SNAPSHOTS OF EASTER
When I was a child and young adult, Easter was a major holiday. Not major like Christmas, but certainly notable and celebrated. Those celebrations included Easter baskets stuffed with green plastic grass and an assortment of jelly beans (the spice ones were the best!) and colorful foil-wrapped chocolate eggs. If one was really lucky, there was also a separately boxed Cadbury chocolate crème egg. (These still exist, but are no longer packaged in a box.) This large egg had a thick outer layer of milk chocolate coating an orb of white candy with a yellow yolk, mimicking a real egg. Yum!
Celebrating Easter also meant going to church, something my family did every Sunday, but on this day in a new dress or, more likely, a new pastel-colored spring coat. We lived where winter held its grip, and little girls wore light wool spring coats in yellow or blue or pink. When older, I participated in an occasional Easter sunrise service. Being at church at 6:30 am was a challenge for any teenager, this one included!
We didn’t have many relatives nearby so dinner on Easter Sunday was usually just my immediate family, with perhaps once, dinner with my great Uncle Edwin and Aunt Ruth. They lived an hour away and weren’t accustomed to having children around. Ruth set a formal table and one time served each of us kids (my two sisters and me) a quarter slab of a pint of ice cream. It was lemon flavor and an undeniably daunting serving for a child! At home, Easter dinner was baked ham with potatoes, often scalloped, green salad, and probably green beans. When our son was small and Cousin Jane lived close, she invited us and other cousins for Easter dinner preceded by an egg hunt for the children, a lovely tradition that lasted for some years.
SEASON’S LASTS
In this past week, we went to the last of a number of events. On Sunday we saw our last opera of the season which was the final performance by the Sarasota Opera for this year. Egen d’Albert’s Tiefland is a seldom performed work sung in German and first presented in 1903. It’s about a simple shepherd who is corralled into marrying Marta, a young woman who is the reluctant mistress of the area’s big landowner and boss, but also a less than eager bride. It was slow at the start, but then picked up and was most enjoyable.
It was also the last week for our SILL (Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning) series and both ended on high notes. At Music Monday, we were treated to Ashu, an exuberant and spirited young classical saxophonist, along with a Russian pianist who was equally dazzling. Later in the week at Global Affairs, we heard a grim, but very detailed, report from journalist Amberin Zaman on the sorry state of affairs in Turkey, a country rapidly becoming more authoritarian and more repressive under the continuing leadership of President Erdogan.
RECOMMENDED READING—STOLEN ART
Stolen Beauty by Laurie Lico Albanese.
This is a wonderful novel about Klimt’s famous work, Woman in Gold, and the woman who inspired it. Last fall, while in Manhattan, we visited the Neue Galerie founded by Ronald Lauder, and it was there that I saw this marvelous painting. Earlier, the C.P. and I had seen the movie, The Woman in Gold, about Maria Altmann’s lengthy legal battles to regain possession of her aunt’s portrait stolen by the Nazis in the 1940’s.
Lico Albanese re-creates the life of Adele Bloch-Blauer, a rich young bride in early 20th century Vienna, whose love of art and whose bold desire to study philosophy and other subjects forbidden to females, prompts her to encourage and support Gustav Klimt. Klimt’s art was daring and controversial and Adele became one of his muses and subjects. 
Interwoven with Adele’s story is that of her niece Maria during and after the Nazi takeover of Austria. Submitting to the unthinkable to free her husband, Fritz, from prison, Maria and Fritz must then re-make their life in a new country. Years later, Maria faces the challenge of recovering her family’s stolen art. Based on history, Lico Albanese’s novel is a fascinating portrait of glittering, cultured Vienna and two equally fascinating women. (~JWFarrington)
Notes: Header image from Amazon.co.uk; photo of Ashu from Ravinia Festival and Woman in Gold from Huffington Post.
