Philadelphia joined scores of other cities across the United States on March 24, 2018, in marching against gun violence and on behalf of gun control. Several thousand took part during the procession from Independence Mall to Penn’s Landing, many carrying homemade signs. The mood was serious and determined, a contrast to some other large demonstrations in recent years that had serious messages but also had a festive atmosphere. 

While in Wilmington, Delaware, for a few hours I stepped into the offices of David Bromberg & Associates, which opened downtown in 2002 after the city lured him and his wife with a good deal on a big brick building. I didn’t see the renowned bluesman and luthier, but it was a thrill to drink in the outer spaces, a temple of stringed instruments.  He got headlines last year when the Library of Congress said it would buy his collection of more than 250 fine violins. 

Bromberg still tours with his band, whose latest album, The Blues, The Whole Blues and Nothing But the Blues, came out about a year ago.  He performed before an enthusiastic crowd at the XPoNential Fest on the Camden waterfront in July 2017 and came back for an encore, a rarity at that tightly scheduled event. 

My now fondest if somewhat contrarian memory of Bromberg is seeing him perform at the old Chestnut Caberet in the early 1980s on a night when from the stage he complained about taxi service in Philadelphia. As he told it in a way that went on way too long, he’d gone to the giant King of Prussia Mall that afternoon and had trouble getting a taxi to bring him back into town, a trip that takes a half hour or more depending on how bad the Schuylkill Expressway traffic is. It obviously bugged him that he could not just hail a taxi, and he went on and on about it as if it were a monologue in one of the extended songs he’s famous for. Anyone from the area knows that you don’t hail a taxi at the K of P mall, and he should have, too, considering that he was from Philadelphia originally. He’d been away too long I guess. 

What was evident from his July show is that his voice and musicianship are strong as ever, and today if he needed transportation he could just pull out his smartphone and summon an Uber.  

One treat of living in my ward of the Bella Vista section is that our polling place is in the Fleisher Art Memorial, part of which was once a Romanesque church. November elections occur just after the Dia de los Muertos festivities, so the back of the chapel where polling takes place is decorated with figures and altar decor from that ritual celebration. 

Today the looming characters lent an especially surreal atmosphere to the otherwise mundane selections of a new district attorney and comptroller and making judicial retention choices. For me the comically ghoulish faces of the marionettes gigantes suggested a morbid commentary on at least two front. 

One, the current absurdity of the country’s national leadership and two, that we were voting to replace a district attorney who only recently began a prison sentence for bribery and fraud.  When he took office in 2010 he proclaimed a new era of cleanliness for the office. Astoundingly, the city got the extreme opposite.