Liverpool

Today (Saturday) is a quiet day. After coming down with the sniffles that the students had come down with earlier in the program, Chris and I have elected to keep quiet until tomorrow, when we take a trip to the Cotswolds with Roots Travel. It's amazing to think that we have reached the last week of the program. It is even more amazing to think back on the "non-summer" that we have experienced here, as opposed to the record-breaking warmth and dryness of Phoenix and other parts of the West. But I look out of my window here at the cloudy sky and the saturated colors of the garden.

We had great luck, however, in one of the longest trips that the program has ever taken, to Liverpool, to the Museum of Slavery on Albert Dock. This visit has relevance both to Eddie Mallot's class on post-colonial Shakespeare, and to my Early Modern exploration class, which treats the beginnings of English involvement in the African slave trade of the Portuguese and Spanish with America.



This is our guide, Stephen, with Professor Mallot. We had arrived maybe a half hour later than we'd intended to, having driven through the pouring rain and having had one maintenance stop. This caused some lack of focus, as students rushed to get a bite for lunch during our tour. The museum is small enough that we needed to split our group into two smaller units, one led by Stephen and one led by another guide.

But there is, of course, an irony in Liverpool; besides being the largest slavery port in England by a number of measures, it is also the birthplace of the Beatles. The Beatles Experience Museum, which Chris and I had a chance to tour, was in its own way very culturally informative. For the most part, the exhibits were both interesting and accurate. The complex nature of the Beatles' early career, their beginning popularity in Germany, and their roots in the Mersey folk music, Skiffle, were well explained.

Their years of popularity corresponded with our grammar school and teen years, so some of the history prompted personal memories and cultural comparisons between British Beatlemania and American. Things got a bit poignant and political at the end, however, with commemorative exhibits of the last years of, especially, John Lennon and George Harrison. Among one of the interesting political things was the way both Paul's first wife and Heather Mills had been "disappeared" from his biography. Only Linda remains. By the way, who was the "5th Beatle"? I don't know, since they changed personnel during their time as the Quarrymen, were associated with Brian Epstein as a manager, and changed a drummer before Ringo. So--6 Beatles? 7? I don't know.

Down the dock from the museum and free if one went to the museum was the Fab 4-D Beatles Show, a "Smellovision" extravaganza, by which I mean, we got 3-D glasses, the chairs tilted, shook and dropped with the bus ride, and when the bus became a yellow submarine, water was sprayed on us. Actually, it was fun. In addition to the show, John Lennon's first wife and his son Julian had put up an alternative exhibit of his life to support their charitable endeavors. This exhibit idealized Lennon less than the Beatles Experience museum, and gave the experience of the time from an alternative point of view.

We finished the day with a walking tour to The Cavern, a rebuild of one of the early clubs in which the Beatles (and Quarrymen--go see the museum) played. There were lots of tourists young and old, there for the experience, and we got one of those serendipities--a cover duo playing Beatles tunes. Since it was a pub, some of the audience had lost their inhibitions (and their ear for pitch), and there was an enthusiastic sing-along. I do have video of the students singing along, but haven't included it here, for privacy reasons. But here is Chris at The Cavern (by the way, her favorite Beatle was Paul. I think that's supposed to mean something.).