Post 464 - June 3, 2022
June 1, 2022 (Day 823)
Meet Me in St. Louis is one of Michael’s favorite movies of all time. There is something about the world created in that movie that Michael just wants to be a part of.
When we got here to St. Louis one of the first things that he wanted to do was to take a field trip over to Kensington Avenue. In the song The Boy Next Door, when Judy Garland is pining for the boy she loves, she very conveniently sings the actual address of the house: “I live at 5135 Kensington Avenue, and he lives at 5133.” It’s usually me that plans our journeys so when Michael says he wants to go somewhere, I’m thrilled.
Sally Benson, who wrote the novel that the movie was based on, lived in that house. She wrote about her family and her life there in a series of short pieces that were published in the New Yorker magazine during the early years of World War II. MGM bought the rights to the stories titled at the time, The Kensington Stories. When Benson put them together, though, for her book, she used the title that the studio was using for the already-in-progress film.
Meet Me in St. Louis was filmed on the backlot at MGM in Los Angeles. The house in the movie is much grander than the original house was. Sadly, neither of the two houses on Kensington Avenue is there anymore. Instead, there’s an empty, overgrown lot where they used to be filled with weed trees and trash. The street, and in fact the whole area, seems to have been left behind to fend for itself as prosperity moved on to other parts of St. Louis. When I told a local that we had made the pilgrimage to see them, their response was that the neighborhood, these days, was a great place to get shot.
My grandparents lived in a neighborhood very much like that one in Lynchburg, Virginia. As kids, we used to love visiting because as the afternoon set in, people started walking. Neighbors would stop by for drinks on our porch or we would gather and walk up to theirs. Each of the neighbors had different fun things to eat and drink. There were several different houses on the street that were regular pit stops on this end-of-the-day passeggiata. Sometimes people from nearby streets would stop over and join the ebb and flow of the neighborly interaction. The neighbors who kept to themselves and weren’t part of this circle, even though they weren’t present, were often discussed. By the end of the day, everybody knew what was going on with everyone else. We were all caught up on the news.
Refrigerators are a recent invention. Commercial units for the home were only introduced about 100 years ago. Attached freezers only started becoming available in the 1940s. My grandparents grew up needing to go to the butcher shop every couple of days because the meat wouldn’t keep that long in iceboxes. The meat also wasn’t pumped full of the preservatives that it is now. It was the same with other groceries. My grandparents had a sizable vegetable garden behind their house and would pick what they needed for the day. For anything they weren’t growing, they’d have to go to the greengrocers. Living that way, you developed relationships with the storeowners because you saw them several times a week. You also met and got to know people from other streets who went to the same butcher or greengrocer shop.
In that environment, the people who owned the stores lived in the town. Their kids went to school with everybody else’s kids. The successful store owners would support the town by donating sports equipment or sponsoring town picnics. The money that was spent in town stayed in the town. Each member of the community relied on every other member of the community throughout their entire lives.
This, I think is what Michael loves about the movie and, in fact, about that whole era. We have had countless conversations over the years about moving to a small town, like the one he grew up in, to live in just such a place as 5135 Kensington Avenue. Unfortunately, I don’t think that there are many places like 5135 Kensington Avenue of Meet Me in St. Louis to be found in 2022.
Downtown St. Louis seems all but a ghost town to me. There are small pockets of neighborhoods, but there are also endless stretches of blocks with empty and dilapidated buildings on them. The famous Arch is a tourist destination, along with the Old Court House where the infamous Dred Scott decision was passed, but it doesn’t seem that beyond that, there is anything down there. The life of St. Louis is in its suburbs, but that life is a very different one from what was there a hundred years ago.
In 2022, nobody walks the streets. Downtown Kirkwood where the theatre is where we are performing The Karate Kid is a sweet little town with boutiques and places to eat but nothing there is necessary. A hundred years ago you needed to go to those stores and get food and hardware and gardening supplies. Nobody needs what is being sold along the main street these days. They are all luxury items. People buy things for fun there, not out of necessity. The chances of running into the same person while you are strolling around are almost nil.
Everyone shops at huge corporate grocery stores and stocks up on supplies and food that can last for months. All our food has so many preservatives in it these days that most of it will still be fine years later. We have huge refrigerators and freezers that can store a bounty of food indefinitely. The money that is spent in these mega-stores is immediately taken away from the town and sent to some nationally centralized hub where the wealthy owners gather it all up. None of that money makes its way back into the community. It is gone forever.
Where we are living here in the town of Chesterfield, there is nowhere to walk to. It’s surrounded by freeways. There are endless strip malls and enormous shopping malls all a car ride away. Many of the malls are virtually empty with most of their store space available to lease. Why some are thriving and others derelict, I have no idea. During COVID everyone learned how to shop online and now that people are out and about again, they haven’t really given that up so many things are closing or have closed. I’m just as guilty of sending my business online as anyone. During a busy tech, it is easy to order a box of kitty litter on Amazon on a ten-minute break and have it shipped to me the next day than it is to run out to a local pet store. There are no local pet stores here anymore. They are all national chains. Whether my money gets added to the coffers of Jeff Bezos or to that of the CEO of PetSmart seems immaterial.
The hospital where I went to have my fractured ankle tended to, is part of a whole network of other hospitals all around the state and probably beyond. Gone are the days when if someone was ill, you’d send somebody up the street to fetch Dr. Bowen. It took me three weeks to get an appointment to see what turned out to be the Orthopedist’s assistant. The money I spent there has now been added to the ever-growing Mercy corporation’s dragon’s hoard.
People don’t leave their homes. They create comfortable islands for themselves then dart out quickly to get what they need and come back home. Nobody needs to sit outside on the porch to keep cool because they can stay inside in the air-conditioning. Kids are inside playing electronic games on their phones; they aren’t outside playing. When was the last time anybody saw kids out on the street playing kickball? That was my whole life as a kid. We were outside all the time. We’d have to beg to be able to watch TV. When I first got my driver’s license, I had to be careful that all the kids on the street were out of the way while I was driving. I didn’t think about that until I wrote it just now, but I swear it has been decades since I’ve seen kids playing outdoors.
So, this brings me back to what my local friend here in St. Louis said about present-day Kensington Avenue. It’s a great place to get shot.
Why?
We have all trapped ourselves in these completely insular bubbles. We do not interact with other people unless we absolutely must. Appointments are made online. If we have an issue with something, automated voice technology talks to us and asks us questions. If we are lucky enough to connect with an actual person, the overwhelming probability is that they are speaking to us from a phone bank in India. We check ourselves out of grocery stores without having to interact with a clerk. We don’t walk anywhere; we sit in our cars. We never leave our homes unless there is no other option.
Shooting an AK47 requires only the most rudimentary skill. You do not need to be anywhere near the person you are shooting. You sit at home and watch endless gun battles on TV and the sheer loneliness of that existence sends an ever-growing number of people out onto the street and into schools and places of worship and movie theatres to experience for themselves what they are watching on TV. The shooters need to be nowhere near their victims. We don’t seem to have mass stabbings or clubbings only shootings. Why? Because to stab someone requires that you be right up next to them.
Hiding out at home and watching endless TV programming makes you think that the whole world is armed and out to get you. Home starts to feel like a fortress that needs to be defended.
Kensington Avenue in Sally Benson’s day was a thriving neighborhood where people constantly interacted with each other. In 2022 it is a largely BIPOC community of disenfranchised people. There wasn’t a soul out on the street. They were all indoors. At the end of the street was a row of stores that had been long-abandoned and boarded up. Further down the main drag was a Dollar Store. Like rat poison that causes a rat to keep eating food with no nutritional value until it starves itself to death, Dollar Stores leach all the money they can out of a community until there’s nothing left. Strangers in the neighborhood must want something and the people who live there don’t have anything to give. A good place to be shot, indeed.
Every time Michael brings up the idea of moving to a small town up the Hudson River, my response is always, “What would we do?” I don’t mean that facetiously. I just can’t picture what we’d DO. Sit in our house?
I would argue that one of the few places where life is anything like the life depicted in Meet Me in St. Louis, is Manhattan. Cars are a nuisance in the city, so everybody walks. Robert Moses did his best to change that by advocating for major freeways through downtown neighborhoods, but New Yorkers stood up to him and the city was thankfully largely left intact. There are plenty of non-chain stores on our streets. Yes, there’s Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods but there is also Manny’s on the corner that has great Greek olive oil and often has better vegetables than the bigger shops. It’s hard to walk in New York without bumping into people you know. If you walk around midtown, we end up running into countless people because of all the theatres there. Even people who live outside the city and drive in then need to walk once they arrive.
Michael and I know many of the people in our building. Occasionally I am called upon to change a lightbulb or do something for one of our neighbors and I am grateful every time that happens. I love being a part of that community. I love being able to text friends a few blocks away and say, “Metro Diner in an hour?” That is what I think Michael is looking for when he says he wants to live in a small town, but I think he already has it. As the star of Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland, said in another of her movies, “There’s no place like home.” Is Manhattan as pretty as a little Hudson River town - no. It does, however, still have a vibrant beating heart that I think has stopped beating in many other places.
I don’t see how we can move forward without sensible gun legislation. I just don’t. As we give up more and more of our lives to automation and gigantic corporate conglomerates, we are going to become ever more isolated from each other. We need each other. Social interaction is as important to our well beings as food and water. As I’ve said before, the worst punishment there is in jail is solitary confinement. Where we should all be free, we are increasingly putting ourselves into dark little prisons of our own making.
These recent shootings have been among the most harrowing of all. I will never get the image of that little girl smearing her friend’s blood over herself so that the shooter would think that she was already dead out of my head. That little girl became an adult in that moment and an adult who will have to live with the trauma of that for the rest of her life. Please, god, pass some sensible legislation, NOW.
We all need to turn off the TV and get out of the house and go and play with the kids on the street.