If it’s Tuesday, this must be . . .
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be . . . San Dimas, CA
Aug 23rd
First: If you are under thirty-five, you may want to skip this post.
Second: San Dimas High School Football rules!!!!!
Shortly after I moved to California ten years ago, I passed a highway sign for San Dimas, the setting for that iconic 1989 film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. San Dimas was real? It sounded (and, in the movie, looked) like such a generic California town, I honestly thought they had made it up.
This weekend, when my husband and I had to drive our daughter to San Dimas to see a friend’s performance, we took the opportunity for a little location scouting. First stop, San Dimas High School, home of the Saints football team. Boy, is SDHS a good looking school! (Keanu Reeves deserved nothing less.) Since it’s still summer, the grounds were deserted except for some maintenance men who looked at me like I was a loon. Or like, maybe strange things were afoot …
… at the Circle K!
According to a very reliable source (some guy who posted on Yahoo answers), The legendary Circle K stood at the corner of Walnut Avenue and Arrow Highway. We went there and found four corners occupied by office parks. So, so wrong. We found a different Circle K, but there is no way the parking lot was big enough for George Carlin and his time traveling phone booth.
It’s been years since I watched Bill and Ted (I’m still traumatized by the awful sequel), but I was surprised to find that the San Dimas in real life looked nothing like the San Dimas in the movie. It is far prettier, with lush trees, mountain views, and old-time Western architecture. It’s like Frontierland, only without the sweaty tourists and the vendors hawking overpriced water bottles.
When I came home, I did another Google search that took me beyond Yahoo answers and discovered that . . . oh no. While the movie was set in San Dimas, it was actually filmed in and around Phoenix. The Circle K was in Tempe. “San Dimas High” was, in fact, in Scottsdale . . . where I lived for two years.
None of that detracts from the movie’s power or central message: Be excellent to one another.
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be … Somewhere Over North America
Aug 16th
On Saturday morning I read two New Yorker magazines cover to cover, spent time with my children, nibbled chocolate chip cookies while sipping Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and caught an episode of HGTV’s Curb Appeal, which was hosted by an architect/designer who is way, way too good looking to be an architect/designer — but, like, who cares.
Saturday morning was awful.
My family was scheduled to fly from Boston to Los Angeles on an 8 a.m. Jet Blue flight, which meant leaving Cape Cod at 4:30 a.m. — assuming there were no technical difficulties with the alarm clock, which, of course, there were. We got up at 4:20, were out the door at 4:50, and crossed the Cape Cod canal just as the sun was rising and the moon was setting.
Yeah, whatever. Saturday morning was still awful. It’s airports. And airplanes. They’re just so . . . unpleasant. All those free-floating stress hormones. That recycled air. Those itty bitty seats (and I am a small person). There’s no getting around it: once you board an airplane, you are trapped.
Even so, there were highlights. The man across the aisle spent some time standing in the aisle, stretching his hips. It looked like he was doing the hula. Plus I got to eavesdrop on the pretty law student sitting in front of me: twenty-three years old, in a serious relationship with a UCLA astrophysicist (“We’re not engaged or anything, but we both know it’s going in that direction”). I was a little disappointed that she didn’t make the requisite “my boyfriend is a rocket scientist” joke. Also disappointed that she was so normal. If you’re going to eavesdrop, you want a touch of the crazies.
The highlight of my flight — I’m not even kidding — was my fork. Before boarding, I bought a Wolfgang Puck Express (sounds way better than it is) salad that came with a folding fork. A folding fork!! How cool is that?
Note: when a folding fork is the highlight of your day, it’s not a good day.
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be . . . RISD (Rhode Island School of Design)
Aug 9th
I spent four years in Providence, RI, when I was an undergraduate at Brown University, but I knew remarkably little about RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), even though the two campuses are adjacent on the east side of the city and allow for cross registration. One Brown student I knew took a photography class at the prestigious art school (as I would have if I’d had any sense at all), plus I remember a RISD student in one of my acting classes. That was about it.
Fast forward a whole bunch of years: now I have a daughter old enough to be looking at colleges. Since we’re in New England for a few weeks, my husband and I took our daughter and niece to see Brown and RISD. I’ve been to Providence several time since leaving school, but I’m still shocked that the city is so . . . nice. There was major, major gentriication around the turn of the millenium (I think) that included uncovering several rivers that run through the center of the city and building a really nice shopping center (“mall” sounds tacky) called The Providence Place, um . . . Mall.
We spent the first afternoon and evening exploring Brown and nearby Thayer Street, which is a funky little street lined with shops and restaurants that are way nicer than the ones that were there when I was a student.
The next morning we took a tour of RISD. I knew RISD is widely regarded as the best art school in the country. What I didn’t know is that it so cool. There is a whole room that has plants, animals (alive and dead), fish and birds (ditto), shells — you name it: everything you’d need as a model if you wanted to draw, paint or sculpt something from nature.And then there’s that other thing from nature: man. There was a skeleton room, too (not all the skeletons were human, but an awful lot were).
Studio classes run six hours at a stretch; the studios themselves are open twenty-four hours a day.
As for other facilties, here are a couple of shots from what is easily the most gorgeous university library I have ever seen.
Yeah, I definitely should have taken that photography course.
If It’s Tuesday, this must be … Orleans, Mass.
Aug 2nd
In 1642, a small group of Pilgrims established the first permanent settlement on Cape Cod when they purchased a large tract of land from the Indians. Of course, Indians had been on the Cape for thousands of years, but they always left in the winter (presumably for ocean view condos in Florida). A man named Nicholas Snow led the settlement of what are now the towns of Orleans and Eastham. Nicholas was my great-great-great (add a bunch more greats) grandfather. He and his wife, Constance Hopkins Snow, built a house near Skaket Beach, on the bay side of the Cape, and stayed there for the rest of their lives. Constance and Nicholas lived well into their seventies, as did many of their children, which is kind of astonishing when you consider that they didn’t have vaccines or antibiotics or even, like, Airborne, but I guess the upside of living on an inaccesible spit of land with no deep harbors was that there weren’t a lot of random viruses floating around. And also, they probably ate a lot of fish, and those omega-3′s can do wonders.
There are still a lot of Snows in Orleans. The library is even called the Snow Library. 
Snow’s Home and Garden Center has all kinds of stuff, including an elaborate indoor train set that is a rainy day godsend to mothers of small, antsty boys. (I’m speaking from experience here.)
You’d think we’d have some fabulous Cape Cod family compound like the Kennedys’ Hyannis spread, but the Snows are not like the Kennedys. (Let’s leave it at that, without any editorializing.) Also, 1642 was a long time ago, and there were an awful lot of descendents. Besides, in the 1700′s my ancestors fled the Cape for someplace warmer (Nova Scotia), and we didn’t make it back to the Cape till my New Jersey-based parents bought a summer house in Chatham in the 1960′s, and then a permanent residence in Orleans in the nineties.
My mom still lives here. Now that we’re grown up, my siblings and I stay at her house or rent places of our own each summer. The house I rent is a short walk to Skaket Beach and not far from where my ancestors lived. Since Skaket Beach faces west, the sunsets are spectacular. Since it’s on Cape Cod Bay, there’s no surf, and low tide turns the sea into what feels like an endless succession of minnow-filled baby pools.
I’ve never seen any ghosts in all my years on Cape Cod, but I like to think they’re here.
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