This post is adapted from Tell It Slant, by Emma Lapsansky Werner.
Having a stroke in October 2019 slowed — but didn’t stop — Chuck Fager’s completion of another new book: Passing The Torch. It’s Chuck’s valedictory collection of autobiographical essays by eleven Quakers of this generation, invited not for worldly renown, but because he found them and their varied Quaker stories interesting. With the help of one of the eleven, an energetic Appalachian Friend, Jennifer Elam, Chuck was in good enough shape to host a lively book launch party in late November 2019.
By February 2020 Chuck also felt recovered enough to board a plane for Las Vegas. His daughter Molly was a nurse there, her husband Marco a schoolteacher.
They hosted a reunion of several Fager siblings and offspring.qMolly to the Nevada Democratic 2020 presidential caucuses, where she was a precinct captain and a fan of former vice president Joe Biden.
(Republicans were also campaigning in Vegas. The most intriguing signs of that contest were the billboards erected by Michael Bloomberg, a media mogul and former New York City mayor. He was then burning through almost a billion dollars in an often witty but hopeless challenge to the return of the Scourge of 2016.)
Chuck, who was rooting for Vermont “radical” Senator Bernie Sanders, didn’t get to vote. But he watched — fascinated — as the Democrats crowded into a large high school, huddled, lobbied for their favorites, and winnowed their choices.
Bernie carried the day in Nevada and was briefly thrust into front-runner status; but Molly, who thought Biden was the one with the best chance to oust the Authoritarian Prevaricator-45. That turned out to be right call in the end, at least for that year.
While in Vegas, the Fager clan held their traditional “Hearts-Messiah” card game tournament/party (We play the Thomas Beecham version of Handel’s Messiah while playing Hearts) — redubbed the Eppers Memorial for co-founder the late David Eppers, for which Chuck delivered a rare icon to serve as the 2020 winner’s trophy: a rubber duckie gussied up as an Elvis Presley impersonator.
The Elvis Duckie was a rare find: after a half-century reign, Friend Presley was rapidly fading as the perennial Vegas icon, presumably because most of his fans were either dead or too close to being “on the rainbow bridge” to travel to Sin City in the desert anymore.
Chuck yearned to take Elvis home, but brother Marty won the tournament, and escaped — with the trophy — back to Brooklyn.
Afterward, shunning the gaming tables, Chuck and several of the rest took their place in line to honor the successor icons: a Beatles tribute band show.
The young men who took the stage didn’t look or play exactly like the Fab Four. But they came close enough for the near-sighted to evoke them. They triggered 90 minutes of suspended disbelief & time travel back 50+ years, in Chuck and the noisy crowd packed into a small theater in the Planet Hollywood complex on the fabled “Strip.”
Most in the audience were old enough to be the musicians’ parents or grandparents, but all gleefully acted (or rather, re-enacted) their age two generations ago, cheering and squealing shamelessly throughout.
Chuck didn’t exactly feel transported back to that August night in 1966 — sixty years ago come this Sunday —when he actually saw the real Beatles, live, in Shea Stadium, New York City.
(Saw, but didn’t hear the group; as soon as one of them announced the title of the next tune, the music was completely drowned out by the screams of 50,000 ecstatic girls. It was still an unforgettable experience.)
But the tribute four were still fun.
The extended Vegas medley skimmed skillfully over the Beatles’ career, songs, and emblematic costumes. It quickly got all that hypertensive blood pumping, and the hall was kept dark enough to cover the jiggling of geriatric cellulite.
And it was not all “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” clowning. After all, who among the crowd could forget that John Lennon went down on his doorstep with two bullets in the back. But the band put that just before the rendition of his “Imagine,” with their John playing a spectral white piano in a matching suit, then smoothly segueing into “Let It Be” and the singalong “Hey Jude.”
Not least, the final bows were done by about 7 PM, which fit a crowd mostly well past their late nights of bar-hopping and other extended carousing. That is, the show was 100% sentimental nostalgia, a staple product of the Vegas dream machine. But for Chuck and company it was their nostalgia, of which The Man still couldn’t rob them (except for the tickets). Unlike the ubiquitous, iniquitous Vegas slots, their bets on the ticket price seemed to pay off for all.
That Vegas trip was also the big finale of what is now called “The Before Times.” Chuck flew home right into the maw of the COVID pandemic and its national shutdown.
The pandemic. Chuck can hardly bear to write about it even six years later.
Healthwise it was not so bad for him: he didn’t contract the virus till late spring of 2023, when the pandemic was officially “over”, and had only a mild case at that.
Meantime, he took the shots, wore the masks, and stayed close to home. He got used to attending Spring Friends Meeting, which is 40-plus miles away from Durham, on Zoom, and was impatient with those who complained that it “wasn’t like real Quaker worship.” For Pete’s sake, he groused. Read Some Quaker History; this is a piece of cake compared to the genuine hard times many earlier Quakers went through; read about Korean Quaker, Ham Sok Hon, jailed by three different oppressive regimes & survived — then, as the army says, suck it up.
But there was no arguing with the staggering toll: Friends and acquaintances died, at least ten in Chuck’s extended circle.
Chuck also thought he saw the highlight of the decade on January 20, 2021, as he watched the AP-45 reluctantly and defiantly leave the White House.
He didn’t look up from the screen until Air Force One disappeared with AP-45 onboard headed south toward Mar-a-Lago.
Chuck was so fixated on this exit, that he almost missed Bernie Sanders and his famous mittens, and the fly on Mike Pence’s perfect Christian coiffure.
At last, he thought, it was over.
Wasn’t it?
Of course not.
But that’s another, ongoing, story.
