This year they had performance art and had opened a few tombs and also the catacombs for us to look at. I had no idea what to expect from performance art in a famous cemetery by the title “Angels and Accordians”, but everyone seemed game to go check it out. We lined up around an announcer who was describing how the tour and performance art would operate. Basically, we were to stay in between 2 undertakers holding up giant black and white Edward Gorey-like umbrellas and follow along through the cemetery where performers would point out which tombs we could explore. Some 30 somethings stuck in their early 90’s goth phase muttered, “This is for old people.”
I looked around and there was a big trolley following along behind us carting around tons of old people, so they were partially right. My sister would scowl at it, “Here it comes again, the bus to force us not to dawdle!”, as the trolley beeped its horn behind us. There were also tons of little kids screaming and tearing through through the headstones, which is precisely what the announcer told us not to do. At first I was skeptical, but after poking my head into a few tombs of famous historical figures, I kind of got into it. There would be “angels” hanging around on the tops of tombs moving in “ghostlike” gestures to sort of point us in the right direction. There were also accordian players that would play some tune related to the times of the people in the tombs, or so I thought.
Our friend Sandra, who is from Louisiana, reminisced how the tombs somewhat resembled the graveyards from New Orleans. Tom and Lynda, who have a background in the performance arts, and also in history, seemed to enjoy the spectacle. However, the tour seemed to slug along, so we decided to at least get to the halfway point, which were the catacombs. Inside, there was a long hallway with individual rooms where the dead lay in rows. Inside some of the rooms were more “angels” lit by skylights inside each room. They would occasionally call out a name from their room and ring a bell. This was the spookiest part of the tour, having a bell echo down a long dark hall as people quietly moved past. At the end was slide show with old black and white photos of some of the people buried in the catacombs.
Finally, we made it back out of the catacombs and decided to make our way out of the cemetery. Funny enough, without the old people trolley forcing us along, we ended up dawdling. Tom noted, “This must be the phallic part of the cemetery.” I looked around and every other marker was a very tall Washington Monument-shaped marker. It was almost as if they were competing in death for the biggest and tallest, ahem, monument. Some of them were at least 2 stories high.
As we made our way to the exit, we noticed that the rest of the tour had already made it there for the grand finale performance. Oh well, we decided to just watch it anyway. All of the angels we up on the hill before us on the tops of tombs way off into the distance as the accordian players pecked out a somber tune. In the forground before the audience and just below the performance, were tons of screaming kids chasing each other through the graves and rolling down the hill in stark contrast to the performance directly above them. I thought it was hilarious, but at the end of the performance, the announcer announced, “Thank you all for coming to participate in the OHNY performance of Angels and Accordians. Oh, and please collect the children rolling on the hill as you leave, as we will not be responsible to what happens to those that are left behind.”
