10/28/2016
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Broads & Balls

Hot Air

Glab Gab

If you elected to stay in last night, babies, you missed it. Your loss.

A heaping handful of Bloomington’s most out-there artists and other such reprobates staged a 100-year anniversary celebration of the fabled Cabaret Voltaire at the Blockhouse on South College Avenue. My guests on yesterday’s Big Talk, ergo, were Bethy Squires of the Sitcom Theater and IU lit maven Dalia Davoudi, two of the organizers and performers responsible for the loving re-creation of the Zurich, Switzerland nightclub that gave birth to the Dadaists.

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Squires (L) & Davoudi

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Catch the podcast of the WFHB Daily Local News feature with Squires & Davoudi here. And, as always, you can hear the full-length, unedited, original interview here.

So listen away. And tune in Thursday, Nov. 3, when jigsaw puzzle-maker and theater company honcho Marc Tschida and I chin it up on next week’s Big Talk.

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Wait, There’s More…

You haven’t read anything yet on women, sex and other sordities until you’ve read Bethy Squires’ columns on Vice‘s “Broadly” page. She’s compelling. She’s informative. She’s funny. I always try to be all three and, on rare occasions, I succeed. She nails it every time out.

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Start clicking, kids.

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Paying The Price

Doug Storm, the ace host and producer of WFHB’s Interchange, recently typed about the state of academia in this early 21st Century:

Last month, the University of New Hampshire made news when one of its librarians, Robert Morin, saved fifty years of paychecks so that he could give $4 million back to the university upon his death. UNH spent $1 million of the librarian’s gift on a 30 x 50-foot High Definition scoreboard for their new $25 million football stadium. The university defended its decision by stating that the donation was used for “our highest priorities and emerging opportunities.” English Department adjuncts at the University of New Hampshire typically receive $3,000 per class. They already knew they weren’t a high priority.

True story.

For new immigrants like me, learning about college sports in a college town is a real eye-opener. Even some bigger cities reflect some of the mania surrounding the NCAA’s fun & games. When I moved to Louisville in 2007, the first neighbor I met asked me, “Who do you like?” Somehow I knew he was talking about sports; I don’t remember exactly why, but the question didn’t come out of the blue. I’d already told the guy I was from Chicago, so I took it as any Chicagoan would. You’re from the North Side, you love the Cubs. The South Side, the White Sox. Of course there are a few infiltrators on either side of town, hot to trumpet their allegiance to the wrong geographic nine. But they are analogous to black Republicans. I replied, “The Cubs.”

The guy looked at me as though I was from the moon. “No,” he said, almost scolding. “Louisville or Kentucky.”

“Um, I thought Louisville was Kentucky,” I answered, dumbly.

“Oh, man,” the guy said, laughing. “You’ve got a lot to learn.”

I did learn. In Louisville, you either live or die with the University of Louisville Cardinals or the University of Kentucky Wildcats. You’re either red or blue. One guy I’d go on to meet down there was a loyal Louisville fan. His wife threw her lot in with Kentucky. When the two schools would meet each year in basketball, she’d don her blues and he’d appear solely in carmine. In fact, they would not even travel to the stadium together. They’d take separate cars to the game because neither wanted to be seen on the streets with the other.

Then, after a couple of years, The Loved One and I wound up here in Crimson & Cream country.

The guy we bought our house from went on and on about how much he loved football. He had season tickets for everyone in his family. He wouldn’t miss a game if his house was burning down. But I still hadn’t learned. I asked, “How long does it take for you to drive up to Indianapolis?”

“Indianapolis?” he said. “Why?”

“Oh, then you’re Cincinnati Bengals fan?” I said.

He cleared things up swiftly. He was, natch, talking about the Indiana Hoosiers.

I’ll be honest with you — I didn’t even know fans could buy season tickets to college football games.

Now, nine years later, I get it. The Hoosiers are big here. Really, really, really big. So big some folks walk around town in the most garish pants ever designed, those red and white striped warmup pants the basketball team wears. You’ve really, really, really gotta love your team to appear in public with these things on:

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By and by, I’d learned that even people who’d never attended a single college class were die-hard Hoosier fans. You can be a townie who longs for semester breaks and summer vacations when Bloomington becomes relatively student-free. You can resent every sorority girl and fraternity guy. You can rail about how the university seemingly controls the town politically. You can love Breaking Away because the townies (read: good guys) won. Still, when it’s time for Hoosier football or basketball, you’re glued to your TV — that is, if you haven’t scored tix to the big game.

Hoosier sports mean as much to the people of Bloomington and surrounding areas as the Cubs or Bears or Bulls mean to Chicagoans. Maybe more, because even if your fave Chi. team gets bounced, there’s always another sport season right around the corner. And if you’re feeling overly glum about your team’s most recent debacle, well, you live in one of the biggest cities in the world with all the distractions and amenities you could hope for.

I’ve just done a little back-of-the-envelope ciphering. It turns out Chicago is a tad more than ten times the physical size of Bloomington. If the city of Chi. were to build a sports campus to rival the the relative size of IU Athletic Dept.’s physical footprint in Bloomington, the damned thing would cover a whopping 20-plus square miles.

I remind you: In Bloomington, college sports means a hell of a lot.

And, I’ve no doubt, the same can be said in college towns across the nation, Durham, New Hampshire included.

That said, perhaps it’s about time each of the college towns starts picking up its fair share of the tab to run its local athletic programs and the facilities. Now, colleges and universities have turned themselves, essentially, into profit-making corporations so as to support their sports programs, among other things. The various college sports operations are huge money pits. And the college towns that host them, for all intents and purposes, get off scot-free.

Now, I know it’s not going to happen, but in a better world, Bloomingtonians’d be footing the full bill — infrastructure, game-day police and emergency services, facilities construction and maintenance, and so on; a bit of which the city already is compelled to provide — for the teams they love.

Oh, the Hoosiers would still be ID’d w/ IU — as would the Wildcats* be to UNH.

That way, colleges and universities could get back into the business of learning and researching.

( * Just wondering: Why do so many colleges and U’s calls themselves the Wildcats? Come on, people, you’re institutions of higher knowledge — can’t you find anybody imaginative enough to come up with some alternative names? Some 27 NCAA teams are nicknamed the Wildcats. But that’s not the worst. Forty colleges call themselves the Bulldogs and 47 fancy themselves Tigers, But the champ of all college team nicknames is the Eagles with 72.)

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Red Rubber Ball

Speaking of ballers, etc., here’s a ditty written by Paul Simon along with Bruce Woodley of Aussie folk-ers, the Seekers. The song was a big hit for the Cyrkle in 1966 when it reached #2 on the Billboard pop chart for a week (No. 1 was the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer”). A decade later Canadian punk rockers the Diodes recorded a version of the song in response to Simon loudly and frequently berating punk music. Knowing what a perfectionist and control-freak Simon is in the studio, I can imagine him hearing the Diodes version and cringing — which is precisely what the Diodes hoped he’d do.

Anyway, here’s Mel Tormé‘s version of the song, released the same year as the Cyrkle’s. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the Velvet Fog, but this recording is pretty cringe-worthy as well.

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10/25/2016
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Dada

Hot Air: Heaven On Earth

I woke up out of a dead sleep. I checked the clock — 3:45am. I tried to fall back to sleep and I did, for a bit. I woke up again a half hour later and then a half hour after that, each time straining to see the clock through the fog.

Man, I thought, I can’t wait for the 6:00 o’clock alarm and for the day to begin. More to the point, I can’t wait for 8:00 o’clock tonight.

That’s when the first game of the 2016 World Series begins in Cleveland, Ohio, for the next two days the center of the entire universe. My beloved Cubs arrived there yesterday morning so as to begin the task of transporting me to a higher state of nirvana.

I still can’t fully believe what has happened. I have to remind myself this is all true. For instance, I keep looking at this aerial shot of the Wrigley Field groundskeepers painting the World Series logo on the foul ground sod:

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Man, it’s all gotta be real, right?

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Talkin’ Big

My gig as host of WFHB‘s Big Talk interview show gives me the opportunity to meet the most fab peeps on this planet — or, at least, within the cozy confines of this sprawling megalopolis. Yesterday I taped Thursday’s show with a couple of hugely creative and focused young people, Bethy Squires and Dalia Davoudi.

Bethy is a freelance writer and one of the driving forces behind Sitcom Theater, a comedy skit gang that skewers, lovingly, sitcoms like Friends on stage. Dalia is a grad student at Indiana University and a key factotum at the Burroughs Century and Wounded Galaxies Festival of Experimental Media. The two of them are now involved in a recreation of the revolutionary and notorious Cabaret Voltaire.

CV was a nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland back when Europe was embroiled in its first attempt to destroy the world. A crew of artists, political radicals, and other such dangerous figures liked to do their cigarette-smoking and absinthe guzzling there and one day in Feb. 2016 essentially formalized their presence when they began meeting, in wildly imaginative costumes, in the nightclub’s backroom. These gatherings became known around the avant garde world and even gave birth to the antiwar, anti-burgeois Dada art movement.

Squires, Davoudi, and some dozens of other similarly avant Hoosiers (and isn’t this the first time in human history that’s ever been typed?) will stage their own Cabaret Voltaire Thursday evening at 9:00pm at the Blockhouse, 205 S. College Ave. Costume-wearing is recommended and even if you can’t quite come up with a good one, they’ll provide masks, etc. at the door for your masquerading pleasure.

My interview with Squires and Davoudi airs Thursday, Oct. 27, during the Daily Local News at 5:30pm.

And, BTW, don’t forget to hie on over to the Buskirk Chumley Theater tomorrow, Wednesday night, for the one-time-only airing here of the documentary Men in the Arena. It’s the story of two young Somali men who endured the horrors of civil war in that godforsaken Horn of Africa nation to become world class soccer players and, now, residents of this holy land. Director J.R. Biersmith will be on hand to take audience Q’s. Biersmith and local promoter Tyler Ferguson joined me on Big Talk last week. Here’s the link to the Daily Local News feature and here’s how you can hear the almost-complete original interview I did with the two (or, you will hear it as soon as I get around to putting the audio track up).

Next week, handmade jigsaw puzzle-maker and theater company director Marc Tschida joins me on Big Talk.

Like I say, I get to meet the coolest folk.

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Daydream Believer

Speaking of the six o’clock alarm, that’s a line from this Monkees’ hit, number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks in December 1967. The tune was written by John Stewart, a member of the Kingston Trio. Give an ear:

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10/21/2016
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Women

Hot Air

Guy Talk

I see in the papers that the Republican Candidate for President is headed for a thoroughgoing drubbing this fall. He’s behind overall in polls measuring voter preferences across the nation. He’s behind in some heretofore dependable Republican states. He behind among Latino voters. He’s behind among African-American voters. Voters feel that Hillary Clinton “won” the three candidate debates. The Republican establishment is petrified that many of its down-ballot candidates will lose, thanks to voter distaste for the man at the top. In polling among the genders, the RCP is losing dramatically among women.

The fact is, pretty much only men are tilting toward the RCP.

I hereby apologize to the nation and to humanity for “thought processes” of my fellow males.

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Big Talk Talk

Following the news this week that IU’s Eskanazi Art Museum will close for three years beginning late next spring for a massive rebuilding project, you may want to check out the Big Track of my interview with museum director David Brenneman. The interview ran on WFHB’s Daily Local News Thursday, September 29th but, as with all Big Talk guests, you can catch the original, pretty-much-unabridged chitchat between Brenneman and me on The Pencil’s Big Talk page.

In the longer track, Brenneman talks about the rebuild. Catch some morsels of info about the Eskanazi’s upcoming plastic surgery in the second half of the interview. The museum will reopen in the spring of 2020.

And speaking of speaking, filmmaker J.R. Biersmith joined me on yesterday’s Big Talk. He directed the documentary, Men in the Arena, a look at the lives of two young Somali men, Sa’ad Hussein and Saadiq Mohammed, who endured the horrors of civil war in their country yet still were able to become top-flight soccer players. Their escape from the war-torn Horn of Africa nation and their subsequent relocation to this holy land are the focal points of Biersmith’s movie. Local soccer maven Tyler Ferguson has arranged for a special showing of the film here in Bloomington Wednesday, October 26, at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. She joined us in the WFHB studios for the Biersmith parley.

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J.R. Biersmith

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Tune in next week for a discussion of the upcoming one-night only recreation of the fabled and notorious Cabaret Voltaire, produced by the Burroughs Century Ltd. and the Wounded Galaxies Festival. The original Cabaret Voltaire was perhaps the world’s most avant-garde and hyper-fashionable locale back in the ‘teens and early ’20s of the century just past. There, visual artists, poets, authors, political boat-rockers, and other suspicious characters gathered to share, create, and define what was hip in the pre-WWII world. It became the birthplace of the Dada movement. The Burrough’s Century’s Dalia Davoudi and other guests will join me for a lively discussion to be aired Thursday, October 27. Stay tuned.

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Leaning In, Too Nicely

Jazz ivory-tickler and poli sci prof Jeff Isaac attended a recent conference where a woman from the Ukraine asked a question of the panelists and was immediately met with an onslaught of males in the audience leaping up to tell her what they thought she should know. He writes: “We are now being treated to a torrent of mansplaining….”

He concludes: “I wish these self-important men would shut the fuck up.”

This reminded me of something that happened at the last Science Cafe, a week ago Wednesday. The discussion had to do with Beauty. Are there objective standards of Beauty? Is there any way to measure it? Does science offer us a way to define it?

It was all pretty heady stuff and, as per usual, the audience was comprised of about 75 percent men and 25 percent women. At one point in the discussion, one man opined that “the feminists” would be “kicking and screaming” at the suggestion that there is such a thing as definable physical beauty. This led to a few other guys spouting off about what women might or might not think about the whole thing.

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“They”

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As they blathered on, I had to squelch the impulse to jump up and tell them to just ask a goddamned woman what she thought. I didn’t wag my finger at them because I figured here’s a gang of males talking about the thoughts or non-thoughts of women and there really was no call for yet another guy to pipe up about it. I longed, though, for one of the women to raise her voice. Hell, I longed for all the females there to kick up a fuss and, ultimately, tell the males to shut the fuck up.

Sadly, though, we’ve taught women never to tell jerks to go straight to hell. I know a few females who’d skewer the blowhards that night. Jen Maher comes mind, as does Irasema Rivera. But seemingly none of the women at Bear’s Place that night carried herself with the swagger, confidence, and controlled rage of those two. Too bad.

It takes time, I suppose, for people to overcome the lousy lessons drummed into them from birth. Especially when those people are constantly told their primary purpose is to make nice.

One day, women’ll make a ton more trouble even than they’re making now — and that’ll be a good day.

BTW: Bloomington’s Science Cafe just may be on its last legs. The moving force behind the (sorta) monthly lectures and audience Q&A sessions is moving his base of operations to another college town. I’d slip you more info about him and his future but he’s notorious for keeping his personal life close to the vest. In any case, the SciCaf gang is looking for someone ambitious enough to keep the ball rolling here in So. Cent. IN. Drop in at the next session, Wednesday, Dec. 7th, 6:30pm, at Bear’s Place.

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Love/Hate

My beloved Cubs are, as of this writing, one win away from appearing in their first World Series since Japan was busy surrendering to the Allies. Now, believe me, I was thrilled to pieces when they pounded a passel of Dodgers pitchers to take a three games to two lead in the National League Championship Series. I slept easily last night.

OTOH, the lead-up to the Cubs’ eventual explosion caused my nerve endings to protrude from my skin. My stomach was being flipped and flopped like a square of “meat” on a White Castle grill. Truth is this newfound success of the Cubs is, for the most part, no fun at all. Despite running up the best record in the game this summer and being generally recognized as the best team in existence today, the Cubs easily could have succumbed to the Giants last week or to the Dodgers this week. And — you know what? — nobody cares what a team’s regular season record was if they don’t win the whole shebang at the end.

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A Moment Of Bliss After Hours Of Misery

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Should LA upset them in games six or seven this weekend, I’ll have to do plenty of mental gymnastics to overcome the voice of my pathologically pessimistic daddy-o in my head. And I’ll have to try to comfort the imaginary soul of my mother who, if she had to experience yet another Cubs heartbreak, would be inconsolable.

Jayson Stark writes on ESPN.com: “One win away….: Are those the most beautiful words in the universe? Or are they the most scary words in the universe?”

Is it better to have loved and lost…, yadda, yadda? Who in the hell knows? Not me, that’s for sure.

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10/19/2016
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The Better Angels

Hot Air

Soaring

Once upon a time, long, long, long ago, a presidential candidate could be heard uttering these words:

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies – to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear – only a common desire to retreat from each other – only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek – as we do – nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

That was Bobby Kennedy, a terribly imperfect man and political candidate, speaking at the Cleveland City Club the day after Martin Luther King was executed. You and I together could draw up a lengthy laundry list of the sins committed by Bobby Kennedy in his personal and public lives. He, precisely like you and me, fell to temptation, rage, ideology, privilege, moral superiority, sexism, and so many other seductions until the day he died barely two months after delivering this speech. His greatest sin, though, was simply being a human being. Yet, as a human, he was capable of greatness. At times he was lucid and courageous enough to say things that, whether read or heard, made hearts soar. Mine certainly soared when I read this just now.

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My friend and sister Zaineb Istrabadi pointed out a snippet from the speech this AM. In researching the time and place in which he delivered these words, I came upon the entirety of it. I was blown away. I hope you’ve been, too.

And now I have to resist a certain creeping sense of discouragement. No one on the public stage today can speak so brilliantly and so forcefully. No one would dare. No one would want to be so blatantly ignored or, worse, ridiculed for speaking in such lofty language of such noble concepts, as anyone who delivered this speech in 2016 surely would be.

Damn 2016.

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10/17/2016
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Word Salad

Hot Air: Speaking In Riddles

Amy Goodman, Martyr?

People have been wailing and gnashing their teeth over the arrest of Democracy Now! reporter and co-founder Amy Goodman at the site of the ongoing Native American protest against the Dakota Access pipeline. Witness this hed from a story in The Nation: “The Arrest of Journalists and Filmmakers Covering the Dakota Pipeline Is a Threat To Democracy — and the Planet.” Yee-ow! The entire globe is now in peril? Okay, I suppose if you see the pipeline as further evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s raping of the environment, sure, the hed makes a pinch of sense. (Although, to say the entire planet is in jeopardy is the same kind of overly-dramatic, alarmist bushwa the Right has become famous for, only in the opposite direction.)

In any case, the outcry over Goodman’s arrest has been loud and emotional. Folks are shaken over this. Hell, I’ve been one of them. I wrote on social media yesterday: “This Amy Goodman case in ND is scary.”

She’s been charged with criminal trespass for an incident in early September when she, Goodman, attempted to report on a clash between protesters and private security guards at the Standing Rock Sioux tribal burial site. The security guards unleashed dogs and pepper spray on protesters who tried to enter the restricted construction area at the site.

Ladd Erickson, McLean County State’s Attorney, issued the trespass subpoena and says he’ll charge her with rioting. Erickson says Goodman had forfeited her status as reporter by actually participating in the trespass action. Goodman says she’ll surrender to McLean County authorities today.

Scary? Sure. I don’t like to see journalists get arrested for their actions in covering stories. That’s as bad as one presidential candidate threatening to indict and jail another after he wins (snort) the election. These days of profit-driven news media, with parent corporations apparently calling some shots in how employee/reporters go about their business, are scary overall. The slant, tacit or not, too often will be on the side of moneyed interests. So the Goodman arrest seems like more of the same corporate jack-booting.

The Nation has been particularly hot for this story. The mag’s Lizzy Ratner penned a piece with a hed that concluded her arrest “should scare us all.”

Only there’s another side to the story. Marc Cooper is a retired prof. from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of J. He cautions us not to get too bent out of shape over the arrest. I present his argument, apparently a social media comment, in full. It was sent to me by a journalist I trust.

I wasn’t gonna say anything about this but I lack self-control. Let’s clear up some of the bullshit here. Goodman is charged with simple misdemeanor trespassing… not much more than a traffic ticket. Charges like these are usually dismissed in court or they are plead [sic] out to a $50 or $100 fine. Period. Been there. Done that. A black mark for the editors of The Nation who failed to disclose that the author of the article is a former producer for Amy Goodman and we are looking at clear conflict of interest. I looked up the incident in the local “establishment” papers that had a much more honest accounting. Some 30 protesters were charged with trespassing on private property and Goodman was among them.

Clearly, the prosecutor in this case is a tin pot loonie… clear from his statements. I have NO idea if the trespassing charge against anybody is valid. Assuming that it is, it matters not whether the prosecutor thinks she is or is not a real journalist. Real journalists have NO immunity to trespassing laws…. something I have bumped into maybe 50 times in my professional life.

Obviously there are bigger issues at play here and it is rather opportunistic of Goodman (and her former producer) to make her some sort of Big Issue when the real issue is the uprising of the tribes. Then again, Amy has never showed any shame in using ANYTHING at hand to maker [again, sic] herself a martyr worthy of fundraising.

In short, she is not being prosecuted for what she reported.

Second, this should not “scare us all”

Third, a misdemeanor puts you in jail. Not in prison. And she will not be going to jail unless she wants to.

Very disappointing work by The Nation.

UPDATE: From what I can discern from further reading in other sources, the original trespassing charges were dropped some weeks ago and the prosecutor has now revised the charges to participating in a riot. I don’t know the facts of the case. But my main point stands. Goodman is not being prosecuted for what she reported. She is being prosecuted for being in a crowd of protesters who over ran a fence on private property and who engaged in activity that the state says was rioting. It sure looks like everybody in this case has been overcharged by a wingnut prosecutor, But Goodman is not being persecuted for reporting.

I don’t know if I buy into Cooper’s argument completely. I merely present it in the spirit of lively discussion. Now, talk amongst yourselves.

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Rudy Sees Dead People (Voting)

You know “inner cities” is code for “negroes,” don’t you? And Latinos. And any other non-alabaster-skinned folk who pretend to be Americans.

The voters of the inner cities, acc’d’g to R. Giuliani, are going to steal the election. This canard is a slam dunk, considering every white person still in thrall to the Republican Candidate for President knows it’s the blacks who steal cars and our women and the Latinos who steal stereos. The Arabs/Muslims? They’re not so much into larceny. They blow things up.

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This latest charge follows on the heels of the RCP’s suggested that Hillary Clinton was doped going into the last debate.

Next accusation? It was Hillary who groped women’s pussies (and bragged about it), not the RCP.

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Saucy

Last night, I made my first batch of spaghetti sauce with meatballs since I underwent you-know-what and that selfsame YKW destroyed and/or adversely altered my taste buds.

The very idea of tomatoes nauseated me, beginning with my first tentative tastes of food back in mid-April up until very recent weeks.

The tastes of various foods, though, don’t seem to sicken me so much of late. My tastes vary wildly from day to day, as is normal for neck chemoradiation patients on the rebound. Some days I can make out a wide variety of tastes, if ever so slightly. Other days everything I put into my mouth tastes like corrugated cardboard, meat and bread especially. I’ve been slowly exposing my pie trap to tomato sauce in the last couple of weeks. Like a tablespoon of some Classico® Four Cheese red sauce added to my olive oil, butter, and white wine concoctions, poured over cavatappi, say.

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Experiment Ingredients

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See, I haven’t wanted to make my own (far superior) spaghetti sauce because if the stuff still sickened me, I’d get all depressed and have to dump out that huge potful. But I felt a little frisky this weekend. Devil-may-care, you know?

So I took the plunge. Man, it felt good to roll out those meatballs, one half ground sirloin and one half ground pork. I chopped my onion and garlic and sniffed my fingertips for my first such odoriferous treat in more than ten months.

I will say this: My honker still works awfully gosh-darned well, so there’s that.

As an aside, back in the early ’80s I had a roommate who’d been raised in backwoods Kentucky. He had, shall we say, a lot of backwoods Kentucky in him but he wanted in the worst way to be a city guy. He tried cooking what would be viewed as an exotic dish by a Kentuckian for me and my then-girlfriend. It had garlic in it, which, to a lot of Murricans at the time, was the equivalent of putting a dash of nitroglycerine in their food. For the next week or so, he scrubbed his hands constantly, even going so far as submerging his fingertips in lemon juice for hours at a time because he’d heard that’d get rid of the smell of garlic. I asked him why he was so worried about the smell of garlic on his fingers. He said, “Because garlic smells horrible.” I said, “No it doesn’t.” We gave each other looks that said, You’re deranged.

Anyway, I simmered my sauce for a good three hours and, at about 11pm, fished out a couple of meatballs and dunked some crusty hearth bread into it. The verdict? Meh. I could barely taste the stuff.

Which, as I say, is a great improvement. At least the pomodori aren’t making me want to hork anymore.

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A Vestige Of Penury

Speaking of those long-ago days of the last century, I spent my first afternoon since the ’80s in a laundromat Saturday. Our washing machine is on the fritz — and ain’t that a chestnutty idiom from a million years ago? — so I had to lug our soiled duds over to the lavanderia next to the Little Caesar’s just off 3rd Street on the East Side.

(BTW: that “pizza” outfit styles its name w/o an apostrophe, begging the question, was the operation named for Gaius Julius Caesar or for him and all the successive Caesars? No matter, it’s yet another reason for you to withhold your custom from it. I’ll give the co. credit, though, for spelling Caesar correctly. Did you know the cognomen (family name) that eventually became the official title for the Roman Empire’s boss of bosses came down to us, lo these many centuries later, in the forms of czar and kaiser? It was pronounced, in the classical Latin, KAI-zahr, the first syllable rhyming with eye.)

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Were Caligula and Nero involved as well?

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Thankfully, the place was empty. I imagine everybody was busy getting ready for the IU football team’s homecoming game that evening.

Funny thing is, even though I’ve got quarters to spare these days, I still tossed them into the machines as if, in the words of Mike Ditka, they were manhole covers. The washing machines offered me no choice — it’s two bucks a load, period. The dryers, though, are a different story. You get six minutes per quarter, so I started off with twelve minutes. Naturally, that wasn’t long enough so I dropped another quarter in when that cycle had finished, even though I knew only one more quarter wouldn’t be enough to complete the job. Nevertheless, I wasn’t about to take the chance that I’d feed the machine any unnecessary quarters. Then I had to add another and still another before I was satisfied my clothes were dried. Only they really weren’t.

It is always so in a laundromat. Since I was a dopey 21-y.o., fresh from moving out of my parents’ crib, I’ve always taken laundry that was ever-so-slightly damp in certain areas home from the laundromat. I’d be damned — and I’ll still be damned today — if I was gonna give the laundromat one quarter more than needed.

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10/14/2016
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Money Matters

Hot Air: Millions & Millions

Being & Doing

Heads up this weekend for a couple of events, whose principals I’ve had on my Big Talk interview show:

  1. Betsy Stirratt‘s “(Re)Imagining Science” exhibit opens tonight with a reception from 6-8pm. Stirrat is the director of Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery of Art and an artist in her own right. She has collaborated with Alex Straiker, a neuroscientist in the IU Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences where he fiddles with cow eye and brain cells to determine the effects of cannabinoids thereon. Straiker, too, fancies himself an artist; his microscopy images have been displayed in galleries around town for years. Stirratt & Straiker’s installation is one of 15 such pairings of research scientists and artists to create artworks illustrating the latest in science inquiry. Cool stuff.

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2. “Resilience: Indiana’s Untold Story” opens tonight at the John Waldron Arts Center. Written by Dr. Gladys DeVane and Liz Watford-Mitchell and directed by Danielle Bruce, “Resilience” tells the story of the black experience in the Hoosier State as seen through the eyes of two elderly dark-skinned women. DeVane is noted for creating this kind of character — a fictional person whose story encompasses historical truths. Sanctioned by the state’s Bicentennial Commission, the multi-media play runs tonight and tomorrow night with a matinee on Sunday. Get your tix at the Buskirk-Chumley Box Office or at the door (although I wouldn’t risk being shut out if you wait that long.)

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Talking The Talk

And speaking of Big Talk, here’s my interview with Betsy Stirratt on yesterday’s edition of the regular Thursday feature on WFHB’s Daily Local News. If the feature piques your interest, you might want to hear the entire half-hour chat I had with Stirratt here. As always, you can catch Big Talk live every Thursday on the 5:30pm news broadcast and WFHB’s podcast of same as well as my own Big Track posting of the mostly-unedited, pretty-much-complete initial interviews with my guests.

Big Talk Logo Usable Screen Shot

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Lyrical Lit

Y’oughta check out author and editorialist Anna North’s screed against the Bob Dylan Nobel Prize in Literature award, announced yesterday. I don’t agree with a word she says but that doesn’t stop me from recommending the read.

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Clintons’ Cash

University of Chicago historian and author of the indispensable Nixonland, Rick Perlstein, is no fan of Hillary Clinton. Not that he digs the Republican Candidate for President; he has a frontal lobe, after all, but HRC’s ties to the Goldman Sachs mob and other Wall Street hoods turn him off as does her somewhat itchy trigger finger when it comes to this holy land’s armed forces.

In any case, Perlstein’s overheard some dope about HRC’s heretofore private talks before bankster luncheons and other such conclaves. Loads’o Hillary bashers like to fantasize that she and the banksters plotted to take over the world, rather like James Bond movie villains, at these get-togethers.

Perlstein sez:

I just learned at second hand that one Wall Street insider has observed, “If the Clintons were crooked, they’d have a lot more money than they do. With the people they know? They’d make a killing in the market.”

There’s a certain amount of truth in this observation. When she and hubby Bill vacated the White House in Jan. 2001, the Clinton net worth, although nowhere near poverty-level, wasn’t that of the shrewd, corrupt, crooked operators both the wingnut Right and Left love to portray the couple as.

The Clintons’ recent accumulation of cash is almost solely dependent upon their speaking fees which, natch, are eye-popping. They haven’t, though, gamed or manipulated the financial system like some presidential candidates we know.

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Play Dough

Just a reminder, IU bosses and coatholders all are panting over the grand re-opening of the Assembly Hall, home of the Hoosiers basketball team. There’ll be a big-assed ribbon-cutting ceremony this afternoon and tomorrow the papers’ll carry all sorts of pix of the gleaming, dizzying hi-tech features and new construction in the now-named Simon-Skjodt Assembly Hall.

See, Cindy Simon-Skjodt is the heiress daughter of the former owner of the Indiana Pacers among other trinkets, and is married to a big deal Indy investment banker. She’s worth bazillions and so pitched $40 mill of her treasure over to the IU athletic dept. so that the b-ball hall could be refurbished and named after her.

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Millions For Defense — And Offense

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Now, considering I’m still relatively new to these parts (I got here in late 2009), the amount of cabbage spent on college sports still amazes me. Hell, the geographic footprints of the various athletic facilities here are the equivalent of several small towns.

And — I know, I know: I’m a pipe dreamer — but jeez, can’t the U. find any uber-wealthy donors to help pay decent wages to grad student teachers and lecturers, upon whom this noble institution has come to depend for the new academic form of indentured servitude?

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10/13/2016
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Big Talk Thursday

Hot Air: Prizewriter

Nobelity

When all is said and done, the ’60s turn out not to be so catastrophic after all.

Look, a ’60s anti-war activist (Bill Clinton) became a two-term president, a civil rights leader (Martin Luther King) won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Nike sold its shoes in TV ads with the Beatles’ “Revolution” in the background, a mixed-race child born in 1961 is the current two-term president, TV viewers went gaga over Mad Men, the Chicano movement began the Latino “normalization” process in this holy land, 1969’s Stonewall riots were the starting gun for the race to LGBTQ rights, the Prague Spring’s Václav Havel eventually became the leader of Czechoslovakia, and now, Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Oh, and marijuana is now legal in several states with the rest of the nation sure to follow in dribs and drabs over the next few years.

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The dying-off old Right would have us believe the 1960s brought us nothing but junkies, welfare queens, abortion clinics in every McDonald’s, and jack-booted regulators “protecting” us from silly things like exploding gas tanks and lead in our water.

The 1960s were hellish in a lot of ways. Riots. Assassinations. Nuclear brinksmanship. Mass starvations. Vietnam. George Wallace.  Sheesh, this holy land was essentially on the verge of a civil war or a race war — or both. But the decade was as heavenly as it was hellish. Bob Dylan was one of its angels.

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Betsy Talk

Tune in this afternoon to WFHB‘s Daily Local News for my interview with Betsy Stirratt, director of IU’s Grunwald Gallery of Art. She’s busy as a beetle this week, mounting the exhibit “(Re)Imagining Science,” opening tomorrow night, 6-8pm, at the Grunwald. It’s features artworks created by teams of IU research scientists and visual artists. Stirratt herself is one of the participating artists. She discusses the differences — and similarities — between scientists and artists. As always, I’ll be posting a link to WFHB’s podcast of the show as well as one for Stirratt’s Big Track, an almost-unedited, fairly full-length version of the original interview after air time.

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Ritz Bits

Longtime local Democratic Party mover and shaker Pat Murphy and Hopscotch coffeehouse are sponsoring a fundraiser for the Glenda Ritz‘s re-election campaign. Ritz, the state’s Superintendent of Schools, has gone toe to toe against outgoing IN guv Mike Pence, now chief abettor to the Republican Candidate for President, over education policy and her role in implementing same.

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She’s a shoo-in for re-election even after her quixotic run for governor earlier this year. Still, pols in this day and age of Citizens United and TV politicking need to pay for printing jobs, pizzas, pens & pencils, and other such sundries when they run or re-run for office.

So, load up a burlap bag or two full of cash — USD, s’il vous plaît — and drop in to Hopscotch, 235 W. Dodds St., Monday, Oct 24, at 7pm. Or write a check for ten bucks, either way.

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10/11/2016
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Blunder Boy

Hot Air: Kid Stuff

Gaffe Master

Another glorious, sunny Monday yesterday. What is it with Mondays around here these days?

And, yeah, another Big Talk taping day at the WFHB studios. My guest was Betsy Stirratt, director of Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery in the Fine Arts Building. The Grunwald will be the site of a cool new exhibit, (Re)Imagining Science, opening Friday.

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Betsy Stirratt

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Betsy and I jumped right into to gabbing about the exhibit — it features collaborations between research scientists and artists — and her own successful art career. Betsy knows her stuff. She’s articulate and excited about the making and showing of art.

So, we were about 25 minutes into the conversation and I’d been rapt the whole time. I wasn’t paying any attention to sound levels and such but at that late minute I decided to check the readouts on the Tascam recorder.

And…, um…, I hadn’t turned it on.

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The Tascam — With Its Readout Reading… Nothing

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Betsy was in the middle of a discourse on the distinction between realist and hyper-realist representations in visual art and her preferred more subjective approach to the making of the stuff. I could feel an embarrassed little smile coming on my face. I jumped in when she took a breath. “Uh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you’re gonna clunk me in the head.”

I explained what I’d done — or, more accurately, not done. “That,” I said, “is the dumbest-assed goofy kid mistake you can make in a recording studio. Just call me a dumb-assed kid.”

Betsy was a great sport about it. We simply started over again and came up with a still-lively, still-compelling interview. Funny thing is, I spent the remainder of the interview nervously glancing at the Tascam to make sure it was on — even though it wasn’t about to turn itself off spontaneously.

Tune in to WFHB‘s Daily Local News Thursday at 5:30pm. My Big Talk chat with Betsy Stirratt will air around 5:45. And then you can catch the entire interview on the Big Talk page on this communications colossus the next day (or whenever I get around to post-producing and posting it.)

Keep in mind you can catch my parley with the creative minds behind the play “Resilience: Indiana’s Untold Story” — Dr. Gladys DeVane, Liz Watford-Mitchell, and Danielle Bruce — who appeared on last week’s Big Talk, here.

And next week I expect to have as guests the folks behind the documentary Men in the Arena. It’s about a couple of Somali soccer stars who strive to ply their trade while civil war and its attendant human rights abuses swirl around them. The film will be shown here in Bloomington later this month.

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10/10/2016
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I do -- We Did

Hot Air: Mmmm, Good

Music Muse

My pal David Brent Johnson was at the Chicago Theater last week, watching as Brian Wilson performed the iconic album, Pet Sounds, in its entirety. Man, I’d have paid a pretty penny to be there myself. Only I’m saving my dough for the big campout I expect to be on — in Chi., natch — when (I refuse to say if) my beloved Cubs reach the World Series later this month.

Anyway, I studied comedy improv under Del Close and Charna Halpern back in the mid-’80’s at the their renowned theater/school, then called the ImprovOlympic, and now, thanks to the International Olympic Committee’s scary lawyers, simply iO. Charna points out that the liner notes in the Pet Sounds Sessions boxed set reveal, straight from Brian Wilson’s mouth, that he was inspired by Del’s How to Speak Hip.

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As such, Del “inspired two of the finest LPs of all time,” as well as “some of the most stellar artists of all time,” she asserts.

Her reasoning? Well, Pet Sounds was ranked the second-greatest album of the rock ‘n roll era by Rolling Stone magazine. And Paul McCartney has long maintained he was driven to start work on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, universally hailed as a R’nR-era landmark, after hearing Wilson and the Beach Boys’ groundbreaking 1966 opus.

Del Close’s How to Speak Hip itself became a vinyl icon when it was released back in 1959. Collaborating with John Brent, like Del a comedian but a beat poet as well, Close crafted the album as a faithful take-off on the foreign language albums that were all the rage in the ’50s. You slapped the album on your turntable and it would prompt you to speak whatever language you wanted to learn in a weird colloquy with your hi-fi.

Close and Brent did a spot-on, satiric Berlitz on learning how to speak like that most exotic of foreigners, the Hipster. This was long before the term took on its current pejorative connotation. In the ’50s a hipster was the coolest life form on the planet, encompassing the likes of Neal Cassady, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Blue Note jazz club habitués, pinkos, reefer-tokers, and other assorted hep cats. Even though it was satire, many younger listeners saw it as a guide to speaking just like the Beatniks and Beat Generation outsiders they would seek to emulate. Terms such as “put down,” “hang up,” “cool,” and “uncool”  became indispensable parts of the hippie lexicon of the 1960s, thanks in large part to Close and Brent.

Cool, huh?

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Uncool

I broke one of my own cardinal rules yesterday by surfing to NPR’s live feed of the debate between HRC and the Republican Candidate for President (RCP). BTW: I have publicly declared my intention never again to refer to that man by name, inasmuch as it sickens me to utter it. I’ve chosen the alternative as a way of hammering the GOP for allowing the likes of him to become its standard-bearer; the bastards have planted the poison ivy, now let them suffer through the unbearable scratching.

Normally I shy away from televised debates mainly because we all know what each candidates thinks, likes, espouses, and prefers to mislead about. As I’ve stated previously in these precincts, these aren’t the days of Lincoln-Douglas anymore, days when there weren’t TVs and the majority of the pop. couldn’t even read, so traveling debates were necessary for the candidates to get their evasions and deceptions across.

I figured this second tête à tête might be a rollick, considering RCP’s recent pussy-grabbing, sexually assaultive brags on an open mic. Would HRC hammer him to death on it? Did she even need to? In any case, I wanted to see how he’d double-down on his mouth ejaculations. I could envision him snapping and saying, “Hey, I’m a rich man, I have every right to grope strangers’ pussies!”

HRC, wisely IMO, played it cool on the pussy front. She must have figured public opinion was a heavy enough sledge to shatter his empty skull so she, by and large, stuck to talking about the issues. The (hope for it, pray for it) next POTUS sounded…, well, presidential.

The RC for P sounded…, well, learning disabled. The man cannot put a cogent sentence together. Among his pearls were the following:

The education is a disaster.

I will be the president that brings… economics to the people

Because you’d be in jail.

We have a divided nation because people like her, and believe me, she has tremendous hate in her heart.

A Kazakhstani, on her or his first night in an ESL course, would be more articulate and decipherable than that. Bizarrely, a number of wits and wags — not necessarily partisan hacks, either — declared him the winner of the debate. This is what it comes to: As long as he refrained from grabbing HRC’s pussy onstage or whipping out his junk at her, he’s seen as somehow in control and not as much the psychopath we know him to be.

If the electorate of this holy land sends him home with his tail between his legs on Nov. 8th we’ll have only slightly redeemed ourselves from the ignominy of having him be a major party candidate in the first place.

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Just Because

On Oct. 10, 2008, The Loved One and I became legal partners, marrying each other across the street from the County Courthouse in Louisville, Kentucky on a glorious, sunny, warm fall day. The Jefferson County Correctional Center chaplain performed the brief ceremony and two ex-cons whom he flagged down as they passed on the sidewalk across the street served as our witnesses.

We dined on a sumptuous luncheon at the elegant and regal Fazoli’s on South Hurstbourne Parkway and then set off for romantic Columbus, Ohio, where we spent our honeymoon evening at that city’s famed Big-Assed Party, a gathering of advertising filmmakers and post-production geeks. We even have a souvenir mug from a Columbus Starbucks to remind us of that starry, starry night.

Anyway, we’ve made it this far and TLO has yet to strangle me, a testament to her iron will.

Some observations:

Marriage is a great institution.

— Elizabeth Taylor

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… But who wants to live in an institution?

— Groucho Marx

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To keep your marriage brimming

With love in the loving cup

Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;

Whenever you’re right, shut up

— Ogden Nash

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By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

— Socrates

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Marriage is a wonderful invention. Then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.

— Billy Connolly

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I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

— Rita Rudner

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10/07/2016
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Stuff & Nonsense

Hot Air: Flotsam & Jetsam

Intake & Output

I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, as always. None of them vital, all of them pressing.

  1. Let’s all get together and apply pressure on Linda Oblack to take her “Goings on at My Place” and her “Today on My Morning Walk…” bits and put them where they belong — on their own interwebs address, something like this one. If you think The Pencil is a global communications colossus, wait’ll you see the following that dame is gonna have when she goes full-out blog with her brilliant, insightful, whimsical, and indispensable daily observations. Lemme put it frankly: If you don’t love Linda Oblack you’re incapable of feeling the emotion.
  2. I’ve just discovered the coolest science show on television. Called Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey, it’s a BBC2 production, now on Netflix, and it’s revolutionary. Why? ‘Cause it’s hosted by two women, the physicist Dr. Helen Czerski and wildlife/science geek Kate Humble. The latter also describes herself as a “naturist,” (I’ll explain in a bit * ). Anyway, the two talk about the very simple — yet amazingly complex in its implications and effects — orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Our climate, our animal populations and migrations, even our civilizations are profoundly effected by the vagaries of our little world’s yearly trip around our star. And the best thing about the programme (oh, those Brits!) is, it’s two women doing the talking, location shooting, experimentation, et cetera. Huzzah for females in the hard sciences! May there be scads more as we inch further into the 21st Century.
  3. Both The Loved One and I have sisters weathering the big blow in Florida this weekend. I spoke with my sis, Charlotte, last night. She had a houseful — two of her kids, a grandkid, and all their respective mates — were hunkering down in her Boca Raton crib, which C. described as dark as a tomb thanks to the storm shutters blocking all outside light. I spoke w/ her at about 6pm; she said the storm was due to hit at about 8:40. Now I won’t hear from her until her power goes back on sometime in the future. TLO’s sis Deanna and her squeeze are battening down the hatches just outside Cape Canaveral, which is getting slammed this AM as I type. If the worst that happens is they lose some tiles from their roofs, we’ll all be lucky. BTW: Czerski & Humble’s Orbit has a lot of dope on how our elliptical path through space actually makes hurricanes happen, thanks to the Coriolis Effect.
  4. The Loved One and I enjoyed a delicious Lou Malnati’s pizza — cheese and sausage, of course — yesterday eve, thanks to the modern wonders of air-freight delivery and the home freezer. Loyal Pencillista, The Lake County Republican, AKA David Paglis, sent us a couple of LM pies via UPS back when I was starting chemoradiation therapy in February. TLO dug the bejesus out of the deep-dish and I was not nauseated — a great step forward considering the very idea of tomato sauce and cheese hitting my cisplatin-damaged maw actually made me want to retch a mere few months ago. Yay for me. And thanks, you old GOP-er.
  5. My beloved Cubs begin their march toward destiny this PM as they welcome the San Francisco Giants to heaven on Earth — Wrigley Field — for Game One of the 2016 National League Division Series. TLO & I will be staking out a front row bar seat at Nick’s English Hut for the 9pm (8 CDT) first pitch. Sorry, Teresa Swift et al, but you Bay denizens had better keep a big supply of Kleenex™ on hand for all the weeping y’all are gonna be doing over the next week.
  6. * “Naturist” is a more continental appellation for nudist. The term, though, implies far more than the shedding of clothes. Humble, a proud naturist, said in a Daily Telegraph article (no link, sorry), that walking around her English countryside farm bare as the day she was born is the perfect way to “get close to nature.” She adds, “Everyone should try it.” The comments under the Telegraph piece were evenly split between men and woman; the dudes, natch, made all manner of cracks about how she was more than welcome to traipse around their backyards any time she wished and the females tended toward self-deprecation, as in this example: “No thanks, as a community service I will keep my clothes on — mainly to avoid people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress from the shock!”

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Pluggin’

Check out Betsy Stirratt‘s “Space and Volume” exhibit at Nashville (IN)’s Red Arrow Gallery. The opening reception is tomorrow night from 6-9pm.

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Abject II

Oil on Panel
2014, Betsy Stirratt

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Betsy will join me in the WFHB studios Monday afternoon for the taping of next week’s Big Talk feature on the Daily Local News.

And speaking of Big Talk, here’s the link to yesterday’s show, with my guests playwrights Dr. Gladys DeVane and Liz Watford-Mitchell and director Danielle Bruce. The three will stage the historical, multi-media presentation, “Resilience: Indiana’s Untold Story,” a pastiche of recollections of the black experience in the Hoosier State. The play runs Oct. 14-16 at the John Waldron Arts Center. Get your ducats at the Buskirk-Chumley Box Office — just don’t go to the BCT the night of the show, savvy?

Big Talk Logo Usable Screen Shot

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Publish Or Perish

Set the alarm for 7am tomorrow. Otherwise you might miss my pal Shayne Laughter‘s big piece on WFIU’s Café Indiana program. Café honcho Yael Ksander is giving the entire half-hour cultural arts show over to Laughter who looks at the scary world of book publishing from the author’s POV.

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Laughter

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Laughter herself wrote Yu: A Ross Lamos Mystery.

 

Shayne’ll delve into both the traditional and self-publishing routes with a special glance at Bloomington’s own AuthorHouse (now owned by Penguin Random House), a noted pay-for-play outfit. Her guests will include the scribes Annette Oppenlander, Claire Arbogast, Kalynn Huffman Brower, and Terry Pinaud.

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