Comments on CRT production of Fairview

 

Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury is the 2019 winner of the Pulitizer Prize for drama.  It is a play that starts out like “The Jeffersons” and then morphs into a page from “Marat-Sade.” To be more specific we begin with a black family preparing a birthday dinner for Mama. The mood is light, music is playing, dancing is going on.  Then the lights go zap and the young daughter of the family steps out of the scene and addresses the audience with some serious concerns.  As all of the preceding action begins to move backward in time, two white folks appear at the picture window that dominates the back of the set. They peer in and as they watch they begin a dialogue about race and privilege. Their observations become more intrusive as they literally move in and out of the house through sliding cubby doors covered by pictures. Throughout the remainder of the show the judgements get harsher, the stereotypes bolder, the volume louder, and the string of four-letter words more frequent.  To go beyond this is to become a spoiler for the emotionally charged ending that comes right out of the 1970’s and 80’s when “make the audience feel attacked” was the avant-garde finish of choice.    

Fairview is a wonderfully rich title.  It might just be a nice name for a middle-class suburb for whites and upwardly mobile blacks.  But is it “fair” for whites to continue to watch, pressure, and judge African Americans over the long haul of history? What has been the cost and for whom and to whom? Keisha, the young daughter, clearly wants more than she can get from her bizarre family. She feels suffocated in her current environment and pleads in her final monologue, “Will I ever be free?” This put me thinking about other famous dramatic exits and how long they continue to echo or be re-interpreted. I find myself now somewhere between the slamming of the door in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and the end of Waiting for Godot when once again the long-awaited savior does not appear.   

Mr. Boseman, the director, has a long list of credits and I can only wonder why he keeps his actors looking to the front so much when he is operating in this tiny three-quarter round space.  His positioning left audience members in the far corners not able to see the face of or hear some critical lines from both Keisha and Suze. The costumes were delightful, but you’ll have to see the show to find out why the prop department had the toughest role.   

 

 

Book Review: The Proof of the Pudding by Rhys Bowen

 

The Proof of the Pudding is the 17^th book in the Lady Georgie mystery series written by prolific authoress Rhys Bowen.  It is a perfect choice when you are looking for something frothy and funny. Lady Georgiana Rannoch and her husband Darcy are two cash strapped royals in the 1930’s. Her Ladyship is a long way down the succession ladder, but royal she is and that does give her a cachet, a bunch of relatives, and a lot of wannabe friends. 

Georgie is now expecting her first child and the couple is living in a country house belonging to her Godfather. A klutzy servant called Queenie is doing what passes for the cooking, but her husband thinks they need a decent chef and she finally decides to hire a French waiter she met in a Parisian Café. His cooking turns out to be so impressive that a neighboring author who dresses like Dracula and lives in a ghastly old mansion hires him out to cook for a special dinner party he is giving. The highlight of the party is a tour of the author’s garden of poisonous plants.  You can guess where that leads. Although the dinner goes well, some of the guests start to feel unwell after they depart and when one of them expires, a police investigation points to the new French cook.

For added spice the guest list at the party just happens to include the mystery writer Agatha Christie and her husband and the young Laurence Olivier and his first wife Jill Edmonds. Given that Mrs. Christie is already a recognized authority on poisons, the two women team up to help solve the case.

Bowen writes with the accurate air of someone born to the Brit gentry and her gentle satire is present throughout the book. Take this description of one of the characters.  His accent was “so frightfully clipped and posh it makes the royal family sound like barrow boys.”  You also need not worry about recommending Bowen’s work to just about anybody. The most vociferous language used is in phrases like  “Oh Golly” or “How jolly.”  What more is there to say?  It is a sentimental and funny mystery by an accomplished author set in the colorful world of Downton Abbey and Noel Coward.   

A good solid four out of five.       

Sometimes You Just Gotta Brag!

 

BOUNDARY WATERS by William Kent Krueger

 

I found this gem in paperback at a used book sale.  It was originally published in 1999 and was the third in a now lengthy series of Cork O’Connor mysteries. Though the arrival of GPS and DNA testing invalidated two of the issues in this novel, the plot, the boundary waters setting, and the characters continue to ring true.     

O’Connor, as we meet him here, is a former county sheriff with a checkered matrimonial past living in the small northern Minnesota town of Aurora. He is drawn into the search for a young and famous pop western singer named Shiloh, who has gone missing in the Quetico-Superior Wilderness. The singer’s mother was a Native American who left town years before to find her future on the west coast.  She was subsequently brutally murdered ten years before the story opens and now the daughter, whose parentage is complicated, has returned to a solitary cabin in the deep woods and may possess memories that could solve the old murder.  O’Connor is hired to join a party of searchers composed of FBI agents, an older man who claims to be the girl’s father, and a local native American and his son.  They in turn are being tracked by a mysterious and cruel assassin. Shiloh, the part native American singer, who is the object of the search has luscious long black hair and Krueger's descriptions of her reminded me of a young Joan Baez.

There ensues a series of cat and mouse games on the remote forest trails and lakes punctuated by killings, narrow escapes, fascinating uses of native survival techniques, and a continued revealing of the complicated backstory that has plunged all of the characters into a “Deliverance” style adventure minus the banjo music.   

Krueger’s descriptions of the natural beauty, the climate, and the dangers of the boundary waters are first rate. His integration of these elements into the lives of the participants and the legends of the First Peoples who settled this area reveals both deep research and great compassion for native Americans.   

 The First People inhabitants bring with them the glorious voice of the Old Ways while emphasizing how the re-telling of those stories can merge the past and the future into a unified myth of survival. The ending ties up the threads but leaves more than enough on the spool to inhabit the several more Cork OConnor adventures that have come after this one.  The only caution I would have is that Krueger  writes out of the hard-hitting Mickey Spillane/Mike Hammer tradition and if you find physical and gun  violence disturbing, you may want to take a pass.    

I still give it a 4 out of 5  

      

Short Review Death of a Spy by M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green

 

Death of a Spy by M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green

Snuggle up by the fire with a glass of good single malt and check out the most recent Hamish Macbeth murder mystery.  The Scottish background is enticing and the pairing of an American agent named Bland with good old Macbeth can’t be beat. These are short books and there are almost twenty of them. Hamish Macbeth is the main sleuth and though he is often funny and a perfect boob with the women in his life, he is a shrewd investigator.  Another plus is that you can polish off one of these good-humored novellas in an evening.

Though Macbeth’s home base is a fictional northern Scottish town, the places he visits are often real. In this outing Macbeth and his visiting CIA sidekick are looking to put a long running Russian spy ring to rest and that means finding the mole who is trying to eliminate all the rest of the players in the cell he created. Along the way you roam the landscapes and lochs of Scotland and find excitement from flooding rivers, wild pub brawls, and a high stakes conclusion in the middle of a British Military Firing Range.

Beaton and Green are aiming for escapist entertainment and they clear that bar easily. I’d recommend having one or two of their yarns on your library shelf just waiting for those days when all you want to do is kick back.  

 

Book Review of The Exchange by John Grisham

 

I recall reading and enjoying John Grisham’s THE FIRM (and the movie made from it) a long time ago. When I saw that The Exchange was a story of Mitch and Abby McDeere fifteen years after their youthful adventures with the Bendini firm, I was eager to find a copy of it.  I found out that Mitch was now a partner in a major international law firm based in New York City and his wife was editing and publishing cookbooks. They had a fancy apartment overlooking the park and two sons in a selective private school. For all the world they were Mr. and Mrs. Successful in the rarified world of high-level Wall Street lawyers.

I was pleased with the couple’s success, but still feel you may want to exchange The Exchange for some other title.  It has a tired overused central plot that cannot make the wonder world of mucho-money and international intrigue seem enticing.  For the record a mysterious cabal of terrorists kidnap a young lawyer from Mitch’s firm and demand an outrageous ransom or they will kill their hostage. After 200 pages of private jet travel, splashy hotels, fancy meals at Michelin starred restaurants, chauffeured black limos, and committee meetings with stuffy partners who appear only marginally less venal than the villains, the dough is raised and the bad guys are paid off. We never know who they were and what they were really angling for. Maybe that’s the point—the rot is everywhere. I remain perplexed that all that money and access can’t manage to find out anything about a group that can seemingly track countless highly personal details and blow up things in cities around the world without leaving a trace. The hostage is kept in a series of hovels and caves in the remote Libyan Sahara and yet can be miraculously delivered alive and spiffed up to the Cayman Islands a day after the ransom is paid.  The cracks in the plot are wider than the Grand Canyon. I wish it were not so, but this is not Grisham at his best.         

Quick Review of a Loser

 

Dorment, Richard.  Warhol After Warhol

I picked this up on a whim as it looked like I might learn a bit more about Andy Warhol and the modern day art market.  Although the jacket promised an exciting read full of action and miscreants, I found it started to get tedious quickly.  The prose plods, the constant meetings, texts, and restaurant tete a tetes with moneyed dolts and venal Warhol executives left me with a bad taste for artists who phone in their work, the critics who are eager to exploit it,  and the people who have too much money who buy it.  If you should see it on a library shelf, leave it there.   

 

A review of FROM A FAR AND LOVELY COUNTRY by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Andrew McCall Smith is up to his old tricks again with this, his twenty fourth, No 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel.  All of the familiar characters are present from Mma Ramotswe to Grace Makutsi, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and Mma Potokwane. The arch villain Violet Sephotho does not appear, but still has a prominent function in the plot. With a deftness that comes from long experience, McCall Smith sets up a series of life’s problems and then ties them together in a satisfying conclusion that once again bespeaks the need of human beings for love and forgiveness.

The first problem is that several important people seem to have forgotten Mma Ramotwse’s birthday.  A more serious one emerges when the daughter of one of Mme Potokwane’s house mothers is victimized at a local singles club. A third complication and the title reference comes in the form of an American woman who arrives in Botswana to find, in Alex Haley fashion, her lost uncle’s African roots.

Along the way McCall Smith continues to sprinkle nuggets of wisdom like cherries on an ice cream sundae. I loved the humor when J.L.B. Matekoni went on an extended metaphor linking types of chocolate to the varying viscosities of motor oil. On a more serious note comes an observation about the nature of home. “We all have somewhere that we think of as our place-and that place stays with you, I think, all the way through your life.  We all have history in our veins.”  When things get really serious, Mma Ramotswe puts things back into balance by observing that lamenting and blaming wastes the time that might be better used to find solutions or at least minimize the damage. “There are always going to be problems”, she says.  “They are a natural background to human affairs.” 

Nearing the end, Mma Makutsi laments that there are just too many “extra low-grade people in the world” and McCall Smith has Mma Ramotswe agree that there are “many people indifferent to the feelings and interests of others, who behave with nastiness and selfishness, and who simply do not care about the effect of their actions.” She goes on to admit that these people are often “. . . conspicuously successful. They even get into high office, sometimes even the highest of all offices, and while they were there continued to lie and cheat in the way that they had always lied and cheated.”  I don’t normally think of McCall Smith as a political writer, but it’s hard not to see a contemporary politician who might fit to a tee that description.

The ending remains as usual, upbeat. There can be no life without trust and without trust no real friendships. When you have found your special friends, you have indeed found your home.

    afrika

          africa  africa           

     africa  africa  africa

                                                                      africa  Africa

                                                                            africa

               I give this a solid 4.5 of 5                                            

Review of ARTHUR COLLINS RADIO WIZARD by Ben Stern

 

ArtthurCollins Radio Wizard by Ben W Sterns

Ben Sterns worked as a public relations executive for Collins Radio for fifteen years and he has assembled here an exhaustive coverage of the life of Arthur Collins and the development of his company.  Collins Radio began as provider of ham radio equipment and before it was sold to Rockwell International it had become a giant in the world of electronic storage and communication.  Art Collins did not invent the concept of communication by wire or through the air, but by the end of his life in 1977, he was recognized world over as belonging right up with Guglielmo Marconi, as  one its major developers.   

Stern’s book is not a mass market tour of the career of a famous businessman. It logs the company’s operations minutely right down to technical details and product serial numbers.  A general reader will not be excited by a lot of this, but do not let that scare you off.  The story of the man behind this technical curtain proves that he was indeed a wizard.  

Collins was born in 1909 and by the 1920’s was already fiddling with crystal sets in the attic of his parent’s home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was there he started his first ham radio business and it didn’t take him long to outgrow manufacturing his units in the family’s basement. By 1933-34 he had a rented location in town. His name was already becoming a byword in the industry because his transmission equipment was on board and functioning when Admiral Richard Byrd embarked on his Antarctic expedition.  Over the next years Collins Radio built a reputation for providing high quality products that could perform even under the most challenging of conditions.

One thing that comes through in the book is that Art Collins was a driven man. He was devoted above all to experiment, improvement, and ultimately perfection in every product he made and sold. To that end he hired talented employees and expected them to be as driven as he was. No executive stayed long at Collins if they could not become accustomed to being called on a Sunday morning or in the middle of the night to report for work in the lab or to have a committee meeting. The only piece of humor about him cited in the entire book was from 1950. He was asked by a reporter “How many people you got working for you now?”  Art’s answer, “About half of them.”

WWII provided the juice that moved Collins out of the ham radio niche and into the world of large government contracts. The war needed airplanes and those planes needed to be able to communicate privately with each other and to their bases on the ground. Collins literally invented the radios that could do that and by war’s end his company was a world leader in aviation electronics. An interesting sidelight to this was that the assembly lines in Cedar Rapids that produced his equipment during the war years were held together by women—many from Iowa’s Amana Colonies. Arthur discovered that with smaller fingers and skills in fine sewing work the women could do accurate electronic assembly jobs better than men. Civilian air traffic mushroomed after the war and Collins equipment anchored the construction of the nation’s air traffic control system and by the early sixties it was the largest supplier of aviation electronics in the world.

Never resting on his laurels, Art Collins piggybacked next on the discovery of solar radio waves and radio-astronomy. His company designed, built, and installed massive receiving dishes for astronomical research and long-range communication all over the world. He also managed to revolutionize marine navigation by inventing something called the radio-sextant that made it possible for ships and even nuclear submarines to know their exact position even when no sky was visible or the sub was underwater. This was one of the key elements in our entire defense posture as it enabled nuclear submarines to stay underwater for extended time periods without ever re-surfacing and thus being almost impossible to track.

The continuation of major government contracts continued on into 1970’s with Collins Radio building facilities in Texas and California as well as Cedar Rapids, IA. (where the company was now the city’s largest employer.)  NASA’s space program was heating up and Collins engineers supplied the audio and video transmission equipment for the Apollo program that culminated in live pictures from the surface of the moon. With the Space Program’s success assured, Collins leaped ahead to work on high-speed computers and network communication. He began pouring large sums of money into research in this area, but unfortunately profitability dropped as the research bills skyrocketed.  Other entities saw weakness and began to make buyout and merger offers. Art’s vision was accurate, but too far ahead of its time.  With his health deteriorating and the business under stress, he was finally edged out of the president’s chair and the company was folded into a new consortium. Happily, they did keep the Collins name alive and the signs now say Rockwell Collins Aerospace.

As noted in my introduction, this book contains considerable amounts of names of many executives and engineering researchers as well as details of products that are somewhat technical in nature. This slowed me down, but will not hamper a reader who has a more advanced technical background. It does not obscure in any way the fact that Art Collins built a multi-million dollar company that had a major impact on the nation’s military capabilities, helped put the country on the moon, impacted the computer age, and brought the joy of clear, long-range radio communication to the masses. He was indeed a wizard.

I give it a 4 out of 5.

 

Reviewing Cassidy Hutchinson's Enough

 

Enough by Cassidy Hutchinson

There is a difficulty in writing an autobiography about your own heroism. It is hard to escape the occasional pitfall of self-congratulation. It is also hard to eliminate extraneous mundane detail, like the bagel flavor you like best or your preferred fizzy water. I presume these details are added to emphasize her ordinariness, but it is hard to forget this was someone who managed to be stationed a few paces from the office of the president of the United States.

Hutchinson lists no ghost writer to help her develop a personal style and color and her narrative, while interesting for its closeness to power, tends to be a bit flat especially in the early stages. There is a lot of “and this happened and then that happened.” The prose is clear, but falters in its physical descriptions and her sense of her own motives and of the people around her.    

Although she did indicate that Rudy Guiliani pawed her and Matt Gatz was consistently trying his luck, she does not draw any connections to the toxic male sexual world she was living in and her own experience with an absentee father. She spent a good deal of her early life trying to re-establish real content with this man and at a critical point went to his home, discovered it empty, with no forwarding address. Shortly after that she began her years of trying to ease and organize the lives of two more power hungry and heartless men—Donald Trump and Mark Meadows.

It is not until we get to the story of her subpoenas and her various public and private testimony sessions that the book becomes more compelling. It is not until the end of Chapter Ten that she records her first sense of something rotten in the Trumpian dream world. The president suggests light highlights in her hair would suit her better.  He compliments her after she tries it and she accepts his praise. Shortly after that, she does note that she decided to quietly return “to the dark side.”  I would have loved more comment on the significance of that mention.

A bit further on, her immediate boss, Mark Meadows, asks her if she would take a bullet for the president. She answers jokingly—"only in the leg”. As they continue walking down the hall, she says that she asked Meadows the same question. He replied, “I would do anything to get him re-elected.”  And thereby hangs the crook of the book and all the multiple sycophants who would do anything to stay on the right side of their cultish and never a loser leader.

Her turnaround gains steam when she begins to hear that some of Trump's enablers are starting to fish for pardons. On January 6^th she reports that the president wanted to let armed people into the rally location, then voices a willingness to let his Vice President be hung, and then tries vainly to get the secret service to take him to the riot he created. Finally, after waiting and watching on TV for more than two hours and rejecting appeals to intercede, she labels Trump's appeal for the rioters to go home as half hearted. 

Her final decision is made as she reads Bob Woodward’s book Last of the President’s Men. This was the story of Alexander Butterfield, who exposed the taping system in the White House, that set up the demise of Richard Nixon. Butterfield’s example, she said, gave her the backbone to adjust her earlier testimony and go on to answer all questions fully and truthfully.

There are certainly some choice tidbits in this book, but you can skim through a lot of it. It remains for me a sad story of a very young woman thrust into the cynical center of political power. She is under great stress and is compelled to please. Then, at a major turning point, she does manage to become one of the few in the Trumpian inner circle to find and use a moral compass.    

I give the book a 3 out of 5.

 

Review of SOMETHING ROTTEN AT Theatre Cedar Rapids

Something Rotten is the kind of show that you cannot take seriously.  You must let it roll, laugh lots, cringe occasionally, and then just enjoy. There is nothing smelly at all about this jiving jumping musical now on view at Theatre Cedar Rapids. It is not the first or the only musical take off on the Bard, but it does rock. Your best introduction to seeing this show is a neat You Tube cut of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” from  Kiss Me Kate.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIpp2Jj8AQ) You can then ease into this show's plot that follows the creation of the greatest play of all time—Omelette. Just remember you can't make anything happen unless you break a few eggs. 

Nick Bottom, Shakespeare’s proverbial jackass, has a brother who wants to be a poet and needs a big hit to bring success against the competition from that cool dude, the bard himself. Bottom consults a soothsayer and discovers that all he needs to do is cut the tragedy out of Romeo and Juliet and add music and dancing. Then you get a good Puritan villain and you are all set.

While keeping an Elizabethan flavor, Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick manage to give homage to the sound or name of almost every musical ever written. There are snippets of theme music, the mention of plots, the names of characters, the titles of blockbusters, and even signature dance motifs from tap dancing to the traditional chorus line from surprise! surprise! Chorus Line.  

The lighting is flashy, the costumes including a bunch of false beards and breakaways, are wildly colorful, and the scenery wagons roll on and off efficiently propelled by costumed stage personnel. Not a second is wasted. The bouncy score was too loud for my tastes, but it had the younger set rising up and shouting. Technically, the production was led by magnificent and energetic choreography. Megan Helmers is credited, but I could find nothing in the program about her background. It is obviously superlative and the hoofing in several styles shows that the Cedar Rapids area has a large well of dance talent. The only thing missing was a “dream ballet.”    

Kudos also goes to director Matt Hagmeier Curtis who clearly knows how to put a large cast, with no glaring weak spots, through its paces.  Calvin Bowman, decked out in leather pants and long sideburns is cool to the core and like his namesake a master of disguise. Brandon Burkhardt, who I loved as the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz, puts in another stellar performance as Nick Bottom. Katelyn Halverson looks the part of Portia all the way, but I felt was a victim of the amplification system. Her voice seemed to come off as unnecessarily shrill through the speakers. One can only wish that modern actors could carry the day better without artificial amping up of their voices in order to survive above the electronics of the score.

The fast-talking character work of Greg Smith as Nostradamus and Aaron Pozdol as Shylock were also victimized somewhat by the amplification. They talked fast and loud, but the articulation didn't seem crisp enough--though I am first to admit that my hearing is not what it used to be.     

Then there is the ending. The Omellette number is hard to top for pzazz of the first order and that leaves the Finale a tad soft. My suggestion for a final visual that might put a better exclamation point on the show would be a new drop or projection of the "new world" New York harbor with the Statue of Liberty standing tall. The core idea of the show is the American invention of the musical as a popular genre and where was that done?  In New York on Broadway, of course. So, let's cross fade out of Mr. Visscher's view of the Thames in 17th century London to the real new world. This is just something for Matt to think about if he has the chance to do this show again.

Congrats to the entire company.  It was a blast.   Jim De Young 2/20/24

 

Review of The Which of Shakespeare’s Why by Leigh Light

The Which of Shakespeare’s Why is a comic take on the historic Shakespeare authorship quest. It has a play within a novel, good and bad puns, some overblown characters, and an Artificial Intelligence sub-plot that is torn right out of the interests of today’s tech startups. Right off the bat the author’s name, Leigh Light, would appear to be an androgenous “nom de plume” and the cast of characters includes an abundance of aliases and some cross dressing. All of this suggests that at least part of the spoof is aimed at Shakespeare’s plays regardless of who wrote them.

The main character, Harry Haines, is a frustrated aspiring actor who is cast as Hamlet in the initial production of a new New Jersey repertory company.  Just before rehearsals get under way, the major angel runs off with his mistress and takes his money with him. Faced with financial disaster even before the first production, Lance, the ever-resourceful director, tries to save the day by recruiting the also wealthy jilted wife of the first money machine. This woman will turn the cash faucet back on if there is benefit for her technology company and a part in the first production. Lance offers the role of role of Queen Elizabeth in the play.  

“Wait a minute” you might say.  “Queen Elizabeth the first, or the second for that matter, is not in Hamlet.”  This confusion may be based on the fact that the Queen was seen as attending a play at the Globe in that cuddly romantic fiction movie titled “Shakespeare In Love”. Dame Judi Dench even won an award for it. Whatever!  To accommodate the new money fountain, a re-write of the bard’s script is necessary. Harry, our lead in Hamlet, for some inexplicable reason, is hired to do the job. He is given the name of Mr. Bottom. Get it!  After which he is plopped in a fancy hotel suite overlooking Central Park and given a pile of money to write a new Shakespearean masterpiece called “The Which of Shakespeare’s Why.” This includes a role for Queen Elizabeth and a slew of other Shakespeare characters like Lear’s daughters, who just happen to saunter by.

 Another requirement is to highlight the 14^th Earl of Oxford. This nobleman will be revealed at the opening, which takes place at New York’s famous Radio City Music Hall, as the author of all the plays now attributed to William Shakespeare. There is a good scene when Harry/Bottom has a drunken conversation with Will’s statue in Central Park, but the long passages that discuss the work of Stratfordian Shakespeare scholars will probably leave most readers cold. You may also find some of the strange druggy sentence structure hard to decipher. The Radio City Rockettes in sequined panties playing some of King Lear’s daughters give us some sex, but the characters created by Mr. or Ms. Light mainly end up having less weight than Shakespeare’s. Even with a pretty good surprise ending, this was still a slog.  

I give it 2.5 stars

What My Mother Told Me or How I Almost Failed Kindergarten

 

I am trying to write up little pieces of memories that will be incorporated in a fuller biography at some point. I did this one for our writing group this past week. 

Not too long ago, I read a brief essay by Robert Reich that told of his expulsion from his day care center when he was a small boy.  Young Bob had refused to eat another tasteless lunch prepared by the dragon-lady proprietor of the school and she had cashiered him out and sent him back to his parents with the dire warning that he was a petulant smart-ass and would never amount to anything. Granted that poor Oliver Twist had wanted a bit more gruel, but the Dickensian echoes do remain.  

Child nursery school behavior has also come up in the PBS Doc Marten series. I remember an episode where the Marten’s young son and only child, James, attracted teacher and parental concern when he did not appear to mix easily with the other children.  This James, like young Bob, was small in stature, but was basically shy rather than outspoken.

All of which leads me into one of my own early confrontations in the educational realm. This story was told to me by my mother a number of times when I was growing up and was the result of my still active penchant not to suffer fools gladly.  In the 1940’s the Milwaukee school system gave a competence test to all kindergarteners before promoting them to first grade. I suspect it involved such things as taking simple words or pictures and putting them into categories or crossing out things that did not belong in a group.  It was a late spring afternoon in  1943 that my mother said she received an urgent and concerned message from my kindergarten teacher and could she please come to the school for a conference at her earliest convenience. 

She diligently turned up the next day right after school with me in tow. The teacher, whose name was Miss Van Raalte, was probably around twenty-five and single although I no doubt thought she was a grouchy old maid. No matter. My mother said she was told that I had refused to complete the required promotion test and would be kept back in kindergarten for another semester if I did not pass it. Not only had I refused to do the required test, I had loudly asserted that I had done all of those exercises before and it was stupid to keep doing them over and over again.

Luckily, I had done what I was supposed to do on one account. I had been instructed to take all my work home to show my parents and I had done that.  My mother brought the papers with her to the meeting and was able to remind Miss Van Raalte that I had indeed not only completed all the various practices for the test, but had gotten lots of good-work stars affixed to the papers. A serious discussion and stern warnings  by both teacher and parent ensued. Both of them insisted that being a student and doing well in practices was never going to be a substitute for passing a required test. At this point, I was apparently convinced of my error and rapidly filled in the appropriate answers on the blank test sheet displayed by my teacher. Come the fall I was happily ensconced in a first-grade classroom and for the record can say that I have managed tests and promotions pretty well ever since.  

Dr. Jim De Young, PhD  2/3/2024  

Sherlock Holmes Returns

 

For total escape reading,  let me recommend the Sherlock Holmes knock-off series by Anna Elliot and Charles Velsey.  I have read two of them (The Last Moriarty and The Jubilee Problem) and there appear to be oodles more. They are quick reads, suitably entertaining, engrossingly faithful to the atmosphere of Victorian London, and many appear to be available on Kindle Unlimited free of charge.

The set-up is that the young Sherlock had an affair with a well-known concert violinist and the relationship produced a daughter named Lucy.  She has been educated by her mother in America, on the continent, and in England, but has been kept in the dark about her parentage until the present. When she discovers her true father while working as a singer in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with the D’oyly Carte Opera Company, she manages to join Sherlock and Watson in the solving of new cases. She has Holmes’ hyper deductive mind, a young person’s devil-may-care attitude toward personal safety, and a thorough familiarity with physical combat. If she lays a kick in the chops on an attacker, they go down for the count.  

In The Last Moriarty members of the now dispatched great villain’s family return to do battle with Holmes and the British government. In The Jubilee Problem a bomb threat on Queen Victoria during her great Jubilee celebration nearly brings the empire to its knees.  When I want more easy-going fun mysteries set nicely in Victorian London, I will return to books in this series.  ***  

How are you at meeting US presidents?

The Name of the Game is Fame

 I think of myself as a fairly ordinary yet lucky individual. I had two loving parents who were hard workers and made it a point to help me get the kind of education they never had access to. I got that education and was able to parlay it into a career as a Professor of Communications and Theatre Arts in a small mid-western town. My wife and I raised our family there and we were residents for over fifty years.

 

Since most of what happened in those fifty years is pretty hum-drum, I am going to take the liberty today to tell you about how I happened to have been able to see in person three United States presidents in those fifty years. Now there was nothing buddy-buddy or intimate about those encounters, but in two of the three cases I was close enough to get a handshake and a short conversation.   

 

I don’t know if my experiences are in the realm of a normal percentage or something unusual for the average citizen of a small town. What I can tell you is that Jeff Rankin, a local historian, friend, and a long-time neighbor of ours, wrote an article in 2021 that appeared in our local newspaper. It reported that our tiny town had had visits from at least eight men who would become, were serving, or had been U.S. Presidents.  

 

Rankin wrote that the first recorded presidential visit to Monmouth was that of Abraham Lincoln. He visited as a circuit lawyer in 1834 and again in 1858 when he was running for an Illinois Senate seat. In 1858 he gave a speech, had his photograph taken, and stayed overnight. The following day he traveled the 13 miles to Galesburg, IL where he took part in a debate against a man named Stephen A. Douglas, who was his opponent in the race.  President James Garfield visited in 1861 long before he was president and Ulysses Grant in 1879 after his term had expired. The only visit by a sitting president came when William McKinley came to town in 1898.

 

This was followed by a long dry spell that was broken by Gerald Ford, who at the time of his visit was the Republican minority leader of Congress not a vice president or a president. He spoke at Monmouth College on Valentine’s Day in 1964. I was in my first year of employment at the college and am sorry to say that I have no recollection of his visit so I will not count it as one of my presidential contacts.

 

In 1976 Ronald Reagan was the next to visit and he became the first soon-to-be president I had ever met. He was really no stranger to the town since his family had lived in Monmouth from 1918 to 1919 and he had attended both first and second grade at a local school. His return in 1976 was during his campaign for president and I do remember that visit well. His advance team actually produced his old first grade teacher and had her sitting in the front row to be introduced during his speech. I was one of the volunteers who helped prepare the college gymnasium for his visit. We helped set up chairs, hang placards and flags, and pass out programs. According to Jeff Rankin’s article, there were over 2000 people in attendance and I can attest that the place was packed right up to the rafters. Like the consummate politician that he was, Reagan made sure that he pressed the flesh of all of the helpers backstage. It was a quick shake and a word or two and we had no idea whether he would win the election or not. Even though I was already a Democrat,  it was still quite a thrill. Many years later, when I was the Director of Acquisitions  for our county historical museum, I helped to collect and catalog the available President Reagan materials for future exhibits.

 

My second presidential meeting was not with a president-to-be, but with a former president. On Mother’s Day in the year 2000, George Herbert Walker Bush was gave the commencement address and received an honorary degree from  Monmouth College. By that time, I was a tenured full professor and occupied a spot rather high up in the marching order. Ex-President Bush was in the platform group just ahead of me and as we were all gathering on the sidewalk waiting to process in and take our seats, he made a point of walking back to talk to several of us and shake our hands. Bush had two Secret Service bodyguards with him. They had donned academic caps and gowns just like all the rest of us, but did stay pretty much in the background. The following morning Mr. Bush, who had stayed overnight at our president’s home, went out to the local golf course and played a round. I didn’t get to join that group, but a nice picture of him with our pro still hangs in the clubhouse at Gibson Woods. 

 

My final presidential encounter was also with a future president. On a warm late July afternoon in 2004, shortly after his impressive keynote address at the Democratic Convention, a young Illinois state senator was scheduled to make a short speech at Monmouth College. He was in the midst of a grueling thirty-nine city tour in pursuit of one of Illinois’ U.S. Senate seats. His talk was originally scheduled for a small second floor room at the college, but the crowd got so big that it had to be moved to the college chapel.  It was there that the audience, including me, was enthralled by his short address. I don’t think I need to remind you that Barack Obama won that Senate seat and then in 2008 made his lasting mark with a successful run for the presidency. I didn’t have any personal contact with him and I don’t remember if Michelle was there, but the now famous Obama smile was on full view along with his oratorical skill. I felt as though he was speaking just to me even though I was only a small part of a large crowd.  I proudly voted for him in 2008 and again in 2012.   

 

There you have it. An ordinary American in a small town in the USA was able to have short but close contact with three American presidents. I consider that pretty lucky and am grateful for it. I’d love to hear about your experiences in seeing or meeting any of our presidents or even other famous people. 

 

Jim De Young  1/11/2024      

 

FOLLOWING CAESAR book review

 

I recently had the opportunity to read Following Caesar, in an advance publisher’s copy before its formal release in December of 2023. The book covers an extended trip through Italy and the Adriatic by a reporter who loves Italy, Roman history, and the magnificent roads the Romans built to make and administer one of the largest empires ever created.

 

Keahey’s modis operendi was to rent a car and drive the routes of three great Roman highways—The Via Appia, the Via Traiana, and the Via Egnatia. As he proceeds along the modern roads that sometimes mirror, sometimes parallel, and occasionally deviate from the ancient ones, he enlists the aid of local guides to help him locate now exposed sections of the ancient byways. At many of his stops he merely sits and contemplates the grandeur and historic importance of past. You get the bloody stories of Julius Ceasar, Mark Antony, Brutus, Octavius, Cicero, Hannibal, Hoarce, Virgil and other not so notables who marched along on the carefully groomed ancient stones and made history with their footfalls.

 

This is not a dry academic treatise. Keahey dispenses with footnotes and keeps the style unassuming and down to earth. He concentrates as much on the current sights, the food, and the morning coffee he consumes en route as he does on the history. My guess is that if you have traveled in Italy or studied at least a bit of classical history, you will enjoy his travel journal more.  Even if your knowledge of Julius Caesar is confined to “Beware, the Ides of March” you may still find some pleasure in this short and easy read.