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Casual Observer

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Today is the birthday in 1904 of Moss Hart, a New York playwright and a theater guy who worked with some of the biggest names on Broadway (Irving Berlin, George S. Kaufman) and won a Pulitzer for “You Can’t Take It With You.”

You would have to include him in your list of 1940’s New York sophisticates (he married Kitty Carlisle, famous for being on the TV game show “To Tell The Truth”) even though Hart grew up far from the bright lights of Broadway. His first visit to Times Square happened when he was 12 years old and he did it on the sly, running an errand for the owner of the music store where he worked, purposely NOT asking his mother for permission to go, as he was told to do.

The family struggled to make ends meet, but somehow there was always money for his eccentric Aunt Kate to go to the theater. It may have been allowed because she brought some of the glamour of Broadway back into the house. In his autobiography, “Act One”, Hart says the family was “grateful for this small patch of lunatic brightness in the unending drabness of those years.”

“My mother and I always waited up for her return, and then she would re-create the entire evening for us. She was a wonderful reporter. She had a fine eye for irrelevant detail and a good critical sense of acting values. Her passion for the theater did not include being overwhelmed by it, nor was she a blind idolater of stars. She always sat in the gallery, of course, but she always got to the theater early enough to stand in the lobby and watch the audience go in – in order, as she expressed it, to get all there was to get! She must have been a strange figure indeed, standing in the lobby, her eyes darting about, “getting” everything there was to get, her conversation, if she spoke to anyone, a mixture of Clyde Fitch and Thomas Hardy; her own clothes a parody of the fashionable ladies going into the theater. But little indeed did escape her and she regaled us with all of it, from the audience arriving to the footlights dimming, and then the story of the play itself. She would smooth out the program on the kitchen table, and there we would sit, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, reliving the play …”

I admire anyone who can be such a keen observer and instant – playback storyteller. It’s not unusual to hear someone say that they enjoy people watching, but it is one thing to have a great eye for detail, quite another to have clear recall, and still another to be able to act it out coherently. Aunt Kate may have been aided in her dramatic re-creations by a touch of insanity, but regardless, she is a major character in the Moss Hart story. Her obsession with the stage may be responsible for the creation of some lasting works from the pen of her fascinated nephew.

Are you a people watcher? And do you remember anything you see?

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A Little Pep Talk

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This came in late last night from Spin Williams, visionary and permanent chair of The Meeting That Never Ends – a rolling idea development and dealmaking workshop.

Here at the Meeting That Never Ends, we were delighted to hear that Asian Carp have probably made it into the Twin Cities area. That is a wonderful thing for a city to have – immigrants! And while their mysterious rituals (they leap out of the water!) and puzzling ways (they never stop eating!) may seem strange to you, it is that very sort of thing that gives a moribund culture an injection of vitality that can keep it fresh and alive. So, congratulations!

I'm An Achiever!

Complainers and isolationists will tell you that the new carp are dangerous because they upend the environment by multiplying faster, eating all the food and crowding out fish that were already in the river. In the business world, we call that “competition”! If those long-time fish are getting complacent about reproducing and have lost the “edge” necessary to fight for food, perhaps they deserve to be overwhelmed! Nobody guarantees you the right to be a big fish in a small stream forever! Somebody’s always gonna come along and knock you off your pedestal if you don’t stay sharp!

Rather than try more ineffective efforts to stop the A.C.’s, we at TMTNE decided this is a great time for Mississippi River watchers in the Twin Cities to do some outreach to those beleaguered local fish. Offer some training and personal coaching. A motivational speech or two could work wonders. Tell them to get off their scaly butts and start going fin-to-gill with these showy, airborne newcomers!

There are all sorts of opportunities to do this work, especially with the prevalence of catch-and-release fishing. It turns out that Twin Citians are already logging a lot of “face time” with our denizens of the deep in that moment after the fish is caught and before it’s tossed back in. Why not add a step and make it Catch-EMPOWER-and-Release? It should be second nature to all Minnesotans. Whenever we take a native fish out of the river, we should give it the support and encouragement it needs to get back in there and fight for resources. Remember – anyone on land OR underwater can up their game, given the right kind of kick in the tail!

I have a feeling if anyone could write a motivational talk that would work on a bluegill, it would be Spin Williams.

When have you been moved by a speech?

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Team Effort

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According to various stories making the rounds in the early going yesterday, the latest despot-snuffing news had many authors and an assortment of modus operandi.

It was Obama with a robot in the pantry.
It was insurgents with a handgun in the hall.
It was a Frenchman with a missile from a gantry.
It was a bomber who was very, very small!

It was his butler with dagger and a bludgeon.
It was his driver with a penknife and a spoon.
He was frowned upon to death by a curmudgeon.
He was hoisted by his heels under the moon.

He was forced to read the text of all his speeches.
Every word had been tattooed upon his arms.
He was thrown into a pool alive with leeches.
He was stuffed with cantaloupe from Jensen Farms.

They were trying very hard to apprehend him.
They expected him to have a day in court.
‘Twas a pity, then, to prematurely end him.
Time ran out, as it so often does, in sport.

I have not played “Clue” in many years, but I always thought heavy candlesticks should be registered.

What’s your favorite board game?

The Baboon Congress

Guilty Pleasures

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Today our guest post comes from Steve.

The difficulty of talking about guilty pleasures is that people have such different notions of the concept.

Many women will purr and confess that a chocolate delight from Just Truffles is their guilty pleasure. I’m sorry; that is not a guilty pleasure! That’s an indulgence . . . and a particularly aristocratic one. People who try to pass that off as a guilty pleasure are suggesting that even when they succumb to a sybaritic craving they have exquisite taste.

Nor is it a guilty pleasure when your two-year old daughter expresses her adoration for “macky cheese,” painting her face and torso with what comes out of those boxes, including powdered ersatz cheese in a shocking shade of orange. She can’t have a guilty pleasure because she just doesn’t have informed taste.

No, a guilty pleasure is something that you know is schlock, and yet you find it irresistible. It is some kind of compelling treat we are ashamed of enjoying. Some remarkably cultured women are suckers for bodice-ripper romance novels. A liberal who enjoys “Gone With the Wind”—with all that Southern claptrap and racial stereotyping—is slumming in ways that reek of a guilty pleasure. And there are so many more: Karen Carpenter’s music, gossip shows on TV, vampire novels and any Hostess or Little Debbie pastry treat.

I have several authentic guilty pleasures. The one I can talk about (with some blushing) is the TV reality show, Survivor. I’m currently following the twenty-third season of it, and I have scarcely missed an episode from those earlier twenty-two years.

Don’t lecture me about how awful that show is. I know, I know! I’m the guy who has watched over 200 episodes! All that stuff about the “tribes” is painfully cornball. The jungle music is gauche. The shows are heavily edited to control audience responses, so you can’t trust your eyes. When Jeff Probst reads the Tribal Council votes, the order of the votes has been carefully arranged for dramatic effect. Most contestants are immature peacocks. The shows are as phony as an email from a Nigerian prince.

And yet I watch. Every week. Why do I watch? Three reasons.

First, Survivor episodes are mostly unscripted. So much TV is stale and predictable that I thrill to something that has a touch of real life to it, even if “reality” is as hokey as it is here.

Second, the challenges are almost irresistible watching. Under the pressure of challenges, cool contenders sometimes melt down and habitual losers occasionally find grit that nobody would have guessed was in them. Challenges that feature an ability to deal with pain often produce the most unlikely heroes. As silly as the Survivor game is, it showcases people performing under stress, and that always has the potential to be interesting.

Finally, while it is not ethical to conduct many kinds of experiments with human beings as subjects, that happens on every episode of Survivor. The show is like a fiendish laboratory where people are put under cruel pressure and tested weekly, with results that are as instructive as they are unpredictable.

The single salient lesson I draw from all those silly shows I’ve watched is that most of us are our own worst enemies. Over and over, contestants fail in the game because they cannot escape their essential personalities. The bossy woman proud of being a leader offends everyone and gets voted out. The accomplished liar gets tangled up in his stories. The guy who sees himself as a “warrior” in tune with his own primal energy becomes an object of derision. The calendar model with implants assumes her looks will reward her, but she inspires seething hatred among other women and is given the bum’s rush.

In the exit interview, contestants always claim to be proud of the way they played the game, never mind that they just lost. What they say is, “I had to be true to myself.” They apparently don’t see that they have stuck with their usual strategy for dealing with the others, even when that wasn’t working for them. Those who do well in the game usually are able to pick and choose the way they interact with others. So the game isn’t entirely silly. I think it instructs me every week about effective and dysfunctional ways of pursuing one’s life goals. But still, it is a guilty pleasure!

Do you have a guilty pleasure?

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Go Big Or Go Home

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An elaborate text came in from the North Woods. Here’s an approximate translation from the original Ursus Textish.

Bart - The Bear Who Found a Cell Phone

Hey, Bart here.

I’ve been hearing that people are doing a victory dance over some guy shooting a great big bear not far from the Twin Cities. There’s lots of “gollees” and “gawrshes” about the bear’s height and weight – almost 650 pounds and taller than 7 feet.

True. Fella was unusually big. But he wasn’t a freak, he was a forecast.

We bears have been watching you, and can see that we’ve fallen behind in a some pretty important contests. All the wild animals have. Yup. You’re winning the temperature contest and calling the shots in the air quality contest (though we just won a small victory). And you’ve been getting bigger physically while we’ve stayed kinda the same.

All that stuff you’ve been saying about how “massive” and “enormous” and “gargantuan” this poor dead bear is – well I’ve got uncomfortable news.

We bears have been saying the same thing about you for years – ever since we woods-dwellers noticed that you two-legged comfort-junkies were having trouble squeezing through the doors of your Winnebagos. It was in the mid-90’s when word got out that an average human wouldn’t fit in a normal sized tent anymore. Talk about making a bear’s job easier! You being bigger meant it was easier to spot you from far away, simpler to hear you coming through the underbrush, and a lot less taxing to chase you down. And surprisingly, the more you ate, the more food you left scattered in your wake.

Here’s a joke we bears tell each other:
Question: How do you find a hunter when he’s downwind?
Answer: Follow the Doritos!

But then it hit us – with an average male bear weighing in at 250 pounds and an average American male human at 190 pounds, it wouldn’t be long before we’d have to run from YOU! Especially if we stumbled across you when you were feeling obsessive about your cubs! (I hear there’s a bunch of Cubs in Chicago who will never grow up!)

Anyway, let this be a notice to you. Black bears are on the move, size-wise. With our habitat shrinking and yours getting bigger, we realize that someday we’re going to stand toe-to-toe. When that day comes, you’d better hope we’re not standing ON your toes, because our only chance for survival is to get bigger, hairier, smellier, and nastier. If humans are gonna respect something, first they gotta learn to fear it.

Moose are disappearing and the bears are bulking up to get ready for a confrontation around our homes and yours. Come December, we’re going to skip the hibernating and launch our own series of protests – Occupy Tool Shed, Occupy Bird Feeder, Occupy Camp Ground, Occupy That Paranoid Place Inside Your Head That Never Ever Sleeps.

There’s a bear in the woods. And he’s HUGE!

Your pal,
Bart

I thanked Bart for giving me a good chill in the lead-up to Halloween. But I don’t think we’re really headed for a showdown with the bears, do you?

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Almost Real Recollections

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Yesterday’s multi-dimensional discussion of Viewmaster reels reminded me that my late brother had an urge for collecting some unusual things. For some reason, he was compelled to accumulate recordings of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” with celebrity narrators. At the time of his death, he had obtained about a dozen different copies. I know he had versions that featured Peter Ustinov, David Bowie, Jonathan Winters, and in parody form, Weird Al Yankovic.

He also collected stereo cameras.

This is the sort of device that was used to take the Viewmaster photos. Two lenses, set about eye-width apart, would record separate, oh-so-slightly different images. On a Viewmaster reel, these images would be placed opposite each other on the wheel to feed each eyeball the necessary part of the scene. We didn’t have the raw materials to make Viewmaster reels, so my brother used a handheld viewer that could only display one 3-D image at a time.

A couple of his cameras are Realists. I love the sound of that – it makes it seem like the machines have a philosophy. Rather than click, the shutter heaves a deep sigh.

We had great ambitions of building a huge stereo photography library – something to prove to future generations that we, too, had depth as well as color. A friend even picked up a perfect little portable stereo slide filing cabinet at a garage sale – complete with some other family’s memories of Colorado, New Orleans, Michigan and Northern Minnesota. We meant to fill up the drawers with our own adventures. Alas, time won that race. But the cameras remain, accumulating a thick layer of dust.

I could show you exactly how thick the dust is, if you would just peer into this viewfinder …

What makes a sane person collect things?

The Baboon Congress

Circular Tourism

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Today’s guest post is by Clyde.

“A penny saved is a penny earned” is a frequent litany in the kitchen.

Which would perhaps irritate the three children, except the mother also says it every time she adds another penny to the broken teapot sitting high in a glass-fronted cabinet.
If it is a war-time lead penny, still in common circulation at the time, she says, “A lead penny is still a penny earned.”

The collection of pennies is closely watched until they have 105 of them. The expenditure of that $1.05 is carefully planned by the children, a project they complete in collaboration.

One hundred and five pennies buys three sets of View Master reels. A set can be one, two, or three reels, but a pack of three is preferred. They can be purchased at either drug store or the dime store, which is never called by its real name, The Ben Franklin.

As the pennies mount, which takes a few weeks, they study their options. None has any interest in the cartoons or the other things so obviously aimed at children. They only want historic sites, geographic wonders, or world or national travel sites. When tourism becomes an “industry” in northern Minnesota, reels for Duluth and the North Shore start to appear in the selections, which confuses them. How can the Aerial Lift Bridge or Split Rock Lighthouse, which are so familiar and near, rank with the Eiffel Tower?

Over the years they collect and regularly view London, Paris, Rome, New York City, San Francisco, the Rhine, Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, the buildings and monuments of Washington D.C., Carlsbad Caverns, Mammoth Cave, Niagara Falls, Dawson City, Plymouth, Mt. Vernon, the time of the mastadons, the Everglades, Angel Falls, the Field Museum, the Louvre, and on and on until they become living-room-braided-rug-world-travelers.
The excitement of planning the next purchase is as great, or maybe greater, than viewing the reels themselves.

The appeal is not only in the magic of the stereoptic effect, but also in how the small black viewer pressed to your eyes shuts out the here-and-now and takes you away for as long as your index finger holds out pulling down the lever to spin the reel.
A penny saved is a travel adventure earned.

If you had a magic View Master, what seven pictures from anytime and place would it show?

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Power of Suggestion

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Today is the anniversary of the day in 1860 when 11 year old Grace Bedell wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln, a homely candidate for President of the United States.

Hon A B Lincoln…

Dear Sir
My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you wont think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother’s and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you to but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chatauque County New York
I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

Clearly, Grace Bedell was the first-ever modern political consultant, recognizing that looks matter when it comes to moving the American electorate. That is a dubious distinction. But we know Grace Bedell is the Mother of Political Consultants, because she got results. The candidate who would become president answered her just four days later:

Grace Bedell, Aghast at a Bare Face

Miss Grace Bedell

My dear little Miss

Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received – I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters – I have three sons – one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age – They, with their mother, constitute my whole family – As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?

Your very sincere well wisher
A. Lincoln

That was a fence straddling answer if there ever was one – responding to a request with a question. But Lincoln must have taken her seriously. He grew a beard shortly afterwards and now we can’t picture him without one.

There is no record of Grace Bedell responding to Lincoln’s answer, though one account describes a meeting between the two shortly after the election, when the president-elect’s train passed through her town.

Wikipedia credits the Schenectady Gazette for Grace’s account of her face-to-face meeting with Lincoln.

“He climbed down and sat down with me on the edge of the station platform,” she recalled. “‘Gracie,’ he said, ‘look at my whiskers. I have been growing them for you.’ Then he kissed me. I never saw him again.”

Today, a presidential candidate having a private moment and a kiss with an 11 year old girl would automatically throw the election to his opponent. But 1860 was a different time. Four years later Grace wrote again, this time to ask Lincoln for a job with the Treasury Department.

I have heard that a large number of girls are employed constantly and with good wages at Washington cutting Treasury notes and other things pertaining to that Department. Could I not obtain a situation ther?[sic] I know I could if you would exert your unbounded influences a word from you would secure me a good paying situation which would at least enable me to support myself if not to help my parents, this, at present – is my highest ambition.

Nice try, but this one met with considerably less success then the beard –o-gram. I guess you don’t get everything you ask for, even if you take the time to put it in a letter. And remember, being an 11 year old girl is much cuter and more influential (with politicians) than being a 15 year old girl. Timing is Everything.

When has someone taken your advice and benefitted from it?

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Royal Treatment

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It turns out I am going to be in the same room with Royalty today, but I don’t think Bubby knows that. Still, this breathless message arrived late yesterday:

Hey Mr. C.,

Everybody at Wilkie High is talking about the King and Queen of Norway being in town, and how cool is that? Some of us were daydreaming how we might grab a bus downtown and maybe run into them, be our super extra charming selves, and maybe get deputized into the royal posse and brought back to Norway as sort of their pet Americans.

Kinda far fetched, I know, but when Mr. Boozenporn lectured on Norway yesterday, it sounded so cool! It almost made me want to find it on a map, but then I decided it would be more fun to learn about that later. Maybe after I arrive. Did you know that they have jobs there? They do! Because they produce oil and stuff. So if me and my friends were Norwegian teenagers, we might actually be thinking about getting jobs when we’re done with school instead of just living in mom and dad’s basement, maybe.

Then last night I had this dream that I went to Norway and became a Scandanavian Oilwegian, and I sent thousands of dollars back home to my folks to help them pay for their health care.

Don’t get me wrong, I love America. But I love money too, and it sounds like in Norway they’ve got some that ordinary people are allowed to have. A lot of the people speak English too, and the countryside is like Minnesota, so I’d feel pretty comfortable right away. Even a lot of the stuff is the same as here. Somebody told me if I go to Norway, I had to ask somebody to show me all the Fords. Don’t know why that’s so important, but apparently they’re all over on the west side of the country!

Anyway, if you happen to see the King and Queen of Norway and they say they’re looking for some American Youth to take back with them, please spell my name right.

Your friend,

B-U-B-B-Y

I told Bubby it was not likely that the Norsk Royals would adopt him or take him home to work in the oil fields. They are not here on a mission to accumulate stray American youth. And if he thinks he might someday move far away to a place where there are jobs so he can send some money back to his poor old mum and dad, he should start in a place that’s more reachable and less exotic, like North Dakota.

What kind of Queen (or King) would you make?

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Ask Dr. Babooner

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Dear Dr. Babooner,

I spend so much time doing my work-from-home job on the computer, I’ve set up a desk in my bedroom so I can take quickie naps when a work lull allows for it.

Lately I’ve been having this recurring dream where I become lost in a storm. Unsure of my bearings, I don’t know what to pay attention to anymore.

My world is transformed into a blizzard of information bits, all of them flying past my head in a swirling cloud of text and images that seems driven by some unyielding, spontaneously generated wind. Too tiny to catch but too big to ignore, each individual know-flake feels terribly significant until I look closely enough to see that it is made up of absolutely nothing. As I stumble through these mounting piles of apparently urgent but ultimately pointless distractables, I have a growing sensation that I am missing something crucial that I will never, ever find.

I always wake up the same way – tangled in the electronic device cords that form a hot, dusty web in the tiny space between my desk and the wall.

What does it mean?

Desperately,
Digital Dreamer.

I told Digital Dreamer she should stop sleeping in the same room with the computer. Your brain and the Internet are just two different types of electronic networks, and it is not healthy to bunk your precious noggin so close to all that commotion. Try resting next to a houseplant instead.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?