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So I've been up in Roxbury, NY with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus over the weekend, playing a couple shows up there for the townsfolk. They had a beautiful Steinway piano at the theater, which is always nice, and I only busted open one finger from pounding the bass notes too hard. We had Kaethe on violin, who plays with The Beat Circus and will be sitting in with us at The Lily Pad on May 5th. I smacked my face into the scroll of her violin more than a couple times during the performances, but it's OK because I already had scars there anyway (pit bull vs. 3 year old Benjamin - oh the memories).
So everyone at Roxbury was really friendly. Down the block from the theater was an old Masonic Lodge that some of the Roxbury Arts Group people have purchased and are renovating. They gave us a grand tour of the building that had served the Freemasons of the area, and alternately as a ballroom, a concert hall and a silent movie theater.
On the outside, the building looked like any other large New England house with nothing but a small metal sign above the door disclosing its identity as the Masonic Lodge of Roxbury.
The bottom floor was so full of construction materials and paint buckets and canvases draped over things that it was hard to imagine it as anything else. Keith Bindlestiff noticed that where the renovators were stripping off the paint in sections, the muted symbols from the original occupants were beginning to emerge.
The staircase to the second floor was somewhat blocked by scaffolding, and our guide asked if we could squeeze through before realizing she was talking to a circus troupe. So we backflipped through the poles and up a creaky old staircase, and here it became clear that for a long time, many men gathered here and did secret things.
In the first room, the original wallpaper was still mostly intact, which was a chocolate brown with diagonally alternating pictures of sailboats and lighthouses. They told me a wallpaper museum came to get a sample for their collection, which implies that there exists, somewhere, a museum devoted to wallpaper.
The next room was a small office that they had already renovated, but the last room was the main meeting area and almost unchanged from its Masonic heyday. The ceiling was painted a celestial design, a giant blue rectangle with golden stars and rays emanating from the center. They even still had the ceremonial altar stacked upside down against the back wall. I pointed out to the current owners that it had the symbol for the Grand Architect on it – a compass and square surrounding the letter G. They didn't realize it was an altar, they thought it was a stool and they pushed it aside with the velvet armchairs to make room for the pirate radio station they had set up on the floor.
Every wall had at least one large hole and a few on the ceiling. With broken rafters, studs and piles of rubble visible, they looked like giant calcified sores, or gaping mouths locked open in shock, or death, or confession.
So we went back and did our show, which everyone seemed to enjoy, and headed back to Brooklyn the following afternoon, which is today. It's one of the first beautiful days of the year, and everyone is out walking their dogs and skateboarding and taking pictures of graffiti. One out of every three people smiles at me, even though I only know about one out of fifty. Sometimes as a rock musician, it seems like your job is to know as many people as possible. But as I write this, I remember that in upstate New York, there is a lodge whose doors have been opened and its walls torn apart, known to no one.
12:49 AM
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