Topsy Turvy

“It’s the Age of Wonders, that’s what it is

The Age of Wonders, I know ‘cause I live”

         “The Age of Wonders,” Hollis Donald

Hollis Donald and Jimbo in IUN library; photo by Muhammad Malik

IUN poet Hollis Donald (above) mixes irony with stoicism in “The Age of Wonders,” which opens with these lines:

Computers the size of business cards

Reconstructed body parts

Children breaking their parents’ hearts

Electronics that can see into the stars

 People with no hearts

It’s the age of wonders

To Hollis Donald, having seen and gone through many perils in the course of a topsy turvy life, just being alive is indeed wondrous.  One couplet in “The Age of Wonders” goes, “Just ain’t enough love in the world today/ That’s the way it is.” Another states: “A lot of good men have come and gone/ A lot of bad men still linger on.”  After noting that too many adults don’t care to be husbands and wives, he laments: “‘Save the children!’ I heard somebody cry/ But who’s gonna do it, everybody’s trying to fly.”  And this:

Now, look here, I’ve seen on TV men on the moon

I’ve seen whole families sleeping in one room.

 

A quarter-century ago, the TV sitcom “The Wonder Years” featured a narrator in his thirties looking back on his life as a middle-class kid (Kevin, played by Fred Savage) growing up in the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s.  Less syrupy and nostalgic than its forerunner “Happy Days” (about the 1950s), the show makes reference to the Vietnam War, the counter-culture, and other events of the time.  In the pilot, for instance, Kevin’s school gets renamed for assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Former student Molly Harvey, in an essay titled “The Wonder Years,” recalled that, growing up, she wanted to be like Kevin’s older sister Karen: “In my fantasy my name would be Sunshine, and I’d paint little peace signs on my face and go to Woodstock.”

The phrase “topsy turvy” goes back at least 500 years and, like “head over heels,” means upside down, confused or distorted.  In medieval English, the word “turvy” referred to someone turning suddenly and toppling over.

Lake of the Red Cedars Museum 

The Summer 2017 issue of Traces featured a cover story on Cedar Lake’s Lassen Resort, whose origins date back to when ice was harvested during the winter and the hotel housed workers.  At the height of Cedar Lake’s tourism heyday during the early twentieth-century, Lassen’s expanded to include a restaurant built out into the lake and a dance pavilion.  After years serving as a church camp, the aging hotel and surrounding acres were used by Town officials until converted into the present home of the Lake of the Red Cedars Museum.  I visited the venerable landmark often while researching Cedar Lake for an issue of Steel Shavings (volume 26, 1997).

Thirty years ago, Archives volunteer Maurice Yancy participated in the Chicago Marathon, finishing well under 4 hours.  Sunday Galen Rupp became the first American in 15 years to win the event, narrowly beating two Kenyans.  Security was very tight, given the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the recent Las Vegas massacre.  In fact, during the summer the Vegas killer evidently had booked a room in Chicago at a site overlooking the Lollapalooza music festival.

above "Virgin Wedge"; below, John Habela

Jonathyne Briggs was trying to track down the identity of a steel sculpture that once stood near Tamarack Hall and now is stored near IUN’s Physical Plant building. Gallery curator Ann Fritz knew it was a 1972 piece by John J. Habela titled “The Virgin Wedge.” Habela was born in 1950 in Hamburg, Germany, moved with his family to Northwest Indiana, and graduated from IU in 1972.  He still sculpts and lives in Chesterton.

Austin Rogers won an eighth Jeopardy match despite not knowing two of the answers in the category “Presidents born west of the Mississippi.”  Hoover, Clinton, and Nixon were easy, but he blanked out on which President was born furthest west (Barack Obama) and, a stumper, who served the shortest time in office.  Answer: Gerald R. Ford, born in Omaha, Nebraska.  Sixteen days later. his mother moved to Oak Park, Illinois, to escape an abusive husband.  She remarried, and Jerry grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

At a Florida Gators football game in Gainesville, Tom Petty’s home town, 80,000 fans sang “I Won’t Back Down” at the end of the third quarter. Saturday Night Live opened with Jason Aldean, who was performing in Las Vegas when a mass murderer began his rampage, also singing “I Won’t Back Down.”  Next day, Vice President Mike Pence, no doubt at Trump’s bidding, left an Indianapolis Colts game after a few players took a knee while crossing their hearts.  Shame on him.  He missed a good contest.

 Maestro Kirk Muskratt

At Munster Center for Visual and Performing Arts Maestro Kirk Muspratt delivered an engaging and witty “Art in Focus” talk on “The Mikado,” which the Northwest Symphony Orchestra will present at Bethel Church later in the month.  He introduced characters by having audience members stand.  Frequent bridge opponent Mary Kocevar was Ko-Ko, the lord high executioner. Muspratt showed excerpts from the 1999 film “Topsy-Turvy,” about how during the 1880s Englishmen William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan came to produce the legendary comic opera.  With Japanese characters named Nanki-Poo, Yum-Yum, Pish-Tush, and Peep-Bo, some critics thought the play ridiculed Japanese culture, but Sullivan conceived “The Mikado” as a satire poking fun at Victorian pretensions.  Muspratt pointed out the Gilbert and Sullivan both had mistresses, and that their lead actor was a heroin addict.  Hostess Jillian Van Volkenburgh plugged my upcoming “Reliving 1957” appearance in two weeks and told the seniors to wear their dancing shoes. 

A consummate professional, Muspratt had the program timed perfectly, leaving exactly ten minutes for questions.  One person noted that the line, “Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into” later became one of Laurel and Hardy’s trademark expressions.  I asked whether, as in “Topsy-Turvy,” it was common for producers to take bows at curtain call.  Yes, especially at premiers, Muspratt answered. When he revealed that his mother played “The Mikado” soundtrack album at home while he was growing up in Crowsnest Pass in Alberta, Canada, it came to me that my parents, Midge and Vic, were in a performance of “The Mikado” at Fort Washington Elementary School. Also in the production, if memory serves, were Ted Jenkins, Fran Breitinger, and LeeLee Minehart’s mother; Bobby Davis’ mother played piano.  In the 1950 Gary Horace Mann senior play, chorus member Tom Higgins recalled:

  “The Mikado” was put on by Eulah Winter.  She had been tenor Jim McCracken’s teacher, and he’d come back from time to time.  They wanted a big cast, and it was fun.  I wore a comical hat and a robe.  One song had the line, “Bow down, bow down, the lord high executioner.”  Surreptitiously, we changed the lyrics.  There was a tavern at Ninth and Adams called the Bowery.  We’d sing, “Bow-ry, Bow-ry, the lord high executioner.”  Audience members in the know thought it was funny.