Listen to Me on the Radio (and Podcast)

Starting with this weekend's episode, I am the host and producer of "The Score," a podcast featured on the news and politics web site Bearing Drift. "The Score" is also broadcast over the airwaves on WINC 1400 AM and WINC 104.9 FM in Winchester, Virginia. In addition, “The Score” can also be heard around the world on Red State Talk Radio Network, its affiliates, and on its Roku channel and free Android app.

This week's guests on "The Score" are Elliott Harding, former legislative director for Congressman Tom Garrett (R-VA5), who talks about a bill that would reduce students' debts in return for their deferring retirement; Libertarian Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Matt Waters; and Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute, who answers my questions about Africa's economic future.

If you're in the vicinity of WINC's AM and FM signals, you can listen to "The Score" at 7:00 o'clock on Saturday morning, preceded by "America This Week" and followed by "In the Garden with Andre Viette."

Hosting a radio show has long been an ambition of mine.  It probably dates to my earliest days listening to talk radio in Milwaukee as a teenager.  Back then it was a late-night program on WEMP-AM hosted by Ira Fistell.  His mix of interviews with authors and celebrities with listener call-ins was still new in the early 1970s (before the FCC repealed the "fairness doctrine") but it set a standard for me.  I also appreciated and learned from Joey Reynolds' laid-back, conversational style manifested in his longtime overnight program from WOR-AM in New York City.  Because, really, what is an interview but a form of conversation?

In my career as a public policy analyst, author, and activist, I have been a guest on more radio and TV programs than I can count, in studios from Las Vegas to New York to Johannesburg and by phone across North America and around the world.  In the early 1990s, I was co-host of a cable access show in Arlington, Virginia, called "Politics: Landry vs. Sincere" and I was a correspondent, book reviewer, and anchor on "Gay Fairfax," a news magazine show originating in Northern Virginia but bicycled to cable systems throughout the Mid-Atlantic.

Readers of this web site will recall that, in July 2015, I sat in for host Coy Barefoot on WCHV-FM while he was on vacation.   Later that year, I auditioned to take over the afternoon drive-time program on that same station.

I have been contributing interview segments to "The Score" since I began writing for Bearing Drift in late 2011, with spots featuring Virginia politicians like former governors George Allen, Bob McDonnell, and Doug Wilder; Senators Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, and Jim Webb; and Members of the House of Representatives like Eric Cantor, Tom Garrett, Bob Goodlatte, and Robert Hurt -- not to mention numerous candidates for public office, members of the General Assembly, and authors and experts on public policy issues.  (Scroll through "The Score" archive to track those down.)  My thanks to former host Scott Lee and former producer Norm Leahy for those opportunities.

In addition to all this, I have been a happy participant in the weekly political roundtable on Coy Barefoot's "Inside Charlottesville" show on 94.7 WPVC-FM, along with fellow panelists Jackson Landers and Shaun Kenney.  You can listen to us live on Monday afternoons at 5:00 o'clock.  There's a livestream of the program and it is also archived as a podcast on InsideCville.com.

The past week has been a whirlwind as I taught myself the basics of editing a 55-minute radio program but I hope the result is easy listening to provocative and timely interviews that inform our audiences and stimulate their conversations. One aim:  to syndicate the show to more broadcast stations, not just in Virginia but elsewhere in the United States, too.  If your favorite radio station could use some fresh content, please recommend "The Score" to its program director.

Celebrating Milwaukee as America's Frozen Custard Capital

July is National Ice Cream month, the result of a congressional resolution passed in 1984 and first proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan on July 9 of that year.  (For what it's worth, July 15 is National Ice Cream Day, per the same resolution and proclamation.)

Just in time for 31 days of gooey goodness, author Amy Ettinger has published Sweet Spot:  An Ice Cream Binge Across America.  She discussed her book last week on the public radio show, Marketplace, with host Kai Ryssdal, and talked specifically about frozen custard, a delicacy almost unique to Milwaukee.

Ryssdal: New York's a tough city, we all know that. A detour now though to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and custard. So first of all, is custard ice cream? And if not, what's it doing in an ice cream book?

Ettinger: I always think of it as sort of a delicious cousin to ice cream. It's very, very similar, obviously. It's a little eggier. And you're not going to find good custard in the supermarket grocery aisle. We live in this age where almost anything can be delivered to you at any moment of the day, and frozen custard cannot.

Ryssdal: Why did you have to go to Milwaukee to get what you deem genuine custard?

Ettinger: It is considered the custard capital of the world, and there is very good frozen custard in other parts of the country.

Ryssdal: Yeah, because we're going to get letters here about custard. The custard fans out there, I'm going to hear from them.

Ettinger: Absolutely! But there is a very large concentration of custard stands that are owned by different families in Milwaukee, so I felt like that would be a way for me to test the different custards and really see what all the fuss is about.

Echoing Ettinger inn the introduction to their book Milwaukee Frozen Custard, (or perhaps she echoes them), Kathleen McCann and Robert Tanzilo write:

Milwaukee is known as Brew City thanks to its once-prominent beer-brewing tradition, but the city has another claim to fame: frozen custard capital of the world.

Here, names like Leon, Gilles, Kopp and Culver are as well known as Miller, Best, Blatz, Pabst and Schlitz. And often they conjure deeper memories and stronger opinions than their beer-brewing counterparts. And while beer-drinking culture is reserved for adults, Milwaukeeans of all ages indulge in the passion for custard.

McCann and Tanzilo ask why Milwaukee became custard central.

Numerous ideas have been floated over the years as contributors to the "perfect storm" for frozen custard's adoption here, among them Wisconsin's dairy tradition, access to fresh cream and the proximity of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Dairy School, believed to be the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere when it began offering dairy foods courses in 1890.

As a libertarian, I was rather taken by this explanation from some of the descendants of the early custard purveyors in and around Milwaukee, which attributes the success to the competition to cooperate and the cooperation to compete:

Leon Schneider, of the eponymous Leon's Frozen Custard, also worked as a custard machine salesman and, later, manufacturer and repairman.

Schneider's son Ron, who now runs Leon's, attributes the city's passion for custard to something else, something that can never be replicated: the synergistic results of numerous stand owners who had strong work ethics, a laser-pointed attention to quality that raised the bar to an incredibly high standard and the generosity to share their passion. He explains:

Between Joe Clark [who opened the first custard stand in Milwaukee], who wanted to do a good job; Paul Gilles [Gilles founder], who also wanted to do a good job. My father, Leon Schneider, taught many people about the custard business: Elsa Kopp, [founder of Kopp's], for one, Al Lach [who started Al's Drive-In], the Town Pride stores, the owner of Trudy's.

He would welcome the competition. He felt that the more people who did a good job with the product, the more the product would become known. This would help us. A bad store down the block does us no good, because if at the first place the customer stops to try frozen custard, he eats lousy product, when he's driving by here, he's not going to stop. They say, "What's the big deal? It wasn't any good." We had more frozen custard stands in this area, geographically, than anywhere else. [But] why I firmly believe this area became the custard capital, if you will, is because there was good product; there was more of it than anywhere else.

Karl Kopp, who owns two of the most popular stands in the area, thinks Schneider might be correct. "Maybe it's the fact that we have a lot of good ones," he muses. "They didn't dilute it. They kept it. I think that's what kept it going here. Guys were pure and didn't bastardize it."

(Tanzilo takes that explanation a few steps forward in an interview on WUWM-FM's Bubbler Talk.)

Frozen custard, like frozen yogurt, can be found on the East Coast, of course. Take Kohr Brothers, a popular frozen custard stand in Rehoboth Beach and other oceanside resorts, for instance. But it's hard to find authentic, Wisconsin-style frozen custard that evokes the childhood memories of Gilles or Leon's or Milky Way (inspiration for Arnold's drive-in on the 1970s TV hit, Happy Days).

One exception -- perhaps the only exception -- is the Dairy Godmother in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.  The store was founded by Wisconsin native Liz Davis, daughter of former Ninth District Congressman Glenn Davis (R-Wisconsin), from the days when Wisconsin had nine congressional districts.  In its decade and a half-plus in business, the Dairy Godmother has been visited by VIPs like former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and former U.S. President Barack Obama and his family.

In an interview with The Washington Post's John Kelly, Davis, in announcing her retirement, explained how the Dairy Godmother came to be:

“If you ask anybody that you meet, they’re able to tell you what ice cream or frozen custard place they went to as a kid and exactly what the scenario was,” Liz said. “They’ll say, ‘My teacher took me’ or ‘My grandparents took me.’ Or, ‘We got to go when we got good grades’ or ‘I went there as a first date.’ It’s the most nostalgic of businesses.”

* * *

“For me, I lived here long enough that there wasn’t any going back to Wisconsin,” she said. “Instead of just wishing I lived in Wisconsin, but knowing that wasn’t going to happen, I decided to bring Wisconsin to me.”

And to her customers. Liz invested in a $70,000 frozen custard machine from Kiel, Wis., perfected her art and watched Del Ray gentrify around her.

“One of the things about Del Ray isn’t just that it has independent businesses, but that the owner is on site,” Liz said. “If you went in there you would see the owner, which is another level of independent business, in my opinion. My customers are used to seeing me. After a while, to be honest, I did start thinking I was the Dairy Godmother.”

Despite Davis's decision to sell the Dairy Godmother, it is not closing.  Local restaurateur and chef Russell Gravatt has bought the place and plans to continue operating it under the same standards.

One of those standards has to be favoring the eating of the frozen custard on premises.  It loses its flavor if it travels too far from the source.  Bill Klein, manager of the Babcock Dairy Plant at UW-Madison, told Mitch Teich of public radio station WUWM, "says that when it comes to eating custard or ice cream, the fresh stuff is always better. But why?"

The short answer: ice crystals. "So when you think of soft serve coming out of the machine, it's got X amount of ice crystals in it and those ice crystals are a certain length in size. The quality of that ice cream at that point - whether it's soft serve or not - the quality of that ice cream is at its best. It only goes downhill from there," Klein explains.

The longer ice cream or custard sits around, the longer the ice crystals get, which alters the way it tastes. "The key is to keep those things as small as possible and that's what makes it really smooth and creamy feeling," says Klein.

As tempting as it might be to buy a pint (or a quart) to take home, Klein explained, leaving it in the freezer for too long "will cause the quality to degrade."

Lesson learned: fresh but frozen, not frozen and refrozen.

From the Archives: A Review of the Revival of 'Chicago' (1997)

Monday's post about Big Stone Gap, which mentioned cast member Jasmine Guy, reminded me about how, in the last years of the last century, I reviewed a musical she starred in: a national tour of  Kander and Ebb's Chicago.

Guy played Velma Kelly in the revival of the Bob Fosse musical, on tour at the National Theatre in Washington in the spring of 1997. Notably, this revival is still playing on Broadway -- a continuous run dating to November 14, 1996, adding up to 7,494 performances as of November 30, 2014.

From the archives, here is my review. It appeared in The Metro Herald in May 1997 and contains some contemporaneous references that may be inscrutable to anyone born since 1994.

My Kind of Town . . . Chicago Is

Rick Sincere

Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Stand aside, Comet Hale-Bopp -- there's a new star rising above the Washington horizon, and she's at the National Theatre! The new star is Belle Calaway, the understudy who took over the key role of Roxie Hart in the new touring company of Chicago, and blew away the crowd on opening night.

Jasmine Guy

Calaway and her co-star, Jasmine Guy, brought the audience to its feet with thundering applause. While Guy slithered sensually across the stage, Calaway exuded energy enthusiastically. A last minute replacement for Charlotte d'Amboise, who is nursing an injury and expected to return to the cast in about three weeks, Calaway evokes the spirit -- and star-power -- of Gwen Verdon, who created the musical role of Roxie Hart in 1975. In fact, Calaway's vocal and dance style nearly replicates Verdon's, a remarkable feat in itself. The question remains: If Calaway -- the understudy -- is this terrific, how good is d'Amboise herself? We'll see in a few weeks.

Chicago features one of the best scores by John Kander and Fred Ebb, who also wrote Cabaret (1966) and the dreadful (but Tony-winning) Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992). Conceived by the legendary director-choreographer Bob Fosse, Chicago is a tuneful and sophisticated musical play. Like Cabaret, it contains hummable and memorable melodies and sharp, crackling lyrics.

Twenty-two years ago, Chicago was shut out of the Tony Awards by A Chorus Line, which at the time was groundbreaking but after its long Broadway run, numerous national tours, and a flop of a movie now seems hackneyed. Despite a respectable run of 868 performances that featured not only Gwen Verdon but the great Chita Rivera (and, succeeding that duo later, Liza Minnelli and Ann Reinking), Chicago had been largely forgotten until an "Encores" concert in New York last year. Its cynical look at the press and judicial system simply did not fit in to American culture at that time. Today -- in the era of two Menendez brothers trials, two O.J. Simpson verdicts, and Court-TV's rising popularity -- it seems more timely and relevant than ever.

This became crystal clear when Billy Flynn, the city of Chicago's hotshot lawyer, first appeared on stage. The National Theatre audience gasped when actor Obba Babatundé strode through the orchestra to sing his first number, "All I Care About [Is Love]" -- for Babatundé bears an uncanny resemblance to Johnnie Cochran, a hotshot lawyer in his own right.

It's difficult to find something not to praise in this production. Ann Reinking's choreography recreates the style of Bob Fosse in a way that deserves hearty appreciation, for the art of the dance has been suffering in recent musicals. (For example, Paper Moon, reviewed favorably in these pages a few weeks ago, had serviceable but unremarkable choreography. This, unfortunately, represents a sad trend in American musical theatre, which was once driven by such creative choreographers as Agnes de Mille, Michael Kidd, Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett -- and Bob Fosse.) Fosse's style -- a unique blend of modern dance, ballet, athleticism, and sexual energy -- is often attempted but seldom accurately rendered. It lends itself to injury -- not only D'Amboise, but Reinking herself has been sidelined in recent weeks -- and is perhaps the greatest challenge to a dancer. When it is done right -- as it is done here -- the Fosse style is eye-popping and jaw-dropping. "How do they do that?" comes to mind quite often.

Walter Bobbie, the director, has reconceived the show that builds upon Fosse's original concept and takes it to its logical conclusion. A simple set, which includes the orchestra on stage (a conceit that originated with Cabaret), forces most of the action onto a narrow apron, which makes that action so much more intimate to the audience. Costumes are limited to black, white, and shades of grey. The stage itself is largely black, with a few frames in gold and the glinting gold of the brass instruments complementing the blackness. Props are limited to a few chairs and feathered fans (don't ask, just go see for yourself). Lighting is emphasized, with golden and white pools creating focus and definition.

In its original incarnation, Chicago was billed as "A Musical Vaudeville." Today it bills itself as "The Drop-Dead Broadway Musical." Both are true. Structurally, the play is a series of vaudeville-type numbers, introduced by various characters in the style of a vaudeville emcee. These numbers, however, advance the plot and define the characters as effectively as any written by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim.

In a nutshell, the plot is this: Chorus-girl Roxie Hart shoots and kills her boyfriend, expecting her Casper Milquetoast husband to take the rap. Instead, she goes to jail and hires Billy Flynn as her attorney, who promises to manipulate the media and the jury to obtain a "not guilty" verdict. Then, as a celebrity murderess, she can go on tour as a -- you guessed it -- vaudeville star. Interacting with Roxie is Velma Kelly (Jasmine Guy), another murderess who has hired Billy and expects the same result. The predatory press itself plays a major role, showing us that not much has changed between 1927 and 1997.

So many performers stand out it is hard to single them out. Carol Woods is at her throaty best as Matron "Mama" Morton, the jail keeper. M.E. Spencer is cloyingly pollyannish as reporter Mary Sunshine. And Ron Orbach is practically invisible -- believe me, that's good -- as Roxie's sad-sack husband, Amos, who does a star turn himself in the amusing number, "Mister Cellophane."

Chicago is not a family musical. It contains adult themes and rough language. It is also a historical landmark of American musical theatre. No one who loves musical theatre can afford to miss Chicago.

Trivia tidbit: the real-life Chicago murder case on which the musical is based (also the basis for the 1942 Ginger Rogers movie Roxie Hart) was covered by a "girl reporter" named Ione Quinby, who later in life was an agony-aunt columnist for The Milwaukee Journal, writing as Ione Quinby Griggs or, simply, "Mrs. Griggs." Whether her choice of a 50-year career as a staple of the back page of the Journal's "Green Sheet" was inspired by the character of "Mary Sunshine" is not known to me.

Christmas in Milwaukee - 1967

Back in 2008, I offered my recollections of how my family celebrated Christmas as I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now I have some videos to illustrate those memories.

I have transferred some ancient home movies, filmed with a Super-8 millimeter camera, to digital format. Through them, one can follow the holiday celebrations of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the year 1967.

Yes, 44 years ago. Almost half a century. I was eight years old. I don't remember what it was like to be eight years old, but at least I can see myself then again.

First, the early evening of Christmas Eve. On this occasion, the rotating responsibility of hosting the Czuta family and its branches by marriage (Benkert, Geilenfeldt, Jaeger, Michalak, and Sincere) fell to my parents, so the party was held at our house in Wauwatosa.

Can you believe that one acceptable Christmas present in those days was a decorative ashtray? (Watch carefully and you'll see it.)

Next, my family took to the road -- no doubt leaving the wrapping paper on the floor and half-empty highball glasses on the bar -- to visit with the Sincere family. The first sequence is at my grandparents' home on North 49th Street, with most of my dad's brothers and sisters (especially those who were not yet married) finding their way there as well.

The later sequence is at the home of my Uncle Bill and Aunt Lucy. Note the several pre-teen boys dressed in tacky Batman costumes. (Adam West would appreciate the gesture if not the execution.) Christmas Eve was about the only time that we kids were allowed to stay up well past midnight. My guess is that this footage was shot around 2:00 a.m., even as Santa Claus was gliding up above to deliver his presents to all the good girls and boys.

I'm sure if I uploaded just the 30 seconds or so of the Batman boys, that video would go viral.

Finally, Christmas morning arrives and it is time to open up those presents left behind by St. Nick.

The first 3'30" of this video takes place at the foot of the artificial Christmas tree at my own family's home on West Derby Avenue in Wauwatosa. The gifts that I open up, as toy poodle Tabitha bounds through the discarded wrapping paper, include a toy called "Incredible Edibles" and a "GI Joe Official Space Capsule," commemorating NASA's Gemini program. I also received a bowling ball (it weighed eight pounds, one pound for each year of my age, and did not yet have finger holes drilled into it).

Later, we traveled to the home of my grandparents, Chester and Josephine Michalak, on Spring Drive in Brookfield. Santa left behind a big haul for me and my cousins, Julie and Sheri (my sister, Cathy, and their sister, Jennifer, had not yet been born; our other cousins, Jason and Chris, were more than a decade in the future). Apparently I really liked that tacky Batman costume, since I wore it Christmas morning.

Whether this was a history lesson or simply an exercise in nostalgia, I don't know.

In any case, I wish you a Merry Christmas (1967!) and a Happy New Year!

That Old Nougat Cross

Many have no doubt heard the story about a syncretistic Christmas display in a Japanese department store that featured a prominent figure of a jolly Santa Claus hanging from a cross. This is likely to be an urban legend but, like many such urban legends, it has wide currency.

Even if the story is true, in a country where fewer than one percent of the people are Christian and, therefore, unfamiliar with Western religious customs and traditions, the odd -- even ghoulish -- pairing of St. Nick and a crucifix can be forgiven as the result of a good-natured desire to be welcoming of foreigners and their beliefs despite ignorance of what we might call "the true meaning of Christmas."

It's a bit harder to be so lenient with residents of a majority-Christian country like the United States, where even non-believers are familiar enough with Christmas customs that they are unlikely to commit religious faux pas.

So I was shocked, to say the least, when I found this item in the clearance aisle of K-mart two days after Easter Sunday: a "Happy Easter Candy Cross" from the R.M. Palmer Company.

Now, I come from a family where Easter breakfast included meticulously-sculpted "butter lambs" made by my grandmother, but they were (to mix a metaphor) cut from the same cloth as dyed-and-labeled-by-name eggs and a basketful of breads, ham, Polish sausage, and horseradish blessed by the priests at St. Hyacinth's, an ethnic Polish parish on the south side of Milwaukee.

Yet when I see a decorated chocolate cross, ready to crunch and mouth-meltable, only one word comes to mind: sacrilege.

Is my reaction a Catholic thing? Do I misconstrue the intentions of something that claims to be "America's Favorite Holiday Candy"? Is my comparison to the crucified Santa out of place?

Next thing you know, they'll be selling lighter-than-air cotton candy to celebrate Ascension Thursday.

Images from Milwaukee's Marquette High c. 1952

Through the magic of eBay, I recently acquired the 1952 edition of The Flambeau, the yearbook of Marquette University High School in Milwaukee.

This particular volume caught my eye because the 1951-52 school year was the last one that my father attended MUHS.  (Today would have been his 76th birthday.)  I was also interested to see if I could find a photograph of legendary broadcaster Tom Snyder, who graduated with the class of 1953.

I scored on both counts, but also found a few other interesting things.

For one, it seems that virtually nobody at Marquette High in the early 1950s -- whether students, faculty, or staff -- had first names.  Some people in the yearbook were identified with a first initial, if they shared a surname with someone else.  The only people with first names were those who shared both a surname and first initial with another person.  So, for instance, my dad is identified simply as "Sincere" and the future host of NBC's Tomorrow Show is identified as "Snyder."

I also discovered that there were faculty and staff members at MUHS who spanned the period from 1952 to 1977, the year I graduated.  These included math teachers John Fountain and Laurence Kelly, S.J., librarian Miss Elizabeth Connelly, and English teacher Father Richard Forrey, S.J.  (I have an even earlier -- 1927 -- Flambeau that has a photograph of Mr. Fountain as a young teacher.)

By sheer coincidence, I found two MUHS graduates of the class of 1952 who later achieved prominence in their closely-related fields.

Tad W. Guzie became a Jesuit priest, theologian, and liturgist.  He later was laicized and married, passing away in 2001.  Juxtaposed on the same page as his graduation picture is a photograph of John M. Haas, who also became a theologian, specializing in bioethics.

This particular yearbook belonged to James Voell, who became a psychiatrist in the D.C. area, specializing in the problems of homeless people.

Here is the only photo in the 1952 Flambeau I was able to find with my father in it. He is identified as "Sincere" and is the fourth from the left in the top row:

As for Tom Snyder, I found more than a few mentions of his name.

First, his class photo (he is in the bottom row, far left):

Then I found him as one of the performers in the Prep Players' production of Mary Chase's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Harvey.  He didn't play Elwood P. Dowd (the role made famous by Jimmy Stewart) but rather was cast as Dr. Sanderson:

In  years past, it would have been difficult to find something as rare as a nearly 60-year-old high school yearbook.  I wasn't exaggerating when I referred to the "magic" of eBay.  The Internet has made possible what we thought was impossible.

Update: The Winter 2010 edition of the MUHS alumni magazine arrived in my mailbox today (March 16) with this note on page 32:

Tom Snyder '53, the radio and late night TV talk show pioneer who often remembered Marquette University High School and the Revs. Jerome Boyle SJ and RJ Connell SJ on-air, paid homage to the school with a recent fift that established an endowed scholarship fund in his name....

The Thomas J. Snyder Endowed Scholarship Fund will help support students who demonstrate financial need and who participate in the arts during their time at MUHS.

The full announcement can be found here.

It wasn't until reading this that I discovered that, not only did Tom Snyder and I attend the same high school (at a distance of about a quarter-century) but we also attended the same elementary school, St. Agnes. (That is, of course, assuming that there has only been one St. Agnes School within the boundaries of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, the one in Butler.)

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Sagal and Ferguson on the 'Real America'

Peter Sagal, host of NPR's weekly quiz show, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, was a guest on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS-TV on its Friday the 13th episode. During the interview, both Ferguson and Sagal had good things to say about my hometown, Milwaukee, and about the Midwest in general. The sequence began with Ferguson asking Sagal about the home base for Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, the City That Ferris Bueller Made Famous:

FERGUSON: But you like Chicago?

SAGAL: Oh, I love Chicago. Illinois is fabulous.

FERGUSON: Do you ever go north?

SAGAL: (startled) To Wisconsin?....

FERGUSON: Do you ever go up to Milwaukee, for example?

SAGAL: Milwaukee's a great town.

FERGUSON: I like that city.

SAGAL: Milwaukee's a great city, very good for sausages and beer,

(audience titters)

SAGAL: It's true.

(audience titters)

SAGAL: They'll laugh at anything.

FERGUSON: That's why they're here; that's what they're paid for....

SAGAL: Milwaukee's a great town. As you know (leaning in), because you're an American, that the Midwest is America. This is where America is -- processed meats, tasteless beer. This is where it comes from.

FERGUSON: I don't know. There are other parts of America, like New Orleans is America, the Pacific Northwest. Where's not America, clearly, is Los Angeles.

At the end of the interview, Ferguson and Sagal agreed to "trade places, like The Prince and the Pauper," with each hosting the other's show.

While the suggestion may have been made in jest, as it was sealed with a handshake, I would not be surprised to see, sometime in the not-too-distant future, Peter Sagal sitting behind Craig Ferguson's desk one night and Ferguson standing at Sagal's podium at the Chase Auditorium, posing questions to panelists like Mo Rocca, Amy Dickinson, and Paula Poundstone.

Will NPR and CBS accede to the experiment? Stay tuned.




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Community Theatre - Part Five

Yesterday the world remembered the first time men set foot on the lunar surface, 40 years after that event took place on July 20, 1969.

Today a smaller number of people -- perhaps as small as one, but I hope more than that -- mark the 30th anniversary of the final performance of Fiddler on the Roof by St. Bernard's Studio Theatre in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, on July 21, 1979.

On previous occasions, I have posted photos and video of other St. Bernard's productions that I was involved in -- Meredith Willson's The Music Man (in two parts), Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend, and The Fantasticks -- and one production from before my participation, Hello, Dolly!

Our Fiddler on the Roof was, in a way, a 15th anniversary production, since the original Broadway show had been produced in 1964 with stars Zero Mostel, Beatrice Arthur, and Maria Karnilova. We didn't think of it that way, however; we made it our own.

I have so many memories of St. Bernard's Fiddler that I don't know where to begin.

Like how I ended up (I still don't know how) sharing the principal women's dressing room: Just me (as Motel Kamzoil, the tailor) along with Golde, Yente, Tzeitel, Chava, Hodel, Sprintze, and Bielke. And nobody raised an eyebrow.

Or that we were performing in an un-air-conditioned school gymnasium during the dog days of summer, dressed like peasants during a Russian winter -- and dancing in those heavy clothes, to boot!

Or how this was perhaps the most glaringly goyishe production of Fiddler on the Roof in history. (None of the men, except for the two actors portraying Tevye, wore beards. And nobody, to be sure, wore forelocks.) There was even a crucifix hanging in the boys' dressing room! At least we all kept our heads covered.

This beardlessness resulted in, for instance, the rabbi (played by John T. Lynch) looking more like a Catholic priest officiating at Motel and Tzeitel's (that is, mine and Patty Fricke's) wedding than he looked like a, well, a rabbi.

There could be one competitor to our vanilla version of Fiddler on the Roof: the Arkansas community theatre production of Fiddler, once described to me by Tim Hulsey, in which Tevye narrates in an unmistakable Southern drawl. At least the good people of Wauwatosa could speak in the vaguely mitteleuropäische dialect so typical of Wisconsin. ("Tzeitel, come here one time." "Tevye's cow is lame again, aina hey?")

Last year I found an audio cassette recording of one of the performances of Fiddler; I think it was our charity show on Wednesday, July 18. I integrated part of that audio with a slideshow and posted it to YouTube. Unsurprisingly -- given the limited scope of interest in photos of a 30-year-old community theatre production of a classic Broadway musical -- there have only been 77 views on YouTube since I posted it htere last summer. Nonetheless, for the sake of history and of those who were there, here it is:

The St. Bernard's production of Fiddler was reviewed by The Milwaukee Journal, on the front page of the Accent (lifestyle and entertainment) section:




Looking back at the photographs from that summer (when I was, gasp, 20 years old) brings back many happy memories. (That despite the gasoline shortages, hyperinflation, and general sense of malaise that most people recall when they think of 1979.) Here are a few extracted from the video slideshow.















That should give you a good idea of what a shtetl looks like in Wauwatosa.



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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

One morning earlier this week, as I was preparing to leave for the Tuesday Morning Group Coalition monthly meeting in Richmond, I became aware of the presence of several emergency vehicles in and near my cul de sac: fire trucks, an ambulance, and at least one police car.

At first I thought there was a fire, but it turned out to be something different -- an idling car had escaped its parking brake and crashed into a nearby house.

While both the car and home owner must have been grateful that the damage was not significant (and that nobody was hurt), the incident flashed a memory of mine.

During my first year as a blogger, I wrote about the time my house nearly burned down. That was 34 years ago today: July 17, 1975. The fire was big enough that it landed on the first page of the local newspaper on July 24 (the Wauwatosa News-Times, founded in 1898 but now, as far as I know, defunct) -- with not one but two photographs.



One picture appeared above the fold.



The caption reads:

In the Line of Duty

PARAMEDIC JESSE MORENO (right) ministered to a fellow-paramedic, Acting Lieutenant Jim Filber, who suffered from smoke inhalation while serving at the scene of a residence fire July 17. Awaiting treatment, Lt. John Accola mirrored the exhaustion of local firemen who fought the $50,000 blaze. Also on the scene was Reserve Policeman Grant Schmidt, one of several members of the Police and Fire Reserves who aided at the scene. Moreno and five other firemen also were treated later for smoke inhalation. Story on Pg. 3. (Photo by Arthur C. Hombsch)

The second picture appeared below the fold, but in the prominent lower right-hand corner.



Its caption reads:

Fire-Call Figures

LEAVING THE SCENE of a major fire last Thursday night, Wauwatosa Fire Chief Byard Sheldon (in white coat) followed Jim Washcovick, on-duty assistant chief, as the two left the Richard Sincere home at 1503 N. 70th St. The fire had just been brought under control after having been fought for almost three hours. Eight Tosa firemen were treated for smoke inhalation from the blaze which caused an estimated $50,000 damage to the residence and its contents. (Photo by Arthur C. Hombsch)

The story on page 3 provided a few more details than the captions on page 1 did.



The text reads:

Nine Tosa Firemen Treated after $50,000 Blaze

Three Wauwatosa firemen were taken to hospitals and six more treated for smoke inhalation at the scene of a $50,000 blaze at 1503 N. 70th St. July 17, according to the latest Wauwatosa Fire Department report.

The fire began when wiring in a pinball machine short-circuited. The fire quickly spread from its origin in a basement recreation room through air ducts to other portions of the house. Damage was estimated at $35,000 to the house and $15,000 to contents.

Three firemen suffering from smoke inhalation were transported to hospitals. Firefighter Larry Tesch was taken to County General and Firefighters Peter Ernst and Lee Werner were taken to St. Luke’s.

Among those treated at the scene were Asst. Chief James Washcovick, who strained some shoulder and arm muscles moving a hose to the second floor; Lts. John Accola and Frank Jankowski, and Firefighters Jesse Moreno, George Polly and James Filber. Filber also sustained a burn on his leg and Jankowski was treated for a cut hand.

One of the interesting things about finding the Wauwatosa News-Times report on my family's personal adversity was seeing some of the items in the paper that put the event in historical context. For instance, there was this photo/story about the new Bicentennial coins being produced by the U.S. Mint:



The caption says:

'Change' of Design

A BIG CHANGE IN SMALL CHANGE will appear when these new Bicentennial coins start circulating throughout the nation and, of course, in Wauwatosa. The quarter, half-dollar and dollar shown here will bear the same head but the dates 1776-1976 will be stamped underneath. On the tails of the three coins are a colonial drummer on the quarter; Independence Hall on the half-dollar; and the Liberty Bell and moon on the dollar. The Federal Reserve System will start distributing the Bicentennial half-dollar to financial institutions July 7. The other two coins will be released by the U.S. Mint before the end of the year.

What really demonstrates the historical context are the advertisements scattered throughout the newspaper. For instance, these two restaurant ads (fish fry with a free stein of beer $2.65! prime rib dinner $5.95!) would make anyone's mouth water, Pavlov-dog style:





Then there are the ads that remind us how much technology (and our expectations and familiarity of it) has changed.

Remember typewriters? And typewriter shops?



Remember when people paid to have a television repaired, rather than just buying a new one?



Now here's something I don't remember: Businesses offering lessons in how to use a microwave oven. Did anyone reading this ever take a class like this?



By coincidence, I just bought a new microwave the other day. I paid $39.00 at Walmart to replace one that I bought just about three years ago at Target. That one shorted out. The microwave oven I had before that lasted more than 20 years: I bought it in 1984 at Sears for about $400, which was a lot of money back then.

Oh, for the good ol' days!

Post script: That same issue of the Wauwatosa News-Times also included a feature article about St. Bernard's Studio Theatre's summer production of Hello, Dolly!



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'Ave, Greenwald': MUHS Latin Teacher Retires

Thanks to Google Alerts, I learned today that Mr. James Greenwald, who has taught Latin at Marquette University High School (my alma mater) since 1968, is retiring as of the end of this academic year.

Jim Stingl writes on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel web site today:

Greenwald is retiring from Marquette High after 41 years. He was 25 years old when he arrived at the school in 1968.

"When I started there, every freshman had to take Latin. But that was the last year of that. Then it stabilized at about two classes of Latin I, two classes of Latin II, and one or two advanced," he said.

Many schools have dropped Latin over the years, favoring instead foreign languages such as Spanish and German that you're likely to encounter around here. Milwaukee has just one public school, Rufus King, that still teaches it; it's more common in the suburbs.

I asked this hometown Mr. Chips to make his best case that Latin matters.

"I would say it's no longer the argument that you learn Latin grammar, you learn English grammar, although that's true to a degree. I think it's more a matter of learning the ancient world, mythology, history, derivation of words - that's something I've worked very, very hard at," he said as we spoke in his kitchen last week.

Although I never had the pleasure of being taught Latin by Mr. Greenwald, I had the nearly unique experience of playing him on stage.

In the November 1976 production of Blazing Seniors, the Class of '77's Senior Follies, a musical revue whose conceit was that each scene was a different period of the school day, from homeroom to dismissal, I played Mr. Greenwald as both Latin teacher and Astronomy Club faculty advisor. Note from the two nearby photographs how we dressed alike. (I'm the one in the color photo, with space aliens.)

In our scene, Mr. Greenwald lamented to his class that he had seen a UFO but nobody believed him. (His/my song: "Hey, Has Anybody Seen My Neat UFO?", a parody of the Tony Orlando pop ditty, "Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose?")

It was for this show -- the one that caused me to fall in love with the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd -- that I memorized what Monty Python's Flying Circus had identified as the world's most lethal joke, in Latin:

Erant duo homines.
Primus vir dixit, "Meus canis habet nullam nasem."
Alius vir rogavit, "Quomodo olfacit?"
Primus vir respondit, "Atrociter!"

(If you need a translation, you should have taken Latin in high school!)

In his profile article, the Journal-Sentinel's Stingl quotes one of my classmates at Marquette High:

George M. Schimmel, now a lawyer in Milwaukee, a profession still relying on Latin phrases, graduated from Marquette High in 1977 with four years of Latin under his belt.

He remembers Greenwald as a fair and helpful teacher, and said that back then his folks used to invite Greenwald to their home every Thanksgiving for dinner....

Greenwald said he has spotted a rather arrogant T-shirt out there that says, in Latin, "If you can read this, you're too smart."

It seems odd to say about a language one would study, but "you didn't have to speak it. That's one of the good things. I remember translating 'Winnie the Pooh' from Latin," Schimmel said.

Even Greenwald himself does not converse in Latin except haltingly on rare occasions.

Schimmel said Greenwald also turned him on to astronomy. "Because of him I own three telescopes," he said.

Greenwald will ponder the stars in his retirement. And he wants to study Greek.

Marquette plans to fill his spot. Think there aren't many Latin teachers out there anymore?

"They had 40 applicants," Greenwald said.

That's good news. There's still a place for classics in the 21st century.



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