Petesophizing...

MKE Online has been nice enough to include "Petesophizing" in their 1000 Voices: the mke blog directory.

They've also nominated me for their "blog of the week" voting this week. Ahem. Here's where you can vote.

MKE is the free weekly published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Nice -- this month they've started featuring an arts blog by Jonathan West. Jonathan was one of the founders of the Bialystock & Bloom theater company.

I don't know him, but coincidentally, Cornerstone is approaching him this week to direct my reading.

Cornerstone Theatre is sponsoring a reading of my play, "The Night They Invented Champ Egan", next month. Details forthcoming. A recent email to a friend, with a few edits, works as a teaser:

In the small town of Nova Vess, in the Eastern part of the Republic of Korvatz, the pagan traditions survived both the Nazis' brutal expansion from the West and the Russians' eventual occupation from the East. Decades later in the early 1980's, with Korvatz still under Soviet domination, the mayor of Nova Vess, a Catholic priest and former dance choreographer, was getting a little frustrated by Communist restrictions. He wanted to add all he loved to the annual pagan harvest festival, so thumbing his nose at his Communist overseers.

The traditional theme of the festival is taming the "Panna Zhenna" (untranslatable, but a "goddess" -- approximately "nonvirgin virgin") and usually she's represented by a mannikin or straw effigy. But the mayor decided, in earnest, to try using a live girl. He dressed 16-year-old Alzhbetta Klinke in bad 1980's fashions -- in spandex and a purple tunic blouse, with a big leather belt off the hips -- and tied her to a cross.

The effect was immediate -- so powerful that the festival organizers had to bring her down prematurely when a young man, driven "kisilikiki" (one of 89 Korvat words for crazy) by the nexus of symbols, ran back to his school and tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window. Fortunately very little money was coming in from the Soviet Union so the dormitory was only two floors. Broken clavicle.

The repercussions of Alzhbetta's ascent can be felt in the urban apartment of Champ Egan in mid-1990's America. Talk about a man's "visual Rolodex". He's already survived (Act One) aerobics instructor Karen Wiggenbotham, her recipe from the book "White Trash Chicken 'n Hash", and her one-of-a-kind back massage. He's about to learn why it's been said about the new woman sitting next to him: "Men would rather be killed by Alzhbetta than cured by someone else".

Three nights. Three conversations. Agitated depression. Sexual dysfunction. The drugs Alprostadil and Rohypnal. An imaginary marriage and an imaginary divorce. A seduction scene inspired by Abbott & Costello's "Who's On First" routine.

The Night They Invented Champ Egan.

"Be the man who is getting laid" is the advice of Dr. Alexander Volovich. But, for Champ -- that's not so easy.

Again, my cousin Dyula Dulvitz, an unemployed engineer, has sent me an email with a "schemata". He's trying to redesign the flag of the Korvatz Republica.

The graphic is small but I'm pretty sure that's a "thumbs up" in the middle.

Couterclockwise: A pear, Groucho Marx, a pan of sausages, and I'm pretty sure the upper right is Picasso's "Les Demoiselle d'Avignon".

On this morning's The View:

Elizabeth Hasselbeck complimented Rosie O'Donnell on her childrearing skills. All panelists agreed -- on television -- that Rosie's kids are so creative, lively, and intelligent because they don't watch television.

An ad for the new Kutchie Kutchie Costner quotes the film's own market research. (First time I've seen THAT.) It's one of the "highest scoring" films in history.

Barbara Walters believes one problem with the Pope's hate speech is the reaction in the Muslim world.

All the girls agree they should book George Clooney as soon as possible, since he's the sexiest man they know who speaks out against genocide.

I turned the TV off before Dr. Phil and his wife could walk on stage.

To get your City Of Milwaukee Class "D" Bartender's License you have to be fingerprinted.

This is an odd moment pertinized by an exchange in my play, in which a character from Eastern Europe yells at an American, "You volunteered to give your fingerprints to the government! You are the King Kong Godzilla of the naive."

I've been fingerprinted once before -- when I volunteered to work on a tutoring program in the NYC schools system. But those were paper and ink prints, buried in a NYC bureaucracy.

These are digitized.

I don't think you have to be planning a life of crime to hesitate at a moment like this.

I believe the playwright's focus is the sand castle, not the waves, so I'm operating with a strong bias against 'night, Mother, Marsha Norman's realtime suicide countdown, running this weekend and next at the Marian Center and produced by Dramatists Theatre.

The Pulitzer Prize committee in 1983 obviously saw it differently, and maybe they were seeing a different play. As much as artists might appreciate being judged on internal aesthetics, some plays are contexted and re-contexted with the passage of time -- by new works, by world events, by scientific discoveries. Romeo And Juliet may still be a love story, but it's certainly now, also, a case study in bad parenting.

In the years since audiences first met 'night Mother's Jessie Cates, a daughter looking to take control of her life by ending it, sophistication about mental hygiene has reframed the character's statements. Even a layman like me knows that "clarity" -- so prized by Jessie, and so seductive -- is a mindset not to be trusted.

If you don't know what I mean look into Tom Cruise's eyes: He's the product of an indoctrination, Scientology, which transformed the word "clear" into a global financial instrument and seduced thousands into baseline hysterics. (Give me Rosie O'Donnell any day. In a depression-related struggle, she couldn't be less acquainted with clarity. She really doesn't know how she gets through the day, and is rightly loved for that.)

Jessie is also, like Seinfeld's Kramer as he pictured sunny California, "already gone". There's never a doubt about the play's conclusion. Julie Swenson-Petras in the Jessie role, under the direction of Raeleen McMillion, accomplishes considerable stage alchemy in the service of being "already gone".

But you don't have to be a psychologist to lose sympathy for Jessie's "already gone". Her tranquility has been undermined, for example, by the pithy comments Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made to classmates on their way into Columbine High. They were "already gone". And like Jessie, they joked, even extending reprieves to friends, as they walked compulsively into the school building to lay waste to innocent lives and shackle hundreds of others with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Thanks to Harris and Klebold I chucked much of what Jessie had to say into the bargain bin with the statements of sociopaths and psychopaths.

I talked to director Raeleen McMillion this morning. Initially she rejected the offer to direct 'night, Mother, but reconsidered. She seems to agree it's a problematic artifact, though confessed she found the rehearsal experience incomparable for stimulating discussion with the small cast.

We can all make a case for our own suicide, just not so eloquently as Marsha Norman. 'night, Mother is unnerving, convincing, a kitchen table universe, one with a gravitational logic all its own, as well as a "to do" list -- how to prepare your mother, how to acquire bullets, how to rationalize around desperate protests. It has a strong annihilation agenda.

It's the kind of representation that activates "copycat suicides", (sometimes called the Werther effect after Goethe's The Sorrows Of Young Werther.) The "legitimizing" effect of one suicide on another has also been documented in the last twenty years and is still being researched. Some countries, less blindly devoted to "freedom of speech", actually now regulate the way suicides are publicized. Such caution could certainly be applied to 'night, Mother, ironically with deference to its own penetrating impact, actualized here in a high quality, small production.

Raeleen McMillion is right: it certainly stimulates thought. But under her direction, with Swenson-Petras as Jessie and Carol Zippel as Mama, the play received better than it deserved. I don't agree with Damien Jaques in this morning's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In the past twenty years it's been undermined as a human meditation.

And it left me in an odd, dual state of mind. I don't regret seeing it. I had a wonderful talk with Raeleen this morning. Still, I wouldn't see it again. And I'm glad it's having only a limited run.

Combat medics train on a simulated battlefield using the Combat Trauma Patient Simulation system at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. The simulators realistically replicate a vast array of conditions to include trauma, weapons of mass destruction, and diseases. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith

The Department of Defense has made about 300,000 images available in their DefensLINK Multimedia Gallery. I noticed there's a sprinkling of "simulated" photos throughout, among each of the Armed Services. Here's one released just last week:

Zen Koan:

A student once asked Joshu: "If I haven't anything in my mind, what shall I do?"

Joshu replied: "Throw it out."

"But if I haven't anything, how can I throw it out?" continued the questioner.

"Well," said Joshu, "then carry it out."

Groucho Koan:

"You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute 'n a huff."

- Duck Soup (1933), to Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont)

Jackie Mason's in the news again, this time for suing Jews For Jesus. I think he’s funny. My mnemonic for Jackie Mason is his routine about how Gentile men are always thinking about their next alcoholic beverage and Jewish men are always thinking about their next bite to eat. Some years ago he was attacked for saying (paraphrase):

You could get a Jewish guy to join the KKK if they served coffee and cake.

It’s difficult to capture Jackie Mason on paper but the line was really funny in his concert and just about every word in it alienated or angered somebody. Cake manufacturers didn't protest but I wouldn’t be surprised. Yet no one really had a right to be angry. The line holds up to scrutiny, saying as it does that joining the KKK is the last thing a Jewish guy would do.

I remembered this morning I’m the custodian of a joke-in-progress. Some years ago, circa 1983, my apartment-mate and college friend Eric Schwartz suggested we invent a joke together. Schwartz is Jewish and introduced me to the marvelous breakfasts integral to his faith. He's also a mensch, so when he proposed inventing a joke he was also ready to get us started. He looked at me and said:

Adolph Hitler walks into a computer store.

We improvised in many directions but in the end, we agreed we'd gotten no further than this promising beginning. I forgot about this college conversation for ten years.

Saw Loose Canon's The Merchant Of Venice again last night. My mother after we went out to dinner said "Let's drive by the theater and see if they're getting a good crowd." When we got there she said "Oh, let's just go in". She's hooked.

Seeing the same theater piece several times is always interesting. I used to do it quite a bit when I worked at The Rep.

Last night -- equally compelling. See my review a week ago. Still, a different crowd, a different theater space, a different moment. As a zen teacher said, they climbed a different mountain.

It's putting jams and jellies inside that shows your mettle.

I add more batter.


Talk to the people.

Then I flip 'em around and brown 'em. Tool of choice: Thin antique wire fork. (Toothpick doesn't work for me.)

I go with the spongy recipe with the beaten egg whites. I might have a smaller pan because a whole teaspoon of jam is too much.

Blogging the Æbleskiver:

My Workshop: Aebleskiver Pan!!
Bakingsheet: Sunday Brunch: Aebleskiver
Culinary Adventures: Aebleskivers