Widespread Panic

“I just spent sixty days in the jailhouse
For the crime of having no dough, no no
Now here I am back out on the street
For the crime of having nowhere to go”

    Robbie Robertson, “Shape I’m In” 

I heard a Widespread Panic song from their cleverly named live album “Light Fuse, Get Away” on WXRT’s Lin Brehmer morning show on the way to IUN.  A Southern rock band from Athens, Georgia, formed in 1986, Widespread Panic is famous for extended jams and often compared to the Grateful Dead.  At the first Bonnaroo festival in 2002, the band performed for 70,000 fans.  Their cover of “Ophelia” and “Shape I’m In” by the Band is a staple of live shows.  The opening lines of “Shape I’m In” go:

Go out yonder, peace in the valley
Come downtown, have to rumble in the alley
Oh, you don't know the shape I'm in

Dame Emma Thompson and the great American actor (“The World According to Garp,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Footloose”) John Lithgow star in the comedy drama “Late Night.”  Mindy Kaling wrote the screenplay and plays an Indian-American who joins the white male staff of a seemingly over-the-hill late-night hostess as a diversity hire. She reinvigorates the show and saves it from being cancelled.  Kaling’s character is fetching, original, and believable; she is initially insecure and cries frequently but has an iron will and loyalty to the truth.  Widespread panic ensues when a story breaks that the Thompson character (Katherine Newbury) has cheated on her husband (Lithgow as a professor emeritus suffering from Parkinson’s)) and had an affair with a staff member.  She is about to accept her show being cancelled when Molly Patel (Kaling) intervenes. Katherine’s confession speech reminded me of when David Letterman had to fess up to copulating with numerous underlings.

I’m 175 pages into Stewart O’Nan’s new novel “Henry Himself,” set in Pittsburgh and about a 74-year-old former Westinghouse engineer and World War II veteran who vacations yearly at Chautauqua with a wife and two married children with offspring of their own.  Taking place in the late 1990s, there’s mention of a Chevy Lumina, Ford Explorer, and the family Oldsmobile.  On rainy summer evenings at the family cabin, family members work on multi-piece puzzles or watch movies from Blockbuster while Henry’s wife Emily knits or reads. Each person has his or her favorite genre: science fiction, English dramas, old classics, comedies, even westerns. The first night they settle on “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Henry’s mother, who’d been dead nearly 20 years, loved silly sayings such as “Lead on, MacDuff”(a misquote from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”) and “I see said the blind man”(one I say, including the punch line, “as he picked up his hammer and saw”).

Henry drinks Dewar’s (same brand of scotch as our friend Herb Passo), remembers eating animal crackers as a kid, and has a bum knee, arthritis in the hips, occasional back spasms, and frequent nighttime bathroom visits due to prostate problems, yet plays golf and is a gifted handyman around the house. When Emily forbids him to ascend to the cabin roof on a ladder to remove an obsolete antenna, his son botches the job.  So far everything is humdrum but charming, but one senses widespread panic lurking in the pages ahead.  Henry’s fingertips, for example, often go numb at night, as do mine.  Dr. Ostroski diagnosed my condition as carpel tunnel, but Henry frets that it is one of five signs of an impending heart attack. 

NWI TimesEditorial writer Marc Chase, partly responsible for Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson’s recent primary election defeat, is continuing his misguided vendetta against her.  Why? Perhaps to play to the former Hammond Times’suburban readership. Chase ridiculed the Mayor’s reasonable plan to balance the city budget as hare-brained, only he misspelled the word as hair-brained.  He’s a lightweight as a muckraker with a flawed sense of proportion.

Over the weekend we played party bridge with our monthly group of eight (Toni was the winner), first dining at iconic, 90-year-old Teibel’s Restaurant in Schererville (Herb Passo ordered a Dewar’s. I had a Three Floyd’s IPA). Next evening Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi Goodman invited us to her place in Valparaiso; Charlie made a delicious pie that resembled cheese cake.  In between I met Ron and Nancy Cohen at Miller Beach Farmers Market, where we traded his old copies of New York Review of Booksfor the Tracesissue containing my article about “The Champ” Joe Louis.  He included a couple items for archivist Steve McShane, including a Post-Tribunearticle about the death of environmentalist Charlotte Read.

Jerry Clemons and Zeke Ronders

At Miller Beach Market entertainment was provided by the Nick Danger Band, a great blues/rock group featuring guitarists Jerry Clemons and Zeke Rongers and drummer Lannie Turner.  The band often plays with vocalist Nicole Jamrose and keyboardist Chris Wander. They jammed on such numbers as “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, “Down Under” by Men at Work,” “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits, and an extended jam on “Cold Shot” by Stevie Ray Vaughan, which showed off virtuoso guitar playing by Clemons and Rongers. The first verse goes

Once was a sweet thang baby, held out love in our hands
Now I reach to kiss your lips the touch don't mean a thing
And that's a cold shot baby, yeah that's a drag
A cold shot baby, I let our love go bad

Band members kept repeating “Cold Shot, Cold Shot” between musical interludes.  What an unexpected delight to watch three professionals honing their craft.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nick Danger Band included a Widespread Panic number or two in their impressive repertoire, perhaps “Pigeons” or “Can’t Get High.”

Loose cannon Trump vows utter destruction of Iran one day and an offer to meet with President Hassan Rouhani with no preconditions the next.  Either would probably end in a complete disaster. Rouhani called Trump, who caused the mess by pulling out of a nuclear agreement, retarded.

In a recent New York Review appeared Sean Wilentz’s essay on Michael Tomasky’s “If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved.”  Wilentz wrote:

 At least some of the current mess derives from the undemocratic apportionment of the US Senate – in which Wyoming, with just a half a million people, and California, with 40 million, each have 2 seats – and the hyperpartisan gerrymandering of House districts.

Tomasky quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt as remarking in 1944: “We ought to have two real parties, one liberal and one conservative.”  That’s what we’re stuck with today, which Tomasky regards as a serious problem. Wilentz prefers a statement FDR made in October 1936 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden when facing a Republican rightwing not unlike today:

 I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match.  I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.

Wilentz adds: “That’s the spirit.”

New York Review of Books Personals are always worth a read, although sadly less erotic as Baby Boomers have become senior citizens.  These appeared in the May 9 issue:

   NYC woman seeks young-at-heart gentleman (70s) with similar sensibilities for one more fling.

   Sarasota Florida man, 75, no children. Passions: long walks and talks, holding hands, sharing life.  Let’s meet.

   NYC attorney, well read and well-traveled, vigorous, eclectic, good listener.  Francophile.  But life is more.  Seeks woman to share the adventures.

History professor David Parnell, who taught an experimental freshman seminar last semester that he and Mark Baer had developed and had me speak about the history of IUN, announced that the class is now mandatory for freshman Arts and Sciences students.  Five sections are on the Fall schedule, including one taught by historian Jonathyne Briggs.  I wouldn’t mind contributing, perhaps assigning a journal or history project in the form of an interview.  Hopefully neither would induce widespread student panic, as oral presentations often do (I’ve had a student nearly faint on me, others clam up, and one literally left a puddle of sweat).  We shall see. 

James registered for Fall classes at Valparaiso University.  I’ll have to check if I know any of my grandson’s professors. During orientation parents were told, better if students not go home on weekends for at least the first month.  Toni has given James the same advice. He was considering bowling one more season at Inman’s, enabling me to take him to Culver’s afterwards, but it looks like that won’t happen - maybe for the best.

 James Wozniak

At Quick Cut in Portage for my bimonthly (every other month) haircut from Anna I ran into James Wozniak, who used to bowl in the Sheet and Tin league at Cressmoor Lanes on a team with Randy Marshall and his dad (“Big Randy”). The same age as Dave, James works shift work at U.S. Steel and has recently been putting in 56 hours a week. A third Jim was having his hair cut in a chair near me, telling the barber to be careful not to touch an area where he feared he was going bald.  A guitar player, he claimed to have played backup for Styx.  When he learned his hair stylist’s son played guitar, he recommended that he watch Carlos Santana play “El Farol” on YouTube (the live version), vowing that it would change his life. When he started mimicking the guitar sounds, Anna said, “We’re being entertained.”  I told him I’d seen the Nick Danger Band on Sunday; he knew them and said, “They started in the Eighties.”