Kennedy, 50 Years After

Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  In 1963 I was ten years old, and in the Fifth Grade class at Washington School in Raritan, New Jersey.  When the first news reports of shots being fired at the President in Dallas made it onto the transistor radio in the school office, I think everybody was caught completely flat-footed and off-guard.  Remember that this was in a time before the many mass shootings we all have to live through now -- nothing like this had happened before.  It was before King, before Bobby Kennedy, before any of the other notable assassinations of the 1960's.  There had been nothing like this in people's memories since the attack on Pearl Harbor some 22 years earlier.  There are occasions where the journalists inevitably ask us where we were and what we were doing.  These were not common occasions in 1963.  I guess they still aren't; the Pearl Harbor remembrances are mostly over as most of those living then have passed.  Today we talk about when the Twin Towers fell and maybe a couple of other things.  Kennedy's assassination was the first time anything like this had happened to a society that I was a part of, or to anybody I knew.

Dallas in in Central Time; we lived in Eastern Standard Time.  So the first reports that so paralyzed our school staff came in just after 11:30 in the morning.  It was around 12:40 PM, during lunch at the school, that Walter Cronkite announced that the President was dead.

The school staff had no idea what to do.  There were no counselors, no grief experts or PTSD consultants, not in 1963 small-town New Jersey.  So they sent us home.

My kid sister and I walked to school, probably about a mile, a distance that would be considered unsafe or unconscionable now, not for five- and six-year-old children.  So we got home a little after 1:00 PM.  My father was at work, of course, and my stay-at-home mom was doing household chores.  She was not expecting us for at least another couple of hours, and, sadly for us, she was not listening to the radio or watching our tiny-screen black-and-white television.  She asked us, with some alarm, what in Hell were we doing home so early?  We told her the school had sent all the kids home because the President had been shot.  I received the beating of my life for "telling such an awful, awful lie."

No kidding.

Finally, when through our tears we kept sticking to our "story," my mother turned on the radio.  It was a tube radio and it took a few minutes to warm up.  I remember she kept looking at us like, "This better not be true, because if it isn't, the beating you just got is nothing compared to what you're going to get" coupled with a confusing measured leavening of "You'd better not be lying."

And when the radio warmed up, WOR 710 out of New York City, the station my family had on that morning for "Rambling with Gambling" and Bob and Ray, reported that the President was dead.  At this point my mother didn't know what to do either, I guess.  So she sent us to our rooms.

Over the next few days we watched the news reports, the funeral cortege proceeding to the cemetery, the horse-drawn coffin, little John-John's salute, all of it.  We were watching live TV when Lee Harvey Oswald was being transferred to a different holding facility and Jack Ruby shot him in the stomach.  It was the first time I had ever seen anybody actually killed.  And on live television.  I wouldn't see anything like that again until the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center live in 2001while I was watching.  I would go on to see a lot of people die on live television that day, as the towers collapsed one by one.  We all saw it on the news that night, and in the days to follow, ad nauseam, but there was something awful and traumatic for me when I saw it happen on live television.  I don't think I've ever gotten over it, and I still have nightmares of the towers falling intertwined with Oswald being shot.

My daughter was in the fourth grade when the towers fell.  Her school staff did not tell the kids much.  They did not send them home early.  I was waiting for her bus at the usual time and we walked home together during those first eerily silent hours when nothing man-made flew in the skies.  She was nine.  We talked a little about what had happened, and how a lot of people had been hurt and worse, and things were going to be a little strange for a while.  We were careful about what we watched on the news when she was around.

The only good that I can see to have come out of all this tragedy is that I learned from mine how not to handle my daughter's.  As we seem fated to ride this same merry-go-round over and over through history, I have no doubt that someday my daughter may have to deal with her own "where were you?" tragedy.  At least she has a decent example of how to cope.

Godot

This past weekend I took my wife to New York City for an early birthday gift: we had orchestra seats on the aisle for a a performance of Beckett's Waiting for Godot starring Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart.  Yup. Vladimir and Estragon were played by Gandalf and Picard.  Or, if you prefer, by Magneto and Professor X.

It was a revelation.  The play has a terrible reputation for being bleak and depressing, but Beckett himself described it as a comedy.  And that's how these two brilliant actors played it.  It was like a two hour Monty Python sketch.  Moving, heartbreaking, and hysterically, hilariously funny.  The two supporting actors, Billy Crudup as Lucky and Shuler Hensley as Pozzo, might have been forgiven for not quite measuring up to the two leads...but no forgiveness was necessary; they were both brilliant.  Hensley's Pozzo in particular was a revelation, giving it as he did a deep Southern American accent, and Billy Crudup as Lucky had to perform not only a difficult physical role but probably the single most demanding soliloquy in the theatre.  Lucky only has one line in the entire show, but it goes on at length when he is ordered to "Think!"  More than the two leads, it's Lucky's speech for me that shows Beckett's mastery of the language.

Godot is being performed in alternating repertory with Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, and I only wish we had been able to stay in the city long enough to catch both shows.  The show we saw was technically a preview, since the official opening isn't until later this month, but it had the smooth, expertly executed feel of a play that's been running for a while.  Which is no surprise since both Stewart and McKellen performed the play together in London in 2007.

Tickets are going fast, but there are always a few cheap (and excellent!) seats to be had on the day of the performance if you can be at the box office of the Cort Theatre when it opens at 10:00 AM.  Or you can hope to get lucky, as we did, when we picked up two superb seats within seconds of a cancellation for an otherwise sold-out performance.  If you have the means, do whatever it takes, but see this show.  You will never look at Godot, Beckett, or either of these two actors in quite the same way, ever again.

[Didi and Gogo, waiting.]

Long Overdue!

Sorry to be gone for a month.  Things have been happening, thick and fast, and there simply hasn't been time even to process my thoughts, much less blog about them.

On the home front, we've been struggling with some unexpected now-that-she's-out-of-the-nest issues with my daughter.  I won't go into any details; she would be mortified and horrified if I did.  Suffice it to say that I have taken serious issue with some choices she recently made, and a rift I never expected to experience has developed between us.  I hope it can be healed -- no bridges have been burned on either side, and hope springs eternal.

On the health front, my Crohn's Disease has been really awful lately.  At first I thought it might be the usual fall allergies -- fall and spring hold horror for every sufferer of autoimmune disease, but things usually settle down once the pollens go away.  This year for me, they did not, and my Crohn's has seriously affected my quality of life in a very, very short period of time.  I have, quite literally, been spending at least 75% of my waking time in or near the bathroom since early September.  My doctor's initial response was not unexpected:  up the dose of the immunosuppressant I take and add Prednisone, a corticosteroid, to "put out the fire."  What was unexpected was the depth of feeling in my refusal to do either.  The immunosuppressant is already at the level that a heart transplant patient would have to take -- much more has its own set of toxic side effects, at least for me.  And Prednisone, quite simply, makes me nuts.  Yes, short-term it puts out the inflammation and takes me back to normal, but the side effects are unbelievable and they kick in faster every time I have to use the drug.  The side effects for me include but are not limited to vastly increased appetite, weight gain, change in the shape of my face (Prednisone can give long-term users a "moon" face) and worst of all, personality changes.  Including rage and depression.

So I said, "no, thanks."

My doctor agreed with my reasons and admitted that there simply aren't too many bullets left in the proverbial gun to try.  The most successful drug for Crohn's Disease, Remicade, is the gold standard for treatment, with something like a 30% remission rate.  It also destroyed my nervous system.  In some folks there are neurological side effects from the drug; I was one.  Biopsies of my nerves show a degradation similar to ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in my nerves, but so far, thank the Universe, only in my sensory nerves.  I still have most of my motor functions, but my arms and legs and face feel things that aren't real, including heat, cold, pain, electricity, wet gravel, insects, etc., etc.  It's a crap shoot; every day is different and nothing lasts long enough to get used to it.  It may not have turned me into a Stephen Hawking, at least not yet, but it has most certainly affected my quality of life.

So Remicade and its cousin Humira are out.  However (and I had never known this, in spite of my pride of knowledge about Crohn's and its treatments) these drugs are harvested from genetically engineered mouse tissues.  There is another version of the drug which does not come from mice, called Cimzia, which is created in the laboratory using recombinant DNA technology.  Cimzia is self-administered injections, two per month given simultaneously.  The drug is viscous and the administration of it is quite painful.  It is also not covered by our insurance, which is even more painful. I am trying to get myself enrolled in a program administered by the manufacturer which would cover $3000 for the first injection, $2500 for the second, and $2000 for the third.  (Each set of injections costs just shy of $5000.)  And my doctor may be able to cover the first injection with a sample.  If the drug works, I have some fast dancing to do financially, but if it works...my life will change dramatically.

So that's what's been going on, and where my brain has been for the past month.  Fun stuff, no?

[Two of these in the belly every month.  I can't wait.]

Road Work

Last April, around Tax Day, we got a letter from our township supervisors informing us that an upgrade needed to be made to the sewers on our street.  Work was expected to begin on April 29th and end on or about June 7th.  Obviously we would need to be aware of some inconveniences about accessing our properties sometimes during this process.

OK.  A hassle, but part of the headache of home ownership.

Except that the work is still going on, here in mid-September.

There has been no information, zero, zilch, nothing from any of the powers-that-be.  Everything we've learned about the project has been picked up via hearsay from the workers themselves, who are usually even more in the dark than we residents are.  What I have gleaned from them so far:  the work encountered more and harder bedrock than anticipated; the equipment they had brought in to do the job proved to be inadequate and getting the right equipment in was harder and took longer than they thought it would be; the final paving will now not happen until the Spring of 2014, etc., etc., etc.

The way the local authorities have handled this situation has been nothing short of appalling.  We have not been informed of any of the difficulties, in spite of numerous phone calls, letters, e-mails and neighborhood petitions.  (Guess who's going to be looking for a new job after the next election?)  There has been no rhyme or reason to the pattern of work, and several times we have awakened to find ourselves trapped in our home while excavations took out the driveway.  I mean, would it have been so BLOODY DIFFICULT to stick a measly postcard in the mailbox saying, "Hey, we're going to be working in front of your driveway tomorrow so if you need to get out, move your car to a side street tonight, okay?"  Granted, with minimal eye-rolling, the guys would do their best to let you get out if it was at all possible, but a little information would have gone a long, long way to making everybody's life easier -- both the workers and the affected residents.

It looks like the work is winding up, at least for the season.  The road is now a Frankenstein's Monster network of patches and seams.  One of the workers told me that the final paving of a top coat will now not happen until next Spring, so as to allow the work to "settle."  He also told me that this is almost certainly a complete load of horseshit.  Nothing they've done needs to "settle," according to the foreman, and it's just going to be a huge, expensive hassle to close the street again in the Spring so that it can be paved.  Which should last only a couple of days.

Right.

When I was a kid in New Jersey, we had a joke:  "You know why it says New Jersey is 'The Garden State' on our license plates?  Because 'The Toxic Waste Dump State' won't fit!"  I feel like for Pennsylvania the punchline should be "The 'You-Can't-Get-There-From-Here' State."

Mike Seeger

Great PBS special on tonight about the history of the banjo, narrated by Steve Martin, who sneaks in a performance with the Steep Canyon Rangers at the end.  Steve and the Rangers, as you might remember, perform one of my absolute favorite modern bluegrass tunes, "Atheists Don't Have No Songs."

In addition to some really wonderful old footage and songs, from banjo players that predate the great Earl Scruggs by decades, the filmmaker interviewed Pete Seeger's brother, Mike Seeger, pretty extensively.  Mike Seeger came to the University of Virginia back in 1972 to do a folk music workshop.  It was, sadly, rather poorly attended...but I was there.  I was very, very into making jug band music at the time.  

Mike Seeger is one of the gentlest souls I have ever had the pleasure to meet.  He taught me how to correctly play the jaw harp (the instrument known in less politically correct nomenclature as the Jew's Harp) and turned me on to the blacksmith in Williamsburg, VA, who makes the finest harps in the known world.  I still have mine, and I still play it.  Mike also taught us a few old, old Appalachian songs and gave me a great tip, which I share with you now:  if you're going to play the washboard as a rhythm instrument, don't waste your time with a modern one made of zinc or tin.  Take the time to hunt down a vintage washboard that was made out of pressed glass.  You'll be amazed at how much richer the sound is with a glass washboard than you get with a tin board.  Sadly mine was lost in one of our interstate moves -- a  whole box of stuff, including the washboard, a couple of tambourines, and an 18th Century fife -- vanished into the limbo where odd socks and moving boxes go.  One of these days I'll get around to hunting down a new washboard.

It was really great to see Mike in this special.  He is still sharing his knowledge and his music, only now, instead of hunting down old mentors to learn their music, Mike has become himself an old mentor.  Bless you, Mike, and thank you for the gifts you gave me.

(Mike Seeger as I met him in the early 1970's--)

(--and Mike Seeger today.)

"Fake" Geek Girls and Cosplay Madness

Recently, the SyFy Channel (and I cannot tell you how much it pains me to type "SyFy" and not "SciFi") began airing a program called Heroes of CosPlay. It is your basic reality-show programming, but aimed at the "geek" target audience. When I first heard about the program, I thought it might be pretty cool. It looked more like a showcase of costuming talent than the typical competition show, as it follows a select group of cosplayers through the comic-convention circuit as they compete for recognition and prize money. Fair enough.

Now while I doubt anybody reading a blog site called Citizen of Oa needs to be told this, just in case, cosplay is the hobby of dressing up as a favorite character from fiction or comic books or films or videogames, preferably as accurately as possible, and attending a comic convention such as the famous San Diego Comic-Con to show off your character creation skills. I have a lot of friends who cosplay.  I myself have been known to cosplay as Hagrid from the Harry Potter books and as Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, and not just at Halloween. I've received grief from friends on FaceBook who reprimanded me for "liking" some of my friends' costumes because, quite frankly, some of my friends are attractive younger women who do some very skimpy, very sexy costumes. They are also amazingly creative people, who are funny, sweet, passionate about their hobby and wicked talented at sewing and fabricating the most insanely detailed props and costume pieces you can imagine. It takes a tremendous amount of talent to make a realistic real-life interpretation of a cartoon drawing come alive, and it takes serious acting chops to then become that character for a day on the convention floor. I'm proud to know 'em and even prouder that they consider me a friend.

And none of that good stuff appears in Heroes of CosPlay.

Instead, the show makes many of the cosplayers out to be naive, bitchy, obsessives who do nothing but snark at each other behind their respective backs.  I hate it. Right now there are shaping up to be two competing camps or philosophies among cosplayers.  The camp I'm in says that if you love a character and want to dress up as that character, go for it.  If you want to be a 300-lb Superman, you should. There are always going be people who will make fun of you, but frankly, if you're a 300-lb Superman fan, you are probably pretty used to that already. I developed a very thick skin a long, long time ago. The other camp, as espoused by the so-called "Ambassador of Cosplay" on the show, a woman named Yaya Han, says that you should be as accurate as possible.  Meaning you should only cosplay as characters you can physically pull off.  I guess that means that according to the Ambassador, people of color shouldn't try to be Batman, tall people shouldn't try to be Tyrion Lannister, and ugly and fat people in general should just stay home and leave the dress-up to the beautiful people.  Ms. Han is a talented costumiere and fabricator, but the show makes her out to be a pretty nasty human being. Another featured cosplayer, Victoria, is an acquaintance of mine through the Replica Prop Forum, a website devoted to costume fabricators, propmakers, and collectors. She is not the loony bitch that the show is making her out to be -- it seems that the only footage they have of Victoria is her whining or bitching or threatening her husband/fabricating partner -- and I know for a fact that she is nothing like that.  In typical reality show fashion, they have selected the worst moments of an individual's camera time in order to make the show "interesting." I hope they've done the same with Yaya Han and that she's a lot nicer than she appears to be.

One cosplayer who is not on the show is a young woman named Jessica Nigri. I also know Jessica through the Replica Prop Forum. She's brilliant. She has taken her costuming skills and is in the process of making a successful career out of them. She got her big break by re-creating the costume of the lead character in a videogame called Lollipop Chainsaw -- a quirky Japanese game about a zombie-fighting cheerleader -- and doing such a great job of it that the videogame company hired her as the game's spokesmodel. She has since done the same by creating female versions of characters in other games ranging from Pokemon to Assassin's Creed. Jessica's thing, though, is that her costumes are always pretty sexy. A lot of time was spent on Jessica this week on Heroes as Yaya Han went on and on over how Jessica had taken an unfortunate path, how that wasn't really cosplay, yadda yadda yadda, as part of Yaya's attempt to win back one of her proteges from the Dark Side of Sexy Cosplay.

It's all crap. One newcomer to the hobby was appalled on the show when she expressed the opinion that I shared above, namely that anybody should be able to celebrate whatever characters they love, and was universally shot down by the rest of the group for that opinion.  Which brings me to the "fake" geek girls portion of the program.

More and more women are being confronted and actually abused at comic conventions because they are deemed to be too attractive to be genuine geeks. Total strangers will confront an attractive cosplayer and grill them on the minutiae of their character in the hope of somehow revealing them as, I don't know, an infiltrator of some kind from the Cool Kids camp. I hate it. We geeks should know better and we should behave better towards one another. Especially now that geeks ARE the cool kids!!! We should be celebrating having found one another, and the fact that we all are so passionate about the things that we love that for years caused others to mock us for being, well, geeks.

So be warned. The next time I'm at a con, and I see someone trying to corner and bully some girl about whether or not she is a "true geek" (whatever the hell that is,) or be rude to her because she chose a sexy costume, or try to abuse somebody of any gender who is dressing as a character for whom they do not have, shall we say, the ideal body type, I'm going to step in. Because I may be dressed as Uncle Fester, but I am "6 foot 5 and I eat punks like you for breakfast" as John Cleese once said.  We geeks spent too much time being bullied to turn into bullies ourselves, and we should never allow it to happen in our presence.  Ever.  Especially at what is supposed to be a celebration of all that we hold dear.

Boys & Their Toys

For about twenty years, now, I've been collecting toys. I have mostly concentrated on toys related to the comics superhero Green Lantern and the other heroes at DC Comics. I've always been a Batman/Superman guy more than a Spider-Man/X-Men guy.  But there has been other stuff along the way that caught my eye (and my wallet.) Actually, now that I think about it, it was a Marvel toy that got me into the hobby, not a DC toy. I was shopping for my newborn daughter and on a whim took a turn down the action figure aisle. I spotted a Green Goblin toy (he's one of Spider-Man's arch-enemies) that was a perfect rendering in 3-D of how Gil Kane drew the character in the late 1960's. Gil Kane was also the definitive artist on Green Lantern and is far and away my favorite comics artist. So I picked it up. Later on I learned that it was a bit of a rare find. Knowing nothing about the hobby, as I did then, I had no idea that villain figures and female figures are few and far between -- the thinking is that moms want to buy their kids the hero, and that boys don't buy female figures at all. So finding an actual bad guy on the shelf was second only to finding Spidey's girlfriend. I took the Goblin home, opened it up, and played around with it. (I've always been an opener of my toys, not one of the guys who keeps everything mint in its original packaging. The only unopened toys I have are the ones that I have no place to display yet!)

The hobby of collecting action figures has changed tremendously over the intervening years, though, and not, I think, for the better. Back then the Internet was a younger place and message boards for toy collectors were primarily used to stay informed about what was out there. It was the era of the "toy run" -- going out to make the rounds of Target, Hill's, K-Mart, Toys 'r' Us, etc., and seeing what was new on the shelves. There were few internet merchants selling toys, and there was a bit of an addiction to the thrill of the hunt -- hoping that today was the day I'd find the rare one-per-case villain or villainess figure.  I belonged to a couple of message boards linking like-minded collectors and we often helped each other out, trading figures and sharing info on who had what. It was tremendous fun. Toys were cheap -- the little 4" and 5" figures were around $5 and the larger 6" figures with more articulation and accessories were $9-$10.

Enter eBay. The scalpers who had already made a mess of collecting Hot Wheels tipped to the fact that there was money to maybe be made off of action figures.  They started lining up outside the toy departments the moment the store opened, bribed clerks to hide stuff for them or bring new unopened cases of toys out of the back, and pretty soon any hope dried up completely of the average collector walking into a store on his lunch hour and finding a hot toy. I have tried to never buy anything off of eBay, but I'm in the minority and to this day, the toy scalpers flourish there.  And in the stores, toys have increased tremendously in price. Those $5 Star Wars figures are now $10-$14. The 6" figures -- when anyone even bothers to manufacture them -- run $21-$27. Larger special toys run even more; DC last year made a $50 Mr. Freeze and a Darkseid figure that cost $90.

It's insane.

I think the passion, the collector's fire feels like it’s been burning lower and lower. I just don’t have it for the hobby like I did, and as the prices are getting higher and higher, I find myself getting closer and closer to the Fixed Income Portion of My Life. (And yet, the Super Alloy Green Lantern figure, $270.00 or not, still lights a spark, so who knows?)

Too much stuff was in the basement, and I recently took steps to do something about it. All my Star Wars stuff that remained in its packaging — not because I keep it that way, but simply because I never got around to opening the toys and never had the space to display them; as I mentioned, I AM an opener — all of my unopened SW stuff, about 300 pieces, is going to the 501st Legion this week. They are a charity group that dresses up in screen-accurate Star Wars costumes and visit children in the hospital. Let my stuff go out with them and be in the hands of a kid somewhere. The other stuff that was never opened is going to either Toys for Tots or a local charity auction, and again, if something can give somebody some pleasure and do some good, well, that’s way better than having it in my basement.

I’ll probably hang on to my Shrine of Oa -- all my Green Lantern toys -- for a while yet. I recently capped it off with the latest DC Collectibles green Power Battery as a centerpiece, and I want to keep my GL stuff for a while yet. I’m also hanging on to my Justice League Unlimited collection — pretty much complete except for Holiday Hal Jordan (a rare Green Lantern figure, although I have a pretty good copy of him in The Shrine) because my daughter wants it, and it was a favorite to collect.  All the prominent DC characters were made in cartoon style, and they are awesome.  I will also keep some favorite DC characters from the Mattel "DC Universe" line — usually GL-related but not always; Hawkman and Hawkgirl are fine, fine figures — so those toys will probably stick around for a while too. But I think I’m getting to the point where I’m feeling like I might be done.