« In Which We Head To Chautauqua »

The Roberts Family at Chautauqua

by OWEN ROBERTS

At the beginning of August, I attended my twenty-third family reunion, in Chautauqua, New York.  The reunion, of my father's family, has happened every year of my life (though I wasn't present when I was zero) and maybe a couple years before, at the same place, during the same week of the summer ("Week Six" which falls when July becomes August). The Friday before I left, when I was telling various friends and acquaintances that I was about to spend a week with my family, I had trouble, as I always have, explaining just what Chautauqua is.

In a sentence, Chautauqua is a middlebrow resort on the Chautauqua lake in western New York, which provides religious and cultural education and entertainment, as well as physical recreation, to mostly Midwestern families.  It's like family camp, if you know what that is (if you do you are probably from the Midwest). The first "Chautauqua Assembly" was organized in 1874 by a Methodist minister and a businessman, at a campsite on Chautauqua lake, near Jamestown (the home of Lucille Ball).  The summer school format became popular and over the next decade, Chautauquas sprung up around the country, some which were permanent sites, and other "tent Chautauquas" set up in different campsites, traveling throughout the summer. 

Chautauquas brought culture and entertainment to different communities, with speakers, musicians, preachers and other performers of the time. Theodore Roosevelt called Chautauqua "The most American thing in America."

With the advent of radio, television, and automobiles, Chautauquas, which had been a primary source of culture for rural communities, became obsolete. Chautauqua, New York, is still, I think, a popular vacation spot, but I'm pretty sure it's the only one left. While politicians like Roosevelt have revered Chautauqua (Woodrow Wilson called it "integral to the national defense" during World War I), other thinkers with less dependence on public opinion haven't been so praiseworthy. Sinclair Lewis called it "nothing but wind and chaff and...the laughter of yokels." William James called it "depressing from its mediocrity."  Gregory Mason dismissed it as "infinitely easier than trying to think."

The four pillars of Chautauqua are Knowledge, Music, Religion and Art. 

My experience of Chautauqua has changed several times since I was one, but it has remained one of my favorite weeks of the year.  As a kid, I anticipated Chautauqua the way most kids anticipate Christmas (not that I didn't like Christmas, but Chautauqua was way better). It basically meant a week of relative freedom from my parents and other things that inhibit a kid from living in a complete fantasy world. 

Because Chautauqua is a gated community (part of what is hard to describe about Chautauqua is the geography and architecture; it's not a typical lake side resort with like little cabins and a big banquet hall or whatever, it's more like a small town on a lake with a fence around it), I was allowed to basically wander around and do whatever I wanted each day, at least until sunset.  

The grounds are small, there are maybe about five main streets and twenty cross streets, but to a five year old from an actual small town in Vermont, it felt like a vast urban center. I remember discovering more of Chautauqua each year as my familiarity of the grounds grew. 

One of the first things I discovered as a kid, was that you could buy things by yourself.  This resulted in multiple daily trips to the Chautauqua Book Store, the drug store and the Youth Activity Center, where different kinds of candy and chocolate bars could be purchased. I held a grudge against one aunt for years because she had reported to my mother that I was eating candy all the time.

These days I don't buy much candy, and I don't get an allowance anymore, so I'm not really excited about having five dollars in my pocket anymore. Instead we have two to three servings of ice cream from The Refrectory, typically after lunch and dinner and sometimes after the evening performance at the Amphitheatre.

Chautauqua was really about liberation. Probably the most infamous story in the family Chautauqua lore involves me and my cousin Allen, who is two years older than I, sneaking out of the house where my family was staying, wearing only our underwear. I think I was ten years old at the time. We basically just kept daring one another to walk farther away from the house in our skivvies until we were on the stage of the Amp, reenacting a ballet performance we had seen earlier that night. (The Amp is the main performance space in Chautauqua, a large, pale yellow painted wooden structure with wood benches that was left wide open when the performances were over.) So after running around until about two in the morning or so, we went home to find that the door we had left open was locked, and my dad was sitting in the living room, eating chocolate ice cream.

My dad is notorious for his middle of the night chocolate ice cream trips. We realized we were screwed.  We ended up sleeping in my family's mini-van for a few hours and then trying to sneak into the house after my parents got up in the morning. My parents discovered that we were gone in the morning, and didn't much care, but when Allen's mom discovered that we had disappeared, she called the police. Actually, I don't even remember if that's true or not, but I think it is part of most versions of that story.

The family consists of my father and his two brothers, their three wives, and two kids each, four boys and two girls. Over the years the aunts have discovered that the brothers have a lot more in common than their looks. It's a little scary actually. All three have mug collections. None of them proposed to their wives. Their "proposal" stories vary, but have in common the theme of being threatened.

A few years ago my dad organized family dance lessons with a dance instructor at the rec center. In the years past we had always played soccer as a family, but the adults were getting too old and the cousins were beginning to lose interest, so there were a couple years of not having a lot to do, and the dance lessons were intended to replace soccer as a "family activity."

The first two lessons consisted of ballroom dancing. This was actually fun for me because I was once a ballroom dance instructor. Watching the rest of the family attempt to follow the movement of the instructor, however, was painfully embarrassing. My dad and his brothers are full on Midwestern wasps, making the rest of us at least half wasp or married to a wasp, and if you know what that means you know that it is a bad recipe for dancing.

I had to leave Chautauqua early that year to go on tour with a band I was playing with at the time (the ill-planned tour never got of the ground and I spent the next couple of weeks crashing at our keyboardist's parent's house in Maplewood, NJ), so I missed the surprise final dance lesson, which apparently was "hip hop." But for the grace of God.

I lost my virginity at Chautauqua, which is a weird thing to tell people, given that Chautauqua is my family reunion. Part of what continued to make Chautauqua exciting after I had grown out of the running-around-in-my-underwear-after-midnight phase, was that there were other families present at Chautauqua, a few thousand people on the grounds at any given time, which meant there were plenty of other teens around who were equally as bored and hormone driven as I was between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. My first real kiss happened at Chautauqua as well.  These summer romances were confusing and exciting, because one never knew, but hoped to see a paramour fifty-one weeks later.

Like any family, the dynamics of my father's extended clan are at times tense.  The problems of our individual and collective lives are not talked about, other than in hushed midnight walks with one cousin or another.  Many of these conversations, especially as cousins have gotten older in the past few years, and privy to more secrets of our parents, aunts and uncles lives before our existence, have been revelatory. Arguments are not had, pasts are not discussed and issues are not addressed; it is nothing that would inspire Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill, though perhaps Evan S. Connell.

Despite being present at Chautauqua for the past quarter-decade, the Roberts family goes entirely unnoticed by the Institution as a whole.  It's sort of the nature of our family.  We don't talk loud, we don't participate in group events, we make dinner for ourselves each night instead of attending one of the restaurants on the grounds.  As kids we didn't go to the kid's camp. We go to the lectures but leave before the question and answer section begins.

This year Ken Burns was one of the big events at the Amp. Ken Burns is probably as emblematic a figure of the Chautauqua brand of intellectualism as one could find. His performance began with a fifteen minute introduction in which he managed to condemn most of modern critical historical thought, what he called "revisionist" historicism, or basically people who acknowledge the problems of western history and colonialism. I guess Ken Burns just loves America, and doesn't see anything wrong with praising it and ignoring the bad stuff. Maybe not, to be honest I don't know much about him, and it doesn't seem like there are any Ken Burns critics out there (am I the first?). Anyway, after the introduction, he showed fifteen minutes of the most boring films of National Parks that I've ever seen. But I think the grey-hairs were really eating it up.  I left.

Chautauqua does attempt to have programming that appeals to all generations. Every Friday night is "pop" night or something, when they have big name acts at the Amp. In past years these have included Hootie and Blowfish, ABBA (what was left of them), Huey Lewis and the News, Engelbert Humperdinck (we're still not sure who he is). Ray Charles performed the year before he died, which was a great experience, because my father loves him and we grew listening to his music.

My own cultural maturation is mirrored somewhat by the activities at Chautauqua. When I was a kid I was often dragged screaming and crying from opera or classical music performances at the Amp that my father had made me go to. These days I'm the only member of my generation that enjoys going to see the Chautauqua Symphony, or the chamber music performances in the afternoon.  When I was younger the only thing I got out of the Wednesday night ballet performance was mocking the weird crap that I saw on stage.  Then in high school and college I started thinking, hey these girls are really hot and this dance shit is kind of cool.  In the past couple years, after seeing actual ballet and modern dance performances in New York, I've realized that the dance performances at Chautauqua are a little silly.

I often wonder how long it will last.  Our attendence this year was smaller than any previous; there were only nine of us, the three brothers, the aunts, myself, my sister and cousin Celine.  I was orphaned for much of the week, as the grown ups paired off, as well as the girl cousins.  I was the only boy cousin left.  I did a lot of reading. I wonder if I'll bring my children to Chautauqua. I can't see any reason why not. Is it really inertia that keeps us coming back each year? If I continue to bring myself and my own future family, will my cousins do the same?  Will the grown ups become the elderly? (Chautauqua is, incidentally, mostly white haired.)

One thing my family has managed to avoid entirely is the religious education aspect of Chautauqua.  There's a model Israel on the grounds, in a field near the lake, with a little fake Dead Sea, and little towns made out of plaster sculptures embedded in the grass, representing Bethlehem, Jerusalem, etc. They gives tours with Biblical history every Sunday night. When we were kids we went there and pretended we were Godzilla and Mothra, stomping on the towns. 

Most of us have no religion. My mom is Catholic, but she doesn't talk about it. One of my aunts is "spiritual," and she talks about it, and is usually mocked by the rest of the family. This year she went to Lilydale, a town of mediums, thirty minutes north of Chautauqua.  Her husband referred to it as "Sillydale." 

Anyway, ignoring other people's religion has never been particularly hard.  While the bizarre "intellectual" climate of Chautauqua can make you want to vomit, you just have to avoid it, because really, Chautauqua is one of the most tranquil places you can find yourself.

Chautauqua has become sort of a meta-vacation for my family in the sense that in the past few years, since the youngest cousin matriculated into college, the week has been spent more in recollection of previous Chautauqua memories and stories, instead of creating new ones.  I tend to think that Chautauqua means more to me than anyone else, but perhaps we all think that. 

Owen Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He last wrote in these pages about the history of the cookie and Yoni Wolf.

"New Wave (Against Me cover)" - Ben Lee (mp3)

"Rock Boys (The Grates cover)" - Ben Lee (mp3)

"Blue Denim" - Ben Lee (mp3)

Comments

[thunder bridge]

i was at that ray charles concert. he played knock on wood. people knocked on wood.