Survivors

 “You held your head up a little too high

When they said ‘Walk Tall,’”

    Darden Smith, “Johnny Was a Lucky One”

For Brady Wade’s graduation party Tom had Blues Cruise learn “Johnny Was a Lucky One” by Darden Smith from Smith’s 1990 album “Trouble No More.”  It’s about a soldier who didn’t come home.  I was under orders to learn the chorus, so I could sing it with Tom, Jef Halberstadt and the band.  It goes, “Oh Johnny, keep on rockin’, Open the door when you hear me knockin’, Johnny, save a medal for me.”  In 2012 Texas folksinger Darden Smith started Songwriting With: Soldiers, where musicians at retreats pair up with troubled soldiers to turn their stories of combat and coming home into songs.  So far two retreats have taken place near Fort Hood.

Grad students at Chicago’s Art Institute asked me to meet with a “Gary Vision Project Team” to help plan community-engaged urban initiatives. I plan to discuss Camilo Vergara’s idea of hanging photographs of artistic tributes to Martin Luther King in various Gary locations to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  Corey Hagelberg and Sam Barnett are excited about the idea, and we may involve French documentarians Frederic Cousseau and Blandine Huk, who’ll be in Gary for seven weeks starting in late August.  Frederic recently asked whether I knew of any white folks living in predominantly black neighborhoods.  Some elderly folks still reside in Glen Park, and an IUN professor lives on the near Northside. Dave Malham’s mother lived for years on Massachusetts behind the old Sears Building despite efforts by her offspring to get her to leave, but the numbers have dwindled as the older generation of white ethnics dies off or grudgingly moves away to “safer” domiciles.

“Survivor in a Tough City: The Blackstone Building, 1993” by Camilo Vergara

Pittsburgh Dave Lane passed along this Conan O’Brien joke: “In Pittsburgh a man was arrested at a Taylor Swift concert for holding up a sign that read, ‘Taylor Swift is with Satan.’  Swift got angry and said, ‘For the record, Satan and I broke up two months ago.’”  Swift is notorious for singing about broken relationships.

The Indiana State Budget Committee unanimously approved construction of a new Tamarack Hall on the northeast corner of Thirty-fifth and Broadway.  IUN will share the facility with Ivy Tech, with hopes that their students pursue four-year degrees.  The “old” Tamarack, formerly Gary Main, was a casualty of the 2008 flood that closed campus for two weeks.

In Gender Studies class Anne Balay talked about the history of feminism.  The first wave, from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to the 1920 passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, was most concerned with political rights.   During the second wave of the 1960s and 1970s the emphasis could be summarized by the slogan, “The personal is political.”  At the heart of the third wave is the concept of intersectionality, developed by sociologists Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, which argues that women experience oppression in varying ways related to such factors as race, class, gender, ability, and ethnicity.  Leave it to sociologists to come up with a vague seven-syllable word to connect what has become scholars’ “Holy Trinity” of race, class, and gender. Students discussed why prisons usually are located far from where most inmates and would-be visitors are from and the rather degrading security screens people entering prisons must undergo.   Breea Willingham’s article quoted Ida P. McCray, who served a decade in prison for hijacking an airplane.  McCray asserted that male inmates generally received many more visitors and concluded: “We’re replaced in society.  Black women are replaced.  If you’re in a relationship, nine times out of ten, you will be replaced within a year, if that long.”  Sad if true.

I’ve recently posted excerpts from my blog on Facebook and have gotten responses from several liberal friends, including Kirsten Bayer and LeeLee Minehart Devenney.  I’ve also gotten Friend Requests from Brenda Ann and Karren Lee, both actively involved in Miller Pop Up Art.  Brenda’s posts range from comments about strange characters riding the South Shore train and simply clever jokes to laments over the loss of a cat and photos of community activity involving her and Sam.  Karren’s are less personal.   (Brenda Ann, below)

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano resigned to become President of the University of California.  Perhaps she’s hoping for a huge salary like the $1,2 million University of Miami president Donna Shalala hauls in annually.  Formerly Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Shalala is defending Miami in an NCAA investigation into illegal payments and benefits given athletes and coaches by rich sports boosters.

In season of “The Sopranos” Tony’s son finds out what the old man does for a living; he spots government agents taking photos at a don’s funeral right before his dad flashes him a smile.  Then when Tony takes daughter Meadow to visit Colby College, he spots Fabian Petrulio, a snitch sent there on a witness protection program, and strangles him as Meadow has an interview.  When he picks her up, she notices that his hand is bloody.  At their next stop, Bowdoin College, Tony spots this Nathaniel Hawthorn quote in the Admission office: “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true.”  Heavy.  In a flashback to when Tony was young, he and his sister watch the Rascals perform  “People Got To Be Free” on Ed Sullivan.

Brady Wades’s graduation party was a blast.  There’s was plenty of “man food,” as Alyssa from Whiting would say – beef sandwiches, meat balls, fried chicken, burgers, hot dogs, brats – as well as such Darcey specialties as potato salad laced with chunks of hard-boiled eggs.  Marianne Brush and Lorraine Shearer attended because daughters Missy and Brittany were playing with Blues Cruise.  Lorraine’s mom just had her left leg amputated, but she’d gone through such pain in the past year that she reportedly was in great spirits.  Laughing hysterically, she demonstrated to Lorraine that when she moved her right leg to sit up, the stump went straight up, as if it had a mind of its own.  The doctor told her she might not be able to have a prosthetic, and she said, OK, then she’d just ride around on a scooter.

Blues Cruise was fantastic.  The band performed flawlessly ten of Tom and Brady’s special requests, including “Get Ready” by Rare Earth and “Never Surrender” by Bruce Springsteen.  John Shearer and drummer Mickey Boger’s brother played guitar on several songs, and Dave got Tom, Brady, Lorraine, and me to sing “Oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh” on “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones.  Tom had fellow teacher Fred and me up bogeying for “Small Things” by Blink 182, and when Fred spotted kids on a nearby sidewalk dancing, he started doing moves similar to theirs.  The kids were so cool mimicking Fred and vice versa that Tom took them tennis racquets to use as air guitars.  When Dave announced the band was playing its final number, Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” Darcey surprised everyone by grabbing Tom and starting to dance.  Her drop-dead beautiful niece Jackie (who had still recalled how good my 2011 Thanksgiving cherry cobbler had tasted) then got everyone up.  Brady and his friends had been inside, but suddenly two guys had Brady on their shoulders similar to like at a Bar Mitzvah, and he started moving his upper body to the beat.  Truly a night to remember.

  

above, from left, Tom, Brady, Jimbo Brittany; below, Lorraine, Dave, Btittany, Missy