From my favorite Irish band, the Waxies!
Check out the band’s site for club dates all over Western Michigan in the next couple months! Slainte!
Big Food = Big Laffs
I’ve been trying to convince the drama teacher at my daughter’s school of this irrefutable equation for two years now, with no success. One need only point to Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” for evidence of its veracity, with the giant banana peel and the aggressive instant pudding. Maybe she’s been swayed by the wave of recent articles about American obesity, and pictures of gargantuan hamburgers that people actually try and eat.
A few years ago at another school, I worked on props for a version of “Jack and the Beanstalk”, which included a lot of material about eating. (The kids thought that material was hilarious, BTW. You can always trust kids to laugh at food, poop and any combination thereof.) For that play, I made chicken legs out of 2-liter bottles and papier mache, hams out of detergent bottles, and bowls of spaghetti out of clothesline, paint and brown styrofoam balls. The giant cheeseburger has had a place of importance in our TV room ever since.
For Liesel’s play this year (which will be held this weekend at the fabulous Portage Theater in Portage Park), I only had one food prop to make, but thankfully it was to be a little larger than life. A character had to get in trouble with the police for smuggling cheese into Russia, so I needed to create a wheel of cheese that was big enough to see but not so big that a grade schooler couldn’t wave it around.
I started with a plastic tray for under flower pots. I cut a pie-shaped slice out of it, filled it with newspaper, and sealed it all up with a couple pieces of cardboard. Then, we covered it with a few layers of papier mache. When you apply papier mache as thickly as we do around here, it’s going to dry very tightly and cause the object to buckle and crease a little bit. Thankfully, cheese is not always a symmetrical delicacy.
Then a base of white paint, which makes it look like brie, a food funny in some situations but much too runny to be believable in our scenario:
Then some yellow paint, and a few holes drawn on:
And Wooola! It’s not very large. In fact, it’s actually life-sized. But I take any assignments I can get these days.
Bonus Prop: Here’s my version of an iPad that I created for the play. These are available now, so you don’t have to wait for Apple to enjoy their little masochistic waiting period. Pencil not included.
Does it ever get old, mocking Milton Bradley?
Naaaah!
Old “Forgive and Forget” Bradley
Because a hitter’s supposed to get hits,
Lou called Miltie a big piece of shit.
With a new gig in Seattle,
Milt’s still fighting old battles,
Showing the world that this shoe still fits.
Bardball is poised and ready to come back for the new baseball season. Please bookmark it for baseball doggerel, served fresh daily during the regular season.
Thanks, Olympics, for giving me a reason to sit on the couch all week
Okay, I think I’ve reached it. I’ve finally had my fill of the Winter Olympics.
I haven’t been sitting in front of the TV EVERY evening for these two weeks. We had theater tickets last night, for example, and I’ve also been around to help with homework (pretty bad form to blow the kids off so I can watch ice dancing) and gave a speech in Ann Arbor last Saturday. But other than that, with the TIVO in hand, I’ve been glued to the set. Why?
It helps that the Olympics are in Canada, undoubtedly my favorite country I don’t live in. Seeing all those maple leafs everywhere warms my heart, and I’ll cheer for a Canadian in just about every winter sport except short track speed skating. I feel bad that the national movement to “Own The Podium” has resulted in Canada landing in fourth in the medal total, but really, that whole quest for domination seems so American that it’s a good thing it imploded. (Maybe American covert agents were behind it all along.)
Also, I don’t know why this is, but I think everyone who is out competing in winter sports at any level just generally LOOKS good. Maybe it’s the lack of sweat, plus the lycra body suits that cover up the overstrained muscles enough so the athletes don’t look like lab experiments.
Hockey isn’t my sport, but I learned more watching the US-Canada and Canada-Russia games than I have in all my life. The speed, the set-ups, the passing, the lack of cheap hits and fighting–all were beautiful things to behold. While this won’t turn me into a rabid rink rat, it will at least make hockey fans more intelligible, if not tolerable. And the pictures of the Canadian Women’s Team drinking beer and smoking cigars after winning the gold medal are the coolest pics I’ve seen in a long time. Olympic officials can go lick a flagpole if they don’t like them.
Bobsled? I still don’t get bobsled. The vehicles they were pushing down the track looked like NHRA funny cars or something. The pusher in the back doesn’t even get to watch where the rig is going. Where’s the satisfaction in that? Luge and skeleton were a little more entertaining, but here are two ideas for consideration:
Just attach runners to an athlete’s jumpsuit and let er go. Talk about a need for control.
OR:
Send people down the chute in those metal flying saucer things we used to ride as kids. The kinds that spun around and gave you know control about anywhere you were going. (Two years ago, I watched some kids in Chicago sledding in the top of a Weber kettle, which was pretty macho.) It would at least let us see the expressions on the player’s face.
One reason I think I’m addicted to watching the Winter Olympics, especially the ski competitions, is that I miss “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” Skiing was a regular feature on that show, and to a kid in Detroit the broadcast locales were exotic, like St Moritz and Squaw Valley and, yes, Whistler. That romantic aura still infects me when I go skiing, no matter how long the lift lines are, how expensive the food and lodging is, and how obnoxious the snowboarders are.
So, thank you, Winter Olympics, for this two-week binge of excitement, vicarious competition, and harmless jingoism. (Well, the Russian hockey team might find such jingoism a little painful when they return to their homeland. Suck it, comrades.) They’re not for everyone, and the arguments against the Games from the non-fans are completely plausible. The way I see it, if you don’t like or participate in winter sports, then you’re a punk (especially if you live in a cold climate). Everyone should at least be grateful that the Winter Olympics have postponed the debuts of “The Marriage Ref” and “The Tonight Show seized by Jay Leno” and all the amazing, breathless coverage of the Oscars that will immediately flood the media.
Who will be left to perform in the closing ceremonies? They used every single Canadian performer I can think of, short of Anvil and Mike Myers.
I Had This Same Dream Last Night!
And it was demeaning and erotic at the same time. Howzy-wowzy!
Happy Valentine’s Day, suckers!
Salinger Dies, Finally Gets the Attention He Craved
I know it’s been a slow news week, but I’ve been impressed with how many column inches have been printed about J.D. Salinger shedding his mortal coil this week. It speaks to the devotion so many people have about his writing, with a little dash of human interest story about the talented artist forced to become a hermit because of the demands of the public.
If I might abuse the cliche, if we didn’t have J.D. Salinger, we’d have to invent him. (In fact, he was reinvented in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and the movie “Field of Dreams” in the character of Terence Mann.) He’s the archetype of a pure artist, disgusted by the commercial demands of the marketplace and the slavering adoration of the masses. Whether this is really true of Salinger, we want it to be true. I think that’s why he’s remembered so fondly by so many. In some ways, it’s a penance that readers are paying, a guilt-ridden offering for living in the crass and conniving world and not sacrificing themselves to change it. Because of the deep mark Holden Caulfield made on them in their impressionable youth, readers have been forced to feel a little like “phonies” themselves in their lives, by doing regular things like growing up, getting jobs and raising families. To some, every little compromise in adult life is a betrayal of Holden.
Ah, but as long as Salinger was still alive, living in seclusion and too pure to share his writing with the world, there was still a connection with the hero of The Catcher in the Rye. Someone out there was still fighting the good fight for honesty and integrity and all those good things. Art will triumph over commerce! The pure soul will live on!! This is exemplified well by the legend that he kept writing these past 40 years and kept all his manuscripts in a safe. There certainly are some crazies out there that would break into a person’s house for holy-grail-type manuscripts, but a safe? A walk-in kind like Scrooge McDuck’s, with piles of papers neatly arranged for each novel and short story? Were there alarms on it like Jack Benny’s?
Now that Salinger is dead, who will be the repository of all those adolescent aspirations? Bob Dylan? Sherwood Schwartz? I can’t think of any writer who would fill the bill. We’ll all be sad when Phillip Roth dies, but he won’t be as beloved, both because his prickly personality has resulted in difficult and thorny books, and because he lacked the good sense to go into hiding when his career was taking off.
Salinger never made a big impression on me, though I certainly admired his prose. His characters and their concerns seemed too rarefied for me, too East Coast, too boarding school. His obsession with children and their inner lives also didn’t grab me, and in fact seemed a little creepy. It was all of a package: characters who were too special to survive in this crummy world, and a writer who couldn’t bear to have anyone sell his babies. You want to be left alone, Jerry? Fine by me. I was always more into Kurt Vonnegut anyway.
One big reason I never much liked The Catcher in the Rye is how I was exposed to it. In my Catholic high school in the mid 1970s, the English Department was a little schizophrenic. The younger teachers wanted us exposed to as much new and stimulating literature as possible, while the older guard was wary about getting parents riled up about “objectionable” books (some memories of the church’s official sanctioning of proper books likely stayed in these priests’ minds long past the time when it was a real concern). So for example, we couldn’t officially read Catch-22, but Mr. Witucki highly recommended we read it during Christmas break because we were likely to be discussing it for a week or two after. In this climate, Catcher was one of those objectionable books. Looking back, I can’t really remember what it was (and still sometimes is) that would get the censors into a lather. Did he visit a prostitute? Did he masturbate? I can’t remember–but I do remember members of our class sharing tips on how to get into the local strip club, the El Mocambo, with a fake ID card, and we treated it like no big deal.
We still read Catcher, but no one could take a book home. Father Enright had 30 copies of the book in his room, and we all read it together in class. Out loud. Paragraph by paragraph. You want a surefire formula for sucking the life out of a book? This one worked like a charm.
New Post Up on True/Slant
Go have a gander at my etymological and rhetorical prowess. William Safire wanted to write this column before he died.
Happy Birthday Michigan!
The Water Wonderland. The Great Lake State. The Mitten and the Rabbit. My home state was admitted into the Union 173 years ago today.
A get-rich place of boom and bust. First furs, then lumber, then copper, then autos. And through it all, a crazy race of people. Where the nickname “Wolverine” came from, no one is certain. It’s been speculated that the Native Americans called the white settlers that because of their rapacious attitudes. It may have been coined during the border war with Ohio in 1836 (often called the Toledo War), because of the ferocity of the citizens insisting that we deserved that little strip of land (we were appeased by Congress when they offered us the Upper Peninsula in exchange–a good trade). But the mysterious origin of the word only makes it more endearing to its folks.
I moved out of there just after college, and I still feel a little guilty about it, but in 1982 things were pretty tough, and I didn’t see any jobs there for a writer. Besides, I wanted to try Chicago for its city living and its public transportation. (Well, I didn’t move here for the El, of course, interesting though it was, but because I could survive here without a car.) I also had family roots in the Windy City, so it wasn’t a big dislocation. But often I feel the pull of moving back to Michigan. Why not trade one bankrupt state for another? I know I could never move very far from it, in any case, because I’d miss those cool summer nights, shocking fall colors, and cold winter mornings over the rolling hillsides. There’s something different about the landscape there. The hills move just a little bit looser and dreamier there than they do in Wisconsin, Ontario, Ohio, or Minnesota. Those big expanses of Great Lakes water allow for so much thinking and feeling awestruck. And the people! They have so much pride in their state that it makes the rest of you all look like sneaky carpetbaggers.
So here’s to the Great Lake State! The Yoopers and the Trolls, the stiff-necked Dutch and the factory rats, the displaced Southerners and Middle Easterners, the hunters and the professors, the casino operators and the industrial designers. Your fortunes will rise again, and fall again, but through it all, you’ll always have hunting holidays and Tiger baseball.
Robin’s ideas for new Bat-stuff were never that great
Welcoming a Second Published Author to the Family
It was a very busy weekend just past, with a lot of cleanup, cooking and preparation for the pomp and circumstance of my ever-lovin’ wife earning her Master’s Degree. (BTW, w00t, my dear.)
On Friday night, in the midst of cooking pork-poblano stew for 50, my daughter came down stairs with a tense look in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what it boded, since she had been very sad and secretive about something earlier and wouldn’t confide in me about it no matter how much I yelled and threatened. Certain things can only be shared with Mom, so I conceded defeat and returned to the stove.
When she came down to the kitchen, she tried to speak but had a lump in her throat. I asked her to repeat it, since my ears have long since reached obsolescence. She rose up on her tiptoes and repeated, “I’m a published author!”
And what do you know? She pulled out the latest copy of MUSE magazine and showed me. Last summer she had entered a contest at the magazine for “The World’s Greatest Prank,” with illustrated instructions. She’d forgotten all about it, until she was reading in bed and happened to spy her work in the magazine:
(If you can’t read it clearly, Here are the steps for the “The Great Fortune Teller”:
1. Make a towel turban.
2. Convince your friend that you can tell the future by his/her shoes.
3. Get them to give you a shoe.
4. Look super-mystical.
5. Say, “You…will…go…on…a…long…journey…”
6. Throw shoe far. Run away.)
There were lot of hugs and kisses all around. I was so happy for her that I waited a full minute before I asked the other members of the household, “So, what’s the holdup with YOU?”
Be sure to pull this prank on someone soon. The more you do it, the quicker it will become a staple of Western lore, along the lines of the “Hertz Donut” interrogatory. It’s especially funny if you do it with someone’s boot while it’s slushy outside.
Congratulations, Liesel! Looking forward to going to NYC together and tearing up the Monkey Bar for your first book contract.
The Mark McGwire Limericks of Shame
So the news comes that Mark McGwire
On the subject of juice was a liar.
Plus, it’s a good bet
That water is wet
And it hurts to grab something on fire“I’m not here to talk ’bout the past,”
Mark blurted to Congress so fast,
Whatever the pride
He had that day died
To give a defense so half-assed.To get a job working for Tony,
Mark had to confess his baloney.
He was juiced to the ears
The homer-derby years,
A fame-drunk, preposterous phony.To get in the Cooperstown Hall,
McGwire will wait for his call
Til Hell freezes over,
The sea swallows Dover,
And Sammy parleys like Bill Engvall.
UPDATE: Here’s another from Friend of Bardball Doug White:
He once chased Aaron and Ruth
With the callow aggression of youth,
But from his head to his toes,
Just like Petey F. Rose,
McGwire won’t face up to the truth.
“Addams Family Musical”: Just a pinch more hemlock in the yak stew, please
Back in October, in anticipation of the holiday season, I went on a little binge with the internet and the credit card. The newspapers were running ads about the new “Broadway in Chicago” shows, and who was I to Scrooge things up and refrain from supporting live theater in town that was destined to move on to NYC and earn silos full of cash?
So, as a final Christmas treat for the kids — after Cirque de Soleil’s “Banana Shpeel,” Goodman’s “A Christmas Carol” and a little skiing jaunt to Breckenridge in Colorado — I took the fam to see “The Addams Family Musical”, which is wrapping up its fun at the Oriental Theater this upcoming weekend. And the final verdict: really pretty good. As good as I expected.
It’s hard to imagine that someone hadn’t thought of adapting these characters for Broadway before. I mean, c’mon — Batman and Spider-Man musicals have been talked about for almost a decade. Can you imagine a guy in red spandex breaking out in heartfelt song? Well, sure you can, it’s musical theater, you droll thing! But aside from Spidey swinging on a tether and singing “Watch Out, Dr. Octopus,” it’s hard to imagine any reason to pay $85 to see such crap.
But Gomez, Morticia and Uncle Fester are a different matter. They’ve been covered in comics, television and a couple of movies, and yet they still seem very consistent and intriguing. Hell, I’ll say it: for those of us who watched the TV show as kids, they are like old friends. A house with a trampoline in the living room? Filet of yak for dinner? Exploding model train sets? Who wouldn’t want to visit there?
Playing the Addams patriarch, Nathan Lane was a little too subdued, but he can throw off a funny line with as little effort as someone brushes off lint. His accent teetered between Spanish and Transylvanian frequently, but after a while, it didn’t matter. At least there was no way for him to channel Lou Costello and Ralph Kramden, as I’ve seen him do too many times.
Bebe Neuwirth has been in the role of Morticia, but she apparently wanted to watch the final Bears game Sunday and left us with her understudy. Rachel De Benedet was fine, I guess, but having never seen Bebe Neuwirth live, I wanted to see what all the fuss has been about all these years.
The big news last week was the importing of Jerry Zaks as a show doctor. His presence is a welcome development, I think, because while the show is pretty good, it could be great. The story line is flexible and serviceable: Wednesday has finally grown up and wants to marry a boy she met in school, and the boys’ parents come in from Ohio to meet the Addamses. (Kind of a switcheroo on having a normal member of the family, like Marilyn Munster.)
Unfortunately, Gomez and Morticia are only sort of interesting, hobbled by their concerns about growing old. In fact, one of Morticia’s big musical numbers is a lament about how she doesn’t control the spotlight anymore. The most endearing qualities of Gomez and Morticia, as I see it, are their self-confidence, their passion for each other, and their acceptance of the weird. Contemplating change and age with these two is a difficult task: They are ageless, in a way, and wedded to a mildewy past of family mansions, old clothes, and torture chambers in the basement. I’m not saying they CAN’T contemplate these issues, but the characters have to come alive first. They’re a little languid at the beginning, and despite Morticia lopping the heads off a bouquet and Gomez playing with swords, the energy of young Wednesday, her lover, Fester and even the Ohio couple makes them pale in comparison. Hell, even Grandmama comes off with consistently funnier lines. A little spark of genuine joie de vivre weirdness from Morticia and Gomez at the beginning (maybe even before the opening number, “Clandango”, which adds a complicated new facet to the family dynamic) would give the show a very solid footing.
I hope the musical does well in NYC. I have great affection for these characters, and think they will survive well the necessary volume and energy that Broadway requires. (It’s a lot closer to success than “Banana Shpeel” was when we saw it in November.) The Addams’ individuality and optimism always strikes me as truly American, so much so that I can completely believe that their mansion (a wonderful use of staging, BTW) is located in the middle of Central Park. And to see a musical celebrating genuine, deep-rooted eccentricity and be successful at it would be one of the coolest things to happen onstage since “Urinetown.”
That’s Enough for Now
Man, what a year. I can’t imagine anyone is very sad to see 2009 in the rearview mirror. Teabaggers, climate-change deniers, Balloon Boy, Octomom, vampires and zombies, Milton Bradley, Joe “Blow” Lieberman, and Wall Street bankers “doing God’s work”. Unemployment, foreclosures, swine flu, bankrupt companies, disappearing newspapers. “You Lie!” “Imo let you finish, but…” “Common sense solutions for America.” Yeesh, there might be something good to look back on, but I don’t have the stomach for it now.
And don’t even get me started on the whole previous decade. Everyone in the media with time on their hands has been asking what should be the standard way to refer to the past ten years–the aughts, the naughts, the Oh’s. I’d be satisfied calling it the “Double-Bunghole Decade” and leaving it at that.
So that’s enough for me. Vacation officially starts when I stop typing this and go make myself a cocktail. Our time off will be full of travel, but it should be the exhilarating kind. (How could Kalamazoo NOT be?) I just pray that the weather will be cooperative enough to only snow AFTER we’ve arrived at our various destinations.
While it’s been a busy week here, I still managed to write a pretty good Christmas story for my wife for 2009. It’s a tradition that goes back to before we were married. The first story I wrote for her, about a cabbie late at night in Chicago on Christmas Eve, is probably still my favorite. It also was the first thing I ever had published, by the now-departed Chicago Tribune Magazine. I still remember my father-in-law buying up all sorts of copies of that paper around Western Michigan.
I’ve posted a Christmas story on the blogsite today, that I wrote last year. The kids liked it when I read it out loud on Christmas Eve, and though I haven’t gone back to edit it in the meantime, I’m going to put it out there for all of you. You can read “Chex Mix Confidential” by clicking HERE, or go to the pages in the sidebar on the right and look over all my Christmas stories. Hope you find something in there to your liking. Let me know in a comment how (or if) you liked any.
So to all my faithful friends and readers out there, have a wonderful holiday, and let’s look forward to a better 2010. Hey, it’s an election year! How bad could it be??
Jack Bauer Enters the War on Christmas
Things turn ugly as Santa is interrogated by Kiefer Sutherland. Pretty funny. Found on The Daily What.
Readers of my book “Recut Madness” might recognize a similar storyline in my Red State version of “Miracle on 34th Street”, wherein Santa is brought before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay. It has a less happy ending than this video, but then again, I wrote it in 2006. You all can read it right here.
Man, I have got to figure out how to use video editing software! How can a writer get his ideas in front of people if he doesn’t also become a videographer/producer/director/editor/sound editor? It’s nearly impossible.
A Joke Worth Repeating Through the Holidays
An old friend just sent a good joke that is both about Christmas and about current affairs. Keep this one in your pocket to have handy at tasteful social affairs.
It is near the Christmas break of the school year. The students have turned in all their work and there is really nothing more to do. All the children are restless and the teacher decides to have an early dismissal.
Teacher: “Whoever answers the questions I ask, first and correctly can leave early today.”
Little Johnny says to himself “Good, I want to get outta here. I’m smart and will answer the question.”
Teacher: “Who said ‘Four Score and Seven Years Ago’?”
Before Johnny can open his mouth, Susie says, “Abraham Lincoln.”
Teacher: “That’s right Susie, you can go home.”
Johnny is mad that Susie answered the question first.
Teacher: “Who said ‘I Have a Dream’?”
Before Johnny can open his mouth, Mary says, “Martin Luther King.”
Teacher: “That’s right Mary, you can go.”
Johnny is even madder than before.
Teacher: “Who said ‘Ask not, what your country can do for you’?”
Before Johnny can open his mouth, Nancy says, “John F. Kennedy.”
Teacher: “That’s right Nancy , you may also leave.”
Johnny is boiling mad that he has not been able to answer to any of the questions.
When the teacher turns her back Johnny says, “I wish these bitches would keep their mouths shut!”
The teacher turns around: “NOW WHO SAID THAT?”
Johnny: “TIGER WOODS. CAN I GO NOW?”