Skidding on a stray sequin or waving away some airborne boa fluff, visitors to the Cape Ann Historical Museum might well ask how it is, exactly, that the display windows of Bananas, a vintage clothing store, have ended up here in the gallery, only a rhinestone’s throw away from the venerable Lanes and Homers. The tableaux have a certain charm, yes, but the fact remains: The owner of the store, Richard Leonard, creates them in the crass name of retail, not for the lofty aims of Art!

Here. Have a cup of tea. It’s true that this fearless show of ten Bananas windows can be interpreted as a knowing nod to retail culture, but it is also very much a bow to an eclectic art form. For in the same way that Egyptian tomb decorating evolved, over centuries, from work-a-day mortuary practice into the full artistic expression of the Old Kingdom, so too with visual merchandising. Not surprisingly, Cape Ann, always a hotbed of aesthetic movements, finds itself in the window dressing vanguard. For thirty years, Leonard has been transforming the castoffs of the community into his own strange mix of fashion and psychodrama, history and anomie, elegance and froufrou, to amuse, shock, and occasionally disturb the denizens of Main Street. If that does not fulfill the purpose of art, then what does? If it also happens to entice a few souls to enter Bananas and buy his wares, all the better.

How stiletto-thin the divide between fine arts and commercial arts, and how precariously a museum balances on that heel. And yet -- aside from hoarding major regional art -- one of the purposes a museum dedicated to local history serves is to chronicle contemporary culture, and what better chronicle of Cape Ann than the windows of Bananas? Behind the glass we discover a repository of our sartorial pasts and a barometer of our changing self-image. The scenes themselves have become part of our collective consciousness. Fiesta does not officially begin until Leonard lugs the heavy plaster St. Paul, playing the part of St. Peter, into the window and surrounds the patron saint of fishermen with white micro-lights and fabric flowers. Because of Leonard, our holiday memories of Christmases past are visions not of sugarplums, but cocktail shakers. And what child growing up in Gloucester could not describe, at length, the proper draping of a satin ball gown and the benefits of good lighting?

Alternately flamboyant, mysterious, and outrageous, the Bananas windows on Main (or the seasonal Bananas on Rocky Neck) are half street theater, half retail blitz. The dioramas suggestively tickle the emotional seat of the brain with marabou, teasing out subconscious sensations with visual symbolism, whose meanings may be overt (garter belt = sex) or they may remain darkly unfathomable (clown wig = uneasiness). As Simon Doonan of Barney’s window fame in New York writes, the goal of window-dressing is to create desire and arouse the emotions.* This desire is not just a simple impulse to buy the glittery objects themselves (although it is that too), but through the sympathetic magic of those objects, the buyer can, if only for a moment, be the languorous bottle-blonde with the champagne-colored chemise and icy stare; be her louche tuxedoed consort posing on the zebra-print rug with his bowtie undone.

Devoted customers make the pilgrimage to Bananas from all over New England to purchase and worship at this shrine of resurrected fashion, hoping the kinky magic will travel. Some even capture photographic images of the windows, and those are history’s only record. Leonard keeps no paper chronicle of his ephemeral scenes which change as often as Madonna’s hair, with an average natural life span of two weeks. Some windows don’t even last that. The Bananas’ 1997 memorial to murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace (a prone male model in black), lasted only as long as a wake. It was also so restrained that there was not even any identification of the corpse. Only those who were also mourning Versace understood.

Unlike Versace, the mannequin was up on his unarticulated feet in two days, back to work with the thirty or more other mannequins in Leonard’s care. As with our own mortal flesh, the dummies become increasingly high maintenance with age, constantly needing parts replaced or reglued. The pouty faces need skillful touch-ups if not outright repainting, and Leonard’s specialty in portraiture at the San Francisco Art Institute serves him well in this regard. But window dressing requires physical ability as well as artistic. The dead weights of the unwieldy mannequins must be dressed and undressed, moved here and there, balanced and posed. The props and accessories, from the smallest pink Barbie shoe to one of the massive Los Vegas-style headdresses created for the Bananarettes (his living troupe of models), must be manhandled until the transformation from a bunch of old stuff to some juicy scenario is complete. Leonard also works with a collection of heads, bust, and torsos, which, like the full-bodied mannequins, date from the 1930’s to the 1990’s. They come from as far away as over the bridge -- J.C Penny’s and Filene’s -- to the local and now defunct Empire’s and Goldman’s. Half the heads were rescued from a basement in Lanesville where a hat shop once stood. In the days when women sported fruit, plumes, and veils, no town was too small it could not support a milliner.

Most mannequins have only a single, rigid pose, unable even to sit unless so decreed by the factory. Inflexible and haughty, they are perhaps in their element at last, here beside the highbrow art. Does it matter that Leonard has had to paint that finely arched brow on himself? No. Art did not first leap from the early hominid’s imagination in the form of oil paint on stretched canvas. Creativity has always been expressed in whatever medium is at hand, be it charred stick on stone, or starched organdy on a fiberglass form.

So while the mannequins might be said to have arrived in a cultural sense, they have also had to leave behind the protective barrier of commercial glass between their inaccessible selves and the pedestrian observer. Here at the museum they may appear more vulnerable, and maybe just a little bit more human. Stripped of their retail context, we can begin to absorb the displays on a different level and we might be surprised to find that our questions change from "Can I get away with wearing hot pants?" to "What is the nature of the world around us?"

So put down the tea and join the show. And the next time you pause on the sidewalk in front of Bananas, awash in longing and memory, contemplating Leonard’s latest theatrical arrangement, maybe you will find yourself looking not at a window, but a mirror.

Now that Addled,my "golf" novel, is safely in print and it’s too late for second thoughts on the part of Little, Brown, it is time to admit the truth: I have never played golf. Oh yes, maybe a few giddy rounds of miniature golf in my wild youth, playing with a truncated club in one hand and a cocktail in the other, blithely aiming the ball between the spread legs of a giant, plaster dinosaur, but that’s as close I have ever gotten to the Royal and Ancient game. So what gives me the right, you ask, to write about golf? No right, but necessity. Addled came to me a few years ago as I drove past a golf course, upon which strolled hundreds of Canada Geese. "They must be someone’s headache," I thought to myself, and indeed, they turned out to be a huge mess of a problem. The conflict between geese and golfers made for a perfect human-against-nature story, but the clincher was, to make it work, the action had to take place on a golf course. So I had to learn golf.

God forbid, though, I should pick up a club. No, I am a writer, so I picked up a book. First came the golf novels, most of which seemed aimed at the sort of reader who actually knew the game. I was by no means swept away in the drama of a single deciding putt, but I received a golfer’s education nonetheless. I learned to cock my wrists early in the backswing. I learned that I should have my spikes custom made by Silvano Lattanzi, and, with crib notes from my periodontist, I have attained a tenuous grasp of the handicap system. I have even learned to speak like a toddler again, freely spouting words like mashie, birdie, baffy, gimmie, mulligan, niblick and bogey. I love that this kindergarten slang is used in deadly earnest by executives at play, men and women for whom the structure of the game allows them to relax and be silly, safe within the boundaries of the rules. No one works this dichotomy better than P.G. Wodehouse, the author of Golf Without Tears. His Oldest Member taught me how to "see" golfers ("the man wielded his mid-iron like one killing snakes") and approximate distance ("the church that stands a full spoon shot from the clubhouse"), and best of all, I learned that golfers were allowed to laugh at themselves. The problem with an education through fiction though, is that you never know if the writer is telling the truth. Are a golf course’s 18 holes designed to go with the 18 shots in a bottle of whiskey? Really?

So I moved on to nonfiction golf and was almost thrown off my imaginary game by the USGA Rules, a book written in a strange Orwellian tongue, as if it had something desperate to hide. A Canada Goose, for instance, is not a "bird," but an "outside agency." The sentences are so gnomic that it is no wonder that every Club needs a Rules Committee to interpret the sacred text. What could "all golfers are responsible for the eventuality of their golf shot" possibly mean? I persevered past this assault of incomprehensible grammar and was rewarded with John Updike’s Golf Dreams, a collection of stories and reviews, which led me to Golf in the Kingdom, a memoir/fantasy written by Michael Murphy, who started the Esalen Institute, the fountainhead of the human potential movement. But before there was Esalen, there was golf, and it was through this book I discovered the ugly secret that the game’s ritual and arcane language was meant to obfuscate: Golf feeds and transcends the basic killer instincts of the human soul, and the course is the ground upon which the bloody hunt is replicated. But instead of mortal prey, you stalk a little white ball. You play against yourself, you keep your own score. Done right, you learn not to carry around the past shot or worry about the future one. Just be here now and play the ball.

We could all use golf lessons like these, but that’s no reason to pick up a club and start swinging. The answer to life, as always, is to pick up a book and just start reading.