Hamptons Letter
But what a great profession for a parent. "Writer" is so nebulous. You can't make a movie about a writer because it's too boring, and to six-year-olds writer means you're just a person bent over a notebook trying to make alphabet letters that face the right way. Not far from the truth, and no fun in it.
Several days later I saw a sign that said Charles Correll, whose pieces are in the Chrysler Museum, would be blowing glass at Megna Studios on Saturday. That morning I drove my daughter LuLu in the hatchback, almost bliss, to the outdoor studio. It is right opposite this huge greenish-blue ball that stands about four stories high (that I guess is filled with gas but I just don't want to know) and backs on Main St.
There on the patio were two giant furnaces and two strong-looking men, one with a long pipe in his mouth, a "blowpipe," that had a little bubble of glass at the end of it. Every now and then Correll, the man blowing, would dart the end of the pipe back into an opening in one of the furnaces, which is not-so-decorously named the "glory hole." He would remelt the glass, and then when he drew out the pipe he would shape the molten substance with tweezers and by rolling it on a metal table, called a Marver table.
He was making, he said, "chicken leg" stems for Venetian goblets. Darting it back into the glory hole, he told us, keeps the glass from hardening before it is fully shaped.
There was a little ball of glass on the ground, a cast-off piece from the previous day, which LuLu spotted and picked up. It was warm, like a fresh-baked roll.
A few days later I returned to talk with Marty Megna. Correll's Venetian goblets were there, all finished, in Megna's glass shop, very delicate, with finely entwined "chicken leg" stems, hinting at nothing of the macho process of making them. Megna is a powerful-looking man with eyes at once translucent and piercing, like those of sponge divers. He has always, he tells me, lived by the sea. He loves the water and the light. It is one of the things that brought him back to Sag Harbor.
But another thing that's probably very deep is the fact that it was here that he became fascinated with glass. He went to camp between here and East Hampton some 30 years ago, and one of the counselors showed him how to melt Coke bottles in a ceramic kiln. "I loved that it changed form?that glass was a liquid, " he said. He was always working with his hands, too. He motorized his bikes. He built tree houses. Most glassblowers are good with their hands, he says; because the overhead is so high, they usually have to build their own equipment.
Megna has built every single thing in the studio, including a furnace to make the glass from a batch of silica, potash and soda lime; another, the glory hole, to blow and mold it; and an annealer, which destresses the glass slowly so it doesn't break as it cools. All are computerized to keep the temperature constant. As we talk, beneath our sentences is this lovely, comforting fire roar.
"The hearth sound," says Mariann, who happens by on the way to pick up her son Tim. "So basic. You have to love heat to do this," she says.
"Glassmaking is an ancient profession. Glass has been around since before the Iron Age, 2000 years," Megna tells me. "The Egyptians used glass only for jewelry. It wasn't until the end of the 11th century that blowing glass began, and it was in 12th-century Venice that it became an art. Then," he grins, "because Venice was always being burned, the glassblowers moved to Murano."
Megna, who is part of the "New Glass Movement" made famous by Chihuly, says he is glad the profession is no longer so secretive. That was part of tradition too. "The English sent spies into Italy to capture the Italians' glassmaking secrets. Stained-glass windows were invented in Murano. The Italians had the best glassmakers. But the English were successful in their theft. In colonial America, your wealth was determined by the clarity of your glass. The clearest glass came from England."
Since we met through the kids, I am part mother here and feel compelled to ask whether or not Tim uses plastic cups or glass.
Mariann laughs. "We're not afraid to let him use glass," she says. "He's never broken one."