March 4, 2011

Ticking Off Celebrities

Although I never actually got to speak to any celebrities while I was on Clooney Watch last week, writing about it last night got me thinking about some of the other famous people I’ve interviewed through the years as an arts journalist. Some have gone better than others, and I didn’t get off to a very good start in the celebrity world.

Dick Clark

In 1994 when I first took over the arts and entertainment desk, Dick Clark came to Cincinnati on a promotional tour for the restaurants that bore his name. A publicist called me to offer me an interview, so of course I took it. I’ve never been a particularly big fan, but we all knew “American Bandstand”, and being new on the beat I wasn’t yet jaded and cynical about celebrity.

Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill was located in the Montgomery Road and Kenwood area, along the lines of Hard Rock Cafe with overpriced bar food and tons of rock‘n’roll memorabilia on the walls. Jim Denny and I went down there together.

Dick Clark was in his mid-60s at the time, and up-close the World’s Oldest Teenager looked his age. I had a cassette recorder with me, and he told me it was OK to record our interview as long as it was for my own reference and not for broadcast, which was not a problem because I worked for a newspaper. He said he would pose for pictures later, but didn’t want us to take pictures during the interview. So Jim went to scout out a good place for a photo and discreetly took pictures from a distance.

Although he clearly wanted to be in control, he was gracious enough during the interview, answered my questions and told a few stories, and when we were done, I summoned Jim, who said we should go to the next room where there was a wall totally covered with gold records and posters. Jim had walked all the way through the restaurant, but there was a pair of bi-fold louvred doors that led directly to the room. There weren’t any handles on the doors on our side, so Dick Clark tried to open them by sticking his fingers in the crack between them. Having just hung doors just like it in our house in Millville, however, I knew an easy way to open them.

“Here, Dick, like this,” I said, and gave a little push to the secret spot. The doors spread open, but not without pinching Dick Clark’s middle finger, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to make him exclaim, “Shit,” and shake his hand like he was trying to dry it off.

He didn’t stay pissed, but I think it kept us from going any deeper with our relationship.

Jim took his picture and when we got back to the shop, we compared the candid shots with the posed ones, and indeed he looked 20 years younger in the latter. The camera loved the man. Jim said it was in his facial muscles.

Lily Tomlin

I’ve interviewed Lily Tomlin twice by telephone, and I mad her a little mad at me, too, the first time.

She called me from her cell phone from an airport somewhere while she was waiting to board. We talked a good 30 minutes, one of those deals where I only had to ask one question and then take notes while she talked.

Which is fine. I don’t have to think too much that way until it comes time to write. After a half an hour of her giving me her life story, her flight was called, and she offered to call me back when she landed so we could talk more about the one-woman show she was touring and the reason for our interview. “Oh, I think I’ve got enough here.”

“Oh, I thought this was going to be a feature story,” she said.

“Well, it is,” I said, “but I don’t have a whole lot of space, and I can get the rest from your press bio.”

“OKthenbye,” she said and hung up.

The next time we talked, about 10 or 12 years later, we went through it all again, nearly an hour interview for a 10 inch story.

Louden Wainwright III

Working for a smallish newspaper, there were three types of celebrities willing to give me interviews, those on their way up, those on their way down, and the mid-tier famous, those who are well known in their field or specialty, but not quite household names. 

I would put Louden Wainwright III in the middle category. He’s had a dozen albums since “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road,” but nothing that trumped that big hit. So I’m guessing that was a sore spot for him, judging by the way he acted in 2006 when I asked him about what it was like to carry the fame for a novelty song when he wrote a lot more serious and better stuff than that.

He went off on me a little, saying that he didn’t want to talk about that, but about his new record. His venom took me by surprise, so I tried to recover by tossing him a softball question about something, maybe how he met the producer or why he wanted to work with that producer. He went off on me again, saying that was all covered in his press bio and didn’t I have any real questions to ask.

It was early in the morning, and I hadn’t had any caffeine yet. Whatever. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood to be bullied.

“Nope, I guess I don’t,” I said, and hung up the phone.

Hal Holbrook

I also interviewed Hal Holbrook a couple of times as he was bringing his Mark Twain show through. It was the second interview in which I got on his nerves, but I handled it a lot better.

He also gave me the “that’s all in the bio” response when I asked him how he got started doing Mark Twain, but he went ahead and told me the story anyway, taking about 20 minutes, talking about him and his first wife touring the West doing a program about great writers, living and working out of the back of their car doing two shows a day and so on.

When he was done, I said, “You see, Mr. Holbrook, in your bio, all that is covered in three sentences, but you gave me a real story.”

He chuckled at me, said, “I see what you mean,” and then we had a great chat for about another hour. He even gave me a 10-minute recitation of some of the material. 

David Crosby

I interviewed David Crosby at a strange point in his life. He had just been outed as the sperm donor for Melissa Etheridge’s child and he was just going out on the road in a band called CPR with a 30-year-old son he didn’t know he had until the son was an adult.

We had a time scheduled, which I think was about 1 p.m. He was going to call me from Los Angeles (10 a.m.) I waited by the phone and worked until I had to leave for a 3 p.m. interview, so I called the publicist before I left and told her what was up.

When I got back, I had this message on my phone: “Um, hello Richard, this is David Crosby. I’m really sorry, man, but I fell asleep. If you want to reschedule, call the publicist and we’ll try again. Sorry again, man. Talk to you later.”

Tony Randall

I’ve always gotten a kick out of Tony Randall in all those comedies from the ‘50s and ‘60s and from “The Odd Couple,” so I was eager to be able to sit down with him when he came to Oxford to do a master class with students in the theater program. He was also going to give a lecture in Hall Auditorium.

He was nice enough, a very polite man as you might expect, but the funny part story about interviewing him happened several years later. Barb came up to Oxford for a conert or something Hall Auditorium, and as we were walking in the lobby, I said, “There’s the room where I interviewed Tony Randall.”

And Barb said, “Oh, really? Before he died?”

Other notables

I wish I’d kept a running list of famous and semi-famous people I’ve interviewed through the years. It’s one of the first questions I get asked when I do career day talks at schools, right after “How much money do you make?”

Off the top of my head: Kasey Chambers, Sally Struthers, Brenda Vaccaro, George “Goober” Lindsay, Jane Goodall, Ravi Shankar, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Moby, Weird Al Yankovich, Jeff Daniels, George Wendt, Stacy Keach, Dale Chihuly, Ruby Dee, Guy Davis, Sandy Duncan, Bill Irwin, Michael Feinstein, Paul Zaloom, Jeff Dunham, Bill Engvall, Ralphie May, Craig Fuller, Brett Michaeals, Bobcat Goldthwait, Stacey Earle, Abigail Washurn, Roger McGuinn, Jonathan Edwards, Emmylou Harris, Paul Rogers, Robin Trower, and Edward Albee, twice. (I’ll add to this list as I remember others)

There are also a few local musicians who have made a name for themselves: Del Gray and Brady Seals, founding members of the band Little Texas, and Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers. Oddly enough, when my family lived on Hardell Drive, the Seals family lived next door and I can remember when Brady was born. Greg Dulli lived in Sharon Park, the neighborhood I lived in as a teenager. He was a couple of years younger than me, but my brother knew him. The first time I interviewed him, we met at the neighborhood hangout, the Columbia Bowling Lanes and bowled a couple of lines after.

The second Dulli interview was on the phone. I had a 2 p.m. appointment scheduled with him and we had the most bizarre interview I’ve ever done. When we were finished, I quickly wrote it all down in Q&A format even though I knew I would have to re-write it to be suitable for a newspaper.

But only two things got cut.  The first: We were talking about his first band at Ross High School, Helen Highwater, whose leader was Mike Estes, a local musician who became a good friend. Dulli said of Mike: “I’ll tell you something about Mike Estes. One time we were playing basketball and his shorts slid over to one side and he has the biggest cock of any white man I’ve ever seen. I was like, ‘Congratulations, dude.’” The other was when he told me that he dosed a guy with acid in high school.

I printed up the raw interview and passed it around the newsroom. Much to my surprise, Lisa Warren said, “Cut the part about Mike Estes’ cock and dosing the guy and you can run it like it is.”

I actually won an award for that story from the Society of Professional Journalists.

It bears repeating.....

Dude, Where’s Greg Dulli’s Car?

April 1, 2004

It's 2 p.m., a beautiful sunny afternoon in California -- “Malibu, maybe” -- and Greg Dulli can’t find his car.

Dulli, a 1983 graduate of Ross High School, first hit the national rock spotlight with the band Afghan Whigs.

Since the break-up of the Whigs in 1997, Dulli has been performing with a revolving cadre of musicians he has dubbed the Twilight Singers, which will be performing Saturday at the Southgate House in Newport, Ky., in support of his latest album, “Blackberry Belle.”

"I went to a party last night,” he said. “Now my car is gone."

Are you sure you drove there?

Yeah, but I don't know where it is. Where I am. They were all very nice, though. How's the weather in Hamilton?

It's a beautiful day. I wish I were outside looking for my car.

This sucks.

When you going back on the road?

The 27th. In Orlando.

What’s the band like? Who you got going out?

It's the same band as before. We played there once already.

I know. You blew off the interview we had scheduled to preview that show.

We’ve played like 60 shows already. We’re a very seasoned unit. Where is my (expletive) car?

So what do you want to talk about?

That’s a pretty vague question, Richard.

Yes, it is. I’d rather talk about something other than you losing your car.

(Expletive). I don’t know where I parked it. Well, look, if this is just another bump in the road in your day, if you don't have some deep, probing, insightful questions to ask, my advice to you would be to just make up a story, attribute whatever quotes to me you want. You can make me look like a superstar or a clown or a demon or a philosopher or whatever you want. Today my benevolence is at a high and I want to help.

Well, the fact of the matter is that it’s 5 p.m. here, I’m on deadline with two stories to write, a copy editor waiting for me to get those finished, we had this interview scheduled, you’ve lost your car, and I’m not particularly impressed by the mundane trials and tribulations of a rock star.

If this is just a bump in your day, I free you up to express yourself in whatever way you want. Write your existentialist epic. Be Sartre. I’ve got to figure out where my car is. (Expletive)! I don’t even know where I am. It looks like Malibu.

So tell me what happened at the party last night.

I had a pretty good time. I think. You know how I can tell? I’ve got somebody else’s shoes on -- and they fit! And they’re way cooler than the shoes I had on.

Is this what it's like to be a big rock star?

Well, I'm a bit more multi-dimensional than this. You just got me at a weird time. If it were a Sunday afternoon, you might have caught me coming out of church.

I'm sure that happens on a regular basis.

No (expletive). I used to be an altar boy at St. Fredrick or St. Stephen or whatever it was. It has a girl's name now.

St. Julie Billiart?

Yeah, that's the one. My mom took me there every Sunday. I grew up going to church. I was an altar boy. Are you going to come to the show?

I might, if I don't have anything else to do.

Don’t you like to rock? I’ll change your life, Richard.

My life has had enough changes, Greg. And I like to rock as much as the next guy, but –

What was the last record you bought, Richard?

I don’t know. I don’t buy that many records. I get enough here at work to keep me busy. The last one I actually bought -- when I buy records it’s usually old stuff -- is the “Let It Be - Naked” record.

What a (expletive) rip-off that is. Phil Spetor -- he’s about to become a convicted murderer out here, you know -- was (expletive) genius. I’m getting really sick of Paul McCartney lately, wanting to change the credits around on all the songs and everything. He's been getting on my nerves. He's becoming what they call “a tosser.”

Hey, have you seen a black Jetta with tinted windows? … A Jetta … The windows are all tinted black … A Dr. Dre-ish kind of thing, if Dr. Dre would drive a Jetta… I'm not sure.

Who are you talking to?

I don’t know. She might be a crack head. Are you a crack head?… No, but you look like you might be a crack head… No. I like reefer.

I'm just trying to find my (expletive) car. I don't know where it is. These shoes are the bomb though. So are you from Hamilton, Richard?

Born and raised. We actually grew up in the same neighborhood.

No (expletive)? Hold on. Hold on… Hello?

Hello?

(Expletive). Hold on.

(There's A long silence while he takes call waiting.)

Hello?

Yeah?

I’ve got Millville on the other line. Hold on. Hello?

It's me.

(Expletive Deleted). Hold on … Hello?

Still me.

(Expletive Deleted). I lost him. That was Tim Huxel.

I knew some Huxels.

Well, he lives in Phoenix now. Did you go to Hamilton High School?

No, I went to Ross, like you. We grew up in the same neighborhood. I'm a (Sharon) Park boy, too.

No (expletive). How far behind me were you?

I'm ahead of you. I was the class of ‘77.

So you went to school with Paul Roberts and those dudes?

Yeah, I know Paul. We were in the same class.

So you know Hochi and all those guys, too.

I didn't know Hochi very well, but I know who he is. So tell me about growing up in Sharon Park. What was your first band?

My first band was called Helen Highwater. It was run by a guy named — 

Mike Estes. I know Mike pretty well.

He went on to be in Lynyrd Skynyrd for a while. He sat next to me in biology and gave me 20 bucks one time to eat a squid that was in formaldehyde. I took his (expletive) money and puked the next period without telling anyone. He's A NASCAR man now.

Yeah. He had a band called Drivin’ Sideways or something like that. So what happened with you and Helen Highwater? Couldn’t learn all the Skynyrd riffs?

We were a rock cover band and Mike wanted to turn it into Lynyrd Skynyrd. We had a gig at a battle of the bands thing and we had a long break so were out checking out the other bands. Mike saw a guy in one of the other bands that looked like Ronnie Van Zant and started talking to him. So he kicked me out of the band because I didn't look enough like Ronnie Van Zant. That was OK. He wanted to be in Lynyrd Skynyrd and I wanted to be in the Rolling Stones.  [This part cut from the published story: Let me tell you something about Mike Estes. He's got the biggest cock I've ever seen on a white man. We were playing basketball one day and his shorts moved over to the side and I was like, "Congratulations, dude."]

When was the last time you talked to him?

Like 20 years or something.

Oh. It sounded like you keep up.

Nah. I just hear (expletive) about him. I wish him well. He's a talented guy and a funny guy. Living well is the best revenge.

When did you leave Hamilton?

I left to go to college when I was 17 and never looked back.

Where did you go to college?

University of Cincinnati.

What did you study?

Gynecology.

Seriously.

Film studies.

Is that when you hooked up with the guys in the Afghan Whigs?

No. I’ve lived all over the (expletive) country. My life has been so weird. Not as weird as it is right now. If I don't find my car soon, I'm going to have to steal one. Hochi taught me how to hotwire a car. I can hot wire any car in the lot. I haven't picked one out yet, but I can guarantee you it’s going to be a convertible. So where do you live now, Richard? What part of town?

I live in Millville, near the Queen of Peace school.

I know where that is.

I’ve got two kids going to Ross School, too. What do you remember about Ross High School? When did you graduate?

I graduated in 1983.

(My mom) still lives in Hamilton. She lives in Lindenwald. The gateway to the south.

The gateway to Fairfield, maybe.

I had some great teachers in that school. I could name them off if you want me to.

Go ahead.

My first great teacher was Mrs. Shelton in the second grade at Elda Elementary. Then there was Mrs. Iams in the fifth grade. Mr. Gross in the sixth grade. But the greatest of all was Ms. Ganz at the high school. Ms. Ganz was my favorite teacher.

I know her quite well. Still see her all the time. I was one of her drama darlings.

She tried to get me to do drama. I said if she'd ever do “Dracula” I'd like to play Dracula. But she never did it, so I didn’t either.

So tell me about the Twilight Singers. What's the idea behind that?

If it’s me singing and your grandma playing bongos, that's the Twilight Singers. The Twilight Singers is me and whoever I invite along for the ride. I was in a band for 14 years and except that we had three drummers, the rest of us were faithful. So it’s like anybody that's been in a marriage, no matter how good or bad it was, once you get out, it's party time. I guess I'm uncovering my shallowness now. Hubris doesn't work when you wear black. Johnny Cash said that. They’’ll (expletive) when I drive into that demolition derby in this T-Bird.

Are you breaking into a Thunderbird?

No. The top’s down, the ignition wires are showing. This car is going to be mine. For a while. Then it’ll be in the demolition derby in West Covina.

So do you have anything special planned for the Southgate House?

Yes.

Are you going to tell me about it?

It wouldn't be special then, would it, tiger?

Sure it would.

I'm also incredibly delusional. I'm stealing this (expletive) car. I shouldn't be telling you all this, but what the (expletive)? By the time this runs, it won’t matter. I’ve got good lawyers, I’m an upstanding citizen and I own several properties in Los Angeles County. It won’t hurt. So ask me another question.

Do you really expect people to get all the literary references, all the Jack London references in your new record? (The first song is titled “Martin Eden,” after a Jack London novel.)

There's only one thing that it’s important to, and you're talking to it. I've never pandered to the public’s stupidity and lack of education and I'm not about to start now. It's personal to me, but I hope someone will pick up the book and read it.

Do you read a lot? What was the last book you read?

The last book I read was “Weathercock” by Glen Duncan. The protagonist so resembled me that it freaked me out. So read it and get ready for the nightmares to ensue. This is a big parking lot and my car is not out here.

So you’re really just wandering around a parking lot in what may or may not be Malibu, getting ready to steal a car?

No. Right now, I’m sitting under a cabana plotting my next move.

And you really have no idea where you were, who's party you were at? Did they know you?

I prefer not to know people. It makes it too complicated. I like to be a fly on the wall. I saw things I shouldn’t have seen and heard things I shouldn’t have heard last night. I’ll be enacting some blackmail in the next few days -- if I ever get out of here. That's how you make your mortgage payments.

Well, we’ve been talking for a half-hour now. I guess I better let you go and find your way home.

OK. Well, come out to the Southgate House. We’ll rock.

Cool. I’ll see if I can make it. It’s April 6, right?

Something like that.

OK. So good luck with the demolition derby, dude.

See you.

Vote with your money

So last night, I was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep by solving all of the world’s problems.

 There are a lot of problems in the world, no doubt, and I lose a lot of sleep over them. But I confess my ideas are far too progressive to be of any practical use in this country today. For one thing, no one in the government is going to make any significant or meaningful changes in the way things are run because it would derail the gravy train.

 Our founding fathers conceived of a nation to be governed by citizen statesmen, but they made a tragic error in not accounting for the kind of greed that a capitalist system encourages. So instead of everyone working together to make sure that we all have an equal chance of enjoying our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, we have a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

 Our politicians play with our tax money as if it were their own, and whether or not they did it on purpose, our legislators have created a system that keeps the average person out of the loop. Even though the Internal Revenue Code is available online for the average American to see and study for themselves, it contains more than 2.8 million words. Printed 60 lines to the page, it would fill almost 6,000 letter-size pages and in a convoluted language that might as well be in Chinese for the average American of a ninth-grade reading level.

 That’s why they call it a “code” — it’s indecipherable.

 And that’s only one layer of taxes. Add on the Social Security, state income taxes, city or local income taxes and the various state, county and municipal sales taxes and the various real estate taxes and it doesn’t take long to get dizzy trying to figure out where your money goes.

 But it doesn’t have to be so hard. I have a plan that is so easy that it’s beyond revolutionary.

 The first part calls for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and its 2.8-million-word code for a flat income tax. No loopholes, no deductions.

 There have been proposals for a flat income tax floating around before. Estimates are that we’d have to pay somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of our income to keep the government running at all levels. On my last pay stub, about 17 percent of my salary went to taxes and that doesn’t include what sales taxes I’ll pay this week or what property taxes I’m responsible for, so the 25 percent flat tax doesn’t seem too out of line.

 So here’s the revolutionary part: Instead of sending your tax money to the IRS, you send it to whatever government agencies you want to support.

 Do you believe that the education of your children is the most important thing to spend your tax money on? Then send your entire 25 percent to your local school district.

 Are you tired of the potholes wearing out your tires and shock absorbers? Send 5 percent of your income to the local municipal street repair fund and you’ll still have 20 percent to give to the National Park Service.

 If you want to support a war, you can give all of your tax money to the U.S. Defense Department.

 Under my plan, not only would the tax system be as simple and fair as it can possibly be, but every citizen will be able to set the national agenda with a vote that really counts, a vote that will really make the politicians sit up and take notice: A vote of money. 

October 27, 2004

February 19, 2011

Today, I was part of theatrical history.

My daughter Rachel is a junior at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. Her school, according to a note in the program for the shows we saw today, is one of the Top 5 musical theater schools in the nation according to some prestigious, knowledgeable magazine. I’d never heard of Baldwin Wallace College until she told me she had a chance to audition there, Monsieur Dog and I gave her a ride to that.

But after what I saw today, I can believe it’s Top 5. This weekend, the BW musical theatre program launched the first ever repertoire production of the opera “La Boheme” and “Rent,” the musical based on “La Boheme” that set a new standard for musical theatre that every newly-written production tries in some what to top it, or be the next “it.”

You’d think that by this time, such an event would have already taken place, but the amateur rights for “Rent” only became available a couple of years ago. In fact, my son Sean played one of the lead roles, Mark, in one of the first amateur prodcations at the Dayton South Playhouse production just about a year ago.

So today, I was part of the first audiences to see both shows on the same stage in one day. Theatrical history.

Not only that, however, I would have to say that this “Rent” is by far the best production of it at I’ve seen of it (this would be the fifth, including a revival with Anthony Rapp and other members of the original cast), and probably the best college level production I’ve seen of anything ever. Except for one performance, I’d have to say this was close to Broadway-ready. It had a vibrancy and an energy that made it an emotional experience, and not just because my Girl was in it. Actually, I barely saw her because we got our tickets a little late and ended up in the front row on the opposite side of where she did most of her business.

The “La Boheme” was pretty good, too, but not quite with the same intensity as “Rent,” and certainly not Met-ready.

But we were in the right spot for the Girl’s business this time as a cafe girl. I cracked up at the little sub-plot she had made up, trying to get the attention of Rudolfo by hiking up her skirt, but he never looked at he. It was hilarious, and I think she got at least one good laugh from the audience other than from me, though it was hard to tell. Maybe they were doing something funny on the other side of the stage at the same time. I was busy watching Rachel.

We were going to stay in the apartment Barb’s son James shares with his fiance Ashley. She’s in med school in Cleveland and he’s in the Coast Guard, stationed on an ice cutter in the Great Lakes, so we didn’t expect him to be here, but on the way up he called as he was driving to Cleveland from Michigan, so we’ve been able to have a nice visit with her kids, too.

The Other Parental Unit was also a part of the historic theatrical event today, but I managed to avoid any contact with her, but it cut into my Girl Time.

We’re planning to have breakfast with Rachel in about seven hours, so it’s time to let the sleeping pills do their job.

PS: February 20, 2011

After a very nice breakfast with Rachel, James and Ashley at a cute little diner called Lucky’s Cafe, in which we all noted the absence of Sean, without whom we were incomplete, who should should send me a text message on the ride home but Sean himself, with some very good news indeed: He had his audition at Wright State University and they immediately accepted him into the musical theater and acting programs with hints of scholarships.

So how proud do you think I am now?

I am so happy for him, especially considering how I basically gave up my desire to go to college for theater because I blew my WSU audition so badly back in 1977. I’ll tell that story in so detail later because it needs some background and I’m anxious tonight to get back to some revisions on the chapter about my very early life so I can get some of it posted.

December 4, 2010

On Friday, I was assigned to cover the military funeral of Sgt. David Luff, a 1999 graduate of Hamilton High School.

In giving me the assignment, my editors told me that the reporter who interviewed the widow earlier in the week had secured her permission to have us cover the funeral and graveside services on Friday, but with a few caveats: I could not interview people but just report on what I saw, and that the photographer would not be allowed in the funeral  home, but it was OK to be at the cemetery.

Fair enough. That’s probably what I would have done anyway.

So I got to the funeral  home about 20 minutes before the service started, and was greeted by about a dozen scruffy looking bikers who had lined up along the path to the door in an honor guard, bearing large American flags. That should have been my first clue what a mess the assignment would to be, remembering the lesson we should have learned at Altamont 40 years ago: Bikers in charge of security? Not a good idea.

So I went inside and took a seat off to the side, and when the service started, I took my notebook out of my jacket pocket and took notes, and when it was over, I went to my car and played “Angry Birds” on my phone until the procession started.

To be honest, I felt myself quite moved, first by the widow’s passionate tribute to her husband and the way the city of Hamilton seemed to come to a standstill as the procession passed. I hadn’t expected that.

At Greenwood Cemetery, I ended up parking behind one of the military vehicles and saw the general who presided over the service at Brown-Dawson. I needed to check the spelling of his name, get the first name of the chaplain who spoke and clarify a couple of other details. The general had a name tag on, but couldn’t help me with the other issues. He said the chaplain was right over there, I could go ask him myself. But I wasn’t going to do anything to make myself conspicuous.

The photographer was already there, and we chatted briefly before he started taking pictures of the pall bearers in full military dress remove the casket from the hearse and carry it to the grave site. I hung back, making sure I was behind all of the mourners but close enough to hear what was going on. About the time the bugler finished playing taps, I made a note about the infant son of the soldier starting to fuss in his mother’s arms.

Then the photographer tapped me on the shoulder. “We have permission to be here, don’t we?” I was told we did. “Can you come and talk to this guy?”

I left my post and went over to where two soldiers and one of the bikers were standing. They said that we had to leave because we didn’t have permission to be there. I assured him we did, that the widow said it was ok, and I went over my instructions.

But they insisted the Army was in charge of the scene and they couldn’t take my word for that. I reminded him that I’m not in the Army and that he had no authority over me. And then the biker got into the conversation. I found out later that before he came to tap me on the shoulder, the photographer had been physically threatened and sworn at by one of the bikers, who were ostensibly there to keep protesters away, but I guess they felt an obligation to harass the local press as well.

They accused us of being disruptive, and I explained that we were both keeping a respectful distance, but that we had a job to do. We were there as the eyes and ears of the people who lined the streets in mourning for this soldier and that they were keeping us from doing our job and therefore being disrespectful to them. I further explained that I was not being disruptive, but that he was my interrupting me from my job. He said he had a job to do too, that the Army didn’t like having pictures of caskets in the newspapers. I wanted to say that they should stop sending our young people to their deaths, but I held my tongue and instead just returned his steely stare thinking about how much I hated him and everything he stood for.

By that time, the graveside service had ended and people were starting to disperse, so there was no more for me to do. I went back to my car and my Angry Birds, waiting for the parked cars to clear out enough so I could go back to the office and file what I had. And I reported what I saw and heard, including their lies about how the soldier had died an American hero fighting for our freedom instead of the truth about how he is really a martyr for the big oil companies and the rest of corporate America who use the U.S. military to guard the oil in the Middle East. Freedom has nothing to do with it.

This weekend, I discovered the root of mid-life crises.

It’s because that even after 40 years of trying to get a handle on the way this world works, the only thing we can learn is how out of our control it is.

I over-slept Sunday morning and had to skip showering to hurry to church in time to play guitar for the early service. I was only a few minutes behind, but in enough of a rush that I took a fall trying to jump onto the stage, barked my shins (two lumps, one bruise, one scrape), and broke the tuning key on my acoustic guitar.

It went downhill from there until I ended up saying things in the church kitchen that makes me now pray that it being Easter, God was busy elsewhere in the building and my language slipped right past Him.

On my way home, as I debated between driving my van into the Great Miami River or going home to take the delayed shower, I thought about liver.

A couple of decades ago, I was the grill cook for Wayne Morgan’s Hickory Hut on Millville Ave. Because it was a slow night, the grill man was the only person on the cook’s line Mondays, when the special was grilled liver and bacon.

I wasn’t so health conscious back then, and there wasn’t much that I would not eat, but liver was at the top of my list. And I hated cooking it more than I hated eating it.

When they trained me on it, they told me to put a frozen slice of on the hot part of the grill with a weight on it and cook it until it looked like the sole of an old shoe that’s been in the middle of the highway for a week. Then it took 10 minutes to scrape the burned-on remains of the blood and juices off the grill.

It was too smelly and disgusting, so as soon as they left me alone, I started to do it my way: Let the liver thaw and when an order came in, toss a piece on the grill, step back and take a whiff of sauerkraut to clear my nostrils, run back to the grill and turn the liver, go to the steam table to put the vegetables on the plate, take a deep breath and go back to the grill to take the liver off. Doing it that way was not only quicker, but it also kept the grill clean because I wasn’t letting all the blood and juices cook out of the meat and carbon up. The blood went on the plate instead, seeping out of the nearly-raw liver and mixing in with the succotash and mashed potatoes.

As far as I was concerned, better a bloody plate than stinky grill residue. I would have thrown it out there raw if I thought I’d’ve gotten away with it. My hope was that people would quietly stop eating the liver, and the only way it would backfire is if got back to the boss and he’d make me go back to the shoe-sole method.

I should have been so lucky. 

The real problem with my plan became apparent the very first night when the waitresses started coming back with a refrain that made me want to slap myself with a hot spatula: “Compliments on the liver!”

Apparently, word spread, because as the weeks passed, I would get more and more orders for the grilled liver special. I checked it out, and sure enough, you could have plotted out liver sales on a graph to find it curve upward after I started working the Monday dinner shift.

What kind of irony is that? To make my tenure at the Hickory Hut remarkable only for improving the sales of the one dish that I loathed, that I would not eat, not in a dozen lifetimes?

And how are we supposed to keep our wits in a world where when you try to do a good thing, you end up nearly breaking a leg, and when you try to sabotage Grilled Liver-and-Bacon Night, you end up feeding it to the entire city of Hamilton?

March 3, 2002

Something told me to turn around.

It was a Sunday morning and I had just left church, having thumped on a guitar for the early service. My normal route home blocked for a street fair, I turned left onto High Street and saw traffic tangled up in front of the former Municipal Building.

An old man was in the middle of the road, apparently trying to flag down east-bound cars, but all lanes were moving awkwardly as drivers tried to avoid him and avoid hitting him.

There was something wrong, for one thing, to have a traffic jam on High Street at 10:30 on a Sunday morning, and I felt there was something wrong with the old man. He was obviously in the wrong place, but he seemed oblivious to the danger and clearly in need of assistance. I hadn’t noticed him around before, and he didn’t strike me as one of the downtown regulars, so I felt compelled to see what was up -- partly out of curiosity, partly out of concern for the old-timer. Not wanting to ensnarl traffic in both directions, I crossed the bridge and looked for a place to turn around, even as the liar on my left shoulder insisted that the police would be along soon to take care of it.

By the time I got back, much of the traffic had dispersed, but the old man was still there talking to a woman in an older car stopped in the inside lane. As I pulled in behind, the driver looked both hurried and worried, and I could tell that she was wanting to rid herself of the intruder, but didn’t want to just turn him loose in traffic again. I put my car in park and opened the door, waving to get their attention.

He wanted a ride, she told me, to Hyde’s Restaurant. I said I could take him and she helped him into my passenger seat.

”Who are you?” he asked as I started the car moving.

”Today, I’m your angel,” I said.

He got a funny look on his face as he tried to puzzle it out, then smiled and said he lives in the Anthony Wayne and goes to Hyde’s every day for breakfast.

So what are you doing in the middle of High Street?

”I get confused,” he said.

I studied his face, his neatly-combed white hair and his attempt to shave that morning. An admirable attempt, to be sure, but there were patches that he’d missed, had been missing for a few days, it seemed. He asked who I was again and where I worked.

He told me his picture was in the lobby at the building where I work, that he was a carrier back in the day when Homer Gard was king and publisher. He had a story about Homer Gard and something about mowing a lawn, but he was soon sidetracked by his own thought stream and started telling me something about Hollywood, Fla., the U.S. Army National Guard and other bits and pieces from his life.

His mind was working full-steam and his mouth doing double-time to keep up.

”I know I talk too much,” he said. “At Hyde’s, they’re always telling me to be quiet, that I’m chasing off business.”

When we got there, I pulled around the back way and stopped the car while he finished a story, but he never really finished one before another took over. I let him go on for a while, then went around to help him step down from my car, telling him where I went to church and that if he needed a ride next Sunday to come there, not try to flag down traffic on High Street. “Don’t get yourself killed,” I said, and waved off his attempt to give me money, sending him inside for his breakfast.

Something told me to turn around, but I’m still not sure why. Maybe just to bank some good karma. Maybe just so that when I’m in my last years and getting confused about things, someone will give me a ride to Hyde’s, if that’s where I want to go.

June 20, 2002

Every exit on every Interstate looks the same as every other exit, the only difference being in whether it’s mountains or desert landscape behind the Waffle House signs and golden arches. With the Internet and the vast array of cable television networks streaming into our homes, the cultural divisions in modern America are more interest-oriented than regional.

That may be part of the reason why it’s so hard for us to understand a cultural divide strong enough, vast enough and bitter enough to tear this nation in two with a violent and bloody Civil War.

I just spent a long weekend in Gettysburg, the site of the largest battle ever fought on this hemisphere (as far as we know), and my mind is still reeling with the enormity of it -- not just the lives lost, though that’s a big part of it -- but also in the ideas that split our nation.

I was fortunate to have as my traveling companion the president of the local Civil War Roundtable, Bill Gabbard, a self-educated expert on the Army of Northern Virginia and almost everything else related to the Civil War. This was his 20th excursion to Gettysburg, my first.

We stayed in a hotel on Seminary Ridge, barely 30 yards from the house where Robert E. Lee set up headquarters, and spent three days walking (and walking and walking) the battlefields, trying to follow along with the three days of the conflict. We stood down in the railroad cut where some 330 Confederate soldiers were trapped and captured or killed. We scrambled up and down the rocky face of Little Roundtop, the rugged hill at the end of the Union line where a rhetoric professor distinguished himself by ordering a bayonet attack, sweeping his troops across the hill like a gate on a hinge. And on the last day, we walked Pickett’s Charge, three-quarters of a mile across the swales between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge. In that shallow valley, some 12,000 Rebel soldiers marched in a mile-long line to face the Union Army’s cannons and rifles. Only a few hundred made it to the enemy line to be quickly overwhelmed, and of the 12,000, some say that only 6,000 made the long walk back to camp.

Bill and I talked a lot about trying to imagine what it would have been like to have been one of those soldiers, to be have been able to endure the mid-summer heat and humidity in those wool uniforms, and then to muster up the courage to face that kind of enemy fire.

My favorite part of the trip, however, were the long walks we took down Seminary Ridge in the evenings, after the day’s tour and study were finished. By the nearly-full moon rising on our right, we could still see the Union cannons that in 1863 would have been poised for the decimation of the Confederate soldiers who would have been camped in the field to our right.

While it was hard for me to imagine the courage it took to charge Cemetery Ridge, I think I understood the trepidation that was surely palpable among the Southern troops on the eve of Pickett’s Charge. We’ve all had moments, though hardly of this magnitude, where we look across the broad field of our own mortality, knowing that someday, we may have to make some kind of final charge of our own. 

That’s a little melodramatic, I know, but the thing about courage is that we don’t know how much we have until we need to use it. 

We spend of our lives, however, avoiding such situations.

June 27, 2002

Panhandlers and Pitchmen

Earlier this year, the city of Cincinnati passed new ordinances restricting the practices of the city’s professional bums.

I’m not sure exactly what the new law says, but it certainly seems to have changed the nature of their enterprise.

For one thing, they don’t just come at me with their palms open anymore. Now, they come at me flashing their picture IDs.

“I haven’t eaten since Sunday. Here’s my driver’s license.”

Which begs the question, so to speak, that if the guy’s homeless, what address does he give the Bureau of Motor Vehicles?

The law also seems to have inspired some of the pan-handlers to be a little bit more enterprising, to offer goods and services rather than to just ask for a hand-out.

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I were walking along Seventh Street on our way to the Aronoff Center when I heard a guy behind me: “Hey, how big is your waist?”

“What?”

“What’s your waist size?”

I figured he was leading up to something, so I played along.

“A year ago, I was about 40, but I’ve got it down to 32.”

“I got something right here that’s just your style,” he said and reached inside his jacket.

That took me aback a little, and I cringed at the thought of him pulling out a gun or a club. I glanced at my daughter, who was mortified and carefully keeping me between the jeans merchant and herself. Instead of a weapon, however, he brought out a pair of blue jeans. They looked new, but didn’t have any labels. I figured they must have fallen off a truck somewhere or wandered out of a department store.

“You’d look good in these,” he said.

“Well, what size are they?”

“They’re 34s.”

“Well, they’d be a little big on me. Got anything smaller?”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. You’ll grow into them.”

“Weren’t you listening to me, dude?” I asked, keeping my stride.

“I just told you that I’ve gone from a 40 to a 32. I’m going the other direction. I’m trying to keep myself on the road to wellness. I’m seeking health and righteousness, and you’re leading down a path to sin and degradation,” I said, putting a fire-and-brimstone preacher’s tone on that last sentence, just for effect.

“Can’t you help a brother out? I only want fifteen dollars,” he said, and then reverted back to the old methods: “I need something to eat. I haven’t had anything since yesterday.”

“If I give you a dollar, will that help you out?” I asked, reaching into my pocket. Whenever I go downtown, I try to remember to keep a couple of loose bills just for such an occasion.

He didn’t seem happy about it, but one dollar is a dollar more than he had. He didn’t hesitate to take it or stick around long after he did. He took the bill, muttered “Thanks,” and disappeared -- to size up somebody else’s waistline, I suppose.

I was telling my Saturday morning hiking group about it the next weekend, and one of the guys made the observation: “So basically, you paid him a dollar to leave you alone and go aggravate somebody else?”

So one way to look at the effect of the ordinance governing pan-handling is not only did it require the pro bums to be more creative, but also created a new job: Professional nuisance.

I imagine there’ll always be openings.

July 17, 2002

Maureen -- better known as Mo – didn’t know squat about baseball, but she knew that my wife and I were big Cincinnati Reds fans, so when she copped four free blue seats at Riverfront Stadium, she invited us along.

We knew Mo from college, and we’d been graduated for a couple of years and hadn’t seen each other in a while, so even though there was a big rain coming through the area, we took advantage of the opportunity to party, whether there was a game or not.

I’m not sure anymore just how long the rain delay was. We spent most of it in the clubhouse bar, but it was close to three hours -- long enough that by the time they rolled up the tarps most of the stadium had cleared out. Our seats were in the upper part of the blue section, but we moved down to just a few rows behind the visitors’ dugout.

The game didn’t last very long as it turned out to be a classic pitchers’ duel. Going into the sixth inning, Tom Browning and the Dodgers’ Tim Belcher both had no-hitters going. The Reds’ managed to bring one player across the plate in the sixth, and the game started to get really interesting.

Poor Mo was bored silly by this time. She wanted to see some action and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. For fear of a jinx, no one wanted to use the words “no-hitter” or -- even worse, “perfect game” -- to explain it to her, so we’d say things like, “Browning hasn’t allowed a baserunner in seven innings.”

“Is that a good thing?” she’d ask. “I thought they were supposed to get hits.”

Poor girl.

Even though there were probably fewer than 5,000 people left in the stadium, it sounded like a full house the last two innings. We were standing on our seats, holding our breath every time Browning started to throw, then either breathing a sigh of relief if he threw a one past or screaming like a lunatic when the batter got out.

And when Tom Browning put down the 27th consecutive hitter, the energy was a mixture of pandemonium and ecstasy like I’d never seen before. Even Mo was jumping up and down, taking high fives and hugging people. 

Maybe she was just in it for the hugging.

Later that night, we stopped for a nightcap, played a little table shuffleboard and joked that we’d never go to another professional baseball game because there’s no way to beat an experience like witnessing a perfect game.

I didn’t now just how close to true that would be. We were just starting our family and I got this job the following summer, so our schedules filled up before we could work in baseball. Then, when the players went on strike a few years later, I gave up on big league sports altogether. It’s such a gouge on the fans.

But I have managed to get out to a few minor league games, going to Richmond to see the Roosters or up to Dayton for the Dragons.

Roosters’ games are the best. There’s a real down-home atmosphere there, and you can take your own chair and sit in the beer garden for $5 and buy big-ass beers for $3. I’ve never spent more than $20 for a whole evening -- including peanuts.

So for the first time in 15 years, I got excited about baseball last week when we learned that Tom Browning would be spending the summer in Hamilton as the manager of Florence's Frontier League team while they are guests at Foundation Field.

I hope we will be good hosts, that a lot of people come out to see the games, to show that we’d like to have a team of our own. I plan to get out to a few games, maybe get a chance to shake a hand that pitched a perfect game.

 (Revised from a May 28, 2003 column from the Hamilton JournalNews)

Creative process a mystery

I had dinner with a friend and a friend of a friend last week and found myself subjected to an in-depth interview about the creative process.

 Certainly I didn’t mind the grilling. Art is my life. There’s nothing I like to talk about more.

 Even after nearly 40 years of being a writer and a degree in creative writing, more than 30 years involvement with theater and music, and 15 years as a journalist writing about arts, I am still largely baffled by the process of bringing a creative work to life.

 That’s not to say I can’t do it or can’t analyze it, but when it comes down to that ultimate question — “Where do your ideas come from?” — I can’t really formulate a succinct response.

 I do know, for instance, that the process itself brings forth ideas. One word leads to another word and when I find the groove, the ideas even take me by surprise.

 The friend of a friend wanted to know if it was possible to nail it down, to recall a time when the good creative juices flowed, then figure out why they flowed with the idea of recreating that set of circumstances.

 The truth is, however, that there are just too many variables to do that. Certainly every artist has a method and manner of working based on their own experience, but what works for me (quiet, dim lighting, usually in the very late hours of the night) may not work for others. Stephen King and Garrison Keillor both get up very early in the morning to write.

 But I think the real key to coming up with good creative stuff is to also come up with a lot of bad creative stuff.

 Bob Dylan has released some 47 albums in his career and hundreds of songs, the quality of both ranging from atrocious to legendary. And I’m willing to bet that he’s written or abandoned hundreds of other songs before they got to the recording stage of the process. A great artist like Picasso is mostly known for a handful of works, but for every “Guernica,” his oeuvre contains hundreds of paintings, drawings, studies, prints, etc., that no one but the most die-hard scholar or collector has seen.

 That’s what the proverbial “cutting room floor” is about.

 So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when faced with a sexual harassment lawsuit over their workroom conversations, a group of writers from the “Friends” television show are saying that talking trash is all part of their process.

 A writer’s assistant whose job it was to take notes for them claims that their banter — which was never personally directed at her — overstepped the bounds of good taste and made it uncomfortable for her to do her job.

 You can read her suit on www.thesmokinggun.com, where one of her claim includes that, “I had to constantly listen to comments about what kind of breasts and what kind of buttocks my supervisors were most attracted to.” She also makes the claim: “I have never been aware of any of the ‘Friends’ episodes that I worked on involving pornography, people having sex on the show or nudity.”

 I was never a big friend of “Friends,” but I’ve seen enough of it to know that it was almost always all about sex and there probably would have been nudity and soft-core bedroom scenes if it were on HBO instead of NBC.

 “They were talking about sex,” their lawyer told the New York Times, “because that was their job.”

 If it were an office of claims adjustors or timeshare salesmen, certainly off-color remarks would be out of line, but if you can’t stand the sight of blood, you shouldn’t go to work in the slaughterhouse. 

October 20, 2004

A great big drowning Jesus

Ostentatiousness isn’t one of the seven deadly sins, but maybe it should be. 

I was taking my son back to The Ohio State University a couple of weeks ago when we passed the giant statue of Jesus along Interstate-75 by the Solid Rock Church in Monroe.

 My son was tickled by the proximity of the statue to the pond. We decided it should be called “The Drowning Jesus.”

 “They should just turn the statue into a giant water slide,” he said. “It would make baptism more fun.”

 Good idea. Then there would be three types of baptizers: Sprinklers, dunkers and sliders.

 “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Wheeeeee!”

 Yes, it’s a ridiculous idea, but once you have erected a 62-foot statue of Jesus by the roadside, it’s not that big a stretch of the imagination. It’s also one of the most hideously ugly statues I’ve ever seen, not at all flattering to the Savior.

 The pastors have been widely quoted as saying that they spent $250,000 on the statue “to help people.”

 “We’re living in a day when a lot of people feel hopeless, but we believe that when people see Him, they will understand He is the hope for the world,” one of them said.

 If that represents the hope of the world, however, I guess I’ll take my chances in hell.

 While it may be a noble cause to try to counter the human degradation represented by the nearby Hustler store and erotic dancers at Bristol’s Show Club — and the billboards that advertise them — the words of Jesus would suggest that there are better ways to fight the enemy.

 Jesus lived a life and espoused a philosophy focused on humility and service to humanity, but there’s nothing humble about a great big Jesus beside the highway, and the quarter-million bucks it took to erect such a thing would have put a lot of Christmas hams — several thousand hams — on the tables of local hungry people.

 There’s nothing new about using Christ’s name in order to justify conspicuous displays of faith such as this.

 The Cincinnati Museum Center earlier this year held a traveling exhibition that highlighted the treasures owned by the Vatican. Among the items was a solid gold hammer that they once used to tap an ailing Pope on the head to see if he had yet died.

 Looking at that exhibition, I had to wonder why a Pope’s physician would need a gold hammer when a common rock would do the job just as well, or why the Pope would need an elaborately-embroidered robe and pointy hat to preach the Gospel when Jesus traveled the countryside with only the clothes on his back — and I would highly doubt that there was a single thread of gold in any of his garments.

 The Sermon on the Mount is pretty clear on the subject: “Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven,” and “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.”

 So anyone who contributed to the great big Jesus should be feeling pretty good right now. This is as close to heaven as they’re going to get.

 Anyone wondering why Jesus hasn’t come back yet as He said He would needs to think about the image of His ministry as expressed by the contemporary church.

 He’s probably too embarrassed by expressions of faith such as the Pope’s elaborate wardrobe and Solid Rock Church’s “King of Kings.” Don’t get me started on Christmas.

 If we want God to look favorably upon this nation, a good place to start earning His favor would be to tear down these temples of idolatry. 

December 1, 2004

Elvis and the Last Supper

We got to the Tavern way too early, but that gave us a good seat to watch the band set up and observe the Beautiful People as they filed in for the New Year’s Eve show.

“What if the King were to walk in here right now?” my friend said out of the blue.

“By ‘the King,’” I asked, do you mean Elvis Presley, the King of Rock’n’Roll?”

“Yeah. How old would he be now?”

We figured it out in our heads that he’d be turning 70 soon.

“Do you believe he’s still alive?”

“Well,” I said, “I doubt that he’s still walking around in his earthly body, but yes, the king lives. If you look over there above the cash register, you can see a photo of him.”

“Do  you mean to say that because there’s a picture of him in the bar that his spirit still lives even though he no longer walks among us?”

“That’s pretty close. We all create waves of energy as we go through our lives, some of us create more energy than others. Whether our souls live on in some other dimension, something we might call heaven, no one can say for sure. But some people achieve something close to immortality by the energy they create and leave behind.

“Elvis left a pretty good wake of energy behind him. Look around. There’s not only a picture of him above the cash register, but there’s another picture of him there on the opposite wall, from the movie ‘Speedway.’

“Most people will leave behind a legacy that will last a few generations and only within their own family, but some people have such a powerful impact that their spirit will survive for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

“As long as people perform the plays of William Shakespeare, Shakespeare lives. As long as the U.S. Constitution endures — which may not be much longer — Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolutionaries will live on.

“Of course, no one left a greater wake of energy than Jesus. Even though his message has been twisted and perverted to suit many questionable causes, his energy still pervades every aspect of our culture. Look over there, in the next room. There’s a clock with the painting of the Last Supper.”

He thought a minute, then posed another question: “But there are two pictures of Elvis, and only one of Jesus. Does that mean that Elvis has a greater energy here than Jesus?”

“Not necessarily.”

And the search was on. We scoured the walls of the establishment and discovered that there were seven pictures of Elvis, three of Jesus.

Elvis turned out to be more versatile than Jesus, too. There were pictures of him as a cowboy and as a race car driver as well as pictures of him with his guitar. All of the Jesus pictures were of Him chillin’ with the dozen at the supper.

But, we figured, that was still a pretty good showing since Elvis had the home field advantage. In most churches, chances are it would be a shut-out.

January 12, 2005

Breaking out of the box

I have a box on my table. 

I don’t know how it got there. It just showed up one day, unmarked and sealed. I’ve never touched it, but I’ve seen it and I know it’s there.

 I had a dream not long ago in which there was a similar box and it was full of money, so I’ve got a really good feeling about this one that landed on my table. I believe it’s the box from my dream.

It’s become quite a debate in my neighborhood. I’ve found a few people who agree with me. I tell them about my dream and they trust me enough to believe what I tell them it’s full of money.

A woman picked up the box and said that there’s a shipping label on the bottom with a Wisconsin return address. She thinks it might be cheese.

One guy went so far as to pick it up and shake it. He thinks its a box of rocks, that it’s too heavy for money or cheese.

One of my supporters, however, said that while he believes I’m essentially correct, that maybe it’s a box of quarters, not $20 bills, and that’s why it’s heavy.

There are other theories. Some of them are so off-the-wall that I’m not going to justify them by mentioning them. Some people just think too far outside the box.

I think most people would agree with me. After all, I’m in possession of the box and I’m the only one who has actually seen what’s inside it. Well, yeah, I only saw it in a dream, but it was a very vivid dream.

In fact, I think 55 percent of America would agree with me, that the box is full of $20 bills.

There are polls suggesting that 55 percent of Americans will either ignore factual evidence, deny its existence or alter the assumptions behind the evidence to believe in a theory that is only supported by spiritual revelation.

For instance, it’s been pretty well-established that dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years, well before the first human beings appeared on the planet. But if you surf over to Dr. Dino’s Web site (www.drdino.com), you will learn that: “Dinosaurs were made the sixth day with the rest of the animals. Noah took them on the ark (probably young ones). They have always lived with man. After the flood many died from the climate changes and from man’s hunting.”

Dr. Dino’s real name is Kent Hovind, who bills himself as “creation science evangelist” and is clearly one of the 55 percent of Americans who, according to a recent CBS news poll, believe that God created man just as he is.

I’ve got a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more about creationism v. evolution in the next four years or so, considering the coincidence that within the 3 percent margin of error, the same percentage of Americans voted for our current, highly moral national leader, giving certain points of view enough political capital to continue to be heard loud and clear.

But the first battles are going to the evolutionists. Last week, a federal judge ordered the removal of stickers placed in high school biology textbooks in Cobb County, Ga., that call evolution “a theory, not a fact,” saying they were an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

The stickers read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

Interesting wording, that “critically considered” part, isn’t it?

A school board in Pennsylvania also last week amended an earlier ruling that required teachers to read a similar disclaimer before mentioning the e-word. The teachers protested, so now they don’t have to read the statement. School administrators do.

People are slow to change their opinions and beliefs. That’s the nature of things. Very few permanent changes come about rapidly, not without some cataclysm or trauma.

Mostly, it’s a matter of evolution.

January 19, 2005

The pain of healing

I can think of a hundred or (given enough time) a thousand places I’d rather ride out a snow storm than the emergency room.

  But a friend was experiencing some scary symptoms, and being temporarily without wheels, rather than barring the doors against the elements and concentrating on a good book and some steaming hot cocoa, I was off to the ER for the bright lights, the disinfectant and the sounds and smells of a suffering humanity.

I shouldn’t complain. I was there as an act of mercy and friendship, but the hot chocolate in that machine tried to use scalding heat to disguise the lack of depth in flavor.

As a people watcher, there doesn’t seem to be a richer — or more heartbreaking — place for observation than the ER.

 Everyone there, it seems, would rather be somewhere else — including most of the staff, although one of the nurses was having a jolly time and told us that he stopped doing home health care because it was too boring. “This is where the action is,” he said.

 But in the same room with us, separated only by the curtains was a 30-something woman child, clutching a toy fire truck and passing great rushes of air from several different places, sometimes all at once.

  She was replaced in that quarter of the room by a 2-year-old girl who was not only quite ill, but quite vocal about her discomfort. With her limited vocabulary, this discomfort was expressed as: “No, Mommy. Mommy. No, Mommy, no. Mommy. Noooooooo!”

 I don’t have perfect pitch, but the last note of this melody seemed to be an excruciating D sharp about six octaves above middle C. Three or four more cycles and it would have been inaudible to the human ear.

 Then there was the EMT student who came in to draw blood and put an IV set-up in my friend’s arm. Long story short, his efforts were both painful and superfluous as he could neither draw blood nor inject medicine in spite of the three-inch needle with which he painfully wounded my friend.

 “I hope you at least learned something from the experience,” I said when he came back to remove the set-up that the jolly nurse had put on the other arm.

 “Well, I learned I don’t have to use that big of a needle,” he said.

 The patient next to us was there because her blood sugar level was about 800 — normal is somewhere around 100.

 She overheard me saying that I should be taking notes from my column and started asking me questions.

 “I love the JournalNews,” she said. “My neighbor prays every day that my paper comes for me.

 “Every day, I’d go out to pick up my newspaper and I’d see him in the corner of his yard praying.

 “One time I asked him about it and he said that he couldn’t get to church any more, but if he went to that one corner of his yard, he could see the cross up on the steeple. So that’s where he went to pray.”

 She was delightful, and an instant friend. She had other stories, too, about her grandmother feeding her pet rooster to a mountain lion, for instance, so now she collects chickens, and she referred to her IV rack as her “new dance partner.”

 “He fell in love with another one out in the hallway,” she said coming back from the bathroom. “I liked to have never got them apart.”

 I wished her well as she went upstairs to be admitted.

 “I hope you’re feeling better,” I said.

 “I feel fine,” she replied. “It’s when my blood sugar is low that I feel sick.”

 My friend, it turns out, was experiencing the symptoms of the onset of pneumonia. The doctor prescribed an expensive anti-biotic — $105 for eight pills — and is now resting, though not very comfortably. 

January 26, 2005

Insecure about security

“This is your last chance, sir.”

 I was a little nervous, to be sure — not that I was doing anything wrong like smuggling drugs or explosives. I just wanted to get to Las Vegas. I left my drugs and explosives at home (as far as I knew — maybe I had inadvertently stepped in some C4 on my way out the door).

 It’s just that I’d never flown on a commercial flight before and all those security precautions at the Dayton Airport — all the dour, unhappy people in their Homeland Security uniforms and the x-ray machines — were quite intimidating to a poor, naive country boy like me.

 I was so nervous, in fact, that when we got to the metal detectors, I needlessly emptied my carry-on bags into the plastic bins to go through the X-ray machines. I didn’t know I had to put the whole bag in the bin. They made me take off my shoes, and in all the excitement, I forgot about my cell phone in my pocket.

 I remembered one fraction of a second before the buzzer went off and had already turned around to put it in with the rest of my stuff before the alarm sounded.

 Embarrassed by my faux pas, I sheepishly laughed as I started back through the metal detector. But the man on the other side was not amused. Maybe it was the giant peace sign on my T-shirt that made him think I was some kind of subversive terrorist.

 “This is your last chance, sir.”

 Every muscle in my body tensed up.

 It’s hard to sort out everything running through my mind in that three-second interval it took me to unpucker, take a deep breath and march through the metal detector. My traveling companion, who was already on the other side and ready to bolt to Vegas had I been detained, said my skin paled and my eyes went wide.

 Fortunately, I made it through the second time, and we had some fun with the memory of the ordeal all the way to Las Vegas.

 Coming home an old pro at this airline travel business, I left all my belongings — which included my laptop computer and a box of cheese crackers — in my carryon bags and just sat them in the bins.

 After I passed through the metal detectors, I heard someone say, “Whose laptop is this?” and I realized that I had a giant peace sign sticker on it, just like the symbol on my shirt.

 They had a better sense of humor about it than the guy in Dayton. The guy filling out the report said that sometimes traces of hand lotion or other items could set off the TNT sensor, not to worry. And they all laughed as they patted me down like a common criminal.

 A young lady behind me set off the same sensor, and she appeared even more nervous than me as they searched through her purse.

 I noticed, however, that we had one thing in common: She, too, was trying to smuggle cheese crackers on board.

 Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it, because the guy filling out the report — his sixth one of the day, a 10-minute ordeal required every time they get an alarm, he said — seemed to lose some of his humor when I suggested that maybe Cheese-Nips should be included on the no-fly list.

February 16, 2005

Once you’re a dipstick …

“Tell me the truth: Is there any hope for me?” 

I pondered the question for a moment, just to make it look as though I had to think about it. 

“Nope. Not much hope.” 

It wasn’t a hard question. There he was, sitting on the edge of the kitchen chair because it hurt too badly to put his cheeks on the seat. His legs were a deep purple with slightly redder patches where the skin had blistered and peeled away. He was in pain, clearly, but stubborn about it. We were trying to talk him into going to the emergency room.

 Three days earlier, he had been driving around town and saw a tanning place with a sign about new bulbs in their beds. The weather had just been nice enough to tease him into thinking spring was just around the corner so he decided to get a jump on his summer skin.

 It may not be entirely his fault, depending on how you look at it. He’d never been in a tanning bed before, so he didn’t know just how intense the experience could be.

 “It wasn’t the girl’s fault,” he protested when someone suggested that he might have case for a lawsuit. “She showed me how to use the bed and everything, and she said, ‘How long do you want to stay in? Ten minutes?’ I told her no, I wanted a full 30 minutes. It’s my own stupid fault. She told me it was too much, but I did it anyway.

 “I’m the dipstick.”

 He suspected as soon as he got out of the bed that he was over-cooked. The next day, huge blisters bubbled up on the back of his legs. A couple of days later, the legs were a rich shade of indigo.

 As we discussed his options (go to the emergency room tonight, go see your doctor in the morning, wait until you legs fall off, etc.), he began to explain the full history of his dipstickedness.

 It started, he explained, when he was just a child and managed to burn his mother’s prized rose bushes while trying to help his father burn leaves in the yard.

 His dipstickedness seems to manifest itself a lot when he’s on vacation. He told of a time in Virginia when a ranger warned him not to feed peanuts to the squirrels in a park. He told them, rather smugly, that he was an experienced animal feeder and that he knew what he was doing.

 “This old squirrel came up to me,” he said, “one of the scruffiest looking squirrels you’d ever see, barely had any fur on his tail. He took the peanut from me, but he also dug his incisors all the way through my fingers.

 “I tried to hide it from the other people around. I went to my wife and quietly asked her if she had a Kleenex. I heard a guy say, ‘I knew that dipstick was going to get bit.’

Visiting the Smokey Mountains one time, he ignored the signs that said “Stay off rocks” and did a little off-trail climbing.

 “I got up pretty far, then I started slipping,” he said. “When I hit the ground, I broke the fall by landing on my hands. I quietly got back in the car and we drove 20 miles until we found a drug store where I could buy some ace bandages to wrap up my wrists until we got home. I broke both wrists.”

Before we left, we had him convinced that he should give up the ways of the dipstick and start taking better care of himself. That should start, we said, by going to see your doctor so that you don’t lose your legs.

What’s even more dipstickish than these experiences, however, may be telling stories like that to a friend who’s a newspaper columnist. 

March 30, 2005

She doesn’t like her voice so she never sings out loud, but I could hear a song in her breath, a melody flowing from her contented smile as she steered her cart through the aisle of bargains.

 “What are you grinning about?” I had to ask.

 “Nothing,” she said. “Just happy to be shopping.”

 It’s not like we’d gone there to blow a bunch of money for the joy of spending or anything. I needed some cleaning supplies and she was, I thought, along for the ride.

 But for her, it was more. It was a bonus therapy session. That’s what she calls it: “Shopping therapy.”

 “What is it about shopping that a gives you so much pleasure?” I asked later.

 “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve always liked to shop. When I was a little girl, that’s what my mom and I did to make me happy. She would ground me, then feel bad about it so we’d go shopping. There were times I’d misbehave just so she’d take me shopping.

 “It was one way that we could spend time together.”

 “And I suppose you’ve passed this shopping gene on to your daughter, too?”

 “Oh, yeah,” she said. “She better find a good job when she grows up.” So I asked her mother about this shopping dynasty. She told me she was never much of a shopper, but after her divorce many years ago, she was seeing a counselor, a social worker, who advised her to go out once a week and buy something just for herself.

 “So I was at the store and I saw a pack of Post-It notes that had little angels printed on it,” mother said. “I thought, ‘You don’t get very many of them for two dollars,’ but it was something I liked, so I bought it.” So did it help?

 “Oh, yeah,” mother said. “I love to buy things for myself now.”

 But her daughter, she said, was a natural shopper.

 “I took her shopping for clothes one time and I picked out a whole cart full of cute stuff,” mother said. “We went to put it in layaway and she wouldn’t let me. She said, ‘If you can’t pay for it now so I can take it home, I don’t want it.’”

 So by now, I’m thinking this is deep. Maybe this is a vestige of the hunter/gatherer mentality of our ancestors. For the same reason men like sports (generally speaking) as a link to their hunting past, so women like to shop (generally speaking) as a throwback to foraging for food.

 And that’s maybe why when men shop for something, let’s say “shoes,” they conquer the shoes and come back with shoes and nothing else. But a woman will go shopping for shoes and come back with a carload of shoes because they found such a bargain, or a carload of anything but shoes because they couldn’t find a suitable pair, but found all this other cool stuff to satisfy the urge to shop.

 Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule. I, for one, loathe spectator sports for the most part. When I shop, it’s because I need something. It’s rarely recreational (unless I’m going simply to keep some female company) or therapeutic. When I do, it usually results in feelings of guilt, either for spending money I shouldn’t spend or because I’ve simply added to my storehouse of unnecessary stuff.

 But the women I know tell me it’s all for the good of the cause.

 “Even if it’s just groceries,” my shopping friend said, “that’s fine by me. Shopping is shopping. I may have 10 boxes of Tide in the laundry room already, but I know we’ll use it eventually — and I’ve saved some money.

 “I may not be the wealthiest person in town,” she added, “but at least we’ve got plenty of food in the house.”

 March 23, 2005

We’ll laugh over it later

Things look a little different once you’ve seen a concrete barricade approaching your vehicle at 40 miles an hour.

 Well, I guess the vehicle was approaching the barricade, but for all the control I had over the situation at that point, my car may as well have been falling from the sky.

 It was a dreary Saturday afternoon and I was exiting I-75 north onto Ohio 129. It was raining lightly as I went up the incline and around the curve, so I was taking it slow. I started to accelerate as I came out of the curve and at the same time, the rain started coming down in buckets. I reached down with my right hand to adjust the windshield wipers and felt the back tires slide to the right. I straightened out the vehicle and then it slid to the left a little. I straightened it out again, but then the rear tires went to the right again and kept on going.

 I’ve revisited the scene since then, many times, and I can see exactly where it happened. At the top of the ramp, the righthand lane — the lane I was traveling in — has a series of dips, the last one being nearly an inch or so (it’s a dangerous place, so I’ve never gotten out to measure) below the pavement level of the left-hand lane — enough of a dip to create a pond for my car to go skiing on.

 I’ve taken cars out of many a skid, most of them of my own making, but there was nothing I could do to stop this one. I’m not sure if it spun all the way around or not — it sure seemed like it. I just remember a big horizontal blur and the concrete barricade coming toward me.

 I turned to check on my passenger, but I didn’t get a real good look as the van hit the wall nearly head on and the airbag exploded in my face. The car spun around another half turn and came to rest perpendicular to the wall, facing traffic.

 The rain poured. I smelled burning rubber from the airbags. I sat there, shaken and shaking, trying to gather my wits enough to figure out what to do. The engine wasn’t running, but the windshield wipers were. I turned them off and opened the door.

 A white van had pulled off to the side and a man came out, dodging the raindrops. He looked at me and started to laugh.

 “Do you need me to call the police?” he yelled through the rain and his laughter.

 I didn’t see my cell phone. I couldn’t remember if I even had it with me. I said, “Yes, please. Call the police.”

 Then it occurred to me why he was laughing: We were coming home from a clown job and were both still in uniform. I took off my big red nose and threw it on the dashboard.

 Go ahead. You can laugh, too. Everyone else did: The paramedics. The state trooper — who gave me a ticket anyway. Everyone got a real kick out of the clown show. Everyone but the clowns. And the guy who came to tow the car. He didn’t seem to be having a good day either, and even a couple of crashed clowns wasn’t going to cheer him up. We weren’t exactly making balloon animals for everybody, either.

 The other clown and I were shaken and stirred, but otherwise OK. I had a few scrapes on my face and ear from the airbag; my passenger ended up with a couple of bruises on her back from the airbag slamming her into the seat belt apparatus behind the door. But if it weren’t for those airbags, I probably wouldn’t be writing this today.

 Yes, the world looks a little different once you’ve seen a concrete barricade approaching your vehicle at 40 miles per hour.

 You have a new appreciation for things. Especially airbags. 

April 16, 2005