Finis to Baptisms at the Clarion Hotel

For the past 2 ½ years, guests at the Clarion Hotel in Northampton, Massachusetts have opened their curtains on Sunday mornings to discover members of Grace Baptist Church in poolside baptismal immersions, ablutions, and other testimonies. That will end in two weeks when the kitsch 1960s-era Clarion closes its doors.

At the 46-year-old hotel, two floors of galleried guest rooms with sliding glass doors girdle the indoor pool, beneath a 30-foot diaphanous dome. Sightlines to the pool are optimal from the rooms, and if viewers aren’t careful with their curtains, visitors in and around the pool might return the compliment.

   

Founded in 2013, Northampton’s Grace Baptist Church has deployed “Clarion poolside” as its sanctuary from the beginning. Now it’s in the market for a new venue.

I offer these photos below in comfort: The congregation is sure to find a new venue given the variety, adaptability, and longevity of the baptismal rite!

Labyrinth and Latin Cross Variations

Biblical Immersion in Seoul

And while the pools below have yet to see baptismal service, I contemplate my oolong and say, “Why not?”

Then again, my understanding of the rite is less than complete. For solace and  company, I turn to fellow traveler Larry David and his own brush with baptism in the video below.  A link to the video on YouTube is here.

Living Large with Apps & Mirrors

After inhaling a cone, your blogger gazes smugly into Herrell Ice Cream's low-guilt mirror.   

“Steve Herrell is the godfather of American ice cream,” notes Alan Richman in Conehead, his critique of many-things ice creamicious in the August issue of GQ. The owner of Herrell’s Ice Cream in Northampton, Massachusetts is an avid consumer of his own “premium” offerings.  So what, if he, like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, casts a capacious shadow?  His shop’s premium ice cream salvos are real and they’re spectacular.

So what if 68.8% of American adults  are overweight or obese? Ultimately, though, having one’s desserts and maintaining a svelte umbra and penumbra when the angle of the sun is reasonably aloft is on you. But you’ve got the necessary self-discipline and vigilance to avoid  mindless eating, don’t you? With that said, chez Herrell offers the opposite of  a confession booth in the  the back of  the Northampton shop, where you can mug in front of a fun-house mirror that elongates whatever horizontality you may have incurred over the past decade. In other words, you can admire yourself as slimmer than when you came in.

When I pointed this out to the co-owner of a Northampton coffee shop known for its distinctive pastries, he confessed that his own culinary output might not figure in America’s solution to its obesity crisis. Then, he flipped open his smart phone asking, “I wonder if I can find an app that makes you look thinner?” Faster than lifting a runcible spoon, he produced a self-image-saving app and then another and another.  Here is a link to one of them, weight mirror.com. So now you can live large while sharing your willowy likeness with envious, clueless friends in your online network.  Bon appetite from the fooderati at Wig & Pen!

Before and After via weight mirror.com

 

 

 

 

I’m with Mensa

What's worse than being stuck in glacial traffic at rush hour on the Calvin Coolidge Bridge outside Northampton, Massachusetts?  Answer: the same predicament but with the bumper sticker Mensa Member staring you in the face. Not the more common, less self-congratulatory version that simply reads "Mensa Society," but the one that  proclaims the bearer’s membership in the cult. (and, hence, his unambiguous superiority) So I sat in traffic behind this egotist who might just as well have flipped me the bird for five minutes palpitating, “I’m smart! And then some--I’m Mensa smart!”

I did try to ignore the barrage, but five minutes behind him in dead-cat-bounce traffic seemed an eternity and a Mensatudinus day. If you ever have the need, do what I did:  undress the felonius bumper sticker in your mind's eye and substitute the sticker below.

For the final word on intelligence--emotional, social, Stanford-Binet--we turn to the sons of Gama Rex in Gilbert & Sullivan's Princess Ida. They begin their ditty about 33 seconds into the clip below: