Aaron Obscura

Aaron always kind of figured that eventually he would see the inside of the famous Broadway restaurant Sardi’s, with its walls lined with caricatures of Broadway stars, but it kind of snuck up on him last Fall when he was working back stage on an obscure Tennessee Williams play, and the opening night party was at Sardi’s. He made sure to take in as many of the caricatures as he could while eating and socializing, and happened to be sitting right across from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s joint picture, but he only went searching for one, and, luckily, found it near a front corner of the restaurant. The caricature of Michael Crawford is, understandably, joined in its frame by a caricature of Michael Crawford as the Phantom, the role that to this day he is most known for, in a rare double picture of a single person. Not knowing if/when he would ever get back to Sardi’s, Aaron took the time to really take it in, as, like the mask he found on display at the Lincoln Center library, this picture is as close as it comes to being an important relic in Aaron’s mostly nothing-is-sacred view of the world.

Aaron has a small army of reliable bookmarks he has been meaning to write a longer blog post documenting, but none are as old or sturdy as this one, a piece of needlepoint created and given to him by his mom. It probably arrived while Aaron was in college, and is, these days, only used for the most important of books (It has spent long periods of time in The Collected Works of Shakespeareand Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens). It is a big part of the reason Aaron has tried to steer clear of single-use bookmarks, like tissues or random scraps of paper, and identify and recruit reusable ones, to reduce waste but still allow for variety. It’s also his cutest bookmark, with needlepoint images of a rabbit eating a carrot and one of Aaron’s second favourite animals, an owl. Maybe it’s cross-stitch, not needlepoint, but regardless, it has no backing, and so the soft ends of the threads can be felt whenever Aaron takes it from between the pages of a book it is helping him read.

This water lily made out of felt was a homemade, by the bride, decoration at the wedding of two of Aaron’s friends from college. Each table had a few, in addition to other pond-inspired felt creations, including at least one frog. Upon learning that he could take it home with him following the wedding reception, Aaron knew that he would need to start displaying frogs, among his second favourite animals, so that it would not look out of place on his shelf. The frogs are not pictured, but there are two small glass frogs, now, that share the water lily as a place of rest. Aaron is in regular contact with the bride and groom, albeit separately, as he and the bride have an e-mail chain going, while he and the groom have been exchanging physical letters since they graduated from college. They unfortunately live too far away for easy visits, but Aaron hopes one day to host them and be hosted by them.

Among Aaron’s second favourite animals, and there are a lot, are owls, and his love of owls probably stems from the time of life when he received this little pewter sculpture of one. If Aaron’s memory serves, it was around second grade, the same year his class adopted a great horned owl at the Seneca Park Zoo, which did not seem too thrilled to see them when they went to visit it. Aaron carried the little owl, a Christmas present that came in a small white box like a piece of jewelry, around like a talisman, frequently putting it on his desk in second grade. Today it is wrapped in packing paper alongside other small but heavy knick knacks in an orange shoe box in Aaron’s closet at his parents’ house, but was recently taken out to pose with an Animorphs book on the cover of which Aaron’s favourite Animorph, Cassie, morphs into an owl. As with many of Aaron’s tiny but pretty things, he looks forward to the day when he has a permanent place to display it.

During the last quarter of 2018, Aaron spent much of his time working back stage on a one-person play about Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary campaign. He learned a lot about the man and accumulated a small collection of Bobby Kennedy memorabilia. The day he interviewed for the job, he was given an original campaign button, and toward the end received a much larger button printed for the show itself, but inspired by the design of the 50-year-old button. Also, apparently that little metal tag is some kind of campaign button, but whereas Aaron kept the original button pinned to his bag until opening night, he worried wearing or otherwise displaying the small tag would result in its being lost or damaged, and so he kept it safe on a shelf in his apartment. The notebook, peppered with quotes from Bobby Kennedy, was given to him on opening night, as was the tie clip shaped like a yacht, a replica of the tie clips handed out by John F. Kennedy during his own presidential campaign in 1960 (which is why it says “Kennedy 60” on it; it has awakened an interest in tie clips in Aaron). The Kennedy half dollar featured above is, of course, not to do with Bobby, but it was Aaron’s only available Kennedy memento when he started rehearsals, and so it shared space with a Susan B. Anthony dollar and two dollar bill in Aaron’s wallet as one of his non-spending monies for the duration of the job.

Aaron collects hats. He has many of them. One of them is somewhat embarrassing but was purchased as a joke. But that is not the hat pictured above. The hat pictured above is the king of Aaron's hats, purchased in the last days of the summer before he went to his first year of college. In the common room of his first dormitory, he would place the hat atop the high seatbacks as a signal to his friends that, though they could not see him, he was there. It once tried to escape, leaping into a river in Manistee, Michigan, and it would have, too, had Aaron's uncle not caught up to it and scooped it up, probably with a paddle (Aaron and his uncle were kayaking). It sports Aaron's favourite pin, in the shape of a lumbering bear, which Aaron seems to recall having gotten from Sleeping Bear Dunes, also in Michigan, long before he got the hat. It is the hat Aaron wears to keep the rain out of his eyes and the sun from burning his face. It is his signature hat, the one he wears when he knows he is going on an adventure. And it is getting old and worn out, and lately Aaron has been considering retiring it and getting a new one, if he can find exactly the same hat. The outer ring of the brim is fraying, but still holds, and the hat can still do its job well, so Aaron has not decided for certain he wants to replace it, but after 13 years, it is not unfair to the hat to consider it. Look at it, though. It still has plenty of life in it. The hat stays. Aaron will just have to be a little more careful with it.

In Aaron's senior year of high school, he put on a play adaptation of his favourite novel, The Woman in White, written by the novel's author, Wilkie Collins. Aaron cast an artist friend of his as the title character, based largely on her in-class reading of a passage from The Great Gatsby, to whom he had, the year before, read a passage of the novel because it reminded him of her. He also asked her to draw a picture for the cover of the program, which he described as a shady man creeping around the corner toward a frightened woman (in white). Aaron was imagining something on the cartoony side, as school production programs often are, but he should have known better, based on who he was asking. What he got, on the 3 by 5 card he had given her, was a beautiful sort of yin yang of an illustration that he has kept to this day. It lives in the pages of Aaron's first copy of The Woman in White, and he plans to get it framed one day. It is one of Aaron's most treasured objects that has survived high school.

Even though the book was written twenty-eight years before Aaron was born, and therefore nearly 60 years before he hiked up to Dibble's Quarry, sat looking at the amazing view, and sang to the mountain, that excursion by Aaron is referenced in Jean Craighead George's middle-grade novel My Side of the Mountain. His encounter with the book's protagonist, Sam, is invented for the story, and the action is moved to a mountain in Delhi, NY, an hour and a half from Dibble's Quarry, but every other detail is accurate, including that Aaron is a songwriter who lives in New York City and was in the mountains for the Passover festivities...ok, maybe that last part is as made up as the encounter with Sam, but the rest is pretty eerily accurate, including everything about Aaron's personality.

921 Spruce Street, in the city of Philadelphia, is the house where Aaron's great-grandfather, Kol Katz, raised his family in the early part of the 20th century. Kol Katz was a band leader, which is why there was always a large bass drum that said "Kol Katz Orchestra" in Aaron's grandparents' basement when he was growing up. Kol's children were also musically inclined: youngest son Marvin played the trumpet, oldest child Harold wrote two musicals and many stand-alone songs, and Aaron's grandmother, middle child Rhoda, tap-danced on the radio. It must have been a very interesting house. Most of the family also went into dentistry, and when one of Kol's patients owed him money, a brand-new piano was part of the payment. It was on that piano that Harold learned the skill that would get him immortalized on one of only five cast albums Broadway legend Ethel Merman recorded.

One of the ways Aaron ingratiated himself at his new school in 6th grade was to ask to join his classmates in the traditional pre-class game known as Butts Up (spelling not necessarily correct; known elsewhere as wall ball). It was a game in which a tennis ball would be bounced off of this broad brick wall in the school's courtyard, and the students would try to catch it and bounce it off the wall again. If the ball touched a student but then hit the ground, the student had to touch the wall before another student could get the ball and throw it to the wall. If the first student failed to beat the ball back to the wall, the second student had the right to throw the ball at the first student while the student stood near the wall (remember, it was a tennis ball, it didn't really hurt to be hit by it). Students could take pity on their victims and lob the ball harmlessly, but if the student at the wall caught the ball and touched it to the wall, the roles were reversed. That got annoying when it happened over and over again. Because of how hard and high the balls were sometimes thrown, they would often get stuck on the roof or in the window frames, as two are in this picture. Aaron has not attended a game in many years, but assumes they still go on at the school.

Behind the small blue house Aaron's little brother lives in in the Catskills sits this small sculpture of a cat/woman god that Aaron assumes his brother, a cat lover, worships. His brother has often talked of cats in religious terms, comparing a previous family cat to such philosophers as Confucius and Nietzsche. Aaron and his brother both grew up non-religious, so Aaron assumes his brother found his way to his pagan beliefs naturally, and takes no issue with them. Aaron's brother's neighborhood is particularly friendly to cults, so it was only a matter of time. While he is moving soon, Aaron's brother has not said he will bring the god along with him, though Aaron will search for it in and around his brother's new living quarters. The Hudson Valley is a great place to invent folklore.

On a recent trip up to the Catskills, Aaron went looking for Dibble's Quarry on the Roaringkill Trail. He did this first thing in the morning, on what would be a day of hiking. He had seen pictures of the grand throne room of Dibble's Quarry, and was sure he would recognize it. But when he saw the comparatively disappointing bluestone chairs pictured above, he assumed he had missed the Quarry's heyday and was looking at its ruins. But, not wanting to be ungrateful, he declared himself satisfied, took pictures and left for more hiking. When he looked again at some of the pictures he had previously seen, and saw how recently they had been taken, he determined what he had seen could not possibly have been Dibble's Quarry, and went searching again, this time moving fast through the Other Dibble's Quarry. He eventually found the real Dibble's Quarry, and feels he got a two for one deal.

Rochester, NY, like much of Upstate NY, used to be Iroquois country, and the street now called East Ave may have previously gone by the name Trail of Peace. Just off East Ave, near Pittsford, is Nazareth College, and between the road and the college's Arts Center is the Outdoor Classroom, built around a tree called the Council Oak. Supposedly, the Iroquois used to congregate around the Council Oak for meetings. Now, students from various Nazareth classes do, though most students apparently don't know the Outdoor Classroom exists. The original wooden benches were carved by a sculptor-lumberjack named David Jewett out of the Norway Spruce trees that once overwhelmed the Council Oak and were taken down at the suggestion of Mary McCarty, a student who had done a survey of campus trees and noticed the Council Oak seemed to need some space. They were later replaced by concrete benches. Aaron, though only ever a Nazareth student in the summertime, has long known and loved the Outdoor Classroom, and used it, while staging a number from Hairfor a summer musical theatre program he once attended and later taught at, to give his students an idea of the kind of place their hippie characters might congregate.

Aaron is not a classically trained musician, but that doesn't mean he can't be part of a performance that includes Alan Gilbert and Emanuel Ax. He was working back stage on a fundraiser for a New York City private school, and the performance was at The Town Hall on 43rd Street. During the day-long rehearsal leading up to the performance, Emanuel Ax, world renowned pianist, asked for someone to turn the pages while he played. One of the school's teachers, who was playing violin on the piece in question and to whom Aaron had just been talking, suggested Aaron do it. Aaron did not want to be presumptuous, but stuck around in case the idea was seconded, which it was by the production stage manager. With one minor mistake, Aaron was able to follow the music, which he had never seen before, and was asked by Ax himself to do the same during the performance. And that is how Aaron was part of a high caliber performance of a classical piece by top musicians in Midtown in New York City in 2016.

Writing for Atlas Obscura, Aaron often had to find the places he was writing about on Google Earth and use the screen capture function on his computer to get pictures of them. He tried to avoid getting people in the pictures, the presence of whom, since their faces are blurred, kind of take away from the neatness of the things he needed pictures of. People sometimes like to play with the Google Street View cars when they go by. Aaron is no exception. Not expecting to see one last September, as he was walking past the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West, Aaron had not prepared any antics, and so just stared at the camera for as long as he could as he walked past it. In January, his behaviour was rewarded when he made his debut on Google Street View, with a very lovely Central Park background. His face is blurred, but anyone looking at it who knows him will tell you it is him. It makes for a very unique facebook profile picture. A new image seems to have replaced him on Street View. That was quick. But he took screen capture shots of the two images of himself captured by Google's camera from various distances, and will treasure them, and will be on the lookout for another Street View car in the future.

He doesn't know how it got there or how it lost its head, but Headless Ronald McDonald, atop an apartment building next to the McDonald's restaurant at 8th Avenue and 56th Street is one of Aaron's favourite little quirks in New York City. It is faintly visible on Google Earth, both satellite and street view. Surely, it began its life as part of the neighboring McDonald's, but then what happened? Was it thrown away whole and the neighbors took it and took off its head? Did the head come off and scare children and so the restaurant decided to just get rid of it altogether? Is there not a more secure way to dispose of Ronald McDonaldses than leaving them on the street for garbage pickup? How heavy was it when it was being carried up to the roof of that building, or does that building actually have an elevator big enough to house something like that? Did it come in pieces? Does anyone ever sit with him? Talk to him? Does he talk back? Do the McDonald's people know he's up there? Is Aaron the only one who's ever noticed? Does the person who put him up there still live in the building? Where's the head?

Combining two of Aaron’s favourite things, Phantom Bear was one of the first presents Aaron received from his roommate on a special occasion after they moved to New York City. Aaron found him at the Broadway Flea Market, but didn’t have enough to buy him with. The ladies at the table said it was a gift that had been given to Michael Crawford on opening night of The Phantom of the Opera, and maybe he received something like it, but though the container was signed by Michael himself, there are many Phantom Bears out in the world, and this one is probably not one that he ever owned. Nevertheless, it is one of Aaron’s very favourite things, and lives most of the year in a ceramic picture frame, like one of the living images in a picture in the world of Harry Potter, on a shelf. At Christmastime, courtesy of a hooked appendage added by Aaron’s roommate, Phantom Bear takes his place near the top of the Christmas tree, the closest thing they have to an angel. The Phantom is, after all, the Angel of Music. Like Aaron, Phantom Bear is also a fan of woody PT Cruisers.