Showing posts with label inner nobility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inner nobility. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Beware Trogs! @lordwestover Twitter Site Has Over 4000 Lordiacs


By Robert Hudson Westover

The Vast Estate (and me!) are very pleased to announce that the Lord Westover Twitter account, @lordwestover, has over 4000 followers, or Lordiacs, as I like to refer to fans of His Lordship.

So, you may ask, why did I start the Lord Westover Find Your Inner Nobility performance art piece?

It all started many, many years ago when, as a young Trog, I was introduced to a woman who changed my life. She gave me a gift that has sustained me throughout my life for which I am eternally grateful. This gift was an awakening of something we all have within us: our inner nobility.

A high-born Russian countess (for real), this woman, Olga C Morgan, was uniquely qualified to take a very rough-hewn character and make him into someone who would lead a productive and useful life.

It could have so easily gone the other way (really easily!)

Unidentified Trog (believed to be this Steven Tyler person)
Attempts to congratulate His Lordship upon hearing
the news of the growing followers of @lordwestover Twitter Site
Since Olga’s passing I find myself constantly drawing on the wisdom she imparted to me to guide decisions, shape my behavior and most of all, to provide me strength. I now realize this noble teaching, this framework of higher life ideals, can be used by others to help them overcome their own life challenges and ignite the spirit of inner nobility that burns within.

And it can be funny, too!

As an artist, I sought out an array of ways to bring this noble awareness to others. Then it hit me! Why not use comedic (that means funny) performance art? What better way to see the impact on fellow Trogs but to actually witness it! (Of course, Lord Westover is not a Trog, obviously.)

I started with a Nobility Oath based on Lowell’s Be Noble quote and created the character Lord Westover to administer it. I then recruited others (seriously, I did) to play the roles they most thought brought out (or didn’t!) their inner nobility.

We “opened” our first “performance” at the Jon Stewart Rally on the National Mall (that’s Washington, DC, not the Mall of America.)

The impact went far beyond our expectations. I named our performance art piece Find Your Inner Nobility and it received national attention with many wanting to take the Nobility Oath!  

Later that year I then created a blog and developed the Ask a Lord column taking “questions” from both “noble” and “trog” alike. The timing could not have been more appropriate for shortly thereafter the horrific Tucson shootings of Congresswoman Giffor, her staff and bystanders, shined a white-hot
spotlight on the growing incivility taking hold in our national discourse.

That year, the Washington Post asked readers to submit their one minute “State of the Union” address. Lord Westover’s speech, addressing incivility, was one of only three to be posted by the newspaper and by far received the most hits.

Our next installation (of sorts) was to take the concept of Inner Nobility to a medium most familiar now to American audiences: the reality show venue. We called it American Monarch  (yes, I know, it congers up so many amazing images!) and created a ten minute “sizzle real” and a “promotional” trailer.

At the same time both comedic and profound, I think Find Your Inner Nobility breaks new ground and goes to the core of why so many of us want to be and do good things (really, most of us do).

Discovering one’s inner nobility has very little to do with the bling (well, not entirely) and societal positioning (ok, maybe not entirely) that Lord Westover possess. It has everything to do with the intrinsic desire we all have in us to be noble as we best understand what nobility means to us.

Here’s to four thousand more Lordiacs!


Wednesday, August 1, 2012

The Nobility of Gore Vidal - Where did he get it?


By Robert Hudson Westover


Love him or hate him (you have no other choice) Gore Vidal had a persistent and apparent nobility about him that could never be denied--not even by those who most loathed him.

So where did he get it?

Many will attribute this nobility to the fact that he was born into a grand political family. But so was his mother and she, by Vidal's own accounts, rarely exhibited the noble traits of her famous son. 

So how did it develop in Vidal?

I think I might have the answer and it might surprise you.

My dear honorary godmother, Countess Olga Chrapovitsky Morgan, was related to Gore Vidal through marriage. Her nephew, Hugh D. "Yusha" Auchincloss III was both Vidal’s step brother and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' (as well as a slew of other well born Auchincloss children). 

Gore Vidal
It's interesting to me that the "Merrywood on the Potomac" kids (the children of family patriarch Hugh D. Auchincloss and former residents of the famed Merrywood mansion near Washington, D.C.) who most all knew and admired Olga, had such nobility about them. And I strongly feel they all got part of their awareness of their inner nobility in large part from Olga. Not that she taught them in any sort of Maria-von-Trapp-Sound-of-Music sort of way. 

No. I think it was just her day-to-day noble actions and reactions to the world around her. I say (and believe) this because I too had the unique opportunity to be exposed to the Nobility of Olga. 

And it changed my life.

Countess Olga C. Morgan with me at her home in Laguna Beach


I wish the whole world could have had this woman as their honorary godmother. To show them, as she demonstrated to so many others, that we all have a Noble spirit within us that just needs to be brought out in our daily walk and conversation—that this world can be a much more civilized world by truly (and honestly) respecting others because they're just as noble as you and me.

Admittedly Vidal fell far short of this aspect of inner nobility! (Nobody's perfect.) But he often recovered.

Case in point. From The Guardian newspaper: 

A few years ago, when I mentioned a passage in his memoirs that admits to being unable to express any open distress after the death of Howard Austen, his supportive partner for almost 50 years, he drawled: "Have you seen that film with Helen Mirren? The Queen? Our class are brought up not to show emotion."

This effortless identification with one of the highest-born figures in history was very Vidal: both in its social self-confidence and the fact that a question about emotional evasion was itself emotionally evaded through a provocative aphorism.

Indeed.


#GoreVidal @GoreVidal

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

FNN: Their Graces announce first ever Noble Act of the Year! Award

Noble Act of the Year! Award to be Announced Dec. 31, 2011 (so there's still time to Be Noble!) Click on the link below to read all about it!
Full Noble News: Their Graces announce first ever Noble Act of the ...: The recognition will include an Ignoble Act of the Year! Award as well By The Earl of Fulton Thomas, Earl of Fulton A Vast Estate, (ob...

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

An assignment to bless

Not to get religious but my mother wrote the attached article focused on humility. Just do the translation and you'll get something out of it!
An assignment to bless | Church Alive - The First Church of Christ, Scientist

My mom and me in front
of the SS United States