Green Island Grrrl

By Rosalie Tirella

We know Elizabeth Warren is in the midst of a Native American heritage poop-storm, but she IS the better candidate! Konnie, please reconsider! Support Liz and not US Senate incumbent Scott “Pretty-Boy” Brown!

Worcester City Councilor Konstantina Lukes has come out and endorsed Scott Brown for US Senate. We love Konnie for her independence and no-bull attitude, but she has got to know that Brown is nothing more than a (hot) empty vessel. Elizabeth Warren is the problem solver and she is so much brighter than Pretty-Boy Brown! MA needs Warren! So does America! The Dems in DC need that Democratic vote to pass legislation.

I mean … look at our senator. Sexually abused (came out with that bit of news when his book came out; of course, he broke his story on 60 Minutes), standing for nothing, voting against extending unemployment benefits over and over again. This guy will say and do anything to stay in the limelight.

Konnie, Konnie, Konnie …

(And yes! Konnie was in our SWIMSUIT ISSUE, but she wasn’t naked, naked, naked!! Is there some weird connection?)

By Rosalie Tirella

Spring is here! Sunny days! Warm nights. croquses jutting out of the grassy squares we Worcester three decker dwellers like to call our front and side yards. Winter is brutal in new England – it seems more and more brutal with each passing year. Chalk it up to our creaky joints or … the sad, sad fact that too often folks in Worcester are just plain rude, unfriendly. They carry a perpetual wintertime of the soul.

Twenty or so years ago it didn’t used to be this way!

I used to say the people of Worcester were “real,” gritty but decent; rough around the edges but always ready to lend a hand … nice. It was as if all the churches we belonged to, all the factories we worked at, all the ethnic social clubs we belonged to took the edge off our urban living, even poverty. Those days seem to have evaporated in the spring sun. I chalk it up to reality TV, and the culture of quasi-porn lots of Americans embrace as they listen to the filth spewed by radio hack Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, watch Paris Hilton and Snookie bare all (body and hollow soul!) on R-17 reality/cable TV shows …

I remember a former boyfriend wanted to take a photo of my breasts to carry around in his cell phone. I said NO WAY! His new girlfriend (a few weeks into the relationship) let him take a cell phone photo of her boobs (the boob) and they proudly sit on his cell phone today (not as the phone wall paper). He told me, “If I asked her to take out her tits in public, she would.”

Glad he’s found someone who “embodies” what it means to be an American in 2012.

So goes the whoring of America, which, I believe, leads to the anything goes attitude of America, which leads to the if anything goes, then we can be in your face rude and obnoxious. We can wear clothes that make us look like whores – we can even dress our little daughters in clothes that sexualize them because these are the outfits stores (taking the cue from Paris Hilton) sell these days.

So, for me, it no longer surprises to see people run red lights and give fellow drivers the finger while they cut folks off/break the law. It no longer shocks me to read about gun play in the middle of downtown Worcester, a downtown I used to love shopping in with my mom and two kid sisters in the 1960s/early 1970s. I accept the fact that Worcester/society has broken down. All the police details and all the community meetings where neighborhood activists declare that we will all take back our neighborhoods can’t put this Humpty Dumpty city back together again.

Still, there are a few glimmers of hope in Wormtown – Worcesterites who – despite the snow, sleet , rain, and undercurrent of selfishness – manage to be polite. Courteous at all (or most) times. Ready with a smile and a kind word. As sunny as spring – no matter how wintery Worcester gets. Even in May.

 By Rosalie Tirella

I am heartbroken. Levon Helm gone. A piece of America gone. A piece of my youth gone.

Like the old medicine men you used to see in the John Ford movies, like John Wayne and John Ford themselves – guys who knew the Native Americans they used in their movies -  The Band were connected to the America of William Faulkner and Mark Twain – pristine, wild, violent, so so young America. I used to feel I was tapping into a world I would have loved to have come of age in whenever I listened to The Band or watched a John Ford movie, a world of: rustic living, majestic mountains, wolves in your back yard, high flying, seat-of-the-pants entrepreneurs; do-it-yourselfers of all stripes, traveling preachers, scrawny dogs, scrawny kids, too too short lives, spirit-breaking hard work/exploitation of  everything that wasn’t white or male. Violence. Utter serenity via the natural world. Horses as modes of transportation. Lovely HORSES! Feisty mustangs!

When I listen to The Band, I feel all that … .

I saw Band singer and sometimes songwriter Rick Danko right here in Worcester – in the building that is now the Palladium. God, I was young. Danko was beautiful.

All the ”boys” in The Band were beautiful, especially: Robby Robertson (chief songwriter, who, thankfully, Helm reconcilled with on his death bed), Danko who died in his home outside Woodstock, New York, in the mid 1990s, and of course Helm, who left us yesterday, to continue his journey as his wife so soulfully put it. The Band members were wonderfully skinny, wore flared blue jeans and velvet suit coats with embroidered vests. None of the short hair Nazi cuts of today. All the guys of the 1970s wore they hair beautifully:  longish, cut below the ear, heavy bangs that brushed against their eyebrows. Yes, I was boy crazy. So was everyother heterosexual girl back then. The men – starting with The Band, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison all the way down to your high school home room buddies, were so wonderful looking. Utterly beautiful. 

Soul, honky tonk, blues, country … . I play my old Band albums, Music from the Big Pink, The Band (I know I have another one or two lying around the house) and their songs just make you ache. They are poetry, but better than poetry because the evocative lyrics come with amazing melodies. And The Band is playing the songs – actually recreating the songs everytime they got up to play.

I love to sing along with Helm. I wail, too, when he sings ”The Night They drove ol’ Dixie Down … .” I will play and replay my Band records this weekend.

A few months ago I watched (for the 1oth time) The Last Waltz – a movie that showcases all the musicians that we Baby Boomers were marinated in! Joni Mitchel, Neil Young, Bob Dylan … . The musicians who came out to celebrate The Band’s goodbye performance (they split up) were also the stars of  this Martin Scorsese movie. The music in The Last Waltz was the muscial soundtrack of my teens and twenties, artists that I, like all my peers, just took for granted. Their excellence was just part of our collective unconscious. When the movie came out, I saw it at the old cinemas in the old Worcester Center. I still remember the poster – the silhouette of the guys playing.

I want to see that movie this weekend. I want to see and listen to all those groovy, one-of-a-kind (for the most part) American poets.

RIP Levon. Your music/songs – YOU – are immortal.

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Enjoy these links to great pics and NYT story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/arts/music/levon-helm-drummer-and-singer-dies-at-71.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/04/18/arts/20120418HELM.html

By Rosalie Tirella

I seem to have grown more patriotic with age. I remember when I played apathetic American years ago, as a dopey kid: sorta standing, shoulders slouched, of course, kinda placing a very limp hand over my heart during the Pledge of Allegiance as it blared over the loud speaker at home room in Burncoat Senior High School. I was 17 then, a cool graduating senior. I did my best to look bored with the whole deal – too cool (it was 1979!) to feel the love for old America, too dopey to understand the idea of America, too immature to get down on my knees (like my grandmother would) and thank God for America.

I remember a few years later, when I was 19, and the Vietnam War had wound down but there was still a draft. I told my mother, if young women were to be callled up: I would never fight. I would high tail it to Canada.

I had never really seen my mom look ashamed of me; she never berated me either. This time was different – she was actually mad at her favorite daughter. “Rosalie,” she said in a stern tone of voice I had never heard before, “you wouldn’t die for your country?” Then, my 40-something year-old mom, a woman way past her prime from raising three kids alone and working 60 hours a week at a minimum wage crap job in an inner-city Worcester neighborhood, said with iron-clad pride: “I would fight for my country! I would die for my country!”

I didn’t get her.

All I knew is that if the Soviet Union had bombed us that second, my mother would have run to city hall, kitchen carving knife in hand, and demanded: WHERE CAN I ENLIST?!

Today at age 85, my mother was/is part of the World War II/Great Depression generaton – the group of folks newscaster Tom Brokow has dubbed: THE GREATEST GENERATION. And they were/are! Tough as nails, my mother is. My uncles and aunts the same – all determined, industrious people who always were/are honest, decent, polite and ready to help a person when the chips are down. They believe: we are in this thing together. We all rise together/fall together. We are Americans! They always sing the National Anthem, too. Know it by heart! They sing it loud and proud at baseball games and other public events. My mom, even with her dementia, hums the pre-game “Star Spangled Banner” when she watches her beloved Red Sox on TV.

My grand parents were just as patriotic as my mom. I remember my feisty old grandma from Poland used to tell people she loathed – like my ne’er do well, peripatatic father – “You no like this country? You no love this country?! Then get the hell out! Get the hell out!” Then she would turn to my father and show him her chunky round butt (swaddled in her flannel housecoat) and whack it hard. Her poverty-wracked life in America had swept the niceties away. Still, for my “Bapy,” it was church every day (back then immigrants like my grandmother attended Mass every day!) and America all the way!

Now? Well, now it is a completely different story. I don’t know if it’s reimagining my mother, my immigrant grandparents or almost 11 years of publishing and writing for my own paper – InCityTimes – but I am absolutely besotted with America! Cuckoo over the very idea! I adore my country’s fab history! It’s music. Its painters. Its national parks. Its great presidents (FDR, TR, Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy!). And lately … its grand musicals of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.

No where can you see America at her finest – her feistiest, her most idealistic, her most artistic and talented – than in American musicals. The melodies, the lyrics, the choreographers, the dancers … all Americans! All American! All first rate! We really were number one back then! In brains, in heart, in spirit! The world looked upon us as a free, brassy, brilliant one of a kind miracle. Buy/rent/watch on TCM the following movies and you’ll see what I mean: “Top Hat/anything starring Fred Astaire,” “An American in Paris,” “Singing in the Rain/anything Gene Kelley,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Oaklahoma,” “South Pacific,” “Gi Gi,” “Show Boat,” “Calamity Jane,” “West Side Story,” “White Christmas,” “Going My Way,” “Guys and Dolls.”

Last night, in honor of Patriot’s Day, I watched the classic American musical “Yankee Doodle Dandy” starring the one and only classic American actor James Cagney! Fantastic!

There he is, James Cagney, a movie tough guy who is no Fred Astaire and can’t even carry a tune (he kinda half speaks/sings the songs), dancing to and singing classic American songs written by another classic American – song writer George Cohan … and he’s brilliant! Cagney’s performance makes you wanna stand up and cheer for our “Grand Old Flag.” And you believe we can lick Hitler because we won’t stop fighting “Til It’s Over, Over There!”!

All these great songs, celebrations of America, written to get us marching and singing. But not progaganda – garbage that was forced from the pen, lies to seduce the masses. These are American love songs written by guys like Cohen, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart. Guys who were maybe considered part of America’s underbelly: Italian Americans and Jews whose parents came from Europe. Life was tough but there were opportunities for the industrious and talented! Look old woman from Italy! Your son has grown up to be frank Capra! Where would American musicals and movies be without first generation Americans like Frank Capra, Irving Berlin and George Cohan?

No where!

But I digress. LIke I said, in the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, Cagney is no Fred Astaire; he can’t really dance or even sing! But he is mesmerizing! Ebullient! When you see Cagney strut down the stage and sing/speak Cohan’s songs, you are uplifted! You are bathed in pure spirit, pure American showmanship! And then the topper: as part of the finale, when Cagney as Cohan plays FDR in a skit, and the camera pans in for a close up Cagney/George Cohan looks squarely into the lens and basically tells Adoph Hitler to shove it!

I loved it! And so did the WW II audiences who first saw it! They got up to their feet in movie theatres all over the country and cheered! Here they were in the middle of World War II, up against EVIL incarnate and little tough thug james Cagney – with a hardscrabbe American background like my mom’s and grandma’s – is telling them: We’ll cream Hitler! We will be a free country – forever!

Only in America!

And FDR, Franklin Delano Roosvelt, the president Cagney/Cohan portrays in the skit? Well, my mom still finds it hard to believe her hero was in a wheelchair all those years. Sure, she tells me, everyone knew FDR had had polio, but … he couldn’t walk?! She still doesn’t quite believe the facts. And By God, if you watch, “Yankee Dodle Dandy” (Cagney/Cohan tells his life story to FDR during a visit with the president to receive the Congressinal Medal of Honor) FDR danced across America. Few folks (accept Eleanor!) could keep up!

It is so important to know our history! To tap into our American idealism and remember how great we really are! It just takes hard work, a bit of selflessness, a lot of joy! Watch “Yankke Doodle Dandy” or any Fred Astaire flick or any American musical, and you’ll see just how fantastic America is/YOU are!

Happy Patriot’s Day!

Anyone (anybody with dough,of course), please, please, please, please, PUH-LEAZE buy the home of Worcester’s biggest liar/creep: Claude Dorman. For years he has made the lives of Worcesterites … creepy via his website, Worcester Wonderland. Writing anonymously as Will WW, Claude has falsely accused people of sexual crimes, alcoholism, etc. We, the good people of Worcester, want Claude OUT! OUT! OUT! OUT!

If you buy Claude’s home, we will work to furnish one room with lovely furniture! Absolutely free!

If you have a dog, we will try to build your canine companion a lovely DOG HOUSE!

Because Claude Dorman has been outed, he is in Worcester’s Dog House – and wants to leave!

Go with God, as my Grandma used to say.

How did such a low-life (Claude/Will WW) get to live in a great house like this? A low-life who hated his next door neighbors, waged war on the little college across the way, set up cameras to safeguard his home/spy on his neighbors. He didn’t even recycle! The entire Elm Park neighborhood rejoices at old Claude Dorman’s eventual departure. They will all, like the Munchkins of Munchkin Land, finally Come Out, Come Out.

The Wicked Witch of the West Side will be gone!

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Please! Worcester needs a nice person living at 38 Sever St. We Munchkins have suffered for so long!

Yes, the price is inflated, but if you offer Claude Dorman cash (via a lower price tag) I am certain Claude will take the money and RUN!

Here are the stats:

Price :$345,900

Bedrooms : 4

Baths: 2.5

Home Type: Single Family

Style : Victorian

Address: 38 Sever St Worcester, MA 01609

By Rosalie Tirella

My mom had a stroke a few years ago and since then she has a kind of dementia. Not the Alzheimer’s Disease kind that sends you (eventually) into a nursing home/Alzheimers’ unit – just the kind where you’re dottie enough to drive everyone around you crazy. You see, the stroke left my mother with very little short-term memory. Conversations about today are pointless. You tell her stuff a thousand times … and still she forgets.

Shame on me. I have stopped visiting her. I mean have stopped visiting WITH her. I am there at her cozy little studio apartment on the West Side every few days, but it’s pretty much to re-heat her Meals on Wheels, make her bed, check to see if she’s OK and that her homemaker and personal care attendant are on the ball. It feels more like a part-time job than a visit with Mom. Sometimes we end up in a kind of screaming match. “Please!” I say to my mother, “Don’t say a word! ‘Cause I’ll go crazy!! I’ve already told you this 20 times!”

Then I make her her precious HUGE cup of coffee and run out the door.

Gone is my best bud. In her place, a weak, disorganized 85-year-old lady.

I feel more guilty than proud. Proud of myself that, as her primary care giver, I have made it possible for my mom to continue living in her studio apartment with her cat and her big TV always turned on to a Red Sox game. If I were living away, in Boston, like my two sisters, she would not be able to continue to live in her apartment. I have promised myself (and my mom though she doesn’t know it) that my mother will not languish in a nursing home – the kind of institution that this dumpling shaped but strong-willed little woman would not – could not – thrive in. The Old Country (Poland) is where my mother’s mother, my grandmother “Bapy,” hailed from. No one put anyone away in the Old Country. Your old, dottie parents were supposed to live with you, turn your hair gray (and make you dottie!) until it was their time to meet their Maker. “God’s will be done,” folks said as they buried their ancient parents who ended up their children at the end. This phrase was always code, in our Polish/Italian household for: “Hooray! Finally! This albatross (insert problem/crisis) has been cut from our necks!”

My Bapy lived with us until she died. She was a holy terror – a 4-foot-5-inch tall woman who could go mano to mano with my hot tempered Italian father. Once she went into the pantry and came out with a huge carving knife to prove her point! So when she (finally) died, my mom cried and said: “God’s will be done.” Which meant Thank you, God, for taking this cantankerous old woman out of my little children’s lives. For the first time in my 14 years on earth, the Tirella household of Green Island was wonderfully quiet. For a few hours at a stretch even!

Easter is when I best remember my grandmother and my mother in their prime, two women who had brutal lives, and yet never missed attedning mass on Good Friday, Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday in their EASTER BONNETS! My mom even wore gloves! All the women did in the 1950s and early 1960s. I can still picture my mother’s Easter gloves: they were cotton and went to the middle of your wrist. Their color: the softest powder pink.

I used to wonder: Why doesn’t Daddy love Mummy when she wears the prettiest gloves? When she tries so hard to make everybody happy? When she walks with us to jack and Jill’s children’s store on Green Street to buy me and my two sisters the prettiest Easter dresses?

My father never went to church and would never dress up for Easter mass. He thought it – religion – was a stupid excuse concocted by my mother. In his ignorance, he had had a Marxist epiphany: Religion is the Opiate of the masses. My father got it. “You’re as simple as the day is long!” he used to scream at my mother, his face as red as a tomato, the veins in his forehead raised and pulsating. “Keep praying!” he yelled. Which meant: You can never know what a shitty life you and your little girls have: your minimum wage job at the dry cleaners, the 60-hour work week you put in, the lack of financial support from me, no car, no vacations … nothing! – because you are too busy dressing up for Jesus, singing for God, enjoying Catholicism!

As an atheist, my father could wallow in his pointless life and perspective.

Still, I can’t – will never – forget my mom’s pink Easter gloves! When I was a little girl, they used to make me so happy! My mom used to let me try them on. Someday, they’ll be yours she told me.

And the hats! My mom and grandmother were chruch going women in the 1940s and 1950s when everyone wore hats -just like they did in all those great Katherine Hepburn and Irene Dunne movies. American ladies – proper ladies – in their proper hats. Lace, feathers, geometric shapes that we so dramatic! Just watch Irene Dunne (with Cary Grant) in the 1940s classic film “The Awful Truth.” You’ll see what I mean!

I remember my grandmother’s Easter hat – a purple affair, with a few purplish berries and some maroonish netting to cover the eyes/top of your face. No matter how bad things got during the Great Depression or World War II my grandmother went to mass every day – walking down Lafayette Street, up Millbury Street to Richland Street, home of her parish, the little polish church, Our lady of Czetchova. In the spring and summer, and especially Easter week, she wore that hat. Maybe a decade ago my sister got a hold of Bapy’s Easter bonnet, composting with age. She took it and I hope has it tucked away safely in some box. Someday I plan to take anothe rlook at that Easter Bonnet!

When we were little kids attending Lamartine Street School, Miss Loftus our first grade teacher had all us girls make Easter bonnets out of construction paper. The flowers that adorned our hats? Pink and yellow and blue tissue paper works of art that we folded and cut and placed on green-pipe cleaners, their stems. And then old Miss Loftus – a spinster whose life was teaching – would take out a record and play “In Your Easter Bonnet” for us and then she made us learn the song. Then we got to march around the classroom in our pretty Easter bonnets. The highlight for us kids? Parading all over the hallways of Lamartine Street School, marching down to the main office where the secretaries oohed and ahhed and smiled at all the poor little Green Island kids wearing their cute/funny creations.

I always felt loved by the adults at Lamartince Street Schoold – from the teachers, to the office secretaries, to our janitor (Mr. Grey, I think he was called). Easter at Lamartine Street School – always fun.

And now. Well, now, I have become (probably) as godless as my father, who died several years ago. I did not try to lose my faith or my God. I just did. My sisters are still great, church-going Catholic girls. Somehow, with my father, poverty, a stint at Clark University where I fell deeply in love with my first boyfriend a Catholic boy who renounced God after her took a class on Neitesche and existentialism, somehow all this caused God to fade from my life. Not the teachings of God – just HIS protection – someone to look to in times of trouble. If there is no God, who the hell has my back?!

How, I ask myself these days, when I really do need a God to lean on, when I am swimming in the deep end of mid-life and could use a life guard, how did I lose my religion? The Old Country Catholicism that made me feel so safe as a child and young girl?

Where is my Easter bonnet?

a few posts some of you Blogroll readers may have missed – R. T.

… Wonderland blogger plays the victim, but the truth is Claude Dorman (writing as Will WW on his Worcester Wonderland blog) has been harassing Worcester folks for years – pulling horrible, illegal cyber stunts. He’s been outed (by me and Paul C.) and now he’s raging. (Stormin’ Dorman is what the WPD call him) And YES Jeremy S. wanted a comment from Claude re: his WoMag story but ol’ Claude said nothing.

Here, from the WoMag article, is what Claude Dorman, the Worcester Wonderland blogger, has been up to these past several years.

But before, we get to the article, here is the pleasant little note Claude wrote to his Worcester Wonderland website readers (he has since deleted it from his blog – but we have the original pages):

– R. Tirella
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

“Welcome to Wusta!”

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From the Womag piece on Worcester Wonderland blogger, Claude Dorman, (aka Will WW):

Claude Dorman, the Wonderland blooger who writes under Will WW:

… “By 2008 it had turned personal, the writer focusing on other bloggers, politicians and those both in the public and not-so-public realm. The blogger’s bio summed up the tone of many of his postings: “This is a blog about being amused and bemused with a city of 181,042 boring people with an exaggerated sense of self-worth. It’s really too bad they don’t have a sense of humor, it would make life bearable here.”

“I’ve just never encountered anybody who has that much interest in me,” says Paul Collyer, who found his personal life and business ventures – particularly his NOLA Festival – often the target of Will W.W.’s blog posts.

“It wasn’t just the content that riled up his targets (to the point where some, including Collyer, put out a “bounty” to unmask Will W.W.’s identity in 2011), but the anonymity of it.

” “Not content with writing about others on his own page, Will W.W. began posting insulting comments on other blogs.

“ … Tembenis, for instance, still smolders over an insulting Worcester Wonderland post that used images from an article about a Rutland horseback riding trail named in honor of his son, Elias, who died at seven years old. The post generated 22 comments, mostly derogatory towards Tembenis, and including this from Will W.W.: “Thankfully Mother Nature had the wisdom to prevent his kind from propagating.”

“That in essence shows how deranged this individual is. He posts outright lies about people and also slanders and libels, too, all in the name of being able to do so ‘anonymously,’” Tembenis adds.

…

“Throughout the four and a half years of this, Will W.W. took the protection of his identity a step further than a fake name: he also scrambled his computer’s IP address – the line of numbers that can identify a computer’s location and Internet provider – making it difficult for even the most tech-savvy sleuths to figure out who or where he was.

” … Dorman, who changed his phone number after his ties to Worcester Wonderland came out, had no comment.

“Dorman has a history of targeting others anonymously, even appearing in a Worcester Magazine article in 2007 for ousting a rival member of a neighborhood association, Robert Bourassa, by using pseudonymous online threats and postings to attack his business and personal reputation (“Neighbor to Neighbor Disfavor: A grudge sparks a change of leadership in the Elm Park Association,” May 17, 2007).

” “The malicious, unwarranted and slanderous attacks on my business and personal reputation by Claude Dorman under the guise of various identities and the lies he has spread have devastated my contracting business, forcing me to close and putting me in a severe financial hardship,” Bourassa wrote in a letter to members of the Lincoln Estates – Elm Park Neighborhood Association before his final meeting. “As such, I can no longer afford to remain where I live.”

“Before stepping down, however, Bourassa filed a lawsuit against Dorman and his wife, Kunigunde Cigan, in February 2008, citing criminal harassment, stalking, attempted extortion, false use of names or organizations and violations of right to peace and privacy, among others.

” “Defendants have engaged in a now twenty month long campaign of harassment of Plaintiff and Plaintiff’s businesses,” read the complaint. “There is no question the course of action, no doubt the intent, no question the harm.”

“Elsewhere in the complaint, Bourassa provided claims that Dorman used various IP addresses to flag Bourassa’s web design and contractor business advertisements on Craigslist – 673 times for 164 ads – causing them all to be removed. He also charged Dorman for creating the elmparkneighbors.net website (to closely mimic the neighborhood association’s elmparkneighbors.org), where he posted Bourassa’s financial and personal information – some of it obtained, Bourassa charged, by intercepting his mail. Dorman used fake names to send harassing and threatening emails to Bourassa through the websites he managed and posted poor reviews of his businesses on websites and online forums.

” ” … Collyer says he and other targets of Will W.W. are entertaining the idea of a lawsuit, especially since there’s worn ground after Bourassa’s complaint.

“They’ve gone out of their way to hurt my festival,” says Collyer.

” “Dorman has really gone out of his way to financially hurt people,” Collyer says …

” … Collyer says he hasn’t crossed the same line that Dorman has.

“That thing [the alter ego Claude-Dorman website, which has since been taken down] has been up for four or five days,” he says, comparing that to four and half years of Worcester Wonderland.

” “It shows we are dealing with evil cats and one who has a history of this type of harassment going back years,” he adds. “This is no longer about opinion and discussion, it is about harassment against many.”

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Claude Dorman, Worcester Wonderland blogger aka “The Wizard of Claude”!

By Rosalie Tirella

Yesterday, after reading Claude’s Dorman’s blog, Worcester Wonderland, I thought: Court again!

But NOPE. There was no court date – just Dorman rehashing the court date of a few weeks ago. Claude, I guess, expected to see me and Paulie dragged off in chains that day. He didn’t. The judge dismissed the case.

So I have deleted yesterday’s blog post (unlike Claude who would a. keep it up and b. concoct even more lies – the guy is totally nutso!) to write a new post:

So now Claude Dorman has become the “Stormin’ Dorman” that the Worcester Police Department has laughed about. He is in meltdown mode and is playing out the court case he lost via his toxic blog, reframing the court events, lying about the proceedings and the people there so he can:

1. feel better about losing

2. whip up some sympathy for himself – a guy who has trashed the entire city, pissed half the city off … defamed EVERYONE he was a wee bit jealous of. People tell me has serious mental health issues.

Let’s just call him … “The Wizard of Claude”!

Last night I was texting Bill and I texted at one point: Claude thought he was Superman but we (Paulie, Harry, Bill and me) we were his Kryptonite!

A few minutes passed. Then my phone buzzes. It’s Bill with: “More like the Wizard of Claude. You were Dorothy and we were the straw man, the lion and the tin man.”

Ha!

Then another buzz from Bill: “Paul is the lion. Harry the tin man. I am the scare crow.”

Hilarious!

And so true. Here we were, the entire city really, wondering who was the almighty Wonderland? Could his magical web powers hurt us? Help us? Send us hurtling back to … Somerville or Green Island?

We – the lion, the tin man and Dorothy – went on our “little adventure” – did the work, the rersearch, suffered for our knowledge/enlightenment, had silly conversations ’round midnight …. THEN FINALLY! … We find The Wizard of Claude!

We have the magic name! Oh, my!

But who is this all powerful entity? Just old Claude Dorman, a crank who lives at 38 Sever St., right here in Worcester – a screwed-up 50-something who has salt and pepper hair and has a history of harassing and calling the police and hauling into court lots of Worcesterites.

The Wizard of Claude – just some middle-aged jamoke messing with his coumputer, some cheapo light machine – behind the big curtain of his security-camera covered home by Elm Park.

Where are my ruby slippers?

By Rosalie Tirella

A few weeks ago I was back at my old high school – Burncoat Senior High on Burncoat Street. I was there for a few hours sorta on business but the rush of memories (once on the grounds) overwhelmed me. I hadn’t stepped foot in my alma mater since graduating in 1979. The old Burnocat High (recenlty built when I attended classes there) made me feel great about the Worcester I grew up in. The Burncoat High of 2012 wasn’t so reassuring.

Where to begin? The Burncoat Senior High of the late 1970s – the one in which I was an all honors and AP student, along with ton of other Worcester kids – was a place to be proud of. It was (still is!) on the wealthier side of town. When I attended, I was a poor kid living in Green Island. I wasn’t zoned to attend Burncoat, but my mom got special permission from the city to have me attend there (I think I was supposed to go to Doherty) because my Aunt “Mary” (and her family) lived a few streets away from my new high school. My Aunt Mary, whose husband my Uncle Mark was an elementary school principal in a nearby town, was a stay at home mom who would always be there in case of emergency. During the day my mom was stuck across town on Millbury Street working at a local dry cleaners. She worked from sun up to sun down it seemed, and though she was always home for us kids and did the cooking and all the other great mom stuff, during school days she couldn’t really get away from her job (no beneefits, sick days, etc).

Aunt Mary’s two boys – my cousins – atttended Burncoat and loved it. They wanted me – a smart kid – to make BHS my high school too. I would even have some of the teachers my cousins had had. My Uncle Mark had complete faith in Burncoat – he planned on having his two boys become doctors. He felt they would get the education they needed to get into the great pre-med program at Holy Cross. Well, all went according to plan: my cousins graduated from Burnocoat, got into Holy Cross, then med school and today … . Well, today, they are very wealthy doctors! Second generation Polish Americans who achieved the American dream, thanks to the WPS and Burncoat High.

In the 1960s and 1970s Burncoat was home base for the Irish Catholic middle class of the city. The school embodied honor, hard work, friendship and caring. The teachers were good to great. I had lovely (for th emost part Irish-American) gal pals (though my best friend was of French descent)! To this day I think back and marvel: In all the three years that I hung out with my smart, over achieving girlfriends, they never ever mentioned the fact or alluded to the fact that I was from Green Island (poor) and they were from places like Mary Ann Drive or King Phillips Road (middle class). They never made me feel less of a person because I lived in a three decker flat and they lived in comfy homes. In fact, I think, they were extra nice to me. They called me smart. they wanted to see my achieve. I visited their homes – got to know their parents and their si blings. And guess what? I loved them so much (and my mom was such a great mom) that they would hang out at my house, chat with my mom on a Saturday, drive across town in their used cars to pick me up on old lafayette Street so we could go to “Spider gates” cemetary, the movies or even Nantasket Beach together. Their parents were doing something right.

In a way, we were raised the same way: by strict but loving Catholic parents. Parehnts who took no crap. Parents who did not indulge their kids and let them run the household – the way tons of parents do today. We knew: We were kids and that made us second class adults compared to our parents and teachers and other adults in the community. These adults had wisdom, experience – jobs. They were running things – we needed to get out of their way. Study hard, have fun with each other – be kids. NO BS allowed.

Burncoat High back then was a gorgeous school. It is/was what is known as a “campus” high school – a string of buildings – all one level. You would walk outside to get to another building. I loved going out and in all kinds of weather to get to class! The teachers? Well, they were serious and capable. We were in honors classes – Worcester’s future, Worcester’s college applicants. We used text books (boring), we took a ton of tests, we had a ton of homework. We had a few clubs, we had great field trips to Washington DC curtesy of the great Virginia Ryan, everyone’s favorite bio teacher (except me – I was a Mr. LaBelle fan)

I was part of that world wonderful world. I graduated feeling like the world was mine … .

A few days ago, i went back to BHS on business. What I saw depressed me: cracked driveway, busted up walk ways, unpainted speed bumps, ugly side netrances where the brown paint was peeling. The building looked faded. I felt like I was walking into a ghetto school!

What happened, i asked the secretary?

Age, she said.

I will get folks to do the painting of the speed bumps I said.

She said, no! We tried that several times and the union always put the kibosh on our volunteer efforts. And never ever did the work.

Everything looked so dingy (outdoors). In doors it was a bit better. The lockers were new and I was told new bathrooms for the students were installed.

Still, things had changed.

The secretary told me: 50 percent of BHS students are poor – eligible for the federal governtment’s free lunch program. Thirty percent of the BHS students were labeled “special needs.”

I said: This wasn’t the way it was when I was 16 and a student here.

She said: Most of the kids in the neighborhood go to charter, catholic or other private schools. BHS is now filled with poorer kids … .

I felt sad. I wanted the best for these new students. I hope we as a city can nurture the new future. I so want the Burncoat Senior High School of 2012 to be the high school I so loved years ago – and still do!

By Rosalie Tirella

Yesterday, after reading Claude’s Dorman’s blog, Worcester Wonderland, I thought: Court again!

But NOPE. There was no court date – just Dorman rehashing the court date of a few weeks ago. Claude, I guess, expected to see me and Paulie dragged off in chains that day. He didn’t. The judge dismissed the case.

So I have deleted yesterday’s blog post (unlike Claude who would a. keep it up and b. concoct even more lies – the guy is totally nutso!) to write a new post:

So now Claude Dorman has become the “Stormin’ Dorman” that the Worcester Police Department has laughed about. He is in meltdown mode and is playing out the court case he lost via his toxic blog, reframing the court events, lying about the proceedings and the people there so he can:

1. feel better about losing

2. whip up some sympathy for himself – a guy who has trashed the entire city, pissed half the city off … defamed EVERYONE he was a wee bit jealous of. People tell me has serious mental health issues.

Let’s just call him … “The Wizard of Claude”!

Last night I was texting Bill and I texted at one point: Claude thought he was Superman but we (Paulie, Harry, Bill and me) we were his Kryptonite!

A few minutes passed. Then my phone buzzes. It’s Bill with: “More like the Wizard of Claude. You were Dorothy and we were the straw man, the lion and the tin man.”

Ha!

Then another buzz from Bill: “Paul is the lion. Harry the tin man. I am the scare crow.”

Hilarious!

And so true. Here we were, the entire city really, wondering who was the almighty Wonderland? Could his magical web powers hurt us? Help us? Send us hurtling back to … Somerville or Green Island?

We – the lion, the tin man and Dorothy – went on our “little adventure” – did the work, the rersearch, suffered for our knowledge/enlightenment, had silly conversations ’round midnight …. THEN FINALLY! … We find The Wizard of Claude!

We have the magic name! Oh, my!

But who is this all powerful entity? Just old Claude Dorman, a crank who lives at 38 Sever St., right here in Worcester – a screwed-up 50-something who has salt and pepper hair and has a history of harassing and calling the police and hauling into court lots of Worcesterites.

The Wizard of Claude – just some middle-aged jamoke messing with his coumputer, some cheapo light machine – behind the big curtain of his security-camera covered home by Elm Park.

Where are my ruby slippers?

By Rosalie Tirella

… gone postal?

He seems to want to do to me what he did to former Worcester City Councilor Dennis Irish a few years ago. Wonderland blogger (Claude) asked Irish to help him get a tax abatement for his 33 Sever St. (Worcester) home. Irish couldn’t get it for him, so Dorman went nuts – going behind the scenes and writing horrible letters abot Irish and sending them to Irish’s city council colleagues.

So, we have outed Claude. The judge dismissed his frivilous complaint against me and NOLA jazz guy Paul Collyer.

So what does old Claude/Wonderland blogger do? Go nutso.

He tries Paulie on his website posting libelous statements up and down. With me? He lies about Judge LoConto’s ruling and then uses Bill Randell’s name and email contact list to send everyone his garbage post about me. Dorman attaches his defamatory post about me and using Bill Randell’s email contacts (how did Wondelrand/Claude get this list?) sends out his toxic blog post – in Bill Randell’s name. The list of Bill’s contacts includes city councilors, and other city leaders. I even got one! Bill and I talked last night – he was amazed that Claude Dorman could be so deranged – worse than a spolied little child who didn’t get his way.

Worse because what Will WW or Claude Dorman is doing is blatantly illegal. He is hacking into people’s email mailing lists, he is falsely using their names and bylines, he is writing false defamatory posts.

I was at a class a few nights ago. The group was buzzing about the news story about Wonderland blogger Claude Dorman and all the damage he has done via his computer/web skills.

Our teacher summed Claude up nicely: “He’s bananas.”

Amen.