A September come true

I could have told you. In fact, I did tell you.

At the end of last month, I wrote here that I was happy that September was on the way. I wrote about how I really like September here, about how things really pick up at this time in this college town, even though it can be awfully hot. And I wrote that I liked knowing that everyone else is here, at work, even in the horrible heat, like me - and not off on some vacation.

Yes, I shouldn’t be surprised. It always happens. Just when I’m ready for the cooler weather, just when I’m set for my favorite season of Fall, which starts today, it gets really hot.

Then why was I surprised yesterday when it got really, really hot and really, really humid, leaving me again with no energy? Why am I shocked today to be starting another Fall shirtless in my cut-off overalls?

I really can imagine a poor freshman kid from Vermont or somewhere at one of the colleges here calling home in tears and saying he had made a terrible mistake.

Like I said, along with many other things, in my Claremont Courier column earlier this month.

A TURN IN THE YEAR

Random thoughts - like the leaves that will start falling soon enough:

*A grunt is not like a cobbler. Instead of a topping, a grunt has little dumplings.

*It’s amazing what can be learned - like what a grunt is - on-line. (I was looking for a recipe with blueberries.)

*The hand-painted signs on the buildings at Pomona College for freshman orientation this year were very clean-cut and straight-forward. No crazy curves and tie-dyed rainbow colors.

*Speaking of tie-dyed rainbow colors, I found out this summer that Spensers has way cooler shoelaces - and lots of other way cooler stuff - than Hot Topic. In fact, I don’t know how Hot Topic gets by with Spensers two doors down in the Montclair Plaza.

*I didn’t find this out on-line. The guy at Hot Topic told me to check out Spensers when I couldn’t find my usual rainbow shoelaces at Hot Topic. I wonder if he tells this to a lot of people.

*Hey, if I could buy rainbow shoelaces in Claremont, I would. I certainly wouldn’t go to the mall.

*In Claremont, September might just as well be January. With Claremont being a college town and with all the students settled back in school, it really feels like a new year here.

*Or let’s just say it’s a turn in the year. A big turn.

*Unfortunately, the weather in September isn’t like the weather in January. It may be cool at times, but September has been known as the hottest month here. After all, it’s “Fair time.”

*Why can’t the Los Angers County Fairgrounds be pretty - that’s right, pretty, with grass and pine trees - like the Nevada County Fairgrounds in Grass Valley?

*I wonder why The Help came out last month instead of in the Fall, when the better, more prestigious movies come out. It is an old-fashioned good movie. Too bad it also has an old-fashioned Hollywood view of a white person coming to the rescue of the blacks.

*Am I the only one who looks forward to the end of Daylight Savings Time?

*The Hodads, who played at Memorial Park last month, give the Ravelers a run for their money in my book. As for the Answer, please - it’s so old-hat.

*Speaking of books, it’s not too late for a good, crazy, trashy read. Mark Haskell Smith’s Baked, which I happened upon at Barnes and Noble after buying the rainbow shoelaces, fits the bill quite nicely. The blurb on the back - “murder, mayhem, marijuana and Mormans” - pretty much sums it up. And Smith, by the way, is a damn good writer.

*It’s also not too late for one last trip to the beach. Or two or three.

*Lots of times, I wish there was only one band playing in the Village on Friday evenings. Maybe they is just the obsessive compulsive in me, who wants to respect both acts, speaking. At least have the two acts be completely different.

*I’m actually glad that Sunset Junction, the annual two-day street fair in the Silverlake neighborhood in Los Angeles, was denied permits due to not paying thousands in fees and had to cancel at the last minute. It got too big for its britches with its big-name acts. I remember getting in with a $3 voluntary donation, in contrast to the $25 charge in recent years.

*And I get cranky when the Village Venture - yep, another thing that’s coming up - takes over our downtown for one day. Imagine having to pay $25 just to go to the Village, before shopping or anything. That’s just wrong!

*Actually, I was on-line looking for a recipe for blueberry glop, but I couldn’t find one. Was blueberry glop - a very loose cobbler with lots and lots of blueberries - something we made up when I was a kid?

*I have written a lot about how Claremont in recent years has gotten to be not quite so dead in the summer, with the street fair and all the music in the Village. But it’s still nice to have the colleges back in session and having all those talks and performances going on.

*Okay, I have a confession: Another reason I like September is that, even if it gets really hot, everyone is back at work and back at school. I don’t feel like I’m stuck here working while others are off on fabulous, cool vacations. We’re all in the same boat.

*I wonder how many students from back east call home during a heat wave saying they made a horrible mistake after taking a campus tour on a bright, crisp February day.

*I’m also looking forward to those falling leaves, so brilliantly colored.

*And apple crisp, speaking of crisp.

*Apple is the best crisp, but what about making a crisp with blueberries? It’s not bad with peaches and raspberries.

*It’s sad to see Borders book store closed down.

*Shame on Amazon.com trying to get away with not collecting state taxes so that it can look more like a bargain, driving stores like Borders and especially smaller book shops out of business. And more shame for trying to do this by having us vote on it.

*Amazon.com - the new Walmart.

*With apologies to the Claremont Forum’s used book store benefitting its wonderful prison library project, the Village needs a good, big book store. And somewhere to buy tie-dyed rainbow shoelaces.

*Spensers. For such a hip store, it sounds so old-fashioned. Like a five-and-dime. Or a grunt.

Living on fear

There he was, advocating torture, pure and simple, in no uncertain terms. He said he would use water-boarding in a heartbeat (if it would lead to any terrorist information).

I never did like Dick Cheney, and I didn’t expect to like him when I saw him interviewed on television last month. The man widely believed to be the force - the force for evil, many say - behind President George W. Bush was making a very rare appearance to promote his recently published memoir, and, not surprisingly perhaps, he didn’t pull any punches.

What was surprising was that, even as he was spewing awful things, I found myself having feeling, having heart, for Dick Cheney. That’s because he literally doesn’t have a heart.

In the interview, Cheney sat in a room and walked around his Wyoming ranch wearing a bulky vest loaded with batteries and wires. Quite eerily, he looked like a suicide bomber, but these batteries and wires keep his heart going after so many heart attacks. The interviewer panicked when, at one point, he disconnected the batteries and it beeped.

This may make Cheney look even more like Darth Vader, with powered breathing, but it occurred to me, as I watched all this, that this is a scared man, a man living in fear. His life is based on fear. To Cheney, death - never mind illness and disability - is imminent, and he has done everything, to the extent possible, to shield, if not arm, himself against it.

Unfortunately, perhaps because he is not good at dealing with this fear, he made everyone else feel it and the need for shielding and arming. And unfortunately, this fear was all too evident in many of the wall-to-wall commentaries and events marking Sunday’s tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

The end of the tunnel

I am happy that I’m writing this. It means this month is over. And what a month it has been!

It started off with my birthday, August 1, falling on not only a Monday but the Monday I returned to working after more than two weeks of more or less not working. I was bummed big-time.

Because of the two and a half weeks off in July, I had to write three instead of two columns for the Claremont Courier, and I wrote a report on Pacific Yearly Meeting, an annual gathering of Quakers. This was on top of my blogging and some other work - and all in August, a month God made for laying out by the pool, if not the beach, with a trashy novel.

What’s more, I think the last week of August is one of the year’s arm-pits (the other is the week below Christmas and New Year’s). This year, it appropriately enough came with a big heat wave - but at least not a hurricane!

The other reason I’m happy is that I really like September - and not just because I’m taking off for six days on the first. For one thing, it means it won’t be too, too long before the cool weather comes, although there may I be some serious bumps along the way. Also, here in Claremont, September is really a new year, with all the college students coming back and things really picking up. But the real reason I like September is that, even if it turns out to be the hottest month as it sometimes has, with everyone back at work and at school, I’m not stuck here working while others are away on fabulous, cool vacations.

Where are Jerry's Kids?

A few weeks ago, the big news was that Jerry Lewis was ousted as the spokesman and public face of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. He will no longer be doing his famous - or infamous - stint as host of the M.D.A’s marathon Labor Day telethon.

In what I read in the Los Angeles Times, there were plenty of people who were “outraged” that the “iconic” comedian was “unceremoniously dumped” from this “legendary” role. There was mention of how important it was to Mr. Lewis to find a cure for muscular dystrophy and to help to do so, including by annually hosting a live television broadcast for 24 hours straight. There was comment on how the comic is beloved despite having made impolitic remarks about women and gay people.

But there was nothing, other than a brief mention in a commentary, about Jerry’s Kids. There was nothing about how Jerry’s Kids have always considered Jerry Lewis and the telethon - or his telethon? - to be infamous, to say the least.

Jerry’s Kids are adults living with Muscular Dystrophy, spearheaded by Mike Ervin and others, who are active and productive and who have strenuously objected to the way Mr. Lewis has always, often in tears on the telethon, portrayed those with M.D as helpless, all-but-dead victims to be pitied. I remember at one point the Kids got into a public argument with Mr. Lewis, in which Mr. Lewis, in a television interview, not only adamantly refused to say he was doing anything wrong but also chastised the Kids for causing a ruckus.

There was nothing about this in all the news I saw. And I think this is more than another instance of the mainstream media ignoring the disabled and what matters to them.

In fact, Jerry Lewis’ ouster as the M.D.A spokesman can be seen as a victory for Jerry’s Kids and at least in part spurred on by them. The M.D.A surely recognizes that Mr. Lewis’ pity model is badly outdated (as is the telethon, which has been drastically shortened to 3 or 4 hours). Give the Kids some mention, if not some credit.

Good-bye, Mr. Weinberger

This was my column in the Claremont Courier a couple weeks ago.

AN EDUCATION WITH MARTIN WEINBERGER

“Do you need to wear shorts for therapy?”

Mmmmmm. Shorts for therapy. It was the perfect excuse for a guy fresh out of high school. Yes, I need to wear shorts to keep my legs in shape. Or how about this? If I don’t wear shorts, my health will be endangered.

Alas, I couldn’t use it. It was the Friday of my first week of being a summer intern at the Courier, and Martin Weinberger, my first boss, had gotten me. I went home, red-faced - why didn’t he tell me on Monday that short pants weren’t allowed at the office? - and made sure I wore long pants when it was time to go to work, no matter how matter how blazing hot it got.

Later, when I began writing my column at home and before I could e-mail it in (hopefully not the same as phoning it in), I would sort of panic when I showed up at the door to drop it off in my overalls, especially if I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

I thought of all this in the days after I heard that Martin had died a couple weeks ago during a hot spell. I also thought that it was most appropriate that this passing took place - almost like with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams - only a few minutes after the Fourth of July.

For Martin was always, always a teacher - sometimes quite a stern one - and his principle, most heartfelt subject, much more so than office attire, was a free, accurate press and its critical role in there being citizens with the right, if not the obligation, to be informed and active. I wasn’t surprised at all to read in his obituary that he wrote news stories as a child in school. And longtime readers surely remember him frequently opining in these pages on the importance of voting, lamenting and even chiding those who didn’t.

The summer of no shorts, in 1980, was the first of two or three, and it was when the Courier office was still on Harvard Avenue, with Martin perched at his desk on the upstairs balcony from where he could see all (including, no doubt, my bare legs...). It was when Martin’s bold, innovative use of super-sized, close-up photographs in the paper, with which he told me he wanted “to bring Claremonters into each other’s living rooms and kitchens” (remember the “Mug Shot” features?), were still causing a bit of rumbling and when Thelma O’Brien and Hope Weingrow were furiously banging out their stuff on manual typewriters, gunning, with cheers from their ardent fans, for the Pulitzers. It was also when I noticed that I was one of the few guys working there and first heard of what was affectionately referred to around town as “Martin’s harem.”

My job - or assignment, since I wasn’t getting paid then - from 8 to noon weekdays was to rewrite the press releases that kept piling up, taking out all the hyped-up language, giving “just the facts” but in a dynamic way, as Martin insisted. These came out as blurbs in the “Our Town” section. I also got to do some wedding and engagement announcements and even a few back-page items. None of these had a byline, but when the Courier came to my house, I very proudly circled every piece I had written in bright red.

My first byline came that first summer when Martin bought tickets to two Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labors Lost) at the Old Globe Theater complex in San Diego’s Balboa Park for me review. I was absolutely thrilled, having let him know I wanted to write reviews. He said this was fine but made sure I understood that what I was writing was not news. It was a review, an opinion - not news.

Martin loved - no, he adored - doing this kind of explaining. He really was a born teacher. And more often than not, as in his “My Side of the Line” column, there was a story or two, usually humorous, that went along with the explaining. I soon saw that these stories were quite familiar; as beloved as they were, there was always some eye-rolling from a staff member or two.

As with the bright, bold layout of the Courier, Martin liked trying new things, and I was certainly a new thing for him. Here I was - a kid in a wheelchair with speech he couldn’t understand. He clearly enjoyed the challenge. Even when he got stern with me, he would grin and chuckle. We were off on a grand, wild adventure together. (I just now realize he had me re-writing all those press releases so that I could do some straight journalism without having to interview people.)

After a few summers of doing internships in Riverside and then graduating from U.C Riverside in 1985 with a B.A in English, I was looked around for a job I could do and wrote to Martin, asking about doing movie reviews. He said that he already had a movie reviewer but suggested I write a regular column on goings-on in Claremont and how I saw them. This would be sort of like reviewing life, Claremont life - cool! At $10 a column, I was off and running.

We agreed that I would not mention my disability, except when it had something to do with what I was writing about (sidewalks and curb cuts, etc.). I loved not being a disabled columnist and that Martin encouraged this. (I’ve had plenty of other forums in which to write as a person with a disability.)

We did have our disagreements, though, especially in the first ten years or so, when he kept a particularly sharp eye on my column and although he would occasionally raise my pay in $5 increments. He got nervous when I got partisian (even though he agreed with me), didn’t like it when I didn’t mention Claremont in a column (“That could be in the Washington Post.”) and really had a problem when I wrote about an African-American professor publicly accusing (in an Op-Ed published in the Los Angeles Times) Claremont Graduate University of racism after being fired. He also told me not to include my poetry in my columns.

Most of these discussions, if that’s what they were, didn’t take place in person. (He had a fondness for typing out notes on his “letterhead” letterhead.) Once I started doing the column, I really didn’t see Martin much. This was no doubt for the best, since I had started wearing overalls - including, yes, short ones - and doing all kinds of things with my hair.

Much later, I would see him in passing slowly walking his dog Rosie outside the office on College Avenue. But I prefer to recall one of the other last times I saw him.

It was, in fact, in my final year at U.C.R. I was going down the hallway in the humanities building when I passed an open classroom door - and did a double take. There he was - Martin, standing at the head of the class.

Teaching. As always.

Playing with disability

“Sadly, the cost associated with taking the medication to control that illness was that he completely lost what he called ‘the pep.’ The pep stemmed from that manic energy that would compel him to just burst out into song and write and create music. Once he started taking the medications, sadly that ended. He was no longer Wild Man Fischer... He became Larry Fischer.”

Yes, it was sad, but for who?

It is bad - and sad - enough - or perhaps I just find it irritating enough - when disabled characters, especially those with psychological illnesses, are portrayed as oh-so cool, even hip. I’m talking about movies like Benny and Joon and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, in which the eternally cool Johnny Depp puts up with being responsible for his schizophrenic brother played by a young, hot Leonardo diCaprio. There’s also Girl, Interupted, in which the hip, pre-shoplifting Winnona Ryder plays a young woman chills out in a mental institution.

I can list other films, but I think you get the point: Being crazy, being a freak can be cool and entertaining, even fun.

However, these are just movies. What about the case of Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, who died last month? According to the large obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Fischer was a mentally ill man who hung out on the streets of Hollywood ranting like many others. But his rants were particularly creative and entertaining and caught the ear of Frank Zappa and other who got him gigs on recordings and shows.

Fischer got to be a star, a cool, hip star of sorts, but this stardom depended on him for being sick, on him being a freak. As conveyed in the quote above by Jeremy Lubin, a documentary filmmaker, when he sought to get more sane and “normal,” he lost the ability to be entertaining. He lost “the pep” and was no longer a star.

Again, who was this sad for? Fischer, who was relieved of the demons in his head, or those entertained by his creative and cool rants?

I have also been thinking of Jared Lochner, charged in the mass shooting in Tuscon in January, who is being held in a mental ward, having been deemed unable to stand trial. That has been a legal fight over whether he can be forced to take drugs that will enable him to stand trial. A court has ruled he can’t be forced to take drugs for this purpose, but I just read this morning that he is apparently being drugged anyway.

This literally doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know who’s crazier - Lochner, or those who want to dope him up so he can be tried and convicted.

Red, white and "shoot!"

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I hate the Fourth of July and that the primary reason for this - on top of the All-American-America-is-Always-Right jingo-ism - is that I have a very difficult time, being startled, with the noise from the fireworks. This year was particularly tough, with there being more illegal fireworks than I remember in a good many years. They started going off around here more than a week before the 4th and kept going until after midnight on Monday. I even heard a couple the next evening.

“Don’t they know it’s over?” I kept saying to my attendant when she came to put me to bed on the 4th.

Who were they? I wondered, figuring they were more than the usual bad boys being bad. And why were they shooting off so much? A few thoughts:

A lot of people are angry, what with all the unemployment, foreclosures, high prices, etc., and this was a good way to let off steam. Who cares if it’s illegal? The government and laws are stupid, and, Hell, it’s the 4th, and everyone’s doing it - and should!

It has been ten years since September 11, and, by God, we’re still standing and still strong - and more of a big deal should be made about it!

Then there’s the killing of Osama Bin Laden - certainly something worth celebrating with pyrotechnics, even if it’s illegal. But this presents a quandry, because it was done under President Obama, which no doubt drives some people nuts. Which leads back to pissed-off folks blowing of steam.

Or maybe there were just more bad boys out there.