Amnesia

“We live in a world where amnesia is the most wisher-for state.  When did history become a bad word?” John Guare

Snow closed IUN on Tuesday even though it didn’t start sticking until 1:30, so I watched two Nineties flicks, “Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino giving an Oscar-worthy performance as blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade and “Mulholland Falls with Nick Nolte heading up a ruthless LAPD anti-gangster squad.  His character’s last name is Hoover and his partner’s is Coolidge.  The bad guys are military types covering up the dangers of radiation from atomic bomb fall-out.  I also found a short HBO documentary on John Guare showing three aspiring playwrights around Rome and giving them pointers on his craft.  The premise of his most famous play, “Six Degrees of Separation” (1990), was that everyone is connected by a chain of no more than six acquaintances.  The play contains numerous references to J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.”  Guare’s flair for the comic and the absurd can be seen in the title of a 1992 production, “Four Baboons Adoring the Sun.”

In the latest “Girls” a manifestation of Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) OCD is that she obsessively counts to 8, especially when stressed out, whether eating exactly eight potato chips or masturbating.  White-haired Judy Collins, looking spectral, makes a cameo appearance singing “Song For Judith (Open the Door.”

Networks hardly mentioned the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, an admirer of Fidel Castro, but are covering the friggin’ Catholic conclave like it was momentous and speculating on the sex of the baby the Duchess of Cambridge is carrying.  What’s this fetish about royalty?  Didn’t we get rid of that pomp and circumstance crap in 1776?  Chicago stations did honor Dawn Clark Netsch, who died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  In 1994 she was the Democratic gubernatorial nominee against Republican Jim Edgar.  A fixture in Chicago’s Gay Pride parade, she’d ride in a convertible bearing a sign reading “I’m Not Running for Anything.”  Chavez called George W. Bush a donkey and, appearing at the U.N. a day after him, told the crowd, “Yesterday the devil came here.  Right here.  And it smells of sulfur still today.”

 above, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez; below, Pat Summitt and Robin Roberts

Newscaster Robin Roberts, who has been battling breast cancer interviewed legendary Tennessee basketball coach Pat Summitt for “Good Morning America.”  Last year 59 year-old Summit resigned as the Lady Vols coach and announced she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.  It must be like the gradual onset of amnesia.  Needless to say, it was very emotional, and tears flowed freely.  James and Becca stayed overnight, and after breakfast we got in several games of Ono.

Jerry Davich posted this lame witticism, referring to Gary’s mostly black population and wondered whether it was bad taste: “Hey have you heard about the white out situation in downtown Gary? It only lasted for a few minutes. I got back into my car.”  He got numerous LOLs and LMAOs, but Teresa Iatarola Arroyo rightly scolded: “So wrong in many ways.”  Dawn Kirk warned, “Watch out for African American ice.”  I commented: “What’s next, Polish jokes?”  Actually what appeared in his subsequent column was a fake Calumet Region ad modeled after the Pure Michigan campaign.  His spoof goes: “A place without big-city skyscrapers, but a smoke-stack skyline, belching toxins into the air around the clock.  A place that greets visitors with billboards for strip joints, liquor stores and smoke shops.  A place where you have to lock up your doors, and sometimes even your dreams.  Come to Northwest Indiana, your trip begins at PollutionPit.org.”  My viewpoint is that Region residents can joke among such things among themselves but should be proud of where they’re from and not let others insult us.  As Catherine Swisher told Davich: “We have the Dunes, RailCats, Northwest Indiana Symphony, and so much more.  Our little corner of the state is only a trash heap if we choose to regard it that way.  I do not.”

Exchanging emails with Mark Hoyert about Steel Shavings magazine, I noticed that included a quote from novelist Richard Russo, one of my favorites, that goes, “A liberal arts dean in a good mood is a potentially dangerous thing.  It suggests a world different from the one we know.  One where any damn thing can happen.”

Wes Moore “made it into town last night despite the weather conditions,” Dr. Rochelle Brock announced, and his talk went great.  The event took place in the Savannah gym.  The author of “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates” was self-confident but not self-important and emphasized the similarities between him and his counterpart, who is serving a life sentence for a botched jewelry store robbery.  Wes quoted a phrase he learned in the military, that you can’t hit your target if you cannot see it.  In other words, one cannot succeed without goals in life.  One is not so much a product of his environment, he argued, as a product of his expectations.  He urged IUN students and educators to be connected to the Gary community and mentioned that some Johns Hopkins students and faculty had no idea what Baltimore, his hometown, was like.  He answered questions patiently and afterwards found the time to interact personally with those wanting him to sign their book.  I sat with David Parnell, who was with two other young faculty who started at IUN the same time as he did, Natasha Brown in Communication and Micah Pollak in Economics.  They bonded at a new faculty event last fall.

At the morning session of the Women’s and Gender Studies Student Conference, whose theme was “Cash, Sex, Gender and the Law,” a half-dozen papers dealt with “Gender Identity and Literary Interpretation.  Alyssa Black discussed stream of consciousness in William Faulkner’s enigmatic “The Sound and the Fury” and had the quote “Caddy smells like trees” on the computer screen.  The audience perked up when she imagined how “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” might have been more interesting if told from the point of view of his nefarious aunt and uncle.  Similarly, speaking about “Gender and the Outsider,” Brenna Echterlling got the audience’s attention analyzing “Hunger Games” heroine Katniss Everdeen.  Bintou Sy was extremely self-assured delivering her excellent paper “Re-Defining Marriage and Motherhood,” about Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century novel “Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress.”  Alyssa, Brenna, and Bintou were all students of Anne Balay, who nurtured their intellectual development and was proud of their poise in front of an audience of nearly a hundred students and faculty.  How in God’s name anyone could judge Anne’s teaching and service to be inadequate is beyond rational comprehension.  Just the opposite is the case.  In a roundtable session on legal issues regarding gender Anne talked about her interviews with GLBT steelworkers.

above, Anne Balay with Alyssa Black, Elizabeth LaDuke, Brenna Echterling, Marwa Nour, Bintou Sy, Ava Meux, and Carina Pasquesi; below, Anne with Matt Bernstein and Monica Solinas-Saunders

 

I showed up early for my Vivian Carter presentation at the Reiner Senior Center and enjoyed a bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup while sitting with a bunch of folks who grew up in Tolleston and knew the Farag family.  One asked if I was a bus driver, referring to my tie and vest the joke being that airport bus drivers dress similarly.  Kristina Kuzma helped play a dozen or so Vee-Jay songs from CDs I had brought along, and the audience remembered most of the selections from the Spaniels, El Dorados, Dells, Impressions, Staple Singers and others.  Steve McShane and John Ban were there, as well as quite a few others who had attended my previous talk on the Region during the Roaring Twenties.  Freddie James, who buys and sells records, wondered if I had any old 45s I wished to part with.  I told him every time I go to prune my collection, I end up keeping virtually all of them.  I mentioned having almost every Fats Domino record ever made, many of which I found at a flea market in Montgomeryville, PA.

Also in the audience was Bob Zemburski, who during the 1960s was the drummer in a Hammond group called the Blue Angels.  He said that his band and Oscar and the Majestics would often face off in “Battle of the Bands” contests and once performed at the Hammond Civic Center on a bill that included the Rivieras, Bobby Freeman, and Chuck Berry.  Often the band members performed in blue outfits that included blue shoes and blue hair.  Sometimes to attract attention prior to a show they’d go to a local restaurant dressed like that.  Heads would definitely turn, Bob recalled.  They had a regional hit entitled “Fame and Fortune.”  Bob got a degree in Social Work at IUN about ten years ago and is a licensed mental health therapist.

Bob Zemburski on drums and on right with blue hair 

The condo meeting to discuss landscaping lasted less than an hour, so I had time to sample a CD Dave Elliott burned for me by the bluegrass group Seldom Scene entitled “Different Roads.”  Formed in the early Seventies, the band has gone through numerous personnel changes but still performs.  I particularly liked the song “Wait a Minute.”