Art: September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb. 

His September (2005) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Remembrances: 9/11

24 years ago this morning I ran a little late and got caught in the rush-hour crowds that prevented me from getting a seat on my EL train. But as I stood there—a relatively new Chicagoan—I was still in awe of the fact that I actually lived in Chicago and rode a train to work and I reveled in the fact that I was one of THEM: my fellow Chicagoans packed in the train car with me, commuting to (or from) our jobs as waiters, insurance brokers, construction workers, actuaries, janitors, bankers, personal trainers, writers, and every other career and purpose in our big, always-moving city.

When I finally arrived at work and got off the elevator, I saw everyone in my office crowded around the TVs in our glass-walled conference room. My first thought was that my colleagues would see I was late. But after joining them—both in front of the TVs and in shared abject horror—and watching the towers burn and fall, seeing the gaping wound in the Pentagon, learning of the disappearance of an entire airplane and its passengers in a fiery pit, I was struck by the fact that my underground commute that morning with my fellow train riders—a microcosm of the city, if not the country—was our last collective moment of innocence before we had access to any news and we suddenly had to face the sickening, horrifying, misanthropic enormity wrought by other human beings on a scale none of us could have ever imagined.

24 years ago today I never felt closer to colleagues, friends, family members and even strangers as we worked to understand the hatred and comprehend the savagery of perhaps the ugliest tragedy in our lifetimes.

24 years ago today we lost a certainty in our collective safety but we gained a powerful strength in our ability to care for and protect and even love each other when we needed to ... and even when we didn't.

24 years ago today, our world changed immeasurably. Our hearts broke irreparably. Our determination grew mightily. Our humanity spread defiantly. Time may erode the intensity of our initial united magnanimity, but we will never forget.

Happy 184th birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

Though a proud native son of Czechoslovakia, Dvořák is perhaps best known for his mighty, highly melodic Symphony No. 9, which is most commonly called "From the New World" due to its early American musical themes and the fact that he wrote almost the entirety of it in the United States—more specifically in Spillville, Iowa, just 100 miles north of Cedar Rapids.

It's the last symphony he composed, and in my opinion its enduring brilliance lies in its endless accessibility. Its dominant six-note theme, often sung to the words of the American folk song "Goin' Home," is never far from the surface no matter how many variations or complex contrapuntal themes he weaves it through.

As a composer, he was rooted firmly among the late Romantics with their heroic storylines, soaring emotions, and confident nods to the nascent but growing fascination with the shimmering textures of the Impressionists and the gorgeous discordances of what would soon be revered around the world as American jazz. And this symphony sits right at the confluence of all that history, all that emotion, all that foresight and all that promise.

 
It's a gorgeous, centuries- and continents-spanning legacy ... built on a mere six-note theme he encountered on an 1893 stay in the humble American Midwest.

Books: Slaughterhouse-Five

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death) is a profoundly disjointed narrative of author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of war told through the eyes and experiences of his fictional proxy Billy Pilgrim.

Vonnegut occasionally inserts himself into the narrative or acknowledges that the work you’re reading is autobiographical historical fiction, creating a meta universe that both draws you in and sets you outside the characters and plot.

Billy’s adventures unfold in short, jarring sentences and jump through time and literal space—which are key aspects of the novel’s postmodernist structure and spirit. Postmodernism in literature (which thrived in the second half of the 20th century, with this novel being written in 1969) broke away from linear, plausible storytelling to embrace logical impossibilities, ponder questions about existence, and often create imperfect character and story arcs that never get resolved.

It’s through this everything-at-once literary lens that poor, beleaguered Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly from surviving the cruelties of war and the (historically true) bombing of Dresden to wetting his pants in childhood fear at the top of the Grand Canyon to losing his wife in a string of bizarre circumstances after he survives a plane crash to being abducted by aliens, ensconced in an interstellar zoo, and mating with a fellow earthling and adult performer with the delightful name Montana Wildhack.

And it’s through this structure that Vonnegut processes the horrors he experienced in war and illustrates the disassociative struggles of living with PTSD.

The story is by its very nature absurd and peppered with droll humor and truly singular characters (many of whom appear in other Vonnegut works) with names like Kilgore Trout and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. This being a novel centered around war, the frivolity is heavily balanced with often nonchalant accounts of death … always followed by Vonnegut’s “And so it goes” expression of existential futility.

The novel’s other recurring expression—”unstuck in time”—provides succinct, efficient shorthand for not only Vonnegut’s narrative structure but for the scattered aftershocks he continues to experience from of war itself, the upheaval it creates, the lives it redirects and the metaphorical slaughter it wields on his psyche … and by extension the world’s.

The 2020 Iowa hurricane

Five years ago today, a massive derecho—a Category 4 inland hurricane defined by its straight-line winds, which exceeded 140 miles an hour here—appeared out of nowhere and with less than 30 minutes’ notice pummeled Cedar Rapids for almost an hour. The National Weather Service literally called it unprecedented.

Roofs were ripped off; buildings were destroyed by hurricane-force winds, high-velocity debris and crashing trees; sewers were overwhelmed and flooded streets, yards and houses; literally all electricity, cell service and light disappeared for over a week … it was a war zone nobody had time to prepare for, and nobody could fully comprehend when it was over.

And our trees. Our beautiful trees. By most estimates, we lost almost 75% of our trees. Many of them were centuries old. They provided essential shade for us and fertile ecosystems for our wildlife and insects. With no place to nest, our birds all but disappeared for weeks and weeks.

My niece—who’d just lost half of her senior year of high school to covid—also lost the young tulip tree she’d chosen and we’d just planted to celebrate her graduation.

And—shockingly ... infuriatingly ... heartbreakingly—people outside of Cedar Rapids had no idea what had happened. Without electricity or cell service, nobody here had any idea what was going on even a block away unless we could get there on our own—and with roads buried under light and electricity poles and massive debris, that was often literally impossible. With virtually zero coverage on the national news, my colleagues on the West Coast had no idea why we’d all gone radio-silent for days. I’d assumed reporters from every national news source had descended on what was left of our city to cover the carnage, interview our citizens and raise national awareness of what had happened. But without cell or TV service, I had no idea that wasn’t the case. Nobody came.

We felt so alone. We had no idea how or where to start cleaning up. People were left homeless and immediately needed covid-safe places to stay. Some of those people were still living in technically uninhabitable housing a full year later.

Gas stations were knocked out without power, and people with low gas in their cars were pretty much screwed. My neighbor and I had to drive almost 45 minutes to find a gas station that actually had gas—and even then we had to wait at least 30 minutes in a line while a gas truck filled the underground tanks as desperate Cedar Rapidians filled their own tanks and as many gas cans as they could find.

Stores had no electricity to run cash registers to sell things. Produce and meat spoiled. Generators were impossible to find.

Three people died.

People and cities in hurricane zones have the benefit of buildings built to withstand hurricanes; protocols in place to manage the preparations, durations and aftermaths of hurricanes; well-publicized warnings that give everyone many days to prepare their homes and businesses, stock up on gas and water and groceries and survival supplies, and get out of town if needed for safety; and the benefits of the aforementioned publicity to generate after-the-carnage relief efforts across the country.

We had none of that. NONE.

And many of us talk about how we’re still kind of resentful when we see other disasters that get lots of warnings, national coverage and organized help.

But we immediately started our slow recovery here. People mobilized to help each other day after day after day. They set up free food trucks and gathered clothing and supplies and bottled water for people who suddenly had none. Churches and other organizations dispatched teams of volunteers to provide all kinds of assistance to all kinds of people. I randomly had just purchased a sharp, really awesome collapsible hand saw, and I found people who needed help chopping up and hauling trees every day and every night after I was back at work and every weekend for months. And I was far from alone.

The city chipped the massive amount of downed trees and made it available to everyone as free mulch. There was so much of it that people were still using it two years later to cover new plantings in newly sunny gardens and yards. Two years later, buildings were slowly being repaired or torn down and rebuilt entirely—though most insurance windows expired two years to the day after the derecho with many repairs still not even started as the backlog of demand slowly cleared. I had very low expectations for seeing foliage the next spring, but even the most stripped tree trunks and stumps were blooming with tufts of green leaves and came back back surprisingly stronger—even though they bloomed in weird ways that are still hard to picture what they’ll look like in the long term.

I'd randomly taken the first of the above three photos of my sister's street on July 4 the year before the derecho because it had looked so lush and beautiful. I found it in a folder on my phone after the derecho and took the next two from the same spot the year after the derecho to show just how devastating the change in our tree canopy had been.

We've planted so many young trees along streets and in boulevards that they've made me extremely contemplative about how trees are gifts from the past to the future. We'd been enjoying trees planted a century ago by our long-forgotten Cedar Rapids forebears, and when our young trees mature we'll be the long-forgotten forebears who've gone to our graves content in the knowledge we'd managed to perpetuate the cycle as we all rose from the ashes.

The world may not have known what happened to us in the days and weeks after the derecho, but I did hear national reports about the one-year anniversary on NPR last year.

So we’ll be recovering for years and maybe even decades, but we relatively quickly got well ahead of what I'd initially expected. 

And we all have LOTS of pictures.

#Pride101: What the hell do LGBTQ+ people have to be proud of?

We’re proud because despite decades and decades of relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when the entire Republican party perpetually enshrines a pledge to strip us of our legal equalities in its national platform, when communities and cities and entire states keep trying to codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.

We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and motivation and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because in just the last few years an openly gay married man was a long-viable, highly qualified, unquestionably respected candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries—something most of us never even considered would EVER happen—and not only does he enjoy enthusiastic support across the Democratic party, but leading Republicans seem to have learned that while they can attack him for reasons they’d attack any other candidate, attacking him for being gay is completely unacceptable.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act long ago collapsed onto their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations … and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us—especially during election cycles—gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and careers and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as unthreatening and commonplace and frankly boring.

We’re proud because our tireless efforts to be seen have engendered (which is the perfect verb in this context) massive visible support for us with rainbows and Pride messages on everything from clothing to flags to television commercials—and while we can legitimately be worried that companies are merely riding the Pride wave for profit, we can also celebrate that the explosions of these rainbows on our apparel and flags and televisions overwhelmingly normalizes the understanding that we have a place at the table and a presence in our communities.

We’re proud because especially during this past Pride month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades—all mostly virtual in 2020 and 2021—that are overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, nonbinary queens, you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, people who prefer not to be called queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

We’re proud because 56 years ago a small crowd in a bar in New York City reached the tipping point in putting up with endless harassment and oppression and instigated a violent retaliation to a police raid that escalated to a week of riots and then to a march for equality that grew unstoppably to a national movement for equality and respect that continues proudly to this day.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

#Pride101: The Stonewall Uprising

Fifty-six years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn—a mob-controlled gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered mostly to drag queens—in an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation specifically targeted at people wearing clothing that didn’t conform to the conventions of what the laws called their “assigned gender.” These arrests usually led to people’s names, photographs and home addresses being published in the newspapers … which carried the high risk of further targeting, job loss, eviction, and family ostracism.

Usually the bar patrons submissively complied as they were being arrested. But this night—clearly fed up past their breaking points—they fought back. When an officer clubbed a Black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie over the head for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd that had gathered outside the club had had enough. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black drag queen and beloved heart of the community, and Sylvia Rivera, a popular Latinx queen, were two of the first to actively resist the police that night, and their fellow queens joined them in throwing bricks, bottles and shot glasses at officers and effectively shutting down the raid. I’m including these people’s ethnicities and orientations here to give credit to the non-white, non-cis-presenting people who showed the courage and gumption to initiate the fight back and start what ended up being six days of riots in the neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn that finally ignited a national fight for the rights and equalities that *everyone* under the LGBTQ+ rainbow enjoys today.

Stonewall wasn’t the first riot in defiance of police raids and harassments; in 1959 angry gays fought police after a raid of Cooper’s Do-Nuts—a gay-friendly diner—in Los Angeles, and in 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of hot coffee in a police officer’s face in a raid at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, sparking a riot that inspired the city to acknowledge the trans community and develop a network of trans-specific social, mental-health and medical services.

But Stonewall was the emotional—and ultimately cultural—turning point. The police raid there quickly drew a large mob whose collective lifetimes of oppression and discrimination boiled over into a violent revolt that trapped police in the bar until the NYC Tactical Patrol Force was dispatched to rescue them. Riots erupted the next night and through the week in the Christopher Street and other nearby gay neighborhoods, including one mob that threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice for mocking the gay rioters and describing the riots as "forces of faggotry" and "Sunday fag follies." The next year, an organization called Chicago Gay Liberation organized a parade on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the city has staged a parade on the last Sunday in June ever since—with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic causing the first exception.

Now, every major metropolis and many smaller cities have Pride parades and events—though in 2020 and 2021 they were mostly held virtually—and many of them usually spill beyond the last week of June to pop up in celebrations all month and all year.

But June is officially Pride month in the hearts and minds of LGBTQ+ people—and an exploding population of straight people and businesses large and small—and we owe it all to the brave LGBTQ+ people—more specifically, the extremely marginalized drag queens and people of color—who had had enough and fought back at great risk to themselves and even to our community and started our slow march toward equality fifty-six years ago today.

THIS IS WHY WE CELEBRATE PRIDE.

CedaRound: The Drowning

Though I was living in Chicago at the time, I was in Cedar Rapids 17 years ago today to visit my folks for their June 14 anniversary. My boyfriend at the time and I had heard stories of looming flooding, and even though the rains and the swollen rivers diverted us north from highway 30 at Mt. Vernon and sent us into Cedar Rapids on Mt. Vernon Road, we still never believed Cedar Rapids could have serious flooding. I mean, it's CEDAR RAPIDS. I grew up here. How could anything bad happen?

By the time we finally got to my folks' house late on the 13th though, the flooding had become serious enough that the city's last intact water pumping station was in such danger of being breached that the urgent call went out on the news for volunteers to sandbag it. Though we'd had a 5-hour drive, we wanted to go out and help, but by the time we had a quick bathroom break before heading for the door, the news announced that they'd already gotten all the sandbaggers they needed. Which was a clear harbinger of the resilience our city would soon show. But at the time it was dark and late and we were 32 blocks from the river so all we could do was go to bed and wait.

The next morning, the footage on the news was devastating. The river had crested at 31.12 feet—19 feet over flood stage—and our entire downtown was drowning, as were 1,300 blocks of the city on either side of the river. Office buildings and banks and stores and my beloved theaters were almost up to the tops of their doors in water. All three bridges that cross May's Island to connect the east and west sides of the city were completely submerged. The Time Check and Czech Village neighborhoods were annihilated, with many houses underwater to their roof lines. The highly elevated I-380 was the only way to get across town, though all of the entrance and exit ramps in the flood zone were submerged. We—like seemingly everyone else in the city—drove slowly along the highway and peered out our windows to survey the devastation as the flood waters rippled mere feet beneath us.

As the water slowly receded, the city reeled over the destruction of homes, the closing of businesses, the undermining of infrastructure ... but never the loss of spirit. The city leaped almost immediately into action to tear down what was unsalvageable, repair what was repairable, clean up what was messy and dangerous, reimagine new life and purpose for what was destroyed, and start to recover and relocate and rebuild ourselves into a newer and better and more thoughtfully redesigned shining city on the river. We now have our vibrant and ever-expanding NewBo district and its neighboring Czech Village restoration, we've literally picked up and moved an entire museum to higher ground, we've creatively and beautifully incorporated new levees and berms into inviting public spaces, we've used the opportunity to upgrade and restore historic buildings, we've turned our once-desolate-after-5:00 downtown into a destination area bustling with restaurants and entertainment (well, before covid hit—but it bounced back as soon as returning was safe) ... and we've salvaged and restored and improved and polished up my beloved Paramount and Iowa (home of Theatre Cedar Rapids) theaters.

The flood was awful and heartwrenching and devastating. Many businesses never recovered. Many homes and families and lives have been forever changed. And our renaissance is perpetually ongoing and far from complete; in the last decade-plus, we've brought to life a towering modern addition to the stately Chicago-school American Building, built an expanding Habitrail of downtown skywalks, converted all the downtown one-way streets into two-way to feel more like friendly streets than impersonal expressways, incorporated towering, visually referential berms into the natural features along the river lowlands, and built many massive, architecturally interesting mixed-use buildings in the vibrantly revitalized Kingston Village neighborhood.

There was one sliver lining linking the 2008 flood that destroyed the center of the city to the 2020 land-hurricane derecho that destroyed enormous amounts of the entire city: The blocks and blocks of still-empty land in what was left of the flood-destroyed Time Check neighborhood became the primary dumping ground for the thousands and thousands of derecho-felled trees that the city slowly hauled away from everyone's property. It was centrally located, it offered a LOT of land and it made a mighty monument to the destruction the city endured. Driving by it was both breathtaking and heartbreaking. But also reassuring in that it provided a useful place for the city to dump the trees it collected and get back out to collect more as efficiently as possible.

Aside from the before-and-after photos of my dad's office, where he thought two levels of concrete blocks would protect his antique roll-top desk from the floodwaters that eventually submerged his entire office past its ceiling, the pictures I'm posting here aren't mine. But they show the depth and breadth of the destruction we all faced and make a great reminder of how amazingly far we have come in the last ten years.

So happy floodiversary, Cedar Rapids! May we keep our recovery and flood-protection development speeding along forevermore. (And don't forget to wish my folks a happy 61st anniversary tomorrow.)

Third Street looking south from First Avenue. You can see the old Theatre Cedar Rapids marquee on the left.

Theatre Cedar Rapids. All the First Avenue storefronts on the left were shut down after the flood, and the space became the awesome new Linge Lounge.

Dad’s office—and beautiful oak roll-top desk—before and after the flood. The desk was unsalvageable, and everything in it got ripped out and carried away by the floodwaters.

1,300 blocks on both sides of the river were submerged—some under more than 10 feet of water.

Those ghostly lines in the water are the totally submerged bridges that cross May’s Island as they connect the east and west sides of the city.

That’s normally-high-in-the-sky I-380 snaking through downtown with floodwater submerging its ramps and lapping at its floors.

The massive crown-jewel National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library building on the lower right was actually lifted and relocated to higher ground after the flood.


We parked this string of train cars on this essential train bridge before the flood to weigh it down so the floodwaters wouldn’t wash it away.


We parked this string of train cars on this essential train bridge before the flood to weigh it down so the floodwaters wouldn’t wash it away.


Entire neighborhoods. Families’ lives. Wiped out. No words.


The floodwaters floated the Mighty Wurlitzer organ console two stories from the bottom of the Paramount Theater orchestra pit to above the stage, where they dumped it like a dirty carcass.

Pride 101: Pride Month begins

Before the 1969 Stonewall riots, virtually every aspect of the lives of gay people was illegal to varying degrees in America: being openly gay, showing public affection, having sex, marriage, adoption, assembly in public, assembly in private, going to gay bars … even owning bars with any form of gay designation.

The only gay bars that existed were owned by crime syndicates, who definitely weren’t at the vanguard of fighting for gay liberation; they saw in the gay population a steady and highly dependent form of revenue that the mobs could protect via their considerable influence over law enforcement. Gay people were exploited for our desperate need to find each other and for the money we were willing to pay to feel like we weren’t alone. We paid exorbitant prices for watered-down, bottom-shelf liquor. We gathered in buildings that were unclean, unsafe and unimportant to society. We entered those bars carrying cash for bail with the clear expectation that we might need it.

The subtexts were shame, risk, secrecy, and arrest and public humiliation—and the very likely loss of our families, jobs and homes—if we were caught entering or exiting these bars.

But in the gathering momentum of our achievements in equality over the last half century, our forebears demanded—and slowly, surely got—our growing equality and our freedom to live our lives openly and safely and without imposed shame and exploitation.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Books: North Woods

If I were going to assemble my favoite literary themes and tropes into a novel like it was a Build-A-Bear at the mall, North Woods by Daniel Mason would tick all the boxes on my checklist: an ancient house with generations of occupants and fascinating stories, ghosts from that rich past lingering to make sure their stories get told and their lives don't end up forgotten, nods to historical events both to establish context and to celebrate our shared experiences, richly drawn (and inherently messy) characters who on some levels end up feeling like your favorite friends, a trust from the author that you'll connect the dots and follow along when you're given only scraps of tantalizing information, bread crumbs and Easter eggs that follow the house and the characters through literal centuries, nerd-grade information about very specific topics you find yourself wanting to learn more about, metaphors large and small that weave through the narrative without smacking you on the head ... and sentence after sentence after sentence of evocative, lovingly crafted prose that sometimes makes you stop and catch your breath because it's just so brilliantly gorgeous.

And if THAT'S not enough to tell you how much I love this book, try this: I read it in September and it's stuck with me so much that I just re-read it in the space of five days.

It's hard to fully describe what the book is about. On its surface, it follows the centuries-long story of a tiny stone hut built in the 1600s in Western Massachusetts as generations of people come and go through its doors and build onto it almost as if to create enough room to hold its ever-expanding history and the stories that echo through it.

The people who come and go are sometimes generations of families and sometimes unrelated buyers and sellers. Some of the stories exist in their own time and reach their logical conclusions and some echo through the centuries and continue to drive the various narratives. Some of the stories are told by an omniscient narrator. Some are first-person accounts. Some are heartfelt letters. Some are even metaphor-laden poems with sing-song rhythms and dark Victorian themes.

One chapter is a graphic, turgid description of lust and wanton, depraved sex between two beetles. (You will need smelling salts and a cigarette after you finish reading it, so be prepared.)

I can't recall ever reading a book twice in the space of a few months, but I'm so glad I did with this one; since I already knew the basic plot points, I could spend my second reading focusing on the gorgeous prose, the larger themes and the tiny details—a lost button, a rusty axe head, a forgotten note tucked in a family Bible, buried bones, the catamount (an old name for a large wild cat) sitting placidly on the book's cover—that trickle through the narrative, sometimes just for fun and sometimes with deeper meaning.

The novel is so packed with characters and moments and delicious coincidences that it's impossible to focus on just one thing to love ... or to worry about possibly giving away as a spoiler. There are twin spinsters I want to be best friends with. There's an unrequited love story that just breaks my heart. There are satisfying, well-justified murders. There's an exploration of worldly insights hiding in a schitzophrenic mind.

Above all, there's an underlying theme that time and nature and humanity are interconnected in both obvious and clandestine ways, that we're all part of a larger, beautifully messy narrative, that small details can tumble quietly through time and space until they snowball into overwhelming influences ... and that reading a beloved novel more than once can fill you with even more joy and wonder than you'd experienced before.

Books: All the Light we Cannot See

The masterful novel All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is, on its surface, a story about two pre-teens—one an orphaned German boy with a self-taught gift for building radios and one a blind French girl with a fascination for science and adventure and access to an entire museum of discoveries thanks to her father's job—whose separate worlds slowly collapse around them (and occasionally, tangentially intersect) in the early years of World War II.

The book is filled with imagery and metaphors and cultural references subtle enough that you don't have to get them to be engrossed in the narrative and beautifully relevant enough that they bring deeper meaning—sometimes profound, sometimes merely observational—to the lives of the characters, their changing circumstances, their collapsing worlds, and their dawning understanding of the cruelties and horrors of war.

Those cruelties and horrors of course extend to the Holocaust, which Doerr acknowledges with the most deft touches; Jewish characters pass in and out of scenes long enough to leave an impression and then sometimes disappear many chapters later with a dreadful understanding told in a few sobering, artfully constructed phrases.

The allusions to Light and Seeing in the book's title filter through the narrative in obvious ways (young Marie-Laure's blindness) and in ways that slowly dawn on you (the invisibilities and abstractions of radio signals that engross young Werner). And the metaphor of light—or lack thereof—lingers in the hushed, unspoken evils of Fascism, the sudden disappearances of beloved characters, and the illuminating discoveries of both children on their individual and tacitly shared journeys.

Doerr has a gift for creating characters you find yourself knowing intimately and caring about deeply ... and since they live in the crosshairs of a brutal war, some of their fates will break your heart.

He also trusts his readers to connect the dots between offhand comments, minor characters, historical references and other pieces of ephemera that slowly coalesce into richer understandings of the characters, the themes, the contexts and the worlds they occupy.

The novel is not new and it's been adapted into a Netflix miniseries so you may already be familiar with its general narrative, but I don't want to reveal any more plot details than what I've said here. The first three or four times someone recommended the book to me, the plot summaries they gave honestly didn't grab me. But I'm truly glad I finally listened. I was instantly engrossed in the book, and now that I've finished it I'm finding I miss the characters as though they were friends and family in a long-ago life in a terrifying chapter of our shared history.

Books: James

The picaresque novel is an enduring literary tradition that’s been holding readers in rapt attention since the 1550s. It typically features a plucky protagonist of low social standing narrating a series of (usually) first-person adventures that may or may not be related or linear but that together compose a tale of self-discovery or personal growth and almost always of biting social commentary.

 
Think Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 Don Quixote, Voltaire’s 1759 Candide, Mark Twain’s 1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man … and on a grander, more modern scale, every book series, soap opera, sitcom and movie franchise that eventually uses the word “universe.”

Twain’s Huckleberry Finn follows the adventures (or at least the extraordinary experiences) of a young white boy in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) South who runs away to escape his abusive father and along the way joins forces with the runaway slave Twain calls N****r Jim, who’s escaping all the horrors you’d expect a human slave to want to escape from.

 
Twain narrates the novel exclusively through Huck Finn’s perspective as he and Jim raft down the Mississippi and encounter bounty hunters looking for Jim, charlatans, hostile crowds, distant family members (and other massive coincidences), love interests, and a host of other people and situations that hold them back and propel them forward to a number of discoveries—the most notable being Huck’s (and our) deeper understanding the cruelties and horrors of slavery.

But it’s told completely through the lens of a white man of privilege.

 
Percival Everett's 2024 novel James revisits Huck and Jim’s picaresque narrative and tells it entirely from Jim’s perspective. The fact that Everett has Jim call himself James (out of earshot of white people when necessary) is the first layer of the dignity, humanity and imperfect complexity he brings to the man as he and Huck stumble from horrors to joys to near misses to more horrors on their way through the antebellum South.

 
It’s not a spoiler to say that he gives James the ability to read and write. Or that he often strays far from Twain’s original narrative, especially as he fills in the blanks in James’ life during the times Twain has him separated from Huck.

 
I hate that my review of this book is mostly about the white literary history and context instead of James’ experience as a black man. But the book is so full of rich details and poignant moments and random brushes with history and a level of experience I could never possibly understand as a white man that I don’t want to decide for people what parts of it are mine to divulge.

 
I’ll leave it at this: The character James that Everett creates in the book is so compelling and so human that I was immediateky invested in everything he says, thinks, observes and does. And I know enough about the original Huck Finn story that I was often filled with dread about the things I knew awaited James as I read. Everett even gives the secondary and tertiary characters James and Huck meet on their picaresque journeys enough humanity and dignity that they stuck with me long after they had fulfilled their literary purposes and he’d left them behind.

James is one of two novels by black authors about black experiences I’ve been reading simultaneously during Black History Month. It is at times a very tough read. It alternates between gorgeously crafted prose and dry, jagged exposition as situations dictate. It’s filled with characters Everett gives deep intrinsic value with small, masterful brush strokes.

And it’s definitely something I’ll read again.

Happy 134th birthday, Grant Wood!

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with the trendy politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European art and culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color. Though as far as Google and every search term I can think of are concerned, it never had a name. But you can see it in all its shimmery namelessness here:

Fun fact: The model for the Lady of Peace figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in "American Gothic."

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the Great War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The delightfully smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O from a blue plate? It looks very-not-deliciously brown.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting ... like right here on my blog.

My relentlessly horizontal framed print of Daughters of Revolution—which has followed me through six houses, apartments and condos in Cedar Rapids and Chicago—now hangs in our relentlessly long front hallway, and one of my grandmother's Blue Willow teacups sits safely on a tastefully underlit shelf with a small collection of other blue-and-white ceramicware in my bedroom. They are quite literally among my favorite possessions. 

And I am proudly and dutifully as a Cedar Rapidian sharing these works and their stories here so you can enjoy their oft-overlooked brilliance and awesomeness in celebration of Grant Wood's birthday.

ChicagoRound: 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire

Chicago emerged from its devastating Great Fire on October 10, 1871, after a two-day conflagration that destroyed 17,500 buildings over four square miles, left 90,000 of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless and killed an impossible-to-quantify-accurately 200–300 people.

And the city immediately began rebuilding.

Thirty-two years and two months later, after rising both literally and proverbially from its ashes to reclaim its place as one of America’s most populous and vital cities, Chicago was devastated by another fire … this time in the month-old, state-of-the-art, “fireproof” Iroquois Theatre.

When it opened on November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and a jewel in the crown of Chicago’s theater scene. Designed in the highly ornate French baroque style, it featured grand staircases, gilded ornamentation, lush velvet curtains and a 6,300-square-foot domed auditorium with a dropped stage to improve the sightlines from every seat in the house. And though it was billed confidently as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois contained almost no fire-safety features. No fire alarm. No backstage telephone. No labeled fire exits (most exits were hidden behind velvet curtains by theater managers who didn't want them to look ugly). Even its supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was made of a highly flammable wood pulp. (Fewer than ten years later, the “unsinkable” Titanic would succumb to a similarly overconfident hubris.)

The theater’s opening production was a touring musical pastiche called Mr. Bluebeard, which featured a 400-person cast and starred popular Vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy. It had enjoyed critical and popular success for over a month when its December 30 audience filed in on a freezing Wednesday afternoon during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Since the theater’s opening had been delayed repeatedly, its owners were desperate to make up for lost revenue, so they habitually oversold the house, seating extra patrons up and down the aisles in the orchestra and balconies.

The fire started at the top of Act II when an overhead stage light shorted and sent sparks leaping to a nearby curtain. As the fire spread through the flylines and burning bits of scenery rained down on the stage, the actors continued soldiering through their performance, confident in their understanding that the theater was fireproof. A handful of people in the audience got nervous enough to leave, but many chose to stay in their seats (or aisles) until it became obvious the fire was not going to be contained.

And then panic set in.

The ensuing stampede up overcrowded aisles through an unfamiliar theater with hidden exits left trampled bodies everywhere. And since most of the Iroquois exit doors opened inward, the bodies piled up in front of the doors, leaving no hope of escape.

The actors, too, created their own stampede to find exits. And when they finally pried open the giant freight door on the north end of the stage, the arctic winter blast that blew into the building combined with the fiery gases above the stage to create a superheated fireball that exploded into the auditorium and incinerated everything in its path, including hundreds of people still in their seats.

Many of the people who did manage to get out of the building found themselves trapped high in the air on unfinished fire escapes. As these fire escapes got more and more crowded, people begin to fall (or jump) to their deaths in the alley below. By the time the fire was over, bodies were piled 10 deep in what is still called to this day Death Alley.

Though it was contained to one building and it burned less than an hour, the fire killed over 600 people (twice the number killed in the two-day Great Fire of 1871), shut down theaters around the world out of fire-safety concerns (leaving thousands of actors and theater employees unemployed), generated worldwide outpourings of sympathy, exposed yet another Chicago corruption scandal in the years of ensuing lawsuits, and ultimately brought about great changes in the way we respond to massive disasters and catalogue and identify disaster victims. It even inspired an Indianapolis hardware salesman named Carl Prinzler, who randomly had to miss the deadly performance, to invent what he called the Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt once he learned that a disproportionate number of victims had died in desperate piles in front of the inward-opening exit doors with confusing European-style bascule locks. Known today as the “panic bar,” his invention—along with outward-opening exit doors—are perhaps the biggest public-safety legacy of the Iroquois disaster.

Today, the stunning Asian-baroque James M. Nederlander Theatre (built in 1926 as the Oriental Theatre until its name was changed in 2019) sits pretty much on the exact footprint of the Iroquois Theatre. A thriving part of the Broadway in Chicago theater collective, it features touring productions that play year-round to thousands upon thousands of theater patrons who largely have no idea that they’re sitting on a historic graveyard of sorts. To my knowledge there isn’t even a memorial on the property commemorating the fire.

There is a memorial about three blocks away, in Chicago’s classical-revival City Hall building. Designed by Chicago sculptor Laredo Taft, the bas-relief plaque currently sits above a glass column that houses a revolving door, so it’s both hard to see up close and hard to photograph, especially with an iPhone.

Thankfully, it’s accompanied by an eye-level plaque that explains it context and memorializes the 600 lives lost on December 30, 1903, in one of the worst theater disasters in history.

Thirty-six years ago today ...

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last thirty-five years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I learn the details of catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and daily mass shootings and our catastrophic global pandemic ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Thirty-six years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Thirty-six years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Thirty-six years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a personal and very limited possession, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Thirty-six years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for nine presidential elections and five new Sondheim musicals. (Seven, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through five cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Have-it-all mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous cat memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Thirty-six years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Dead ahead

The RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and started sinking 112 years ago today at 10:40 pm Central Time.
(This exact time is actually hotly debated; Titanic's constantly moving Ship's Time doesn't translate hour-for-hour/minute-for-minute with the fixed time zones on land, and there were conflicting timelines for the collision and sinking reported by the survivors. Also: Daylight Savings Time wasn't established in the US until 1918 [time zones themselves were established in 1883, just FYI], so whatever the exact Ship's Time was, it does translate to true Central Time here.)

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the tragedy—mostly from the perspective of wanting to know what it was like to be on such a grand ship ... and then to have it slowly, terrifyingly disappear under my feet. I’ve recorded the sinking as an annual event on my google calendar so I get a pop-up reminder every year to take a moment to think about the people who died and the horrors they and the survivors endured.

 
We’re 112 years later still in the murky waters of a seemingly endless Titanic metaphor: Things we’d taken for granted as unsinkable—from industries and economies to legal equalities and merely going out in public and hugging our friends—have sunk beneath dark waves that have lapped at our feet for years. Political wars, cultural wars and actual wars never stop rising to the sky and crashing down around us. Gun violence has gotten so commonplace that it’s become almost unremarkable. Class divisions and the desperation of the poor keep being more and more impossible not to see. People we personally know and love have succumbed to covid and drowned, literally in the fluid filling their lungs.

 
Those of us who are still safe and healthy know we’re extremely lucky to be so—and that covid, though largely under control, is not entirely behind us and our circumstances can change with something as innocent as having a short conversation. But it takes just one cough, one shooter, one extremist official with the power to vote away our equalities … and our own world can sink out from under us.

 
It’s terrifying, it’s sobering and it’s devastating—and I’ve found that living amid the social terror and existential exhaustion wrought by all of this has profoundly underscored whatever emotional connection I’ve given myself to the Titanic passengers and crew I technically know nothing about but still mourn.

 
Unlike those Titanic passengers and crew, we're lucky that we're able to keep solid ground reliably under our feet. And I urge you to consciously maximize the benefits of that advantage. Don’t wait for an annual reminder of a century-plus-old tragedy. Don’t wait for the next devastating blow of the current tragedy. Take a moment—take MANY moments—every day to be thankful for the people you love in your life while you can.

Dramaturgy: Something Rotten!

In the interest of squeezing SOME value out of my B.A. in Renaissance literature, I appointed myself the unofficial dramaturg of Theatre Cedar Rapids' 2024 production of Something Rotten!, the narrative of which occurs toward the end of the English Renaissance. I posted occasional bits of historical/contextual information on our cast/crew Facebook page, but since I put all that damn work into researching and writing I decided it would be nice to have it all seen by more than 42 people. So I'm posting the entirety of my musings here. They often reference inside jokes and details from the script and score, so if anything here confuses you you’ll just have to get tickets to the nearest production of the brilliant Something Rotten! you can find. You won't be disappointed.

GOD, I LOVE CONTEXT!

To start off our adventures in learning, here’s a brief(ish) timeline of events and lives relevant to the Something Rotten! narrative:

500ish–1450ish: The Middle Ages in Europe (also called the Dark Ages or the Medieval period)

1347–1351: The first wave of the Black Death in Europe (also called the Plague, the Pestilence or the Great Mortality)

1360–1667: Many, many recurring (but far less destructive) waves of the Black Death in Europe

1436: Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press

1450ish–1650ish: The European Renaissance

1492: Christopher Columbus lands in what is now San Salvador in the Bahamas

1503–1566: The life of Nostradamus (born Michel de Nostredame)

1533–1630: The Puritan movement in England

1558–1603: The reign of Queen Elizabeth I

1564–1616: The life of William Shakespeare (born Gulielmus Shakspere)

1595: Nick Bottom writes Omelette

1599ish: William Shakespeare writes Hamlet

1925: Grant Wood (yes, that Grant Wood) produces a play called Cardboard Moon in his 5 Turner Alley studio in Cedar Rapids and launches what will eventually become Theatre Cedar Rapids

2015: Something Rotten! gets ten Tony nominations (and wins only one: Christian Borle [Shakespeare] for Best Featured Actor in a Musical)

2024: We put on some snazzy pants, do some jazzy hands and make a star-lit, won’t-quit, big hit musicaaaaaal!


THAT PESKY LITTLE PESTILENCE THAT’S KILLING HALF OF EUROPE

The Black Death (also called the Plague, the Pestilence or the Great Mortality) made its first recorded appearance in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Italian dockworkers entered the ships to begin unloading but were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus.

Their mysterious, terrifying disease spread through the local population at alarming speed and soon spread farther along trade routes that ran both inland and along the coasts. It also followed people to neighboring cities as they tried to escape but unknowingly brought the disease with them.

Modern epidemiologists have traced Black Death outbreaks to regions of China as far back as 600 BCE. The Medieval outbreak appears to have started in the same regions and traveled northwest across Asia to ports in Constantinople and then through the Mediterranean Sea to its first European appearance in Messina (which is right where the Italian boot makes contact with the Sicilian football, for those of you who visualize shapes in land masses). From there it spread roughly clockwise along the Mediterranean border and up the continental interior until it hit England in June 1348. (247 years later, Nick Bottom wrote a merry little Black Death showtune with a derivative medley and frankly it was TOO SOON.)

From England, the Black Death spread further north into Scandinavia, where it hit water, had nowhere else to go and finally died out in 1351, after a four-year European rampage that killed an estimated 25 million people—which was somewhere between 40% and 60% of the total European population.

Fun fact: Ports along the Mediterranean started making trade ships wait 40 days offshore before docking to help prevent the Black Death from reaching land. The Latin word for 40 is “quadraginta,” which eventually evolved to the modern word “quarantine.”

One more fun fact: The “Ring Around the Rosie” nursery rhyme may or may not (depending on your school of etymological thought) trace back to the details of the Black Death: Rosie rings represented bubonic lumps on the body, people carried posies and other flowers to mask the smell of rotting corpses, bodies were burned to ashes in an attempt to kill off the mysterious illness, and falling down was because people were really clumsy back then. Or they were dropping dead from the plague. It was probably the latter, but I wasn’t there and I hate to make assumptions.


WHAT’S THAT COMING UP THE SILK ROAD?

The Silk Road (a name that wasn’t coined until the 19th century) was a collection of trade routes linking Medieval China and the Mediterranean between the 3rd and 16th centuries. Named (obvs) for the transport of Chinese silks and other textiles, the Silk Road also saw the transport of spices, salt (which at the time was most importantly a preservative and often a form of currency), precious metals, gunpowder, cultural artifacts, ideas and education, missionaries of many religions, and—the least lucrative from an economics standpoint—the Black Death.

Look for it on a map. It was VERY LONG. And there were very few hotels with complimentary shampoos and continental breakfasts along the way. But there were plenty of bandits along its 4,000-mile route to help you lighten your load.

Did you catch that 4,000-mile part? People traveled the Silk Road in camelpower caravans, and a full-length one-way trip could last an entire year.

Trade and transportation along the Silk Road lasted until 1453—a full century after the first Black Death outbreak in Europe—when the Ottoman Empire (which at the height of its power and territorial control engulfed everything around the Mediterranean Sea except modern Italy and the northernmost coasts) boycotted trade with China and closed the route. (142 years later, Nick Bottom wrote a merry little Black Death showtune with a derivative medley and frankly it was TOO SOON.)

Remnants of the Silk Road survive today in the form of a paved highway connecting Pakistan and the Xinjiang region of China. The Silk Road also survives as a metaphor for the exchange of sketchy goods and services on the Dark Web, which is something that hack Nostradamus clearly didn’t see in humanity’s economic future.


WELCOME TO THE RENAISSANCE!

Now that we have our Middle Ages backstory out of the way, let’s join the historical narrative of our merry little play. (And my advance apologies: I totally geeked out researching and writing this so it’s way longer than I intended. I promise to be less overwhelming in the future.)

Renaissance—as our opening number helpfully explains—means “rebirth.” The Black Death had killed roughly a third of the entire European population, which—among mega-many other consequences—gave serfs (the lower working class) bargaining power for their agricultural labor. It decimated the longstanding feudal system, caused a seismic redistribution of wealth, and spawned the rise of a middle-ish merchant class that had newfound money, leisure and upward mobility through commerce and education.

It was against this socioeconomic upheaval that a confluence of events across the continent stirred and boiled over into the aforementioned rebirth that underpins two full centuries of cultural development, artistic exploration, scientific discovery, social restructuring and political reform:

GEOPOLITICAL: The 1453 fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul) (not Constantinople) (this is a joke for the They Might Be Giants fans among us) brought a brutal end to the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine scholars fled mostly to Italy with their collections of Greek and Roman books and manuscripts, which inspired a widespread revival in the studies of philosophy, science and art.

EDUCATION: These Classical Greek and Roman texts fostered a more rational, scientific approach to theology, the natural world and the arts. Human beings and nature became subjects worthy of study.

PHILOSOPHY: The texts also shifted the philosophical zeitgeist from the longstanding Medieval philosophy of scholasticism—which demanded a strict adherence to religious theology, doctrine and dogma—to a newfound exploration of humanism, a rational outlook that emphasized the potential value, goodness and morality of humans and looked for rational ways to solve human problems. This transition sent our very own Brother Jeremiah through paroxysms of existential crises, and Paroxysms of Existential Crises would make an objectively terrible band name. Which is exactly why we mock him.

SCIENCE: Humanism’s emphasis on rationality, empirical observations and mathematical knowledge challenged generally accepted scientific theories and led to what we now call the Scientific Revolution. In 1534, Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which placed the sun—not the Earth—at the center of the solar system. It upended centuries of scientific thinking and inspired scientists across Europe to approach the natural world from a multitude of innovative perspectives. (Of course, that one guy on YouTube has since proven that the earth is flat, so we know today that all that Copernicus stuff is just silly.)

ART: Artists adopted the rational elements of Classical learning—such as anatomy and aerial perspective—and strove to achieve newfound levels of perfection in their representations of humans, animals and nature. (Once that perfection ideal had been achieved, however, artists had nowhere else upward to go and over the centuries started to deconstruct the content and representation in their work to eventually bring about movements like Abstraction, Impressionism, Cubism and the sad little stick figures I’m barely able to draw because I have zero artistic talent.)

PATRONAGE: Most of the Renaissance’s rich artistic achievements would not have been possible without the funding of wealthy patrons. Perhaps the most famous of these patrons were the Medicis, an art-loving family of bankers (and three popes) who commissioned enormous quantities of paintings, sculptures and architecture for their palaces and family tomb. Their most immediate legacy, of course, was the lofty ambitions of our very own dyspeptic Lord Clapham and awkwardly earnest Shylock as they struggled to usher Nick Bottom to the literary pantheon of fame and glory.

LITERATURE: The artistic achievements of the Renaissance also extended from the visual arts to the worlds of literature and theater (otherwise we wouldn’t be rehearsing all these songs and tap numbers). Inspired by humanism’s emphasis on emotions and morality, the literature of the Renaissance broke free from stringent religious dogma and began exploring the struggles and triumphs of human protagonists from history, folktales, Biblical narratives and other familiar sources. In addition to dramatic comedies like Omelette and dramatic tragedies like Hamlet, the Renaissance also saw a flourishing of the poetry that brings our very own star-crossed Nigel and Portia together in awkwardly adorkable love.

I think we can all agree, though, the the most important aftermath of this dramatic rebirth in literary thinking and writing was the day in the late 1980s that a befuddled Iowa college student realized he was NOT cut out for a career in engineering, biology, music, dance or journalism and finally declared his sixth major: English, with an emphasis on Renaissance literature—which he accomplished in three short but overwhelming semesters. And then he waited 33 damn years for this opportunity to use it. He deserves an omelette.


THIS BOTTOM’S GONNA BE TOPPED WITH A DONKEY HEAD

Many characters in our merry little play get their names from characters in Shakespeare’s plays.

Nick Bottom, for example, is a buffoon who alternates between being a character in and a narrator of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s a member of a mediocre acting troupe (sound familiar?) who, in the middle of rehearsing a play for the amusement of Oberon, the King of the Fairies, gets transformed by the mischievous Puck, a minion of Oberon, to have the head of a donkey. (Are you still with me?) But it gets weirder. (If you can believe it.) You see, the Fairy Queen Titania, wife of Oberon, gets put under a spell that makes her fall in love (and totally make out) with the donkey-headed Nick Bottom (as one does). Other stuff happens, and long story short Titania eventually gets unspelled and Nick Bottom gets his human head back and ends up thinking the whole thing has been a dream in the night in the middle of summer (hence the title).

But there’s more! The mediocre acting troupe eventually (and very poorly) performs for Oberon a rife-with-subtext play called Pyramus and Thisbe (which are objectively cool pet names), which ends with Nick Bottom performing a melodramatic death scene that’s cringier than the entirety of the Cats movie.

And, scene.

It’s worth noting that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream after the narrative of our merry little play, implying by our authors that he continued mocking his rival after poor Nick Bottom got exiled to America. Because Shakespeare is kind of a dick.


THE MAN WHO PUT THE "I AM" IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER!

The above lyric kinda flies by as Shakespeare gets introduced at the beginning of "Will Power." But it’s actually a pretty important and defining aspect of the way he wrote.

Iambic pentameter—for those of you who slept through British Lit as we nerds took fascinated and copious notes—is a type of metric line built on standardized syllables and patterns.

It’s broken into iambic feet of two syllables with the emphasis on the second syllable (“da DUM”) strung together in sets of five (“penta-”), like so:

Da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

And Shakespeare—being a total word nerd—almost exclusively followed this pattern for a whopping 884,647 words in 118,406 lines of plays and sonnets. No wonder the other kids kept beating him up on the playground and taking his lunch money.

But it ended up bringing a unifying lilt to everything he wrote:

But SOFT! What LIGHT through YONder WINDow BREAKS?

If MUsic BE the FRUIT of LOVE, play ON.

Two HOUSEholds, BOTH aLIKE in DIGniTY.

Of course, Shakespeare—being the talentless, no-future hack that he was—didn’t always nail it. Some lines ended up with extra syllables:

To BE, or NOT to BE: that IS the QUES(tion)

And some ended up playing fast and loose with standard cadences and speech patterns:

Friends, ROmans, COUNtry MEN, lend ME your EARS.

But it’s the occasional fast-and-loose line that prevents his dialogue from getting sing-songy and that gives his actors room to breathe and bring natural inflections and interpretations to their lines.

For those of you looking to pad your trivia-night knowledge base, iambic pentameter is part of a wide and diverse meter family. Here are just a few of its siblings and their weird feet:

FEET:

Iambic: da DUM
Trochaic: DA dum
Anapestic: da da DUM

METERS:

Trimeter: three iambic/trochaic/etc feet
Tetrameter: four iambic/trochaic/etc feet
Pentameter: five iambic/trochaic/etc feet

Now pair them up any way you like and write poetry like a sixteenth-century badass. Or don’t. This won’t be on the test.


INTELLECTUAL ICONS IN PUFFY PANTS AND POINTY LEATHER BOOTS

Here are some CV basics about every local celebrity mentioned in our opening number, in the order their appear:

Francis Bacon (1561–1626): English philosopher, statesman (under the name Lord Verulam) and scientist. Considered the father of empiricism—a scientific philosophy that emphasizes sensory experience and evidence (often derived from experiments) over intuition, skepticism or rational thinking—he became a martyr to his own scientific method when he stuffed a dead chicken with snow to see if freezing temperatures could preserve the meat and in the process he developed fatal pneumonia from his prolonged exposure to the cold.

Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552–1618): English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. With Queen Elizabeth’s patronage, he commissioned and financed expeditions to what is now North America and helped establish the Roanoke colony that soon disappeared under mysterious—and still not definitively resolved—circumstances. Raleigh never personally set foot on the continent, but he did bring potatoes and tobacco to England from what is now South America. In 1617, Raleigh violated a Spanish peace treaty in his search for the mythical “City of Gold” riches of the mythical city of El Dorado in present-day Venezuela, for which he was imprisoned and eventually beheaded by King James.

Thomas Dekker (1572–1632): English writer, dramatist and pamphleteer. He was known primarily for the lively descriptions of English life he published in pamphlets, which were unbound booklets circulated to spread humor, op-ed commentary and political propaganda. While he was also a prolific playwright, he was not regarded as worthy of the pantheon of masters like Shakespeare, Johnson, Marlowe and Middleton. Heck—he wasn’t even regarded as worthy of getting a first name in our lyrics.

John Webster (c. 1578–c. 1632): English dramatist. While he collaborated with many leading playwrights, he is best known for his intricate, subtle, brooding tragedies. The two most famous of these tragedies—The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi—are still studied, revered and performed to this day.

Ben Johnson (1572–1637): English playwright, satirist and poet. Generally regarded as the second most important dramatist after William Shakespeare, he popularized the character-driven comedy-of-humors genre that directly combatted Shakespeare’s signature emotion-, adventure- and fate-driven romantic-comedy genre. Though intellectual rivals in writing style and worldview, Johnson and Shakespeare had great respect for each other and Johnson called Shakespeare the “Sweet Swan of Avon” in tribute of the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays seven years after his death.

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593): Arguably the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights and poets outside of Shakespeare. The first English author to receive critical fame using blank verse—unrhymed poetry written in a consistent meter and thought to more closely mimic natural human speech and inflections—Marlowe had a profound influence on Shakespeare, who quoted his work and referenced his existence in Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth and many other plays. Marlowe died relatively young (age 39) under mysterious circumstances variously attributed to a violent bar fight, blasphemous libel against the church, homosexual intrigue, betrayal by another playwright and assassination due to espionage.

Thomas Kyd (1558–1594): English playwright. His play The Spanish Tragedy (along with a Hamlet precursor often attributed to him) created the Elizabethan revenge-play genre. The genre established tropes like the vengeful ghost and the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer, both of which drive narratives in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and some of his later works.

Thomas Middleton (1580–1627): English poet and one of the most successful and prolific playwrights of the Jacobean period, which immediately followed the Renaissance. Named for King James I and marked by intense conflicts and threats of civil wars between Protestant and Catholic states, the Jacobean era saw a literary focus on tragedy, revenge, cynicism, satire and human evil. Though Middleton was skilled in writing across all genres, he wrote something literally called The Revenger’s Tragedy and he may have collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, Macbeth and All’s Well that Ends Well.

Thomas Moore (1478–1535): English author, lawyer, judge, philosopher, statesman and humanist. Eventually declared the patron saint of statesmen and politicians, his staunch Catholicism made him a vociferous opponent of the Protestant Reformation, the theology of Martin Luther and Henry VII’s separation from the church to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII—which was required of everyone taking public or church office—he was executed for treason.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616): Hack “writer” and total nobody who’s completely lost to the ages. If he even existed, he’d probably be one of those obsessive fans of Cats. It’s silly to even include him in this list. God, let’s hate him.


IT’S HARD TO BE THE BARD

But it’s easy to tell you what a bard is. Or was.

Outside of Shakespeare hogging the bardness title to himself for all eternity, a bard in the traditional Renaissance sense was one or any combination of the following:

• A poet
• Someone who recites poetry to an audience (poetry readings were a popular form of entertainment back in the days before Golden Girls reruns)
• A writer, composer, singer or orator who recounts epic tales or impassioned narratives using lyrical, poetic language

“Bard” isn’t a formal title; it’s more of a descriptor for an avocation, like pianist or painter or gymnast or cat lady. It comes from a pre-Renaissance Celtic tradition where a wealthy patron would hire someone to tell stories, compose music and lyrics, act as an oral historian and genealogist, and generally shower the patron with praise for his sophistication and benevolence.

By the late English Renaissance, a bard did what Shakespeare and Nick and Nigel Bottom were doing: writing poetry and epic narratives about kings and supernatural beings and good-cholesterol breakfast comestibles.

But Shakespeare wasn’t called The Bard—at least not in a way that took in the public vernacular—until 150 years after his death. The designation is attributed to David Garrick, an English actor, playwright, poet and theater owner, in a 1769 poem he wrote about Shakespeare.

So when Nick Bottom complains about Shakespeare being called The Bard in our merry little play, it’s a bit of an anachronism—but thankfully it’s the only anachronistic cultural reference in our entire show.


A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Many—but not all—characters in the Somethingrottenverse share names with characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Here’s some background (or not) on the more prominent folks:

Bea: A feisty, sharp-witted protofeminist (full name: Beatrice) in Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice is tricked into falling in love with a soldier named Benedick, with whom she has a will-they-or-won’t-they “merry war.” (Spoiler alert: they do.)

Nigel: The only principal character in Something Rotten! not based on a character from a Shakespeare play. To add insult to injury, Nigel had a brilliant song called “I Suck” that was cut from the show before it got to Broadway.

Portia: A wealthy heiress in The Merchant of Venice. Written as a wise woman ostensibly modeled after Queen Elizabeth I, Portia disguises herself as a lawyer to circumvent the lottery her father established in his will to find her a husband.

Shylock: A greedy Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice. Characterized with rather appalling stereotypes from our modern perspective, he contractually establishes—and tries to literally collect—”a pound of flesh” as payment on a defaulted loan to a Christian. Even more appallingly, his “redemption” arc ends with his conversion to Christianity at the end of the play.

Lord Clapham: The only prominent supporting character in Something Rotten! not based on a character from a Shakespeare play. But he’s happy and he knows it, so clap your hams.

Toby Belch: The pseudonym Shakespeare uses when he infiltrates Nick Bottom’s acting troupe, Sir Toby Belch is originally ingénue Olivia’s boisterous drunk uncle in Twelfth Night. Though he mostly provides comic relief and a few insightful observations throughout the narrative of the play, he also exhibits a cruel streak toward some of the more vulnerable characters.


AWW, SHE’S BEDAZZLED!

Shakespeare isn’t kidding at his party when he brags about making up words. Of the 20,000 words in his plays and poems, he invented more than 1,700 that are still in use today. Here’s an alphabetical sample, except for a sample for X because Elon Musk hadn’t been invented yet:

Alligator: Romeo and Juliet, Act 5 Scene 1

Bedroom:  A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2 Scene 2

Critic: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 3 Scene 1

Downstairs: Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 4

Eyeball: Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 7

Fashionable: Troilus and Cressida, Act 3 Scene 3

Gossip: The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1

Hurry: The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1

Inaudible: All's Well That Ends Well, Act 5 Scene 3

Jaded: Henry VI Part 2, Act 4 Scene 1

Kissing: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 5 Scene 2

Lonely: Coriolanus, Act 4 Scene 1

Manager: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1 Scene 2

Nervy: Coriolanus, Act 2 Scene 1

Obscene: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1 Scene 1

Puppy dog: King John, Act 2 Scene 1

Questioning: As You Like It, Act 5 Scene 4

Rant: Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1

Skim milk: Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 3

Traditional: Richard III, Act 3 Scene 1

Undress: The Taming of the Shrew, Induction Scene 2

Varied: Titus Andronicus, Act 3 Scene 1

Worthless: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 4 Scene 2

Yelping: Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 2

Zany: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 5 Scene 2

THOMAS NOSTRADAMUS? I PROMISE!

Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566), usually Latinized as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary and reputed soothsayer who is best known for his 1555 book Les Prophéties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains—none of which involved the discussion of gyrating one’s ass—allegedly predicting future events.

Les Prophéties was by no definition a work of scholarly merit; it was filled with anagrams and references to mythology and astrology, and it very vaguely predicted (inevitable) natural disasters (Beware! It will rain someday in the future!). And Nostradamus wrote it in his own hybrid of French, Greek and Latin—most likely to stay vague enough to avoid being persecuted for heresy during the Holy Inquisition.

Soothsayers, seers and oracles—a list that is objectively more fun to say than “lions, tigers and bears”—were people (or sometimes just things) revered for their ability (?) not only to predict the future but to provide insight and counsel to everyone from royalty to lazy playwrights with giggly last names. Their powers (?) were said to come from both deities and the occult. And they were almost never named Greg.

You’ve probably already figured this out, but since the real Nostradamus died 29 years before the events of our merry little play, the Something Rotten! writers invented his ass-gyrating nephew Thomas to help drive our narrative. You might say they tapped him for the job. But please don’t. Nobody should ever say that.


THE MOST LAMENTABLE COMEDY

The men in Nick Bottom’s terrible acting troupe are named for the men in a terrible acting troupe made up of menial laborers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Midsummer, the troupe barely holds it together enough to very poorly perform a version of a Greek tragedy they call The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe at a wedding celebration. Here’s a bit about each of them:

Francis Flute: A young, over-excited actor and a bellows-mender by trade, Francis Flute is forced to play the female role of Thisbe, who talks to her lover Pyramus (played by Nick Bottom) through a gap in a wall.

Tom Snout: A tinker (a name for a tinsmith) by trade, Tom Snout plays the aforementioned wall, holding two fingers of one hand open to be the aforementioned gap. He even has two lines as The Wall.

Peter Quince: An amateur playwright, Peter Quince is the author of The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. He and the troupe perform it at a wedding celebration for Theseus (the Duke of Athens) and Hyppolyta (the Queen of the Amazons).

Snug: A joiner who literally joins wood for a living, Snug plays a lion who indirectly causes the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe. Though The Lion was only supposed to roar, Snug was worried he’d forget his lines. In the end, Peter Quince gave The Lion a few lines explaining that he’s not a real lion so the audience shouldn’t be scared of him.

Robin Starveling: A tailor by trade, Robin Starveling plays the role of Moonshine in the play. He makes a fool of himself using a lantern to create moonlight, and he’s thoroughly derided by the audience for it.

BONUS CHARACTER!
Sir John Falstaff: In our play, Shakespeare calls the Master of the Justice “Lord Falstaff.” It’s not a withering insult, but it’s not necessarily a compliment either. Falstaff was actually a recurring character in three of Shakespeare’s plays: Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Shakespeare eventually killed him off with casual mention in Henry V. (All four plays were written after the events of our narrative, so it could be said that Shakespeare invented the character in our courtroom.)

Falstaff was mostly a comic figure: a vain, boastful drinker who hung out with petty criminals and lived off of stolen money. While he certainly led people into trouble, he’s generally regarded as being a jolly, debauched figure, and he’s lived on in other works by Giuseppi Verdi, Ralph Vaughn Williams, Edward Elgar (whom you know for writing Pomp and Circumstance) and even Kenneth Branagh.


THE STUPIDEST THING THAT I HAVE EVER HEARD!

The characters in our merry little play break into song in two separate worlds: the one they live in and the one they create onstage.

And there’s a very cool—and rarely useful—word for the world-they-live-in singing: diegesis (say it: die a JEE sis)

Diegetic (say it: die a JET ik) songs are songs sung between characters who in the backs of their minds keep wondering WHY AREN’T THEY TALKING? The songs in almost all musicals are diegetic—or, more specifically, the songs that characters sing to each other are diegetic. The songs that characters sing to themselves or about themselves to the audience are diegetic-adjacent, which is objectively a terrible name for a puppy.

On the flip side, songs in a show that are sung as performances by the characters in the show are mimetic (say it: meh MET ik).

Memesis (say it: meh MEE sis) has a number of contextual meanings in theater—and a bunch more in the various disciplines of science—but for the sake of this already-too-long explanation, they’re play-within-a-play or stage-upon-a-stage songs performed for a scripted audience.

So in our merry little play, “God, I Hate Shakespeare” and “A Musical” are diegetic because the characters sing them to each other instead of talking like normal people. And “The Black Death” and “Omelette” are memetic because they’re being intentionally performed.

“Bottom’s Gonna Be on Top” and “Hard to Be the Bard” are the aforementioned diegetic-adjacent soliloquies that the characters sing to themselves or directly to the audience. And “To Thine Own Self be True” and “We See the Light” muddy the diegetic-adjacent waters even further because it’s not always 100% clear to whom they’re specifically being sung.

Finally: If your cholesterol’s high, you’re probably diegetic. Or not. In either case, you should definitely get it checked out.


NOTHING RHYMES WITH AMERICA!

What did the Bottom brothers and their merry band of misfits encounter when they reached the New World?

Our narrative takes place entirely in 1595 and the average transatlantic travel at the time took two months, so it’s safe to assume Nick et al. had arrived on the first ship to the New World by 1596.

But Hamlet was written between 1599 and 1601 and transatlantic travel wasn’t a terribly regular occurrence at the time, so let’s assume word of the play’s success wouldn’t have reached the New World until 1602.

Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina in 1585. Virginia Dare, the first known English child born on the North American continent, was born in 1587. But the Roanoke Colony disappeared under mysterious and never yet fully resolved circumstances in 1590. So it’s safe to say there wasn’t much of an English-expat welcoming party—or even an audience—for the brothers and their epic tale of leaving Cornwall when they arrived.

Kinda-lost-to-history explorer and privateer Bartholomew Gosnold was the first Englishman to land on the New England coast—exploring and naming Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard—in 1602. But if he was the first person (and potential audience member) in the area, it’s unlikely that the Bottoms were in their dressing rooms waiting for anyone to call places as soon as their New England house was full.

Another Bartholomew—Bartholomew Gilbert—landed in the Chesapeake Bay in 1603, but he was killed by Native Americans as soon as he came ashore. And his season tickets were probably non-refundable, so his seats sat empty during any possible performances.

BUT! The American social landscape wasn’t completely barren. There were Native American settlements all along the Atlantic coast—though their insatiable hunger for ponderous, derivative musicals about British perseverance in the Renaissance was debatable.

BUT AGAIN! All was not lost. The Pilgrims arrived in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. An offshoot of the Puritans—their main difference involved the Pilgrims’ belief in some degree of separation between church and state—the Pilgrims’ hunger for bawdy musical theater was also dubious. But I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure.

A pilgrim is just a person who journeys—and the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived two decades after the Bottoms—so history is very unclear about who might have been on Shylock’s Pilgrim Productions Board of Directors.

In any case, our adventures at Theatre Cedar Rapids come to a close today, just as the Bottoms’ adventures in England eventually came to a close in 1595. And I’m gonna put a stake in the ground and say we had waaaay better—and more attractive—American audiences.

Land of opportunity indeed!