I Heart Rain Forestology

By Mickey Friedman
September 25, 2011
The Jungle, Costa Rica

Frank T, who transformed sandwich life as we knew it in Great Barrington, and simultaneously built a home for wayward Barringtonians of all shapes, sizes, and pedigree and fed them MacGuidos and Avocado Montalbans, starts his day here in Costa Rica with a look back in time and space by reading the Berkshire Eagle online.

I thought that by traveling into the jungle, I would leave news of home back home. Because I haven’t traveled in a very long time, I was stuck in the past, thinking of a pre-email, non-Facebook universe, where you got away. I mean far away. I can remember my first trip to Europe where I would have to find the nearest American Express office to send and receive old-fashioned, written by hand, often illegible mail. Correspondence weeks old. But today’s traveling is something new.

Frank says you can’t really get mail mail here because there are no real reliable addresses, let alone reliable roads or reliable mail-carriers ready to track down unreliable addresses on countless miles of unreliable roads. But with high-speed internet, there’s email, the internet, and The Eagle.

Anyway, it’s an early day here in Paradise because the monkeys and birds don’t really want you sleeping late, so about six in the morning the other day I found myself reading once more about “Lenoxology.” That’s the very expensive slogan developed by a crack New York PR firm to attract more tourists to Lenox, Massachusetts.

Usually, sitting in my favorite seat at Fuel in Great Barrington, reading about Lenoxology is enough to make me laugh. But here reading online in the rain forest of Costa Rica, I am ironically my own version of the perfect demographic. In the words of Eagle scribe, and Lenox Correspondent, Clarence Fanto, the Lenoxology campaign is about “wooing off-season tourists to a haven for rest, contemplation, healing and serenity — as well as lodging, shopping and dining.”

My God, Clarence Fanto is talking about me. Mr. Off-Season Tourist. Craving rest, contemplation, healing and a haven in Costa Rica. And while I’m trying to say no to shopping, I certainly won’t say no to dining. In fact, just the other day I had lunch thirty feet from a crocodile. So for me, being an off-season tourist in the land of “Rain Forestology” I have a new vantage point. I figure while I’m sucking up serenity, why not take another look at  “Lenoxology.”

Now I know from before I left that the Lenoxology campaign has had mixed results. Some Lenoxians hate it. Some Lenoxians are willing to give it a chance. Several Lenoxians hate it so much they have moved to West Stockbridge.

It’s been a time of trouble in Lenox. An ill-conceived memorial “belvedere” built in rustic Kennedy Park in honor of a well-liked doctor who died too soon of cancer. Too much rain and not enough Tanglewood to close the summer season of 2011. One moment The Eagle is trumpeting the opening of another restaurant in downtown Lenox, then four weeks later it’s announcing that it’s closing. When you do the spiritual math, maybe Lenox does need a Lenoxologist.

But isn’t that the problem. How do you know when things have gotten to the point when you really need a Lenoxologist? And how up to date is he or she on the latest developments in Lenoxology? And while you’re at it, what is Lenoxology anyway?

Scott Lagenour, chairman of the Lenox Economic Development Action Plan Committee, seems to have a handle on all this. According to Fanto, Lagenour explains Lenoxology this way: “It’s a phenomenon that’s unique to us. It’s an essence that’s always been in our midst which is now to be distilled and promoted so people will talk about it, wonder what it is, and come here to partake in it.”

Down here surrounded by the dense Costa Rican rain forest where the locals speak Spanish, more than two thousand miles from Lenox, where I’m doing my best to speak bird and coax a quetzal from the mountains, I might have lost a handle on the English language. I don’t have a clue about what he’s talking about. Of course, people will wonder if they don’t know what something means. But there’s good wonder and what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about wonder. I certainly wouldn’t pay $178,500 for that kind of wonder.

Fanto quotes Kenneth Fowler, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, who has confidence in the creators of the Lenoxology concept: “These people [Bodden Partners] are very good at what they do. Unfortunately, the premature hoopla about ‘Lenoxology’ with no backup got people weighing in without knowing what it’s all about.” Fowler asserted that “it’s a big winner and even if we can’t sell it to the locals, Bodden will create a campaign that fulfills the mission.”

I take a bunch of prescription drugs these days but nothing for premature hoopla. But hey, if it works!

The Bodden boosters talk about a website and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter as if they’re magic. But healing and contemplating and with time on my hands, I took a trip to the Bodden website: http://www.boddenpartners.com/home.html.  I’m just a tourist so what do I know. It’s spiffy, very spiffy. It’s got some kind of slightly spooky techno soundscape in the background. Which is probably hip which I don’t know much about these days – remember those prescription drugs? I mean, really how hip can you be with high blood pressure?

Anyway, the website has Gray Circles which become Red Circles and they circle a lot. If and when you’ve had enough of the music and the circles, you can try and figure out who these guys are. I started with the version of “Lenoxology” they created for themselves –  “Bodden Partners: We Create Customers.” Here it is:

“We create customers with selling ideas that spring from a clear selling strategy. With creative that hits home with the people we need to reach. With the right channel to solve your long and short term marketing challenges, with mail, print, TV, web, radio, outdoor, promotions, events, or PR.

We are a results driven agency with results driven clients.”

That sent me back to the pool in a hurry. Craving more contemplation. From my wet vantage point, Lenox is in trouble. If the people in charge of telling people why they should visit a small town in Western Massachusetts that sits next to a whole bunch of other small towns in Western Massachusetts really think that these guys from New York know how to sell what’s special about the small-town charms of Lenox, it’s time to check the drinking water.

You think maybe “Lenoxology” might be a tad cold and clinical? Without warmth and heart. If living in a small town is about anything, it’s about connection. Knowing your neighbors, the man who fixes your car, the nurse you rely on when you’re most vulnerable, the waitress who brings your dinner. It’s about being able to talk to your daughter’s fourth-grade teacher when she seems not to understand her homework. It’s about the man behind the counter who knows you want mayo not mustard.

I’m reminded of all this because of Frank. And because of The Deli.

Living in a small town is about knowing and being known. At least, that used to be the way things were, a way of life known to all in small-town America and even manageable city neighborhoods, something that could easily be talked about, on the tip of everybody’s tongue, not some slogan to be bought.

What has happened to Lenox that they don’t know this anymore? That at a time when people are having trouble meeting their mortgages, they want to throw $178,000 down the drain?

Several decades ago Frank came to Great Barrington, Massachusetts via several cities to create a living, breathing small-town community, a Deli where people came to eat and meet. Frank was a full-time facilitator. He worked too hard and served too many of us for much too many hours and paid a price.

Still, these many years later, people in Great Barrington love to tell their Deli stories. Their favorite sandwiches, their favorite Deli moment, their favorite Deli party, or the time Frank said this or did that. Or threw them out of the place for asking for brie when they knew Frank only had cheddar, Swiss, and muenster. Communities are created by people who care about what they do and how they do it. If one person cares, it’s easy to find others who care.

The Deli made terrific sandwiches of all sorts. For meat-eaters and vegetarians; for those who loved egg salad and those who needed roast beef. With so much good food you always knew you were getting what you paid for. More, actually, than what you paid for. Which was part of Frank’s problem. It might be hard to believe but Frank created a world where half a sandwich was enough.

To this day lots of people who ate copious amounts of roast beef and pastrami and bacon, lots and lots of bacon, don’t know that Frank was and is a vegetarian. And that he served his customers all the meat they required with grace.

Now I’ve written several articles for The Berkshire Record poking fun at the Lenox campaign but down here, away from the United States, I’m struck by how very sad it all is. How very symptomatic of what is happening in our country. We so very much want to believe in American exceptionalism. But it is so very clear how we have lost our way.

Always, the job of humans is to become better at it. To temper our very human faults with understanding and compassion and a resolve to love and care for one another. To be less violent; less greedy; less afraid; more communicative. We’ve turned so much of that upside down. To the point where those qualities are mocked, not cherished.

So the inability of small-town Lenox to find a simple, heartfelt way to tell others why they might benefit from spending a day, a week, a month, a lifetime in their town is profoundly disappointing.

It used to be the United States offered a second chance, another opportunity. Emma Lazarus’s words, posted at the Statue of Liberty, announced to the world how we were different: “Give me your tired, your poor; Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
 Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” It was also a reminder to us about the constant need for generosity; a reminder that all of us were once immigrants, and that any one of us could find ourselves an outcast, in need of a helping hand. How’s that for creative that hits home?

I can imagine the plaque at the new thousand mile-long electrified border fence down south: “Give us your Wall Street bankers and brokers, your arms dealers and military contractors, your corporate lawyers and Washington lobbyists yearning to make a buck.”

Today, a centrist like Obama is considered a radical; moderate health care reform is called socialized medicine; and science has to justify itself all over again. Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk — climate crisis take a hike. And while we’re cutting social programs at home, we’re spending $100 million for a new prison in Afghanistan.

In the world we’re becoming, just maybe “Lenoxology” will fly. I hope not. I’d like to believe there’s a better Lenox out there.

It’s time to head back to the pool. I Heart Rain Forestology.