Stitching History from the Holocaust: a Czech dressmaker's story sewn into life at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee

There’s another impressive little exhibit at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee (JMM) through February28th of next year:  Stitching History from the Holocaust.  It tells the heartbreaking story of a German-speaking Czech Jew named Hedvika “Hedy” Strnad & her husband Paul.  At age 39, Hedy ran a successful dressmaking shop in Aussig (Usti nad Labem), Czechoslovakia.  But it was 1938.  

The Nazis came & swallowed the Sudetenland, with ignominious Allied blessing, destroying the Strnads & their whole Jewish community within a few terrifying years.  Perhaps worse, our government did nothing to help the Strnads when they desperately sought refuge in the USA.  Paul's typed letters to cousin Alvin Strnad in Milwaukee hang on the gallery walls like silent screams.  

An envelope from abroad bears the dreaded SS logo, an occupying bureaucratic censor’s stamp of approval. The so-called affidavit of necessity required by Uncle Sam didn’t suffice to save the couple.  They were deemed too average to deserve a precious US visa.  

But this story has a sort of happy ending. In a sense, the exhibit itself is an act of redemption, a gesture of regret on behalf of a talented woman, a cultured Czech citizen who died beside her husband in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1942.  The JMM worked with the costume shop of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in bringing several of Hedy Strnad’s designs to life.  

These artists of cloth took great pains to find or create just the right fabrics, prints, colors & other details.  The seamstresses' results are beautifully draped on forms: a pair of modest blue & white dresses as well as a fine modern lady’s well-shouldered grey suit.  The Old World patterns that led to these retro-garments were probably illustrated by Hedy herself.  Meant to be the Strnads ticket to escape the coming Holocaust, they at least inspired a moving labor of love 75 years later.   

Prof. Beverly Gordon, a fashion & textile historian at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), gave a companion talk called “Hedvika Strnad & Czech Fashions of the 1930s” at a JMM luncheon on December 4th.  She suggested that, given a history marked by medieval pogroms, the 1745 expulsion from Prague & the anti-semitic horror shows inflicted by central European fascists, Czech Jews could never feel entirely secure.  No wonder the paranoid literary genius of Franz Kafka sprang from Prague Jewry.  

Nazi documents show that 92,000 remaining Jews were deported to concentration camps & walled ghettos from Bohemia & Moravia by the Germans in 1941-42.  The vast majority died during the war, either by brutal murder or criminal neglect.  A lucky few (e.g. pre-war Kindertransports to England) managed to escape the genocide.  The Strnads too tried hard in 1939.  

Unfortunately, like many others abandoned by indifferent foreign authorities, Hedy & Paul didn’t manage to get a golden ticket to freedom.  Official US records show that thousands of American refugee visas, which might have been issued to European Jews in 1939, instead went unused, making Adolf Hitler's plans for a Final Solution feasible.  Imagine what a vibrant would-be immigrant like Hedy Strnad might have added to our country & its culture.  

It makes me wonder about those Central American refugees that our federal government deports to dangerous places.  How many more Hedy Strnads must die before we learn compassion for endangered strangers?

NOTE:  This exhibit provided the occasion for a catalog about the Strnads & their plight, available for purchase on the JMM website:  www.jewishmuseummilwaukee.org  

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]

Ray Bradbury's Big Read: Fahrenheit 451 ignites Racine & Kenosha, courtesy of UW-Parkside

[T]hey didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life.  People talked too much.  And they had time to think.  So they ran off with the porches”

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The temperature in the ballroom at the University of Wisconsin - Parkside may have been closer to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but the excitement in that audience of hundreds burned white hot.  Sam Weller, a professor of creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago & the authorized biographer of Ray Bradbury, gave a stirring keynote speech on Wednesday evening, September 24th.  The communal spirit of reading was thriving in that big warm room.  And so the Racine-Kenosha Big Read began with a BANG of applause & an echo of  audience questions. 

Sam Weller sustained us, a crowd of hundreds, hungry for his personal stories & biographical tidbits about the Master.  Bradbury wrote & published Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, angry at the national hysteria about alleged Communists, alarmed by the spectacle of his beloved country’s post-war fit of witch-hunting.  From the halls of Congress to the local schools, repression & fear chilled free speech.  So Ray gave us a cautionary tale, set in the foreseeable future, when firemen burned books - and even people - rather than saving them.  It still resonates around the globe with its message of love & hope for misguided humanity.  

Fahrenheit 451 poses a now familiar society, in which numbing drugs & televised distractions (on large flat wall-mounted TV screens, no less) threaten to dehumanize everyone.  Fireman Guy Montag ironically comes to see the beauty in books, in people, in all the life-affirming things that his bureaucratic superiors are determined to control or crush.  He escapes to a wooded utopia of soulful rebels who memorize books as a form of resistance.  They constitute a living library, a mode of survival amidst social madness.

Now, I've never been a fan of science fiction as a genre.  Even Stanley Kubrick's trippy1968 film 2001:  A Space Odyssey (an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's bestselling novel) put me to sleep.  I do not drool over high-tech gadgetry or fantasize about sexy titanium robots.  But Ray Bradbury's book The Martian Chronicles moved me when I read it at age 13.  The interconnected stories, featuring lonely, nostalgic astronaut families struggling to make sense of life, rang true.  Who cares if the author got the scientific details - e.g. Mars has an atmosphere similar to Earth's - wrong?  It remains a credible portrait of humans forced to live on an alien planet due to man-made disasters.

Early on, Bradbury was dubbed the Poet of the Pulps.  His writing style, his unique voice on paper, was inspired – even when his tales of dinosaurs, rockets & killers appealed mainly to weirdo commercial (i.e. lowbrow) tastes.  Fueled by a vast imagination, Ray also had the artistic determination to set his visions & memories down for others to enjoy.  

Born in 1920 in Waukegan (Illinois), just north of the metropolis of Chicago, Bradbury was drawn to the mass media of his era:  Buck Rogers comics, Oz & Tarzan books, silent as well as talking pictures & network radio shows.  His aunt Neva encouraged the energetic, clever, curious boy to read, to dream, to write adventures of his own.   

He lived ninety-two years, passing into the Great Beyond in 2012, after producing a steady stream of stories (his goal:  one a week), novels, radio dramas, screenplays for both Hollywood (John Huston's Moby Dick, 1956) & TV (Alfred Hitchcock Presents & The Twilight Zone, among others), theatrical plays, poetry & journalism.  He also consulted with fellow "imagineer" Walt Disney on the design of EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) in Florida, so that the USA would have a permanent World's Fair.  Ray's was a fertile mind indeed.  

Remarkably, this literary muse of the Space Age, never drove a car.  Bradbury refused to use a personal computer & he didn't fly in an aircraft until late in life.  The prestigious accolades that the cultural establishment eventually gave him, such as the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters & the National Endowment for the Arts National Medal of Arts, mattered less to him than the respect of fellow writers.  The adulation of Ray's many fans & the money it brought must have been a great comfort to a child of the Great Depression. 

In essence, Bradbury remained a wonderstruck boy from Waukegan, an enthusiastic toy collector, a wannabe magician, a devotee of dark carnivals, speculative circuses & flickering cinemas.  A loafer on warm summer front porches.  A dreamer, a stargazer, an unrepentant sentimentalist.  His name said it all:  like a Ray of Light, Mr. Bradbury's prose pierced the finite universe of literature, entering the cultural lives of millions.

Those fortunate residents of Racine & Kenosha, that thinking community of thousands, took up UW-Parkside Library Director Jo Cates's welcome challenge to read & discuss a dystopian novel from the Cold War.  Perhaps we even met, you & I, over a beer at the cozy tasting room of Public Craft Brewing Co. (creator of No Front Porches Imperial Smoked Red Ale).  Or was it at Rustic Road Brewing Co. (inventor of Fahrenheit 451 American Pale Ale, brewed with jalapeno peppers & Malabar peppercorn additions) in downtown Kenosha instead?

Maybe we sat side by side, time traveling at Racine's 1964 Golden Rondelle for that screening of Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 - a scratchy print of an analog film from 1966.  Or were we sitting together at the UW-Parkside Cinema for 1984, the British film adaptation of Orwell's dystopian classic (filmed in 1984)?  Well, we certainly burned the midnight oil reading Ray's book, then dipping into Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles:  The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005).  And, as the novel says:  "It was a pleasure to burn."

Bradbury enjoyed giving advice to aspiring fiction writers.  In his essay “Zen in the Art of Writing” (1973), he boiled it down to three words:  Work, Relaxation & Don’t Think.  Freeing the subconscious to express an individual’s innermost truth - rather than money or fame - was the ultimate goal.  If a writer achieved that breakthrough, Bradbury said, then “[t]he time will come when your characters will write your stories for you, when your emotions, free of literary cant and commercial bias, will blast the page and tell the truth.”  Good advice for us all, in a way.

We defiant ones, we readers in this alienating digital age, bombarded by video & social-media nonsense, heed the advice of Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose epigram opens Fahrenheit 451:  "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."  And as Bradbury warned in Fahrenheit 451:  "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them."

Thanks to Ms. Jo Cates & her UW-Parkside staff for reminding us that wise souls resist censorship & conformism.  This Big Read may have ended on October 22nd, but the fire it lit in the readers of Kenosha & Racine will yield glowing embers for years to come.

[© 2014 by Joe Crawford Mrazek]

Racine’s SC Johnson company legacy: Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces & more

On a recent August Saturday morning I met up with a group of architecture aficionados - by design, so to speak.  We’d gathered in the lobby of the Golden Rondelle,  a plush futuristic auditorium, in order to see a pair of marvels from the inside.  Built to show an inspiring avant-garde documentary film called To Be Alive at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Rondelle is Racine’s counterpart to Gaudì’s Sagrada Famìlia basilica in Barcelona, a weird flying saucer of a theater.  

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Racine is a city of 80,000 located on Lake Michigan, about 30 miles south of downtown Milwaukee.  Hundreds of extra tourists have been coming to the Belle City this summer to tour Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces for Johnson Wax, a globally successful company now called SC Johnson (known to most locals as J-Wax).  Among my group of 23 enthusiasts, the excitement was palpable.  We were not disappointed.  

Herbert Fisk “H.F.” Johnson commissioned the renowned Wright, a Wisconsin native, to design two commercial structures.  Seventy-five years into its working life, the details in the Administration Building (1939) - such as the polished kasota limestone stairs & the curving glass-and-brass-enclosed elevator - are exquisite.   

Wright’s first work for Johnson, the Administration Building was among the first air-conditioned offices in the United States.  A polymath perfectionist, Wright also designed the terra cotta-hued desks (outfitted with swing-out drawers & waste-baskets off the floor for easier cleaning), the matching steel-frame padded tilt-backed chairs & the geometric stained-light fixtures.  

SC Johnson is a privately held corporation, advertised with pride as a “family company.”  The heirs who now own it form a small yet powerful clan of billionaires.  Their companies - which include the Johnson Financial Group (banking & insurance) & Johnson Outdoors (kayaks & other outdoor recreational products) - have subsidiaries in scores of foreign countries, from the United Kingdom (since 1914) to Japan, Australia & South America.  

The pair of Wright buildings, examples of the elegant “organic” modernist style favored by the self-confident master, are located between Fourteenth & Sixteenth Streets, rising above the otherwise ordinary neighborhood a mile from the shore of Lake Michigan.  They are dazzling inside:  the Great Workroom is awash in natural light, thanks in part to the forest of dendriform columns supporting the broad translucent ceiling.    

With their streamlined edges & smooth Cherokee-red brickwork, these two Johnson Wax buildings are unobtrusive, pleasing to the eye.  Wright reportedly wanted to erect them in a more natural setting, as part of a utopian workers’ village.  He only agreed to the current location when H.F. Johnson, the client who was paying the bills at a time when Wright was nearly broke, insisted that they be situated alongside the company’s ugly cluster of structures just east of Racine Street (state Highway 32).

The 150-foot tall Research Tower (1950), a cantilevered beauty, is shaped like a giant electric solenoid.  Yet it still manages to seem warm & mysterious:  lit from within on summer nights, its curved bands of glass walls - comprising seventeen miles of Pyrex tubing - make it glow like a lightning bug in the humid air.   The tower was evacuated in 1982, partially due to handicap inaccessibility.  

With a single narrow winding staircase & tiny toilets within curved concrete walls, the building’s interior access feels confining.  This may explain why the company only opened it to public tours beginning in May 2014.  The research & development department workers who toiled in it had reportedly long complained about the heat & draftiness of Frank Lloyd Wright’s impractical take on an industrial high-rise for a modest Midwestern city.    

Among the (mostly) men & (few) women who developed new products in Wright’s bright tower was Allen “A.C.” Buhler, an in-house lawyer & marketing manager who laid claim to naming Off!  According to the late Buhler’s son Tom, one of a trio of brothers who now run Butter Buds, a dairy-products firm based on J-Wax research, his father came up with the insect repellent’s catchy name in a brainstorming session with a Navy aviation vet.  

“We could call it Wave Off - a term used on aircraft carriers,” the ex-sailor suggested.  “Why not just Off?” Buhler countered.  It was one of many eureka marketing moments at Johnson Wax as they expanded their product line in the 1950s & ’60s.

This tour was especially welcome to Wright fans due to the addition of access to the Research Tower.  The two floors we were permitted to inspect have been professionally curated with artifacts from Johnson’s mid-century heyday.   Among the used microscopes & beakers, old J-Wax advertisements, company magazines & newsletters, and that red 45-rpm vinyl recording of “The Wassail Song” by the Johnson Wax Men’s Glee Club (1951), I traveled happily backwards in time.  The future looked pretty bright in Harry Truman’s America - apart, of course, from the atom bombs & the Korean War.

“When the announcement went out about this tour, our office email went crazy,” said Sheri, a young architect from Chicago who was joined on the tour by friends & colleagues from the Windy City.  She acknowledged the continuing influence on contemporary architects of the portfolio - albeit not necessarily the esoteric theories - of the eccentric Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959).

Wingspread (1939), the Johnson family’s pinwheel-shaped mansion on Four Mile Road in Wind Point, is another Wright marvel.  It lies just north of Racine in the type of bucolic surroundings that inspired the nature-worshipping Wright.  Since 1961 it has served as the home of the Johnson Foundation, which hosts public-policy conferences & allocates grants to non-profit causes that Sam & his widow Imogene (“Gene,” an alumna of Cornell University) embraced, such as environmental sustainability.  While the Johnson family’s philanthropy is admirable, it also has tax advantages.  

Even during the Great Depression Johnson Wax was a mainstay employer in Racine, boosting its national profile in part by sponsoring the popular NBC radio sitcom Fibber McGee & Molly from 1935 until 1950.  The company certainly hasn’t lost its ambition:  SC Johnson  & JohnsonDiversey keep buying smaller companies, adding to their large roster of janitorial & personal-care products, including Windex glass cleaner, Edge shaving gel, Glade air fragrances & Raid (tagline:  Kills bugs dead®). 

In the late-summer sunshine the curving Finnish-glass-walled Fortaleza Hall, designed by Foster + Partners, gleams like a pricey monument to an adventurous spirit & a robust ego.  A red-&-black replica 1930’s Sikorsky seaplane hangs from the high ceiling.  Named after the Brazilian town where H.F. flew from Racine in 1936, on a mission to study the carnaúba palm tree in order to obtain a reliable source of wax, Fortaleza Hall is a glitzy companion to the understated Wright buildings.  It contains a cafeteria, a small museum & a gift shop called the Lily Pond.

Imagine having enough resources to (1) commission a Wright-designed tower; (2) close it as a workplace after 32 years; and (3) then spend a small fortune on annual maintenance for a purely aesthetic object.  Fellow tour guest Prof. Richard Keehn, a retired UW-Parkside economic historian, explained how it was feasible:  the Johnsons are the ninth wealthiest family in the entire USA, he told me.  The family is now comprised of Gene & her three children:  Fisk Johnson, S.C. “Curt” Johnson III & Helen Leipold, who oversee the J-Wax empire.  

Indeed, at times the tour seems hagiographic in its enthusiasm for the business savvy of the Johnson patriarchs.  It’s no surprise, since Big Money attracts sycophants like rockstars attract groupies.  Samuel Curtis Johnson, Sr., a former bookseller & failed railroad investor, founded the corporation in 1886.  It started modestly as a parquet flooring factory that he’d bought from a hardware store.  Johnson’s entrepreneurial breakthrough was the decision to sell his proprietary floor-wax to anyone who wanted it.

Samuel Curtis “Sam” Johnson, Jr. (1928-2004) took the company to new heights of innovation & profitability after World War II.  Among the many family photos & mementos on display in Fortaleza Hall, you can see Sam Johnson’s US Air Force-issued Civil Air Patrol pilot’s license from the Cold War days.  A decade after his death, Sam remains a local hero.  In his final years he publicly battled WE Energies over the health hazards of burning coal at its power plants.

For generations, the Johnson family’s philanthropy & support for the arts have given Racine some much-needed sophistication & hope.  For example, the annual Animal Crackers live-jazz performance series brings world-class musicians to the Racine Zoological Garden’s natural amphitheater by Lake Michigan.  The city that boasts J-Wax’s world headquarters could use a few more employers like SC Johnson & its affiliates.

Nevertheless, I wonder how much SC Johnson’s employee profit-sharing & other benefits have done to help Racine as a whole.  Like their publicly owned competitors, J-Wax employs an army of temporary & contract workers in order to reduce costs.  Also the home of global tractor manufacturer J.I. Case (now the Italian-owned CNH - Case New Holland), the Belle City has the highest unemployment rate (officially around 10%) - as well as one of the highest crime rates - in Wisconsin. 

The impressive Johnson legacy has been tarnished in recent years by court cases.  In August 2014, SC Johnson & JohnsonDiversey (a spinoff company that was sold to Sealed Air a decade ago) settled a federal class action by retirees (http://journaltimes.com/news/local/sc-johnson-settles-retirement-plan-lawsuit/article_febb5975-0e99-58da-9ec8-853d32e3b678.html).  More shockingly, 59-year-old Curt Johnson pleaded guilty in June 2014 to misdemeanor fourth-degree sexual assault of a minor (http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/johnson07-b99285933z1-262145461.html).  Fortunately, even in this plutocratic era legal rules & moral constraints still apply to billionaires & big corporations.

A quotation from Sam Johnson adorns one of Fortaleza Hall’s shining lobby walls, as though it had come from the potent pen of Abe Lincoln.  It does at least offer a provocative insight:  “We should not worry about whether we have lived up to the expectations of our fathers, but whether we, as fathers, have lived up to the expectations of our children.”  

Amen, Sam.

© 2014 by J.C. Mrázek

Links:

(1) SC Johnson architecture tour information:  http://www.scjohnson.com/en/company/visiting.aspx

(2) Photos of Wingspread by Racine-based photographers Brad Jaeck & Carol Hansen:  

http://www.photographicdesignltd.com/artist.asp?ArtistID=7646&AKey=2C782FMS

Bonk! at the Eco-Justice Center: barn cats & curious turkeys meet poets & musicians

I had another satisfying meal at Olde Madrid restaurant in downtown Racine on Saturday night.  But this time I dined at a long table with a dozen strangers & a few acquaintances, including young poets, potent musicians & performing-arts enthusiasts.  We had all just experienced a mind-bending installment of Bonk! at the Eco-Justice Center (EJC) in Caledonia, Wisconsin (USA).  

Bonk! is a lively cultural series sponsored by the Racine Public Library & the Racine Arts Council, and made feasible thanks to private-sector support.  Started in 2008, Bonk! is now curated & emceed by the long-haired & kind-hearted poet-librarian Nick Demske.  Like all true creative gifts, Bonk! is free & open to the public.  The solar-paneled barn at EJC's renovated farm, which serves as a hands-on sustainability education facility, turned out to be a charming venue for the 6:00 p.m. show on August 23rd.

The scene that muggy (but not buggy) evening, was weird yet welcoming.  It reminded me of a vegetarian meal & reincarnation lesson that I chewed on at the crowded Hare Krishna house in New Orleans circa 1988.  Mercifully, there was no chanting or confounding metaphysics at the EJC's Bonk! event.  Apart, that is, from what the featured artists (a pair of poets & a guitar-slinging troubadour) suggested with their lyrics.  

Despite the pungent setting, that fertile night's gathering of Bonk! participants seemed magical.  I may be a geocentric ex-Catholic agnostic, yet I still harbor residual affection for Dominican nuns.  Members of that enlightened religious order taught me at St. Edward's Grade School as well as St. Catherine's High School (Go, Angels!) in Racine, from 1966 to 1978.  Given my background, I feel spiritually uplifted at the Eco-Justice Center.  

On Earth Day (early April) 2009 I volunteered at the EJC.  A burly man handed over a chainsaw & told me to convert a mess of windstorm-felled trees to useful cordwood.  I tried to act nonchalant & manly, suppressing a well-founded fear of maiming myself by accident.  I reckoned that my skinny arms might be no match for the heavy, dangerous & distressingly loud power tool.  But I survived, stacking chunks of wood as ordered - until a timely rainshower cut short my lumberjack act.  

And I'm happy to report that no animals, human or otherwise, were harmed in the course of Saturday's pastoral Bonk! either.  In fact, we attendees were so quiet in that open barn that other creatures serenaded us.  EJC's Critter Chorus included clucking ducks, some curious turkeys, diverse territorial geese, some cooped-up contented hens & a few lucky roaming roosters.  Meanwhile, the Soul Sisters' small herd of brown & beige alpacas grazed in an enclosure near Michna Road, looking comfortable in their wooly skin despite the heat.  

Following a flurry of announcements & Nick's flattering introduction, Racine native AM Ringwalt approached the microphone.  A precocious 19-year-old student at Emerson College, Ringwalt recited her verse with poise & purpose.  Suddenly a small black barn cat named Vader climbed the stairs & hopped onto the stage.  While listening to Ringwalt, an attractive blonde in a stylish neo-beatnik outfit (black skirt, black blouse & black ankle-boots), I heard Howlin' Wolf growling the blues in my over-imaginative brain:  

Well, I ain't superstitious / But a black cat just crossed my path . . .

The gracious Ringwalt (alias Anne Malin, an aspiring folk musician) told me later that she hadn't even noticed the feline interloper - a fortunate oversight, since she's allergic to cats.  Ringwalt is a compelling literary newcomer, celebrating the recent publication of her first chapbook, Like Cleopatra.  The cover features a mirror-image photo of bob-coiffed country-pop singer Skeeter Davis.  Born Mary Frances Penick, Davis had a melodramatic crossover hit in 1963, as referenced in section XII of Like Cleopatra:  

The second time I got in a car crash I was listening to "The End of the World" by Skeeter Davis.

Next came the soft-spoken mustachioed Joe Hall, taking the stage in slacker gear (powder-blue t-shirt, plain pants & sneakers).  In between reading texts from his published chapbooks, including Devotional Poems, Hall discussed his interest in the redemption of so-called human trash.  A Maryland native, Hall is now a Ph.D. candidate & creative-writing teacher who endured a decade of bohemian poverty & odd jobs.  He finds inspiration in quotidian objects as well as remote subjects.  For example, he once mined the absurd life of a Spanish conquistador for a series of poems.  

Hall had driven to Racine from faraway Buffalo via Ontario (Canada) & Chicago in a BMW.  After distributing homemade scratch & sniff styrofoam squares for a "smell my trash" bit, Hall was upstaged by a pair of turkeys.  Those bold birds pranced into the barn, undeterred by the presence of an energetic dog.  One turkey nibbled at a hay-bale while the other checked out the seated audience.  Apparently we entertained them as much as they amused us.  Joining the gentle audience for a while struck me as an intelligent - albeit bird-brained - response.

Last up was singer-songwriter Naomi Marie, a colorfully tattooed Twin Cities transplant to the Belle City.  She performed with a mesmerizing intensity that served her musical material well.  No barnyard animals dared intrude during her 20-minute set.  Perhaps the amplification & audible emotion kept them at bay.  To paraphrase the old Broadway tune:  How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they have seen Bonk! free?  As usual, a Q & A session completed the festivities.

  

To my regret, I met just one nun at this performance.  A pragmatic elder, Sister Rosemary interrupted our conversation in order to tell another guy named Joe (from Kenosha) that smoking is banned at the EJC.  It reminded me of a funny photo-calendar I had circa 2005 called Nuns Having Fun.  Among its black & white prints, one depicted a nun sneaking a cigarette while dressed in a burka-like traditional habit.  The mere prospect of cancer didn't deter that God-fearing sister.  

Later that night at Olde Madrid (a Bonk! underwriter) the co-owner & manager Natalie Salinas & her husband Manny Salinas (chef & co-owner) fed the performers gratis.  My meal - tapas of fried shrimp with cilantro sauce, cup of gazpacho, flan custard & a glass of red sangria - was also on the house, Natalie said.  I was surprised & delighted.  I'd simply given their place an honest newspaper review that drew extra diners from metro Milwaukee.  

The generosity & gratitude that I witnessed last weekend - at Olde Madrid, the Eco-Justice Center & the Bonk! show - give me hope.  That can be a lifeline for a semi-cynical loner.  Joe Hall offered me a taste of his seafood gumbo:  it was creamy, unlike any gumbo I’d ever tried.  So I passed him my plate of flan (custard).  It was a sweet fore-taste of heaven, to borrow a poetic metaphor.

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]

Links:

(1) Info about the Bonk! series:  http://bonkperformanceseries.wordpress.com/

(2) Info about the Eco-Justice Center & its upcoming annual Fall Festival:  http://www.racinedominicans.org/eco-j.cfm

(3) A recent article about Anne Malin & her music: http://www.berkeleybeacon.com/arts/2014/4/16/the-eerie-music-of-anne-malin

My date with Derek: This Is Spinal Tap turns 30, mock-rock fans still love to Smell the Glove

I once had sex with Derek Smalls, fictional bass player in the parody metal band Spinal Tap (played in the mockumentary by Harry Shearer).  Okay, that’s a misleading statement.  In fact, I fucked a facsimile of gentle Derek.  

Inside that flare-legged jumpsuit with a blatantly stuffed package, the slim-hipped creature I met & made love to was actually a young woman in a gender-bending costume.  Whatever.  This faux Derek was hot - albeit androgynously so.  I didn’t know whether to kiss him/her on the cheek or merely shake hands.  

Heterosexual by nature, I found the turn-on rather awkward.  Yet I’m man enough to admit that I grew an instant - uh - crush on him/her.  This led to satisfying coitus by night’s end.  That doesn’t make me a rock ‘n’ roll groupie, does it?  I’d hate to embody that cliché.  Let me explain by setting the scene.  

Voice-over by activist-actor Peter Coyote:  It was the fall of 2001.  The nation was at war again, in remote Afghanistan this time.  Even stateside civilians lived like there might be no tomorrow.  With W & his evil sidekick Dick in the White House, things got very weird for the next seven years.

So in late 2001, on a bracing Friday evening not long after my 41st birthday, I was attending a “fancy dress” (British for costume) party on the eastside of Madison, Wisconsin (USA).  It had a perennially hip humorous theme:  This Is Spinal Tap.  I had no idea that I was about to experience a reverse-Lola moment.  In the living room a big TV played the Show of Honor on DVD.  The party’s main action, however, was in the basement.  A lousy garage band played far too loudly.  But with a keg of beer flowing freely, nobody complained.  

I approached a medium-sized person dressed in a Derek Smalls get-up, complete with dark mullet, chinless beard & a messy nest of chest hair.  I struck up a conversation.  The alto-voiced lady-in-drag & I hit it off.  Before long we left to go shoot pool at nearby Mickey’s Tavern.  Only then did she remove the fake fur, revealing a friendly babe with a fantastic sense of fun.  Later that night I learned that she was blonde underneath the wig (& elsewhere). 

You know the movie, don’t you?  If not, here it is in a nutshell:  A mostly improvised 82-minute satire with several deserving targets, This Is Spinal Tap bombed at the box office upon release in 1984 - exactly 30 years ago Friday (August 1st).  A lot of people didn’t get the extended joke:  aging British rock band releases new album (Smell the Glove) & arranges a US comeback tour that turns out to be ridiculously doomed.  

It features a host of gifted comic actors doing cameo appearances.  Bruno Kirby plays an embittered limo driver, while  Howard Hesseman is a nasty rival band manager.  Billy Crystal & Dana Carvey play catering-company mime/waiters in New York.  Fran Drescher vamps as high-maintenance record-company PR flack Bobbie Flekman & David Letterman’s musical sidekick, Canadian import Paul Shaffer, says “kick my ass” as Polymer Records incompetent promoter Artie Fufkin.

The feature film was embraced by a growing legion of fans upon its VHS videotape reboot.  But the stars who created it got ripped off & supposedly never made any money from their red-headed stepchild’s subsequent success.  Nevertheless, the movie started a buzz - it had legs that still keep it moving after 30 years.  That’s an eternity, measured in the rapidly passing time of disposable pop culture.

Sample dialog:  Christopher Guest, as boyish bullshit-artist/guitarist Nigel Tufnel, telling fan & film documentarian Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner):  I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really.  It's like a Mach piece, really.  It's sort of -

DiBergi: What do you call this?

Tufnel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump." 

Or dig the famous bit where Nigel explains to Marty that the volume knobs on his amplifiers go all the way to eleven.  But they’re no louder than standard amps, which only go up to ten.  Marty’s puzzled.  Why not just make the amps louder? he asks.  “But these go to eleven,” Nigel whines, after a long pause.  He’s a spoiled 30-something idiot, proud of his noisy toys.  

Less invention was required to author & improvise those scenes than you might think.  Reiner, Guest & company had done their research. In a recent conversation with Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis of WBEZ-FM Chicago public radio’s outstanding program Sound Opinions, co-writer & then first-time director Reiner said that the scene where the bumbling Spinal Tap members get lost en route from the dressing room to the stage was based on a real incident involving Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, who reportedly got so stoned in the green room that they couldn’t manage to locate the stage entrance.

Reiner admitted that he based his enthusiastic documentary film-maker, Marty DiBergi, on Martin Scorsese.  Scorsese’s concert film about The Band, The Last Waltz (1978), inspired some of the looniness captured on celluloid forever by Reiner.  Amateur - yet accomplished - musicians Guest, Shearer & Michael McKean (as David St. Hubbins) played themselves into pop-culture immortality.  Most enlightened rock & film critics (Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert gave it two hearty thumbs up) agree:  This Is Spinal Tap is not only one of the best insider movies about the business of rock ‘n’ roll & its many greedy players, it’s also one of the best comedies ever issued by a Hollywood studio.

Saturday Night Live alumni Shearer & Guest, along with McKean & an ensemble of talented improv actors that includes Fred Willard (who appears in Spinal Tap as a clueless US Air Force colonel), Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, Catherine O’Hara & Eugene Levy, went on to make several more satires.  They deftly skewered the Sixties folk-music generation in A Mighty Wind (2003).  They lambasted purebred-dog competitions (Best in Show, 2000) & community theatre (Waiting for Guffman, 1997).   They even used their sharp comic wits against their own kind, sending up vain Hollywood actors in For Your Consideration (2006).

You may be wondering, whatever became of my faux Derek?  We dated a few times, but we didn’t deploy disguises or engage in role-playing.  We had some good clean (sometimes naked) fun.  But she lost interest faster than I did, for a change.  Derek’s real name was Sara & she was a gem, but we lived 75 miles apart.  At least I have a good memory tied to that great movie, in that mad era in American history.  

This Is Spinal Tap may be 30 years old, but it still smells fresh as a new glove to its many admirers around the world.  As David St. Hubbins philosophically put it, “It’s such a fine line between stupid & clever.”  Rock on, Tap!  Milwaukee’s Shank Hall awaits your next tour.

NOTE:  Here's a link to the excellent Sound Opinions podcast featuring the Rob Reiner interview about Spinal Tap:  http://www.soundopinions.org/show/451/#robreiner

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrázek]