I just wrote a petition for campaign reform to eliminate private (and corporate) funding from the political process. It’s at the whitehouse.gov website, see the link below. It would be great to get 5000 signatures on this in a month; that means they will take action on it. Sign and share if you can! Thanks!
Post from class
Showing students how to post on wordpress.
24 Buyer Outs
My ebook is ready for you to use! Download it at www.villagescribes.com for $9.99. Make sure you download it to the device/computer where you want to read it, as it can’t be copied or printed once downloaded. Please let me know what you think!
Trying out hootsuite to aggregate all my
Trying out hootsuite to aggregate all my social media at once. Test…test…test
Truth about Teaching
Since I am about to publish a book on the subject of teaching today, I couldn’t wait to see and review this play!
“You must teach values!”
“How? Where is the curriculum you want me to use?”
“Values are taught by your actions!”
Dead White Males: A Year in the Trenches of Teaching addresses many of the problems with education, in a very creative set and with superb actors. The production is tight, energy-driven, cast perfectly. The description online makes one think it will be a comedy of errors, with teachers certified to teach each others’ subjects instead of what they are teaching. It definitely has funny parts–I laughed out loud–but it also has a dark side. I don’t think I’m being a spoiler to tell you a true story about teaching in public schools today can’t end very well.
Teachers straining to remain in love with teaching, buckling under pressure to teach history and science lessons chosen by right-wing fundamentalists, hyper-evaluated by administrators and school board members—all ready to throw the first stone since they are safe. As a former teacher, I can testify: there was nothing made up about this play.
First tidbit from mentor teacher to shiny new teacher: When all else fails, lower your expectations. Second tidbit: Cover your ass. Oh, yeah.
Please see this play, but please send a link about it to all of the teachers you know. They will enjoy it, in a “Right on!” kind of way. And a special date would be September 10, the final production, when the playwright William Missouri Downs will be visiting and host a ‘talk-back’ after the production.
Special acting shoutout for Molly Fonseca and Dennis Kelleher Bailey, and director Derek Kolluri for great pacing and staging/design.
Production: Sustainable Theatre Project @ The Hideout Theatre, 617 Congress.
Orthodontia
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I am convinced that had I not had the meddlesome and gigantic fingers of one Dr. Blackwood in my mouth at the age of 13, my face would work better today, including lusher lips. Judging from my sons’ faces, lips like Angelina Jolie.
At my age, lip lushness is an issue. Why is it that lips get narrower and narrower with age? Why can’t they be like ears and noses that continue to grow throughout our lives? I’ve even heard that those appendages continue for a while after death, although I can’t imagine who is circulating that rumor, nor how they would be checking its veracity.
When I was 12, my mother was told that I had an overbite that rivaled a rabbit, but looking at my front teeth now I can’t imagine it. Who told her? Our dentist, who lived in our neighborhood and ran off and left his wife and children for his hygienist. His name was Dr. Swindle, if you can believe that. Who would truck with someone who was named Swindle? His wife should have seen it coming. Probably made part of the $2000 proposition, the cost of braces, at that time. $2000 in the 60s!! And you can be sure that it was intimated that the parent must not really love their child if they weren’t willing to spend it.
Upon stern recommendation that I obviously had too many teeth for my mouth, four permanent teeth, the 4th away from center on top and bottom in both directions, were pulled and the rest yanked back using an ever-tightening wire attached to each tooth by running it through a track that protruded from bands attached with cement around each tooth. Hurt? Lord, yes! But not enough. We had to increase the speed with which we pulled those teeth from their rightful places by using rubber bands for constantly increasing pressure. Tiny rubber bands that would not even encircle your pinkie, were attached to a tooth’s track assembly on the sides of your upper teeth, and then anchored to a similar assembly on the bottom teeth an inch or two further back in your mouth. The resulting tension was STILL NOT ENOUGH!! I also had a “mouth-bow”. This was an apparatus (I use this term with the full knowledge that it is only the first of two apparati I have had inserted into my body, the second being a gynecologist’s speculum, duration about 2 minutes) (Don’t try this at home.) that I used nightly. All night. Every night. My braces had small metal tubes on the offending upper side teeth. This bow-shaped apparatus fit into those metal tubes inside my mouth, had a parallel bow outside my mouth attached to an wide elastic strap with Velcro closures running around the back of my head. It was padded, thank you! Don’t want to create pain! The pressure this monstrosity created was like having a fish hook with tension on it attached to a finger or toe nail 24/7.
After all this are my teeth straight? Yes they are, but my tongue has never fit in my mouth. When I close my teeth, my tongue is further back in my throat than feels normal. If my tongue is relaxed, it is between my upper and lower teeth. I’ve gotten used to it, of course, but it just goes to show, don’t fool with Mother Nature. Was it a good thing? Probably not. Now that I see how my own children’s teeth turned out, and how what was mildly out of alignment went into place as the jaws grew to accommodate them.
There are jokes made about the Brits’ awful teeth, and how they are not nearly as interested in perfection as Americans. They believe it gives a face character to have some flaws. Americans believe in magazine perfection, and that it is not just attainable for each of us, but imperative. I believe that somewhere in between lies the answer—isn’t that always where the answer lies?
My Life in Gardens
4 X 4 "Square Foot" Intensive Garden
Planted my little garden yesterday and it got me to thinking about gardening through my life. The first one I can remember was my Great-Uncle Joe’s in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was a jungle to a four or five year old. Whenever I watch ‘The Godfather’ and see Brando as an old man in the garden where he dies, that is the garden I remember from my uncle and aunt’s house. Towering plants taller than my uncle took up the entire back yard of their small frame house in town, with a tall fence, gate, paths and trellises throughout, filled with leaves and blossoms. Combined with the butterscotch Lifesavers he always had on hand, no wonder it’s such a sweet memory of what a garden is.
The next garden I remember is my Granny McCain’s garden in Coushatta, Louisiana, probably six twenty-foot rows, again fenced with a tall fence and gated, mostly against meandering cows. I was sent to live with grannies every summer, and I remember being in that garden every morning before it turned hot, and especially discovering the prickly texture of okra when she made me pick it. Granny grew all of her vegetables, including purple-hull peas (like black-eyes) which were my job to shell, turning my thumb purple as I pushed it up the inside of the pod to shoot all the plump peas into a big bowl in my lap. You start with a big bowl of long purple pea pods and put the shelled peas in the same bowl, so it gradually changes from a bowl of pods to a bowl of peas. I always loved to run my fingers through them when I was done–it was such a physical glory, “Look how much work I’ve done!”
I know there was a lot of acid in that soil because Granny had huge hydrangea bushes around her house and garden that had blue blossom bouquets as big as basketballs. If you don’t have acid soil, the blossoms are pink. Hers were as blue as the sky.
Next was Grandma Saxon’s orchard in Georgia. Grandma didn’t do too much with vegetables, but she was hell on wheels when it came to “putting up”: canning, freezing to fill the big chest freezer, jelly making, even made blackberry wine that she made me drink when I was coming down with anything. Stuff near killed me. Serious peach eating was done there, with the nearly red juice running down your chin, down your arm and dripping from your elbow. Fig preserves were one of her specialties. One plump fig mashed on a piece of toast was all you could fit. Although she was too busy putting up fruit to garden vegetables, she bought them by the bushel when they were in season and she did plant a patch of tomatoes every year and canned most of them. She taught me to eat a tomato like an apple, just holding it in one hand and taking huge juicy bites, with the salt & pepper handy to season each bite, and how to make a tomato sandwich: bread+mayo+tomato=heaven on a back porch.
My own gardening started with about a 6’ X 8’ patch of my mother’s suburban back lawn in Shreveport. It was in the area you couldn’t see from the house (by command), back behind the fence on the side with no gate, between the air conditioning unit and the side fence. I had limited success, then got too busy with teenager business for gardening –daily hair rolling on orange juice cans, phone chatting, shopping at the shopping center (this was pre-mall!) and car riding. The only thing I used that corner of the yard for any more was to stand beside that AC unit, turn my head upside down, and brush my wet hair in the hot fanned air to blow dry it straight when that was the fashion. It was such a huge blast of hot air it was like standing behind a plane engine. Only took three or four minutes that way.
As an adult or near-bout one, I have had gardening ‘eras’. Some places I have lived coincided with times in my life when I had the place, the time, and the inclination to start a garden, but I’ve never been true to it year after year. When we lived in New Mexico would have been a great time, but I had a neighbor who had a huge garden and shared everything with us. He was a grandfather to my kids, who ran back and forth between our acre yards, through his apple orchard on a beeline for the raspberry bush he had planted just so he could sit and watch the boy ‘pick raspberries’, popping every one into his mouth as he picked them. I might have received a half cup to make a cobbler with. Bob lived alone, in an old trailer, and had a huge shop next to it where he worked on his assortment of VWs and his old Willys jeep. Gardening took up most of his time spring to fall, though. He was out most mornings opening rows to irrigation water from the ditch, the acequia, that ran behind our houses. Open a row, lean on the hoe watching it fill for ten minutes, then open the next one and close the first, gently moving the dirt back into place. He was so happy to have someone who wanted all that produce, and I was so happy to have him in our lives. He put his feet under my table every night and we raved about his tomatoes, Silver Queen corn, peas peas and more fat green peas, giant heads of cabbage and rhubarb pies. So I didn’t garden much there, but I did get a canner and learn what my Grandma did when I was little, putting up what we couldn’t eat from Bob’s garden.
When we moved to Texas, we lived in a suburb in Round Rock for ten years. I did a good bit of landscaping there but no food gardening. Just never had enough time with teaching and then starting the real estate business. So now I’m trying to simmer down and at least have me a patch of tomatoes and peppers, raise my own lettuce and greens, at our place in the hill country. I’m using raised beds that my husband made for me last year, “square-foot” intensive gardening, with little fences just around those boxes to protect from the deer and rabbits we have out here. I started a little orchard, too, just a couple each of apples, pears, peaches, plums and figs. The drought won and everything I planted bare-root last year died, so I just replanted a few of those. It’ll be years before I see anything from them, but I have high hopes for the vegetables this year. I moved one from the west side of the house with no shade up close to a picture window with late day shade, so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with the new spot this year. I had terrible luck last year, almost no production. I got started too late and after struggling to keep even the little beds watered through the drought, I found out from seasoned gardeners that they just quit through the heat, and plant a second fall garden in September or so. Duh.
I gave up on raising things from seed at this point, buying good-sized plants to jump ahead of the game and move harvest sooner so I can stop in the heat and won’t feel like I just have to keep watering because the poor plants haven’t even had a chance to flower. I was worried about bees or lack of them last year, but I was buzzed by one as I was planting. A good sign. And the heat and drought just can’t be so bad two years in a row, can it? I’m hoping the rains keep coming, don’t know how long El Niños last. So wish me luck, pass on any wisdom, and if you have a surfeit of something good, I would sure be happy to take some and hopefully have something to trade!
Get Physical with Chamber Music
Most people think of chamber music as being staid, solemn, and proper. When Michelle Schumann is involved in anything, though, those preconceptions float away, along with the surroundings when you close your eyes. Saturday night, went with esposo to the Brahms Violin Sonatas presented by the Austin Chamber Music Center at the First Unitarian Church. Michelle Schumann is the Director of ACMC, in addition to her other work as a performer around the world and as a teacher at Mary Hardin-Baylor. I have seen her 3 times now and try not to miss a chance, because she informs the performance with her narratives about the composer and the times in which each piece was written, and enlivens the piano with her sheer physical joy.
Her research of the musicians and the society and culture they were writing and composing in is always the entry to a fuller experience, and her emotive face nodding, eyebrows raised then knitted, rocking back and forth then slyly looking over her shoulder at her playing partner to coordinate the perfect ending note all add to the feeling.
This time she played with Soovin Kim, also a performer with numerous major orchestras around the world, and the players complemented each other well. Particularly in the last piece which included a melody ‘played on the G string of the violin, and that is just as sexy as it sounds’… Mr. Kim was braced for action with his feet anchored shoulder width apart while the top half of his body swung and swooned with the powerful and evocative music.
If you want to see the last concert of the season by this group, it will be next month, April 17th again at the First Unitarian Church. Great acoustics.
Check out the program, which will include works by Amy Beach, Paul Schoenfeld, and Mark O’Connor’s 4 pieces on Johnny Cash (!) by Ms. Schumann on piano, Clancy Newman on cello and Tereza Stanislav on violin, at their website, www.austinchambermusic.org
WPA Today?
In the State of the Union speech last month, the President asked Congress to prepare a new jobs bill for his signature asap. What should it include? The powers that be seem bereft of ideas. Obama has dropped all his talk of ‘weatherization’ creating the jobs to bring us out of the recession, thank goodness. Not that it’s a bad idea, you just can’t put millions of people to work that way. He is now lobbing the problem over to Congress. Wonder what they will come up with? Pork perhaps? Earmarks already identified? Road projects to repair our crumbling infrastructure, especially in states such as Texas that pride themselves more on tax cuts than taking care of people?
I shudder to think. I’ve been wondering though, since all this ‘jobs’ talk started way back at the beginning of the recession. Back when we weren’t even calling it a recession yet. I admit to being a bit excited at the prospect of what the government could do, since I have always admired the work done during the WPA era. Those great Arts & Crafts designs for public works buildings, bridges, parks, schools. Almost every community had something constructed by the agency. It also operated large arts projects, including drama, media and literacy, fed children, and redistributed food and clothing.
When the WPA was established, they invented a wheel that could be reused, instead of creating a new one. The jobs paid the prevailing wage in their community (this was before minimum wage). WPA workers were limited to 30 hours per week, and only one adult of an unemployed couple could get one, to spread the jobs among as many breadwinners as possible.
We need to encourage our representatives to think along these lines. It seems as though without vision, they are happy to take federal money to complete projects their state has underway anyway, then take credit for ‘cutting taxes’ since they didn’t use that state money after all. We need to shore up the arts, provide help for theater companies who visit schools, provide a place for communities to connect, and a reason to go out for an evening, maybe eat out, too, and increase the local restaurant business. Live theater is expensive to produce, and if we don’t want our viewing choices to be limited to only blockbuster films that Hollywood beancounters know will be a success, we need to go, see, and do, if we can, but definitely send a message to our representatives that we don’t want a jobs bill that leaves out the arts. Wouldn’t it be great to fund artists to create at least visiting art and music programs in schools where they’ve been cut?
In spite of mounting pressure to cover only the social programs that fill the holes left by corporations so that they can stay alive to move more jobs offshore, we need to look up again, not just over our shoulders.
FronteraFest: A Man, A Magic, A Music
Movin Melvin Brown
Movin Melvin Brown is a very good entertainer, an engaging and friendly individual who has lived an interesting life through interesting times and can weave his story through those times to arrive at a memoir with song and dance that is entertaining and engaging, but not enough to sustain 90 minutes.
Using the hit songs of black music from the 50s to the 90s, Mr. Brown tells the story of his life, starting as one of twelve children in a family who lived in the projects in Cincinatti with a powerful mother who made sure there was food on the table and that church was attended without fail. He then tells his story, at times painfully honestly, through an entertainer’s life. Entertainment career, military service, marriages ending, he holds nothing back.
Sampling the songs of Jackie Wilson, the Temptations, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and many others, Mr. Brown intersperses tap dancing of various styles and even clogging into his work to good effect. Mr. Brown is definitely a mover, and though I hate to say ‘for his age’, that was in my mind whenever the dance pieces were finished. What worked best of all were the sections when he encouraged audience participation (in the singing, not in the dancing), and if he is workshopping this piece, that would be my recommendation—to find more ways to engage the audience in participating, and to add a stool to the set, so that when he is recalling the events of his life the audience gets that message that it’s ok to sit back and listen, he’s not going to bust out into another song for a while. Not that his singing is not good, it’s just not as interesting as his own story.
Melvin Brown is clearly a special individual, with talent and vision about what he wants to do for other people. His performances benefit a project he has been working to complete for some time, a home for homeless elderly and children that he is building in the Elgin area. When I see someone who is out there, off the couch, helping other people with their time and money, it is hard to give them anything less than top marks. But as a theater piece, A Man, A Magic, A Music still has a way to go.
At the Blue Theatre for Frontera Fest, the piece has 3 more performances, on Sunday 1/24 @ 4:15, 1/25 @8:45, and 1/30@10:15.
