Peg Leg Bates and learning from death

When I was in college, I went through a phase of being obsessed with obituaries. This was back when we still read newspapers on paper, and I would sift through the cast off left in the student center. I don't remember how this started, but I remember Peg Leg Bates' obituary. He was, as you might imagine, a tap dancer who lost his leg in a work accident when he was 12 and still made it big on the vaudeville circuit. This fascinated me, and because I was young and thoughtless, I also found it kind of hilarious. I cut the obituary out of the paper (something else we still did back then) and showed it to all my friends who were equally callous and amused. Death seemed so far away--at that point life was much scarier. Looking back now, I realize part of the fascination with obituaries was the very vague sense that by reading about people who had done enough to merit a write-up in a major newspaper, I might find some guidance on how to live my life, on how to be the adult that I was about to have to be, on how to be, at least a little extraordinary. In the truest sense of the word--ordinary, but with a little extra. At that point in my life, I remember having the overwhelming urge to sit at the feet of every teacher and mentor I had a say "please, please tell me how to be a person." That feeling is still so vivid, over a decade later, and I know that urge is a big part of why I teach college-students now. I want to be that person for someone else, at the same time I realize that no one can ever tell you how to be anything. I like reading the obituaries of people I've never heard of, as it reminds me of how much there is for all of us to do, how little of it gets seen. So I'm thinking about going back to that, and maybe writing about it, writing about what I learn from obituaries. I think I'm a little less callow now, if no less self-involved, and I am in need of as much guidance as ever. Look at that image of Peg Leg Bates. How could that NOT be a lesson on how to live life and be a person?
Important note: Some friends who also found the Peg Leg Bates obit hilarious tried to use it as a teaching tool in a writing class for middle-school students. The middle-schoolers were horrified, rightfully so, that their teachers were laughing at an obituary. Mentorship comes in all shapes and sizes and unexpected ages. 

Native

This is a piece I performed last week at Write Club at the Hideout. Two opposing ideas. Two writers. I wrote about "native." The incomparable Mary Fons wrote about "foreign." Mary won. The picture above is what I looked like. Here's what I wrote.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a smallmouth bass

First off, you are adorable

Those golden iridescent scales cascading down your back

That Betty Boop mouth. Sensual. Small.

You are, and I quote a very reputable fishing site, a “plucky game fish that gives good fight on the line”

Well well well…

Native is what is here and what belongs here

It is the indigenous and the natural and the group with deepest roots

BUT

We can’t deny that in this globalized, post-colonial age, we are, and should be a little suspicious of the term

The word NATIVE has been used to delegitimize the colonized (“the natives are restless”—hint: they mean DARK people!)

The word NATIVE has been adopted by conservative cranks to describe all those guys that they CLAIM were disenfranchised by our most recent election results  (hint: they mean WHITE people!)

So I want to take NATIVE out of the realm of politics altogether, and wash it clean of its historical muck in the fresh, sweet waters of that closest body of water. Lake Michigan.

Back to you, a smallmouth bass, shimmering through the chilly damp atmosphere, maybe blowing a kiss to a drum fish, maybe winking at a perch (or not, cause you know, no eyelids)

It’s a good life

Swimming peacefully through the green-brown haze of the Greatest of Great Lakes, and the world, is not your oyster, but your delicious local crayfish

When all of a sudden, it’s coming at you, the gaping maw, a huge hole in the middle of the lake, framed by teeth

You are staring into the abyss

Then your eyes meet the eyes of this creature

(I mean this metaphorically, because not only do you not have eyelids, your eyes are actually on the side of your head)

You are looking down the throat of your own destruction

You may have heard of the terrifying ASIAN CARP. The possible invasion of this species of hulking meaty fish, gnashing at the water around them, their bottomless hunger, their rapacious need to eat everything in sight sends environmentalists into a frothy panic

They don’t belong here, the Asian Carp

Their presence destroys the delicate balance

They are the foreign, and they will destroy the native

And you, the innocent little fish, just trying to swim around

Is it your fault that globalization, that the rapid speed at which every beast, fish or fowl can now travel to parts of the glove where they were never meant to be means that your very ability to gurgle and spawn should be threatened by pre-historic monsters from Asia?

It is not.

It is our fault. The humans. We enjoy our first world access to cheap electronics that sending boats around the world allows. The destructive foreign influence has merely hitched a ride on our greed. But still, the native will pay.

Now I am fully aware of the racialized undertones to this story. Lest you fear that I espouse any sort of xenophobic, nativist philosophy, let me assure you that I am big fan of the human Asian-American community, having gone so far as to MARRY an Asian-American

For you see my husband was raised by foreigners

And let me tell you, no one loves all things deeply, disgustingly American like a man who was a little boy with 2 heavily accented parents. He’s at home right now figuring out how to deep fry a turkey for god’s sake.

I’m glad his parents were both brave enough to become foreigners in a strange land. I love foreigners. We live in a city, which seems by definition a celebration of the foreign. Cities are the places where foreigners arrive, where they buy cheap property and open restaurants. Where they get their footing in a new world and I am thankful for that for both ethical and culinary reasons. But that is merely the built environment. Nature, that thing that is native by definition, peeks through the cracks in the pavement, the spaces between parking lots. There are places you can stand, on the shores of Lake Michigan, within the city limits, where you can watch the native grasses swaying, and listening to the birds who have sung the same songs since long before you came here.

Everything I know about the native small-mouth bass I learned from the aforementioned turkey frier, my own little Asian Carp. He’s dragged me out to the lakefront at ungodly hours of the morning to go fishing. Here you see Polish grandfathers, sipping their Ice Mountain beer as the sun comes up. Vietnamese men who have arrived on bicycles, balancing heavy buckets as they pedal. Men from places in Africa I can’t identify, whispering rapid French to one another. They each love the lake. They trade tips and disagree about which of the native species is the tastiest. And if you walk past them on an early morn, you’ll see them periodically pull a fish from the Lake frown at it, and throw it behind them to be fed to the seagulls. Foreign, invasive species. These foreigners share one thing, a love of the native.

me and studs

Studs Terkel would have been 100 today. I had already been obsessed with him for many years when I finally got to meet him. I shook his hand after a speaking engagement he did with Howard Dean. I leaned in close to his ear and said, “STUDS, WE HAVE THE SAME BIRTHDAY.” He was very deaf, so I had to speak loudly. He said, “MAY 16??” I said, “YES.” He said, “THAT’S GREAT! WHAT DO YOU DO?” I said, “STUDS, I’M IN THEATRE, AND I KNOW YOU WERE IN THE THEATRE ONCE.” He gave me a big smile and said, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU.” It was great.

He means a lot to me. He means a lot to me because he listened to people and because he liked them. He means a lot to me because he believed things, and you know what he believed when you read his interviews. I like that he never hid that.

So I’ll say the same thing I say every May 16: When I grow up, I’d like to be a short, bald, gravelly journalist who believed in work so much he wrote a book about it. And I hope my life work values humans as much as he did.

This is a piece I wrote for this.  The theme of the night was the Supreme Court. I played a little ukulele during the piece, because, as I have been told over the years, I am a one-trick pony.

Strict Scrutiny

© Chloe Johnston (2012)

For some reason, it’s really easy to picture them, even from a simple description.

10 small children, dressed in elaborate American colonial era costumes, sporting enormous white powdered wigs and holding a pre-revolutionary flag. Their faces are very serious because someone has told the to be still for a photo. Someone else must have given them those costumes to wear and lines to learn. That’s what it’s like to be a kid. Constantly the smallest person in the room and never allowed to eat exactly what you want and told to put this one, say this, stand there, smile. Look—you’re in a play now!

It took two executive orders, one official, one implied, to get them here. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive order 9066 ordering all American of Japanese descent into internment camps for the duration of the war. It’s been four months since Pearl Harbor.

But what executive order demanded that these Japanese American children end up dressed up at Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson?

The American concentration camps. That’s what the Japanese man said to the Jewish girl over Nepalese food. Well, he’s part-Japanese, and I’m only half Jewish, but he’s studying the language pretty seriously and me, I’ve been known to light a Hannukah candle on occasion, and we would have both ended up in camps if we’d had the misfortune to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I spend a fair amount of time around people who are much better schooled in history and oppression than I am, so I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut in key moments. Still, I shudder when he uses the word.
But what else to call them? A group of people defined by race, forcibly concentrated in government-run camps.

There’s a quietness around certain stories. Shouts are left empty and words don’t quite fit the page. There are stories and pictures that fall into the dustbin of history. But these pictures are hidden under the papers in the false bottom of the locked drawer of history.

Fred Korematsu challenged Executive Order 9066 by refusing to report to a camp. The case goes to the Supreme Court, where it is upheld by the principle of strict scrutiny. The order is deemed constitutional because it protects America’s interests.

And these kids. Someone put them in those wigs and handed them that flag and said smile. Someone said to them show them who you are, maybe not who you look like, but who you are, which history is yours and which flag is yours. And the people who did that were the people who wrote the rules but the people who were told where to be. Who were handed the metaphoric wig and flag and told to smile and perform a part of something that were also being told they could never be.

It would be another 40 years before the government releases documents that reveal that at the time of the order, most experts believed none of the internees posed a real threat. Locked drawers of history are never unlocked in time.

Accomplishment of the week

I made some students fight this week. So that's good right? It got heated over the issue of whether identity should matter in evaluating a work of art. Also, a student wrote on the board, in response to a probing question from the other side, "2+2≠art." She wiped chalk from her righteous fingers and sashayed back to her seat triumphantly. That about made my week. Also, it was over this lady pictured above. Hrostvitha (or Hrostvita or Roswitha) of Gandersheim. 10th century nun, playwright, and all around bad ass. Her plays feature folks falling in love with pots and pans. Good stuff.
Spent a night in my own state of self-righteousness this week trying to talk a friend into a new career path. When, of course, really what I was describing is the path that I wanted to follow. But I don't think I'm sad about that, even though my psychology was showing in the most embarrassing of ways. I think getting people to fight over 10th century nuns is great, too.

During a January thunder storm

Things I’m thinking about before I go to sleep tonight…

-January is good for the brain. I always dread it and it’s endless grey, but when it actually arrives, it turns out that I have inculcated myself through intensive pre-worry, and my brain is free to think about new projects and get excited for new things to put in my ears and my eyes and a whole unspoiled year ahead of me—that stands in stark contrast to the chunky grey snow outside.

-I somehow hoodwinked my way into this amazing “un-conference” sponsored by the VERY SMART people at Google and Inventables for the second year in a row. Surrounded by certifiable tech geniuses and radio geniuses and BBQ geniuses will make you really want to a) Invent something worth googling, b) wonder what you were doing while everyone else was learning to code (I know what I was doing, I was in rehearsal for the better part of 34 years—what do I have to show for that?, c) update dormant blogs. It was energizing and exciting and made me think lots of things are possible. I also found myself thinking about this article I recently think, which is a bit of an attack on the concept of group brainstorming. So how can some of these methods I learned about be modified to be useful on an individual basis? This might be a think problem that takes me through to February. Also, at this conference, I tasted all the constituent ingredients of gum. Amazing.

-Will be teaching Aristotle AND Judith Butler this week. Great to be teaching texts that I discover I don’t understand each time I return to them. I think that keeps me alive to the way my students’ brains are changing throughout the 16 weeks I get to spend with them (nevermind the 4 years of college) and how I never know what will sink and when, and just get a front row seat to a fraction of their development. I like that.