There’s a story in today’s Sunday Oregonian (although that link is to the original Los Angeles Times version) about the last community of Shakers.
Coincidence and luck figure largely in our lives, or at least Agent Dale Cooper said something similar to that nearly twenty years ago in an episode of Twin Peaks. Just the other day I ended up in a conversation that included a reference to the Shakers, and I couldn’t figure out an excuse to mention it.
It started, in actuality, as a conversation about Instructables, during which someone asked for “hi-res” pictures of the patternmaking tips for bras submission, but then (disingenuously, I’m sure) claimed what they really wanted was hi-res pictures of the roast bison with caramelized onions instead.
That prompted me to mention that our mascot at Shaker High School was the bison. In turn, that prompted someone to make the following remark: “Well, having a chair as a mascot would be pretty lame.”
(Shaker High School, in fact, was and is located in Watervliet, New York, the site of one of the original nineteen Shaker communities. It’s cafeteria, at the time I was there, had a rather poorly-painted mural of Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, which of course did include a chair.)
Which prompted me to muse upon just that idea. And that, in turn, led to me writing the hypothetical headline for the school newspaper’s sports section which appears here as the title of this very post.
So, my thanks to The Sunday Oregonian for publishing this Los Angeles Times piece on the last Shaker community, thereby giving me the excuse.
What I can’t believe I didn’t mention here was the friend of mine back in college who wrote a song which he said was “by one famous Shaker, Michael Landon, and another famous Shaker, Lou Reed.”
(I have no idea whether or not this is the person in question.)
That song was a rewritten version of “Sweet Jane” and was entirely about a Shaker and his workshop. It was called “Sweet Chair.”
Somewhere I still have an audio cassette with that on it. It’s him performing with the Tom Vick Trio, which didn’t actually have Tom Vick in it, except for the course of that one song.