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Gristmill: There Is a There There

Thu, 02/23/2023 - 10:01
Big Head Todd and the Monsters at the Patchogue Theater, Valentine’s Day, 2023.
Julie Greene

When, exactly, did Patch­ogue get cool? That may be based on a limited sample, but it was a telling one — an evening stroll down Main Street, which was not only well lit and attractive, but happening, with bustling bars and restaurants, couples arm in arm, and a 100-year-old beauty of a theater successfully renovated 25 years ago.

Judging from such appearances, long gone is the village I remember from my youth — a Riverhead on steroids, with the added menace of a racist streak.

The Mexican place on Main Street we ducked into on Valentine’s Day was packed, fun, decidedly unpretentious. Equally to the point, that was the best chicken enchilada I’ve ever had. Crisp margaritas, too, greedily double-fisted.

What can I say, it was like an evening in America. Not the Hamp­tons.

In that vein, we were there for a Big Head Todd and the Monsters show, not the hippest reason, a deeply middle-aged one, but worth it for “Bittersweet” alone, which never gets old, an atmospheric portrait of romantic doubt well rendered in the scant lyrics available in a six-minute popular song.

The Blue Point brew from a tap at the lobby bar didn’t hurt either.

For you armchair sociologists out there, here’s something to ponder, a spectacle I’ve never seen before at a show: a tune that drew only a subset of graying males to their feet, swaying to the music, no women. It was the band’s other big hit, “Broken Hearted Savior,” with the refrain “And I’ll love her yet, though she has done me wrong. / And I’ll bring her back, though she has been long gone.”

A curious admixture there of heroism and victimization. A sign of the times after all these years.

Back out on the sidewalk I was reminded of one of my proudest, if entirely obscure, moments as this paper’s book review editor, getting into its pages a consideration of Thomas McGonigle’s “Going to Patchogue,” that is, a 2011 Dalkey Archive Press reissue of a 1992 novel, equal parts travelogue, memoir, and metafiction, a grappling with a less than ideal hometown and any lingering aftereffects of having grown up there. Wherever he goes, McGonigle posits, “I am always in Patchogue,” a place, in the reviewer’s words, “best defined by its excessive number of parking spaces.”

The reviewer was a touch harsh, to my mind, given the appealingly downbeat author’s reach toward creativity. Or maybe I winced because I’d first heard about the book by way of a proud listing in the alumni magazine of McGonigle’s and my alma mater, Beloit College. But that was the reviewer’s experience of the book. Fair enough.

Thomas McGonigle, broken-hearted savior.


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