C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, MAY 7 , 2022
of Montgomery’s reliably vital
voice as a composer. I hope this
first time wasn’t my last time
hearing it.
The through-line of dance con-
tinued into the night’s closer,
Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier”
suite, which has just as much to
do with Artur Rodzinski, who
arranged it from sections of
Strauss’s 1911 opera and conduct-alluring by the end).
A thrilling cadenza found Pratt
up and over the keyboard, reach-
ing into the body of the piano to
strike an icy sequence of high
notes before lowering himself
back to the bench as though sink-
ing into water — a restless flood of
notes rising all around him.
“Rounds” was something of a
revelation, and a reinforcementtimes the music seemed to reflect
its own surfaces. Pratt’s shimmer-
ing piano hovered like a mist
before the strings scattered up-
ward like a startled flock of pi-
geons. He moved from feather-
light textures (smartly punctuat-
ed here and there by plucked
basses) into harshly hammered
figures (the crooked teeth of the
central motif become strangelyAdapted from an
online discussion.Dear Carolyn:
I’m a late 20 -
something who’s
been dating a late
30 -something
single dad for
several years now. It h as taken
me a while to get used to the idea
that I could be a stepmom if our
relationship got serious, but over
time, I’ve come to accept and
dare I say even cherish that role
and my b lossoming relationship
with the little boy.
It h asn’t b een easy though —
we have been juggling long-
distance for a couple of years
now, so coordinating everyone’s
busy schedules (including the
mom’s, who also lives in a
different state) has been difficult.
Fending off the constant
questioning of friends and family
can be a bit of a drag, too.
My q uestion is, if it has taken
me this long to grow into the
stepmom role, and given all the
other many challenges, would it
be better for everyone if I stepped
away? I really don’t w ant to and
I’m confident our relationship is
worth every challenge, but I also
don’t w ant to get in the way of
the world’s b est single dad if in
several years I realize I wasn’t c ut
out for the job.
— Can I Stepmom?Can I Stepmom?: I think your
experience is more the norm,
that it takes time. So, no, its
taking a while doesn’t mean
you’re doomed. Maybe tell your
partner you struggle with self-
doubt, but step away, no.
If you want to step away,
though, and are looking for
things to justify doing that, then
that’s different. It i s really
important that you’re all-in.
Which is not to be mistaken for
“loving every minute!!!!” — it just
means being committed to giving
it your best and riding out the
toughest times.
I take you at y our word that
you’re not eyeing the door; I’m
just trying to cover it all. If the
only issue really is that you’ve
had to work at i t through
multiple challenges, well, that
just sounds like the job
description to me: parent or
stepparent. As f or the “constant
questioning”: Please say to the
culprits, “I know you're showing
you care, but having to respondmean, think back on some long-
expired crush. Can you even
remember what the attraction
was?
That’s o ur best weapon against
the weirdness: We k now it’s
going to be REALLY INTENSE
and then die.
So, you mantra-fy that, I guess:
“It goes away. It g oes away. It
goes away.”Re: Crush: I s tarted looking past
the crush sensations to view
them as serving a purpose: to
guide me toward something I
need more of in my l ife by
focusing on a person who
embodies it. Maybe they are
really spontaneous or confident,
or whatever. It d oesn’t h elp the
whole “I feel like a total doofus
around this person” problem, but
I get over crushes sooner and
improve the quality my l ife at t he
same time.Write to Carolyn Hax at
[email protected]. Get her
column delivered to your inbox each
morning at wapo.st/gethax. Join the discussion live at noon
Fridays at washingtonpost.com/live-
chats.A single dad’s girlfriend wonders if she’s stepmom material
Carolyn
Hax
many times over just makes my
life harder.”Dear Carolyn: Why o h why do
we still get crushes into our 40 s,
especially when we’re
contentedly partnered/not evenlooking? I can’t b e the only one. I
have out of nowhere developed
feelings for a woman I’ve known
casually for years. She and I both
are in committed relationships —
and anyway, p retty sure she’s
straight. I feel a bit ridiculousand like I’m 17 a gain ... this isn’t
even a question, more of a
distraction, I guess I need one!
— Too Old for ThisToo Old for This: Don’t w e all.
Crushes are so weird — INICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
her first fondness for “My Old Ken-
tucky Home” formed when she
read a nd loved Margaret Mitchell’s
Lost Cause novel, “Gone With the
Wind.” In t hese stories, she not only
holds her own legacy to the light,
she challenges her reader to see
that liberalism is not equal to anti-
racism.
What makes us so afraid to
learn? What makes a person, a fam-
ily, a country afraid of veracity?
Emily Bingham’s new book is a
work toward truth and reconcilia-
tion. Bingham writes, “I don’t be-
lieve it can be wrong to love a song,
but I do believe we commit wrongs
when we do not understand what
we claim to love. Refusing to look
closely at u ncomfortable aspects of
history has hurt this nation and
may be its undoing.” I gnorance, she
intimates, is not an option for the
patriotic.Rebecca Gayle Howell is the poetry
editor for the Oxford American. She is a
seventh-generation Kentuckian.sive, transformed the paper. For
example, he changed the Courier-
Journal’s support of Confederate
politics, including the paper’s per-
spective on lynchings. And, under
his wing, the paper often sided
with the Appalachian mining fami-
lies against the coal companies.
But that, of course, is not the whole
picture.
Last summer, Emily Bingham,
with her father’s sister Eleanor,
published a statement that leans
toward taking responsibility for
the family’s need to do better, be
better. In this book, she advances
her effort significantly. Bingham
shares the memory of her family’s
“chilled” response to the rumor
that Muhammad Ali was buying a
house in their neighborhood. She
tells of Robert Worth’s father: Rob-
ert Hall, a Klansman. And also of
Robert Hall’s Confederate battle
flag, which Robert Worth hung on
his newspaper office wall. Bing-
ham also questions her own ac-
tions, including remembering thatand choir will be in full voice.
People who are devoted to pro-
vocative hot takes will probably
accuse Bingham of canceling a
standard perceived to be an an-
them for the American Dream. But
Bingham’s research is finely de-
tailed, extensive, complex. Further,
her identity — and its many com-
plications — is vital to her authority
as a needed writer of this book.
Bingham is a daughter of the
formidable family who owned and
published the Courier-Journal —
Kentucky’s largest newspaper —
for nearly 70 years. Inside the com-
monwealth, the Binghams are fa-
mously liberal. The writer braids
her pursuit of the personal along-
side the national, revealing an in-
vestment in accountability.
Emily’s great-grandfather, Rob-
ert Worth Bingham, bought the
paper from Henry Watterson, a Pu-
litzer Prize-winning editor who
was o nce a volunteer in the Confed-
erate army. In some ways, Robert
Worth, a self-professed progres-still. ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ nev-
er became an abolitionist rallying
cry.”
Minstrelsy weaponized laughter
and music against this country’s
own citizens. It was terror sold as
entertainment, and it was massive-
ly popular. Or, as Bingham writes, it
was “the most significant Ameri-
can cultural creation up to the ad-
vent of Hollywood.” Bingham is
also clear that Douglass “despised
blackface minstrels, calling them
‘the filthy scum of white society
who’ denigrated his race for profit
even as they stole ‘from us a com-
plexion denied them by nature.’ ”
In 2020, Black Lives Matter ac-
tivists called for Churchill Downs
to not use the song on Derby Day,
hoping for a reprieve in honor of
Breonna Taylor, who was shot and
killed by Louisville police officers
earlier that year. The request was
denied. Instead the stadium pre-
sented the song by bugle, with a
moment of silence after. This year,
the University of Louisville bandmusic itself. That, and the word
“home,” which when isolated from
the rest of the lyrics might speak to
those who simply miss a place.
A spokesperson for Churchill
Downs, responding to a query
about the organization’s plans for
the song at this year’s race, turned,
as many do, to a quote by Frederick
Douglass in which he says that the
song “awaken[s] the sympathies
for the slave, in which antislavery
principles take root, grow, and
flourish.”
What this quote does not dis-
close is that Douglass names Ken-
tucky’s state song alongside other
sad minstrel tunes, arguing for ab-
olitionists to surprise themselves
and enlist such songs for the cause.
He acknowledges that “it would
seem almost absurd to say it,” for
them to consider allying them-
selves with such words. Bingham
confirms that, indeed, “Nothing of
the sort happened. Chattel slavery
disturbed relatively few white
minds, and white action was rarerboth riveting and thorough, taking
us across a c entury of spinout mar-
keting campaigns, protests and
versions that emerged from Fos-
ter’s l yrics. Shirley Temple, Colonel
Sanders, the country of Japan,
Henrietta Vinton Davis, J.K. Lilly,
Marian Anderson, Richard M. Nix-
on, the 31W Highway, “Mad Men”
— and yes, the Kentucky Derby —
are all summoned. Before Bing-
ham’s done, she will argue with
powerful momentum that the song
“is a spy hole into one of America’s
deftest and most destructive crea-
tions: the ‘singing enslaved person’
whose song assured hearers that
the plantation was happy and a
place where Black people belong.”
Not everyone agrees. A frequent
position, and perhaps the most
damaging, is that “My Old Ken-
tucky Home” has somehow be-
come h armless, as if it is made new
by naivete. What many hear in the
song is only the delicate ache of the
BOOK WORLD FROM C1
Generations of whitewash on ‘ My Old Kentucky Home’
ed its first performance in 1944.
Reif’s fondness for Strauss was
evident in his inhabitation of the
suite’s many moods, from the
bellowing entrance (Octavian
and the Marschallin’s passion a
fitting bookend to Henze’s) to its
wild waltz(es), which Reif threw
himself fully into, indulging their
oomph while sharpening their
irony. (Honorable mention goes
to Lura Johnson on celesta and
Sarah Fuller on harp for their
splendid handling of the recur-
ring rose motif.)
It remains to be seen who will
fill Marin Alsop’s shoes as the
BSO’s music director. It’s tempt-
ing to parse the orchestra’s on-
going string of guest conductors
— including Reif — as a shortlist
of sorts. In Reif, the orchestra
would get a showman, but, as this
brief encounter also revealed, a
conductor who contains multi-
tudes — who can dance many
dances at once.Awadagin Pratt Returns repeats
Saturday and Sunday at Meyerhoff
Symphony Hall, Baltimore.
bsomusic.org.ery’s “Rounds” has an almost
mnemonic stickiness. The con-
certo was composed for pianist
Awadagin Pratt — who spent
eight years in Baltimore, becom-
ing the first student at the Pea-
body Institute to earn degrees in
three performance areas.
“Rounds” was commissioned by
Pratt’s own Art of the Piano Foun-
dation, as well as nine orchestras,
including the BSO. On Thursday
night, he joined the orchestra for
a forceful, imaginative and pre-
cisely tinted performance of the
work.
The piece is built upon lines of
exacting tension from a 1936 T. S.
Eliot poem, “Burnt Norton”
(which later would become the
first of his “Four Quartets”): “At
the still point of the turning
world. Neither flesh nor flesh-
less;/ Neither from nor towards;
at the still point, there the dance
is,/ But neither arrest nor move-
ment.”
This tug-of-war between stasis
and movement animates the en-
tire piece. Montgomery also cites
fractal designs as an inspiration
for “Rounds,” and, indeed, atwhich banished and beckoned
sounds from all around him —
once or twice he seemed to lift a
figure to his nose like a rose.
The conductor brought the
same variety of expression to Mo-
zart’s Symphony No. 39, a piece so
perma-polished it can be hard to
tell when it’s being freshened.
Reif matched a fluid grace with an
architectural sensibility, offering
a detail-oriented performance
with especially pleasing lightness
and clarity across the woodwinds.
The Mozart showcased the
BSO’s strong, invested and slight-
ly caffeinated sound. Even at t heir
softest or most refined (that Län-
dler in the third movement was
pure delight), the musicians felt
fully charged, extra-present. I
chalk this up to concertmaster
Jonathan Carney, who brought a
contagious edge-of-his-seat in-
tensity the entire evening.
It’s not often that “The New
Work” reliably wedged into stan-
dard classical programs ends up
the one stuck in my head the next
morning. But Jessie Montgom-
BRODEUR FROM C1
P ianist Pratt gives an e≠usive performance at BSO concert
SYLVIA ELZAFON
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