Day Twelve – June 29, 2018 – Chautauqua

Day Twelve – June 29, 2018 – Chautauqua

The first thing on today’s agenda is a lecture on codes;  but it starts at nine!!  Betsy, Roddy, and I are up early enough to have breakfast (delicious leftovers!) and Myra comes down, too, before we leave.  We decide that the advantage of staying upstairs, in the “dormitory”, is that we get first dibs on breakfast!  That done, we head to the United Methodist House for our lecture.

Cool clock in the United Methodists house.

The speaker, Chaz Kerschner, is a retired cryptanalysist from the NSA!  He takes offense at my NPR shirt! Apparently there was a time when the NSA and NPR were enemies!!  He’s being facetious (I think).  His lecture is entitled, “”Codes – from Caesar to the 21^st Century” and begins with Egyptian hieroglyphics, moves on to the Rosetta Stone, Caesar’s Shift and all the other stages of code development, including the Enigma Machine, the Purple Code, Jefferson’s wheel cipher, and Navajo Code Talkers.  The newest development is the private/public key, which we all use in things like our iPhones and communicating with our banks.

He tells us that some encrypted messages are simply disguised.  One example from ancient times was a rich man who shaved his slave’s head and had the message written on his scalp.  When his hair grew back, the slave was sent to the message’s recipient!  Not very timely, but effective! 

The lecture’s final slide is “UIF FOE” with a note - Caesar s1 or “THE END”, in a Caesar shift, one step.  Giggle!

After the lecture, Betsy and I have coffee on the porch of the Methodist House.  When I ask where the kitty is, a lady smiles and tells us there isn’t one!  Once, sometime in the past, someone made a stink of the asking of a donation, and they did away with it!  Now, each church takes turns providing coffee and sweets!

It even has a dial tone!

Lucas and Kate

 

From there, Roddy returned home and Betsy and I went next door to the amp to listen to the 10:45 lecture.  This is always based on the theme of the week, which, this week, is “words”.  Today’s speakers come from the theater world.  Michael Kahn is the director of the Shakespeare Theater Company and was the first director of the Chautauqua Theater Company.  Kate Hamill is an actor and playwright, most known for her adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and other Jane Austen books, featuring strong female characters.  The third participant was Lucas Hnath, a playwright best know for his play, “A Doll’s House, Part II”.

They discussed the craft of writing plays, including how they construct a play, how the actors influence their rewrites, and why they are playwrights.  Both playwrights said that they write nearly every day and are awful at taking vacations.  Kate said that she has a border-collie brain and after a few days off she begins chewing the table legs!

Kate describes her process as a collaboration between two people, herself and an author who is currently dead!  Lucas’s written plays used to have pages that might just say “silence” or “Charles shifts in his chair”, but he found that when they were doing read throughs, that just resulted in a lot of page turning and defeated the purpose!  Now he might have a page and a half of just dots!

Lucas described plays as “empathy gymnasiums”!! 

 

After that lecture, Betsy and I are going to learn how to bake Challah, but the directions we got are to the wrong location and by the time we figure that out, it is kind of late and we decide to just head back home for lunch.  And I get a chance to finish yesterday’s blog post.

The plan is to head back to the Noble Winery for the view and one last tasting, before our last dinner and 8:15 extravaganza.

People drift back in from their morning’s activities and soon we decide there is enough time for a wine tasting or two.  We take two cars since all eight of us are going.  We go to Noble Winery first and there is a reason that they say, “Come for the view”.  The view is quite pretty but the wine is not quite up to its standards.  We give it the old college try, and sample ten or eleven, and none of them appeal to anyone!

That's Lake Erie in the background.

Thanks, Betsy, for people pictures!! ...

... and a different shot of the view from their patio.

We agree to go down the road to Sensory Winery and 7 Sins Brewery.  The art is about like the wine at the last stop;  but the beer is another story!  Ginger and I share a flight and agree that the “Lust” beer, a cherry wheat, is a winner!! We’re going to have a large growler of it for dinner tonight!

Peek-a-boo!

The seven deadly sins!

We all stop at KISS BBQ to pick order and pick up dinner.  Our carful waits for the order to be ready while the other group goes to Haff Acre Farms to pick up two three-berry pies.  That’s Pete’s favorite and he, Kris, and Elliott are coming for dinner before tonight’s concert.

The BBQ is tender and tasty and everyone cleans their plates!  And there’s pie and ice cream for dessert!  We clean up the kitchen and are off to the amp for Voctave, an A cappella group.  Everyone sets off at their own pace, and Betsy, Roddy, and I wind up sitting in pretty much the same seats we’ve had all week.  There are eleven singers in the group and they have magnificent voices.  The performance, however, isn’t exactly what any one expected.  There’s no choreography and little humor, not much like Rockapella or Straight, No Chaser.  Still, it was pleasant and it is a nice night for walking.

Waiting

"Anything you can do, I can do better!"

Back home everyone is making plans for departure in the morning, packing, and straightening out our finances.  I’m going home with cash money!  Of course, I’ll have the credit card bills to match it!  There’s just time to blog before bed.  Oh – 11, 340 steps!