob Hiatt.

And so, as silly as this my sound, I can't think of the Patriots without thinking of the Krafts and as one woman said to me yesterday afternoon, "If the Patriot's are not in the Super Bowl, it's not the Super Bowl to me."
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Be sure to watch David Rojay on The Dan and Dad Show each Saturday night at 9:30 on Channel 17. Read A RED STATE HERO and THE LONG BRIDGE RUNNER by David Rojay on capecodtoday.com. Read Sea Street-David Rojay's blog on capecodtoday.com and finally check out David Rojay on YOUTUBE. For more information, Google "David Rojay". Coming "One Year After"