Here's to Zora. And Ashley. And the Good Brothers of Florida Tile

Last week I talked about Zora Neale Hurston in Ashley Kistler’s linguistics class where she had invited me to do a guest lecture. As I explained to the class, I’m an unlikely person to talk about the great Zora since I grew up in a small southern town where all the public schools were segregated. And like a lot of people, I had not even heard of Zora until around 1980-something.

In class I talked a bit about her work as an anthropologist/folklorist in Polk County (!) and Ashley mentioned the Signifyin’ Monkey tradition in African-American folklore.

This opened the floodgates of memory for me.

Signifiyin’ Monkey.

I distinctly remember Brother Sammy introducing me to this character back in the summer of 1965 when we both worked loading up trucks with tile in a Florida Tile warehouse on the north side of Lakeland. Sammy was a Florida A&M student and I was preparing to go off to college in August, so, being the youngsters on the crew, we felt we had a lot in common. Not too much in common, though, since, unlike Sammy and all the other truck loaders, I was white.

Sammy was incredulous when he mentioned the Signifyin’ Monkey and I allowed I had never heard of the chap. I got a brief lesson right there, but I pretty much forgot about this wily trickster from African American culture until a few years later when I picked up Roger Abrahams’ Deep Down in the Jungle, a fascinating study of street lore from south Philly. Outrageously obscene that book, but that wasn’t the only interesting thing about it. Lots of cool folklore in it, some quite subversive in tone.

It was while working at Florida Tile that I should have realized I was destined to become an anthropologist. I was learning about a world I hadn't known existed from Sammy and a couple of the other brothers who had a thing or two to teach me. There was a very sharp forklift driver named Bobby who was hoping to organize a union but who was suddenly fired when a palette of dropped and ruined tile was blamed on him.

The guys all told me in serious and earnest voices that if Bobby had busted the tile, he would have owned up to it. They said he was framed by management who probably wrecked the tile themselves to create an excuse to fire him. I have no reason to doubt that the brothers were right, and, in fact, I feel sure they were.

A heavily used phrase on the crew that summer was “Are you ready?” which was taken from the popular Barbara Mason “sweet on you” song of that title which repeats the phrase “I don’t even know how to love you (kiss you, etc.), but I’m ready to learn.”

The phrase was used by the guys to reference the recently passed Civil Rights Bill with the idea of “Are you ready for Civil Rights?” A variation of it was often used when someone screwed a job up and his buddies would start in with, “Looks like Clarence ain’t ready…no, he definitely ain’t ready…” and so on.

Since I had never met any African Americans in my “separate but equal” school, I was really getting off on learning about this utterly unfamiliar culture. One day, Ben, one of the guys who was probably 25 years old or so, invited me to go with him to Tampa on Saturday night. I would never have been allowed to do such a thing had my parents been home, but they were gone for the weekend, so…yeah. Risky Business/road trip style.

I had no idea what the hell I would be getting into when I headed to the north side of Lakeland to pick Ben up that Saturday, but I had stashed a fifth of Dad’s scotch under the seat since it just seemed like it might come in handy. It did.

When Ben and I got to Tampa he directed me to the apartment where his girlfriend and her roommate lived. Ben had brought a fifth of – can’t remember if it was vodka or gin – but at any rate, the roommate told us, “Well, I only drink red whiskey.” So I said, “You mean scotch? Because I have some of that under the seat.” Score one for us.

We sampled our booty at the apartment for a while and then went over to a local club where, as I recall, we were allowed to sit at our table drinking from our byob stash. I say, as I recall, because as the night progressed my recollections grew fuzzy. I definitely remember dancing with the roommate and then, late into the night, Ben suggesting I could use some chitlins to clear my head.

At that point we said good-bye to the lasses, who got a ride home, and Ben took me to a joint near the club where, in fact, the deep fried chitlins did succeed in clearing my head some little bit. Afterwards we hit the sidewalk and started back for the car. As we were walking, Ben, who was a good-sized bear of a guy, threw his arm around my shoulder and said, “You know, some of these guys are looking like they don’t like you, Bob, but don’t you worry. As long as you’re with me, you’re all right.”

This was good news and bad news to me. I was actually too zonked to realize that anyone was throwing hostile stares at me, but since they were, I was glad to be with my protective friend.

I couldn’t possibly drive back to Lakeland, so Ben took the wheel and we made it without incident. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but what kind of shitstorm would there have been had we been stopped by the cops? Particularly dangerous for Ben. Headline: “Negro Debauches LHS Youth” or some such.

As it happened, Ben got us home without incident and invited me to join the gang at their picnic next weekend, which, as it turned out, I wasn’t able to do. The only glitch (again, shades of Risky Business) was that the warehouse boss, who was our next door neighbor (that’s how I got the job in the first place) found out about my adventure and from him my parents found out.

Dad was pretty upset. “Good God, Bob! You took our car to Tampa’s colored neighborhood? What would you have done if it was stolen?”

I could have said, “No worries, Dad. If anyone had messed with our car, Ben would have kicked his ass!” I don’t think that would have helped, though, so I just took the scolding. I had been careful to get Ben to buy a bottle of my Dad’s brand of scotch so I could replenish his supply, consequently I faced no tongue lashing on that count.

Really, I have to be grateful to Ashley and her class for helping me dredge up these sweet memories. And to Zora. And, most of all, to Ben.






Zora

Protecting the Truth from the Powerful

I just finished Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle, which was recommended to me by America's leading library science student. It's a graphic memoir, and by graphic I don't mean it's full of sex and violence, but rather that it's written in comic-book-like format with words and pictures. It follows, in other words, the great tradition made famous by Art Spiegelman's Maus.
















North Korea, it turns out, is an entirely free and open country, the kind of paradise we Americans could only hope to someday experience.

Psych. It's actually a hellhole, albeit a rather clean and tidy one, according to Delisle. But most of us have already have gathered that from our own mainstream media coverage.

What is so bizarre about the place is the way so many people actually seem to accept that their Great Leader, the deceased Kim Il-sung, was truly one of the world's most amazing presidents ever. Also worshiped is his son, the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, who, at 5' 2" is referred to by Bill Maher as Lil' Kim. Not, ahem, that there's anything wrong with being short.

North Koreans all seem to wear pins with the likenesses of one or both of these Kims, and the country has built a series of monumental statues, museums and other structures designed to glorify these two characters. And people are expected to bow to their images at appropriate times. I mean, come on, aren't these guys supposed to be communists? If, as Marx says, religion is the opiate of the people, the North Koreans seem to have OD'd on their own homegrown Kimotheism.




The Great Leader surrounded by adoring school children











Foreigners in NK are not allowed to go anywhere except when accompanied by guides, or minders, and life for ordinary Koreans is exceptionally tightly ordered.





From Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle








One thing I'm sure they don't have in North Korea is tenure. Delisle doesn't mention this, but I'm only bringing it up because I've been having a mini-debate with my dear niece, Ms. Tracy, who doesn't believe that tenure for educators is a good thing.

I do, of course, and for this reason: powerful people cannot be counted on to let scholars and educators seek and teach the truth in accordance with the precepts of science and reason. If a truth (e.g., tobacco causes cancer or using fossil fuels contributes to global warming) contradicts the interests of powerful people, these powerful ones will inevitably attempt to stifle or silence those educators who bring it to light. In the bad old days, before tenure, it was all too easy for some big shot millionaire to get a teacher or professor fired for saying things Mr. Big Shot objected to.

Stripping educators of tenure will not turn us into North Korea, of course, but it would be a big step toward that kind of society: the kind where people with power, not those with knowledge, get to decide what "the truth" is.

In North Korea, "the truth" is that Kim Il-sung led Korea to a glorious victory over Japan in World War II (the U.S. had no role in this) and Kim Jong-il was born on the sacred slopes of Mount Paektu under a shining star and a double rainbow. I'm not kidding.

CAGW - CItizens Who Want You to Hate China

There’s an organization that calls itself “Citizens Against Government Waste” that, in fact, is trying to fool us by calling itself by that name. I’m sure they don’t like to see the government being wasteful, but then, who does? Which is to say, their organization’s name is meaningless. They might as well call themselves “Citizens Against Bad Stuff.”

What CAGW is really against is people who are not multi-millionaires. In fact, if they were honest, they would rename themselves “Citizens With Questionable Ethical Standards Who Want to Make Life Even Easier for the Privileged Few.”

I say this because CAGW has recently been rerunning an old ad, one whose messages are that (1) America has lost its way by letting government get too big, (2) America, having let government get too big, will soon be dominated by China (a country, we should note, whose government is as big as they get), and (3) Chinese professors and their students are malicious schemers who will gloat fiendishly as soon as they have us where they want us.

Let’s start with this last point, the one based on CAGW’s bigotry against the Chinese. In their ad, a gloating Chinese professor from the year 2030, laughs with satisfaction at the way Americans have been forced to work for the Chinese. His laughter triggers a similarly gloating response from the students in his class. The reason for America’s downfall is said to be its heavy burden of debt, much of which is owed to the People’s Republic of China.

The portrayal of both the Chinese professor and his students is a gross misrepresentation of what most Chinese professors and students are like, and seems designed to conjure up racial hostility against Chinese in general. I think CAGW has tried to provoke this bigotry in its viewers because it believes that the fear and resentment this entails will encourage viewers to accept its message about how America went wrong. CAGW, in other words, is not racist for no reason at all. Rather, it is racist because it believes promoting racism will help sell its message.

Let me say at this point that my work over the past three decades has brought me into contact with dozens of Chinese professors. And let me also say there is not a single one among these colleagues who resembles the cartoonish villain portrayed by CAGW. For example, in the summer of 2000, while I was living on a university campus in Beijing, one of my Chinese colleagues, whom I will call Professor Lin, described to me the anger he felt toward his own government as a consequence of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Dr. Lin told me how, on the day following the massacre, he went from hospital to hospital in Beijing trying to determine just how many citizens had been killed by the troops who rolled into the square the night before. He concluded that probably about 300 fatalities resulted from that action, and his attitude toward his own government remains bitter because of it.

Being a man who believes deeply in democracy, Dr. Lin has freely criticized his own government for its failure to implement liberal reforms. Nor is he reluctant to criticize our government for its failings. He was not favorably impressed, for example, when we invaded Iraq. He would never, however, stand in front of a class and sneer mockingly to his students about the helplessness and stupidity of Americans.

And Dr. Lin is typical of the Chinese scholars I have known. I have spent about a year and a half living on various campuses in the People’s Republic of China, including one year (1993-94) when I was a visiting professor at Qingdao University.

Not only have I met and worked beside dozens of decent and forthright Chinese professors, I’ve also met and lectured to hundreds of Chinese students. The CAGW ad would have us believe that just as Chinese professors are scheming villains who look forward to subverting American interests, Chinese students act the part of the villain’s weak and dimwitted sidekicks: They laugh gloatingly once the professor clues them in to how helpless they have made the United States.

The Chinese students I have taught have been generally patriotic in the sense that they would like to see China grow strong enough to earn the respect of the world and provide its citizens with a middle class standard of living. Some of them have even expressed a measure of envy toward the status and influence enjoyed by the United States. But no class of Chinese students would laugh like a gaggle of villainous sidekicks at the comments made by CAGW's Chinese professor. If one of their professors were to indulge in such an outburst of gloating, the students I know would most likely sit in stunned silence wondering whether their mentor had downed too many shots of baijiu before coming to class.

CAGW sees a problem with our government’s endless borrowing and so do most of us. But the problem with our government’s borrowing is not that it represents an opportunity for evil scheming by malicious Chinese; the problem is that that the massive debt will have to be paid back by future generations of Americans and thereby undermines our children’s and grandchildren’s futures. It was not necessary for CAGW to resort to racism to make this point.

In addition to expressing a racist tone, the ad is fundamentally dishonest. For example, it presents taxation as contributing to national debt when it was the drastic tax cuts of the Bush administration that broke the back of our once balanced budget.

Since the “against government waste” line is obviously bogus, why won’t CAGW explain what truly sets it apart from the rest of us? From their “Chinese Professor” ad, I would suggest it is a bias in favor of giving corporations more tax breaks combined with a willingness to disregard ordinary standards of fairness and decency in promoting their agenda.







Naive young American being subverted by scheming Chinese student?

Lads and Lasses of the World Unite!

Well, I’ve not been my groovy self lately -- feeling just a bit off. This is partly due to Brother Jonathan’s reminding me of the horrendous environmental/economic collapse that threatens humanity in this century. A collapse, I hasten to add, that the global warming deniers and pro-capitalist fanatics are pushing us toward.

On a lighter note, I’ve been reading Keith Richards’ memoir Life, and when I say “reading,” I mean listening to while driving around town. Aren’t books on CDs great?? Suddenly my optimism stirs anew!!

Anyway, there is a lot of interesting stuff in Life, including tales of Keith’s childhood (kind of lower middle class) and his early days with Mick Jagger and the other Stones. What strikes me most in this section is his dedication to musicianship. He talks at some length about how his aim (and presumably Mick’s as well), was to be the best blues band in London. They weren’t thinking in terms of world fame and all that in the very early 1960s.





Young Keith as Mod








He describes living together, five or more to a tiny apartment, surviving partly on whatever food they could pinch, and, all the while working, working, working to master the Chicago blues style. Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters are all featured as people Keith admired and tried to imitate, sometimes struggling for months to figure out a particular guitar riff from one song or another they had recorded.

He also comments on the way the younger generation, led in the UK largely by the Beatles and the Stones, overthrew a longstanding mafia-like establishment in the music industry. At one point he describes a bargaining session in which his manager, Andrew Oldham, instructs the boys to show up at the negotiations wearing shades and to not say a word, but let him do all the talking. The Stones did as they were told, and, according to Richards, they garnered a groundbreaking deal that overturned the old guard forever.

More than once he describes the younger generation as creating a new world, while those in charge of the old one stand by helplessly or, in some cases, get swept away.

Which reminds me of an interesting article in this week’s Time magazine (of all places). I have a long history of looking down on Time since in the old days, e.g., the Nixon era, it played the same role that Fox News does today: It was the unofficial propaganda branch of Republican conservatism. But Time seems to have redeemed itself, at least to some extent.

The Japan story says, in essence, that there is a generation of young Japanese who have long seemed complacent and disengaged from society, but the recent tragedy may have succeeded in activating a yearning to serve and possibly even to reshape Japanese society.

Japan has suffered a period of economic stagnation that has lasted for over 20 years so far. It may be that part of the problem is that Japan’s tradition of deferring to elders has enabled this stagnation, since it is almost always the young, it seems, who lead us into new worlds when the old one falters.

If the Beatles and the Stones (and Bob Dylan) could have been the point men in their day, could there be a young leadership in Japan today that will finally shake that country up and put it on a new and dynamic road? Could it be, as Time suggests, Yujiro Taniyama, a 38-year-old (which is young, by Japanese politician standards) who has launched a Facebook-based political campaign? I hope that some young leader manages to take the reins in that troubled country because it is a country that has a lot to offer the world. And besides, since I continue to harbor the sentiments of a Young Turk in my own tattered, not very young heart, I cherish the prospect of yet one more youth rebellion shaking up the world as we know it.






Lovely Land of the Rising Sun

Will We Endure?

Civilization is

a. Doomed
b. Going to be here for the long haul
c. Going to be here for the long haul, which is totally depressing

This quiz is prompted by a debate I had with our friend Jonathan last night, in which he essentially chose “a,” while I went for “b.” I feel obligated to point out that answer “c” has some supporters, who were not represented in our discussion.

The issue came up via Stuart “Whole Earth Catalog” Brand’s notion of a super-slow clock that would be big enough for people to actually walk around in, and which would provide information relevant to what Brand calls “The Long Now.” It would, for example, give us not just the year, but also the century and millennium as well as other chronologically and astronomically significant data.






Stuart Brand's World-Changing Catalog








The problem, as Jonathan sees it, is that eventually people won’t be able to read or understand Brand's 10,000 Year Clock because the languages and symbols of our civilization will be incomprehensible to future generations, just as cuneiforms were incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Here is why Jonathan is so very wrong:

We now have

1. widespread literacy,

2. replicated texts, both electronic and in duplicable hard copies, and

3. an international political/economic system that has apparently eliminated the kinds of catastrophic wars that in the past routinely toppled civilizations (e.g., Sumeria, Rome, Ming China). It is, after all, wars like these that resulted in the trashing of the information of the deposed civilizations making them largely lost to future generations. (I did not get to make all of these points last night, but they are still very, very valid.)

To my arguments, Jonathan replied, “Bob, you bumptious popinjay! Darla, how could you have married such a bloody optimist?!*

Jonathan is wrong to think the information available to us will vanish in a millennium or two, because, in my opinion, the Internet, in some form or another, is here to stay. I don’t believe it’s going the way of cuneiforms or the Library of Alexandria. There are, after all, multiple nations and organizations, both friends and rivals, now cooperating to keep it going, and I don’t see them just giving it up or being forced to abandon it by some greater entity.

Furthermore, you can read this. What I mean to say is that widespread literacy is the norm today, even in countries whose literacy rate was about 10% as recently as 100 years ago. I would guess that cuneiforms, when they were the basis of literacy, were accessible to fewer than one out of ten Sumerians. Limited literacy like that makes the texts much more vulnerable to eternal obscurity than literacy rates of 90 or 95%, which are now common.

Finally, War: The hippies won! We have peace in our time! (Sort of.)

As I write this, President Obama has announced possible military action in Libya, so maybe some clarification is called for. What I mean is, really catastrophic wars have become things of the past. The horrific, civilization-toppling wars of the last five millennia typically pitted the most powerful nations of the day against each other: UK, USSR, France, China and the US against Germany and Japan…and, I guess, Italy. Or, going further back, Arabs against Persians, Chinese against Mongols, etc.

But for the past 40 years, major powers have not gone to war directly against each other. This is no doubt partly due to the dangers of nuclear war, but probably more due to the elites of the great powers recognizing that their elite status is tied up in the international economy -- which would be demolished were, say, China and the US to go to war.

There are still some dangerous situations, as between India and Pakistan, but the tensions, even there, seem to be on the decline. The wars we’ve seen have been mainly either great powers vs. smaller ones (US vs. Vietnam, Iraq or the Taliban) or civil wars (Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone).

Given the ever decreasing likelihood of catastrophic, great-power wars, our precious body of knowledge will, I believe, endure. Generations to come will be able to enjoy the music of Mozart, the plays of David Mamet, tapings of the Jerry Springer Show, tales of the Kardashians, and so on.

Of course, in the really long run -- when the earth becomes a lifeless rock hurtling silently through empty space -- then Jonathan may have a point.






Here for the Duration









__________________________________________________________

*These may not have been Jonathan’s exact words, but he has been known to use this phraseology on other occasions. Anyway, it captures his scornful tone.

Big Government and Big Tea

Tea Partiers would like us to see them as implacable foes of Big Government. But this they are not, as the ongoing showdown in Madison, Wisconsin, makes clear. This showdown pits Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Tea Party against teachers and other ordinary citizens. The governor’s aim is to strip these citizens of their right to defend themselves through collective bargaining. He is so fanatically devoted to this goal that offers by the teachers and other public employees to yield to him on key budgetary issues have not softened his attack on collective bargaining.

The Tea Party backed Governor Scott during his campaign, as did the Koch Brothers who pumped all the cash the law allows into his coffers. In a sense the Tea Party and the Koch Brothers are the same thing, given that these Kansas billionaires have poured millions into the Tea Party and have worked to make its actions helpful to their own corporate bottom line. On this point, refer to the revealing article by Jane Mayer in last August’s New Yorker.

This "governor & fat cats vs. teachers" showdown calls to mind a similar clash: the Colorado coalminers’ strike of 1913-14. The Colorado struggle was triggered by the murder of a labor organizer in September 1913. The miners immediately went on strike for higher pay and safer working conditions, but were promptly kicked out of their homes by the company they worked for: the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company or CF&I.

CF&I belonged to the Rockefellers, and the shacks that were the miners' homes belonged to CF&I. Suddenly made homeless by the Rockefellers, the workers responded by setting up tent cities in the vicinity of the mines and continued their strike, despite the oncoming Colorado winter and the aggressive moves made against them.

The Rockefellers hired professional gunmen (the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency) to subdue them, but the miners fought back, suffering casualties as they did so. Finally Colorado Governor Elias Ammons called up the National Guard and, with the Guards’ pay covered by the Rockefellers, the Guardsmen continued the harassment of the miners’ tent camps. This harassment came to a horrifying climax in April of 1914 when the Guard assaulted the main tent city in Ludlow, Colorado, and burned it to the ground. This assault, known to history as the Ludlow Massacre, resulted in the deaths of two of the miners’ wives and eleven of their children.

The coalminers’ strike ultimately failed to attain its goals, but it did bring to national attention the feudalistic conditions under which some Americans were forced to live. The incident was also memorialized by a monument constructed by the United Mineworkers of America which still stands today. Woody Guthrie composed a song about the massacre which is now on youtube.












Monument Commemorating the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914



At this point, I think it’s appropriate to pause and thank Governor Walker and the Koch Brothers for their restraint. Though many of their actions are reminiscent of those surrounding the Ludlow Massacre, they have not, at least, hired gunmen or called up the National Guard to physically assault the teachers and other Wisconsin employees. So far, they have merely threatened to deprive these citizens of their livelihood.

We might also pause to consider the essential role that organized labor has played as a bulwark of democracy here and around the world. For example, when the American occupiers of Japan attempted to construct a democratic society there following World War II, they insisted on a law guaranteeing the right of employees to unionize and forbidding Japanese corporations to refuse collective bargaining with said unions.

It is particularly important, given the steady erosion of our public elections by private corporate money, to remember that votes alone do not a democracy make. The capacity of people to organize and resist exploitation by the rich and powerful is also an elemental democratic right, though it is one that Governor Walker seems determined to suppress. Notice, that as he does so, he portrays himself as an advocate of small government. But the only thing "small" about Wisconsin’s government today is its regard for the democratic rights and well-being of its public employees.




(My account of the Ludlow Massacre comes from a variety of sources, including a visit I made to the site when I lived in Colorado some 30 years ago. A good, compact published account appears in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.)

Jan Kasoff - Behind the Scenes at Saturday Night Live

On Monday Jan Kasoff came to Rollins, invited by the Critical Media and Cultural Studies Department. Mr. Kasoff talked engagingly about his 36 years as a cameraman for Saturday Night Live and other NBC programs. On a table near the speaker's podium were pictures of the SNL cast and crew as well as other people he had filmed over the years. There also stood a real live Emmy.  Jan modestly indicated he wasn’t trying to show his Emmy off, but he displayed it because he thought people might be interested in seeing it.

He was right. I thought the statuette was cool, and I imagined it to be alive with “mana,” the ethereal force that Polynesians say can deliver a wicked jolt to anyone -- spiritually unprepared -- who comes in contact with it. Consequently, I was reluctant to even touch it. My evil twin, Otto, was there, however, and he didn’t hesitate to pick the trophy up and demand that someone take a picture of him. His plan was to show the picture around claiming he had been awarded an Emmy for “a lifetime of awesomeness.”

Jan Kasoff was very down to earth. He talked about his teenage years when he had managed, through luck and persistence, to gain a foothold at NBC even before he was out of college. He mentioned a Perry Como special he attended back then and conjectured that we were all too young to remember Perry, but he was wrong about that.

Jan said that SNL began because nothing was being shown on Saturday nights that appealed to young audiences, the demographic that the capitalist money-grubbers (my words) are always most interested in. Lorne Michaels badgered NBC to try out a live show, and finally convinced them to do so. NBC’s Los Angeles studios were so overbooked that it was decided to film the show in New York at 30 Rockefeller Plaza's Studio 8H, which was originally a radio studio. Arturo Toscanini used to conduct his symphony orchestra there.

The camera and technical crew got to know all the SNL actors well, even socializing with them at times, but Jan said he remembered the original cast best. He was also able to tape a post-rehearsal segment of Paul McCartney and his band letting loose, playing Beatles songs for two solid hours just for the SNL gang.

He showed us several SNL clips in order to explain how the camera crew, the actors, directors and other stage workers hustled to put together a show. It looked maddeningly complicated and demanding. But cool.

My favorite segment was of Christopher Walken portraying “The Continental,” an unctuous would-be seducer who talks directly into the camera, giving the TV viewer the impression that he or she is the woman being targeted by the Lothario. Jan explained that this is known as a “subjective camera.”

I wondered how the segment would have looked to people in the studio during the show, and, to my delight, Jan next showed us what the studio audience saw: A 250-pound man wearing a dress and a blonde wig and carrying a camera on his shoulder while reacting to Walken so as to give tv viewers the viewpoint of the “pixie” Mr. Continental is trying to lure into his clutches.

Jan’s presentation was one of the most enjoyable and informative ones I’ve seen this year. Thank you CMC colleagues for bringing him to us.