Walleye Afterglow

Quite a weekend, but mostly a good one.

My mother is STILL in the hospital in Toledo. The doctors have been trying to stabilize her blood sugar levels. They won't release her until they do that. So, Julie and I visited her on the way to Port Clinton and on the way back. Hospitals are very depressing places. The lighting is horrible, the rooms are cramped, the food is awful and there are all those lovely smells. It's amazing anyone gets well. The good news is that my mom is looking pretty good. She's hooked up to a heart monitor and we noticed on the way back that her heart was stronger and steadier.

On Saturday, we picked up my brother and went to THE WALLEYE FESTIVAL! I was actually looking forward to this. It's a piece of small town America and something my hometown is very proud of. There were rides and lots of booths for food and arts and crafts.

Here's my suggestion for Port Clinton's next Walleye Festival... um, more walleye.

You would expect a festival for walleye would be overflowing in walleye. Nope. There was only one food stand out of maybe fifty food stands that served walleye, fried, on a bun. That's it. Perch, walleye's nemesis in the Lake Erie fresh water fish popularity contest was more available. And there wasn't much representation of the walleye around the festival itself. Except for a sign or two, you wouldn't know what the hub-bub was about. My girlfriend Julie was disappointed there wasn't some kind of walleye tossing contest. I would have been happy just seeing a guy walking around in a walleye outfit. Julie had never tasted walleye or perch and got to sample both. Perch won.

Walleye...

Perch...


On Sunday, we drove around the area where my brother lives, which is east of Port Clinton, in Marblehead. We drove to an old cemetery we used to go to in high school. It juts out into the quarry there and there used to be an urban legend of a witch that would jump out from behind a headstone if you flashed your headlights at it. We never saw a witch there. Just drank a lot of beer. We also took pictures in front of Prehistoric Forest, which had cavemen living with dinosaurs way before creationists or The Flintstones. We stopped by Just for Ewe, an arts and crafts shop my sister used to do a lot of work for. She still had a few stained glass pieces there. She does lots of different things, but I think her stained glass work is her best.

The most interesting thing we did is visit Johnson Island. During the Civil War, it was a pow camp for confederate soldiers. Many of them died there. The Masons were conducting a Memorial Day service specifically for them. The guy in the top hat and apron said that these were soldiers who were Americans and they were fighting for freedom. Their freedom, any way. I wonder if there were any Memorial Services in the South for any of the boys from the North.

On Sunday night, we visited Julie's parents and hit them up for dinner at their restaurant. Monday, they bought us lunch at a sushi restaurant. Parents are good things.

Saturday Morning Cartoons!

I'm off to Ohio today to spend time with my mother and older brother. And, of course, to enjoy the Walleye Festival. I envision a nightmare Body Snatchers- type scenario where I will be watching the Walleye Queen crowned and someone will point and screech "vegan!" at me.

Julie and I will stop in Michigan City on the way back to have sushi with her parents and grandmother. I'm not sure what this has to do with Memorial Day, unless it's to honor the fallen Japanese soldiers. You know, just to be nice.

Bite and Smile will return on Tuesday!

Until then, here's the Saturday Morning Cartoon!!!

I remember watching cartoons when guys like Barnaby and Captain Penny hosted local kids shows. Oh, sure, in retrospect they look like top-of-the-line child molesters. When I was pre-school, they were the coolest guys around. And no one knew pre-school hip like me. They were both out of Cleveland, so, I only got to watch them when the weather gods and the TV antennae all got along. These shows would often feature cartoons from the 1940's.

Here's one of my favorites...

Thigh Day

Last night's Robowriter's meeting was a lot of fun. The 8pm - 10pm group had the assignment to write a brand new ten page scene. Now, if you're primary experience is sketch writing, you're used to writing in 3-5 page increments. Trying to write a ten page scene can make your internal editor scream quite loudly and make your heart panic a little. Only three of the seven writers were able to accomplish this. Nat Topping wrote his in two hours the afternoon of the meeting! In the 6pm-8pm group, Scott Levy had similarly written a scene hours before the meeting based on one of the assignments from two weeks ago. It's the assignment I used last week to write my scene in forty-five minutes, also on the day of the meeting.

The interesting thing is, all three of those scenes were actually pretty good. All three need tweaking, but not a lot. There's a lot to be said for just sitting your ass down and writing. Especially under the pressure of a deadline. All three of us had the experience of not having much more than a sliver of an idea and all three of us were surprised by the results. I think it might come from trusting oneself. Or at least trusting that something good will come of it, even if it doesn't work on the whole.

NEXT WEEK'S ROBOWRITERS ASSIGNMENT: Develop a character based on a family member you may not know very well, living or dead - like an uncle or an aunt or a cousin. Write a scene where this character encounters something unusual.

MOM UPDATE: As of writing this, she is supposed to be released from St. Vincent's in Toledo and back at Edgewood Manor in Port Clinton by this afternoon. Julie, my girlfriend, and I are going to drive to Ohio this weekend to visit. Just our luck, it's also the weekend of The Walleye Festival!Yippeeeeeee!

TREAT: Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry are two very brilliant guys in their own right. I was surprised to find out not too long ago that they used to perform comedy together. Hugh Luarie did an outstanding job hosting SNL, so I sought them out. Their stuff's a little too clever for its own good, but still a lot of fun. Hugh Laurie's songs are hysterical. This sketch is a bit old-fashioned and punerific, but pretty darn funny.

Cowards and Jackasses

Today we have a guest blogger... W. E. B. Du Bois (pronounced boys), one of the drafters of The Harlem Renaissance.

In 1919, W.E.B. wrote an essay for The Crisis magazine on drafted soldiers of African-American descent returning from helping liberate France from Germany and fighting for freedom in the name of the U.S.A. They were proud to serve and proud of a job well done. In spite of the deep irony of fighting for someone else's freedom and returning to a land of lynching and oppression.

Beyond color, I thought Mr. Du Bois had some interesting things to say about a country that "despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land."

It disfranchises its own citizens.

Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white. The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies.

It encourages ignorance.

It has never really tried to educate the Negro. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated. It wants servants, dogs, whores and monkeys. And when this land allows a reactionary group by its stolen political power to force as many black folk into these categories as it possibly can, it cries in contemptible hypocrisy: "They threaten us with degeneracy; they cannot be educated."

It steals from us.

It organizes industry to cheat us. It cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of our labor. It confiscates our savings. It reduces our wages. It raises our rent. It steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty.

It insults us.

It has organized a nation-wide and latterly a world-wide propaganda of deliberate and continuous insult and defamation of black blood wherever found. It decrees that it shall not be possible in travel nor residence, work nor play, education nor instruction for a black man to exist without tacit or open acknowledgment of his inferiority to the dirtiest white dog. And it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason.

A little shocking, isn't it? This was written almost ninety years ago. Even if the color issues don't seem to apply at the same level, the class distinctions sure seem to. The rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer. W. E. B. doesn't leave it at that, though. He also offers a solution.

But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting.

Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

So, the solution is us. We are the change we need to return our country - today in 2007 - to a true democracy.

You can read the full essay HERE.

ROBOWRITERS TONIGHT! Starts at 6pm, goes til 8pm, at Uptown Writer's Space. Bring a sketch you're working on.

What the F---?

As an artist, I believe it's my responsibility to be up on what's going on in the world. A part of being an artist is having your antennae up. An artist is a reporter of sorts, reflecting back what one sees in the world. And, as the saying goes, if you're not pissed off, you're not paying attention...

Bush's new strategy in Iraq, which the White House and toady republicans all hailed as such - the NEW plan - is to send more troops to Iraq. Fortunately, we elected a majority of democrats into congress last round of national elections to turn this Titanic in a bath tub around. The democrats have been standing tough.

Their new strategy for ending the war?

Give Bush what he wants.

Give him more money to spend and more bodies to send home in caskets. Um...what the f---?

Granted, they are sneaking in some pet projects of theirs - stuff that deserves funding and legislation, and shouldn't have to be buried in a seperate bill - more aid to Katrina, more money and care for war veterans, a hike in the minimum wage....but you're still giving the president money to fund his hellbent war in Iraq that's generated more terrorism than it has curbed.

Remember when The War on Terror was about eradicating the Taliban in Afghanistan and finding Bin Ladin and bringing him to justice? Pardon me for waxing nostalgic, but those were two very good ideas directly linked to 9/11 that were put on the back burner so Bush, Jr could manipulate suspect intelligence to show his daddy how it's supposed to be done in Iraq. That, by the way, is the opinion I held BEFORE the war. I'm just some schmuck in Chicago and even I thought the intelligence the Bush administration was using to justify war wasn't good enough. I had hope the democrats would be able to stop funding the madness and get us the hell out of there. Some people say that stopping funding doesn't support our troops. I believe it does if it gets them out of there and uses them to a better purpose, like in Afghanistan, which has been falling apart since our focus has been on the monetary and human blood-letting that is Iraq.

Agreement Near on Iraq Funding Bill

By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON - Flinching in the face of a veto threat, Democratic congressional leaders neared agreement with the Bush administration Tuesday on legislation to pay for the Iraq war without setting atimeline for troop withdrawal.

Several officials said the emerging compromise bill would cost about $120 billion, including as much as $8 billion for Democratic domestic priorities _ originally resisted by the White House _ such as disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina victims and farmers hurt by drought.

Reid and other Democrats pointed to a provision that would set standards for the Iraqi government in developing a more democratic society. U.S. reconstruction aid would be conditioned on progress toward meeting the goals, but Bush would have authority to order the money to be spent regardless of how the government in Baghdad performed. (!) (That's my "!" by the way - Joe)

Republicans said that after weeks of struggle, they had forced Democrats to give up their demand for a date to withdraw the troops.

Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, added, "Democrats have finally conceded defeat in their effort to include mandatory surrender dates in a funding bill for the troops, so forward progress has been made for the first time in this four-month process."

You can read the full article by clicking HERE.

Harlem in the 1920's

Harlem: 1920's Black Art & Literature

This is one of the classes I'm taking at Columbia this summer. It is taught by Marya Patrice Smith. I thought this would be a fun class. The Cotton Club, zoot suits, Duke Ellington, etc. This will be a blast. I love the time period, I love the music, I love black people. Let's party!

Once, again, I was in for a wake-up call. Marya (pronounced like Mariah) loves to teach. She's not your standard lecture and regurgitate kind of instructor. Hers' is experiential. She expects us to engage and participate in the course. She expects us to wake up to what The Harlem Renaissance was really about. She inspires me to use italics, a lot.

I left the first class stunned and glad I enrolled.

Here's a few nuggets I learned...

- The Harlem Renaissance was not an art movement. It was a consciously generated social movement. A social movement created by people tired of living in fear at the mercy of people who didn't see them as anything more than animals. Their goal in creating the movement was to be seen for their humanity. Their tool was art. Their target was white America. So, was it art or propaganda?

- From 1897 - 1907, there were 3,000 documented lynchings of black men, women and children. In 1919, during what became known as Red Summer, 643 lynchings occurred. Again, well-documented, with little or no repercussion to the perpetrators. These lynchings were well documented, because people took pictures. There are plenty of group photos that look like fishermen proudly standing next to their catch of the day.

- Most of the lynchings occurred in the north. In 1919, Red Summer began in Chicago because a black child went for a swim in Lake Michigan off the wrong part of the beach.

- The Cotton Club modeled itself after southern plantations. The servers were dressed like slaves. All the help and the entertainers were black. All the clientele were white. Blacks were not allowed in The Cotton Club unless they were hired to be there. And even then, only light-skin blacks. Louis Armstrong was not allowed to play there. Near the end of The Cotton Club's hey day, blacks were allowed in. They had to pay more than whites for entrance and had to sit in a segregated area.

It's funny how nostalgia works in this country. I find myself nostalgic for time periods I didn't even live in. I thought it would be fun to live in the 1920's. We remember only the good times or, at least, what we were told were the good times. This class is all about context.

And I feel like it's going to be like my Contemporary European Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict class where it's going to bum me out a lot on the road to being enlightened.

Congratulations to my good friends Pete Ficht and Paul Custodio who have put together a site called The Graffiti Table. I wish they were my teachers. Sometimes I think I'd much rather be studying about female streakers, pot brownie etiquette and running quality diagnostics on aging bands.

The Danger of Experience

I have a very odd schedule. I almost never have a clear, consistent "x" amount of days off. When The Second City Training Center is between terms, I'm teaching at Columbia College. When Columbia is on break, I'm at Second City. Last week was the unusual harmonic alignment of both Second City and Columbia being on break for one week both at the same time. And I still ended up at Second City on four of those days. Not complaining, though. I love what I do. I have two Writing 5 shows opening next Friday, so I had extra rehearsals with them. And I picked up teaching an Adult Weekend Workshop. This is where a group of grown-ups come in to Second City, usually from out of town, and take improv classes in the morning and writing classes in the afternoon.

I love teaching these, especially when the improv teacher is someone of strong caliber. This time, it was Bina Martin, who's an excellent teacher. Without intentionally sitting down and working it out, both our curricula dove-tailed nicely into one another. I was able to build on whatever she did in the morning and she was able to continue the work the next day. Improv and sketch writing have a lot in common. The elements that make an improvised scene work will also make a written scene work.

While I love teaching these workshops, there's an element of trusting everything will work out that's required by me and the students. Most the students come in with high expectations that a brief weekend just won't fulfill. I usually tell the students that I'll be covering a lot of ground over the three two-and-a-half hours that we're together and if one-fourth of it sticks, we did a good a job. The workshop is essentially Second City's eight-week Intro to Comedy Writing smashed into seven-and-a-half hours.

I have noticed that the majority of these workshops tend to be populated by two types of students: writers experienced in another medium and members of a comedy group from another state. This time, there were five older ladies who were experienced authors, mostly romance novels and children's books. Another three or four students were from a Baltimore/D.C. group called The Comedy Pigs.

Here's the danger of working with students from either category...

- They've had enough success through bad habits that it's hard for them to be open to trying a new way.

- They're so preoccupied in showing me that they're just not some other student, but someone who doesn't really need the class, that they miss a lot of the value available. Instead of learning, they're looking for validation for what they already do and know.

- They talk too much. They spend a lot of time relating their own experience or giving wizened feedback to their classmates. They forget they came to be a student.

These are extreme examples and while this past weekend had some flavoring of this, it was really a great group to teach. The folks from Pigs were especially eager to learn and absorb as much as they could from being in Chicago and at Second City. But there was one woman who on the first day was resistant to what was happening in the workshop. She never said it directly. She expressed this through loud sighs, not writing during the writing exercises and whispering to her friend when the focus should have been elsewhere. Bina had similar issues with her non-participation participation. Not surprisingly, she also seemed to be the most experienced writer in the group. I believe she's had seventeen books published. To her credit, she got better each day. And by that I mean, quieter and actually did most of the work we did in class. Again, not surprisingly, her writing assignment on the third day was among the weakest in the class, which were generally pretty good.

This isn't a story about me reaching out to her and connecting and turning her around. I don't have the time and, quite frankly, I'm not interested. If someone already has their brain locked into being miserable, there's not much I can do or care to do, especially in a brief workshop. Had this been a full-term class, I might have had a conversation with her, but she likely would have dropped out after the first class. I'd rather focus on the students who are hungry to learn and fold this experience back into whatever their goals are as a writer. Unlike our president, I believe there is such a thing as a lost cause.

If you're going to take a class, especially as an adult, be a good student. I enjoy taking classes. I enjoy learning and growing (I start two new classes at Columbia this week - Harlem in the 1920's and French I). It expands my abilities not only as an artist, but as a human being. I'm a good student. I'm attentive, I'm curious and I'll give it a try. I empower my teachers. And here's something I know, things almost always go the way you think they will. If you think you're not going to get value out of a class you're in, you're probably right. It's up to you to take responsibility for your own experience.