Today's Moment Of Pure Ridiculous Joy: "I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance"

Fun fact: There is a 2001 three-act opera exploring, parodying, mocking and even sympathizingly understanding the cultural underpinnings and social normalizations of The Jerry Springer Show. It is called (if you can even believe this name wasn’t already taken) Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Its breakout song—at least for gay men at massive circuit parties in the early 2000s—was “I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance,” in which a stripper who is done being belittled and called a whore takes ownership of the actions and choices her circumstances have offered her and proclaims “I’m tired of all this trying / I wanna do some living / ‘Cos I’ve done enough dying / I just wanna dance / I just wanna fucking dance!”

Yes, there is swearing. It’s about JERRY SPRINGER.

But back to us gays and our massive circuit parties (which are massively massive dance parties with laser light shows, rampant shirtlessness, speakers the size of industrial refrigerators and deafening remixes of awesome dance songs, with the exception of Madonna’s appalling rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” which is in every conceivable way the polar opposite of awesome and you are to NEVER MENTION AGAIN). Anyway, we gays OF COURSE made many deafening remixes of “I Just Wanna Dance,” which is an awesome dance song. Plus it’s about wanting to dance. TOTAL TWOFER.

Speaking of twofers, here’s a super-awesome remix (though we're now long past the 15th anniversary) paired with dance clips from every awesome genre of awesome movie musical from Sweet Charity to Xanadu. IT. IS. SO. AWESOME. Watch it. Love it. Sing along with it. If it doesn’t make you wanna be gay, it will at the very least make you wanna dance. I mean wanna FUCKIN' dance!

Movies: The Boys in the Band

I tried. Again. But the plot has way too many illogical stupidities. And I quit within the first hour.

I get how it was groundbreaking 50 years ago when it put gay men front and center in a narrative that didn’t play us as one-dimensional faggot stereotypes. And I appreciate that it let the gay characters be messy and imperfect and complicated and unlikable for reasons any other character in any other narrative could be unlikable.

But the conceit driving the entire plot was illogical then and it’s illogical now—and we’re no longer in a zeitgeist where gays are so desperate for representation that we’re slavishly thankful for sloppy pop culture just because it mentions us.

Maybe in another 50 years a director or screenwriter will find a plausible way to keep nine arguably unhappy people from en-masse leaving a hostile, toxic, physically violent birthday party before the end of the first act. Until then, I’ll just appreciate the fact that this revival appeared on Broadway and now in this movie starring all out gay actors, many of whom are relatively famous. And for that, I am indeed slavishly thankful.

Movies: Of Two Minds

I stumbled on this documentary about bipolar disorder last night on Amazon Prime, and it is so well done that I didn't even pick up my phone as I watched it. Which says A LOT.

The film follows the lives of four people living with bipolar disorder for over a year and veers off once in a while to profile a handful of others, which I think leaves viewers with a robust understanding of the commonalities bipolar people all deal with but really underscores the fact that no two people's experiences are the same. Some people (like me) have hallucinations, some cut themselves, some find manic episodes to be thrilling, some (like me) find them scary and exhausting, some experience functional depression, some (like me) fall into depression so deep that it's past the point of functioning and therefore safely past the point of being capable of self-harm, some attempt and eventually succeed at suicide, some hate taking meds and even refuse to fill their prescriptions, and some (like me) can never forget how awful it is to be off our meds and therefore take them religiously.

The people profiled are straight, gay and bisexual. Some are religious and some are atheists. Some have money and some are struggling so much that they can't afford their meds and rent and seriously consider leaving the United States for a country that can offer them healthcare. They live in cities all over North America. The documentary really does a deep dive into the environments and experiences that shape the way people manage their mental health—though my only criticism is that there are only three people of color, all of whom are just one-off side interviews, which I think really misses an opportunity to paint a more robust picture of experiences and contexts and cultures and personal decisions.

It's edited deftly to be thorough and intimately informational but not overwhelming. I was left feeling emotionally connected to everyone—to the point that I rooted for all of them but ended up angry at one person and genuinely disliking another.

If you or someone you love is living (or struggling) with bipolar disorder, I highly recommend watching this. 

Books: The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria

I tend to be obsessed with novels and documentaries about epic disasters—partly, like many people, to gawk at the sheer enormity of a catastrophic event, but mostly to find some level of personal, emotional understanding of what the people who were caught in it experienced.

The Andrea Doria was the epitome of Atlantic ocean-liner luxury in the middle of the century ... until 1956 when it was broadsided dead-on by the ice-cutting prow of the liner Stockholm in thick fog and then it slowly sank 45 miles south of Nantucket. And while The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria documents in great detail both the mechanics of the catastrophe and the harrowing stories of the passengers and crew, it does so with distracting clumsiness that's in desperate need of an editor.

There's a definite art to creating emotional, memorable relationships between a reader and even a handful of key players among the 1,100+ passengers on an ocean liner. Erik Larson (who wrote Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania and is perhaps best known for writing Devil in the White City) sets the bar high with deftness, poetry and a smartly curated understanding of the human experience. Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria struggles and fails to reach that bar. To wit: Chapter 2 is little more than paragraph after relentless paragraph describing the lives and backgrounds and travel purposes of 100+ people. The paragraphs are all well-researched and filled with interesting information—but they're overwhelming, and they contain so many superfluous details and tertiary names that they become a numbing blur by the time they finish plodding by.

It's this clumsy, belabored lack of editing that makes the entire book feel somewhat like a high-school paper that's padded to reach a minimum number of pages. In perhaps the most egregious example, there's a paragraph that all but dominates page 72 with an excruciatingly detailed litany of 47 foods that may or may not appear on an evening's dinner menu. Honestly, does ANYONE find useful narrative value in knowing that First Class passengers "could choose from a variety of vegetables, including potatoes (mashed, boiled, roasted, or fried), cauliflower, roasted tomatoes, or sauteéd endive"? And for all the breathless descriptions of the ship's Mid-century Italian-chic décor, there isn't a single photo of its magnificent interior among the 16 pages of photos ... two of which are just full-page stylized print ads about the ship.

All that said, if you train your eyes and brain to skim past ponderous lists of beverages and games available in First Class—and, curiously, the names of the two helicopter pilots who eventually helped rescue the passengers—this is a gripping, detailed (though again: way too detailed in places), incredibly good read. It fully delivers in telling why-and-how details of the physical destruction of the collision and the passengers' and crew members' stories of terror, survival, heroism, cowardice and every attendant emotion in between—though because of the staggering volume of character introductions in Chapter 2 it's nearly impossible to remember who people are when they meet their fates on the sinking ship.

The Andrea Doria and its sinking were the last gasps of high-style ocean travel as passenger airplanes (literally) appeared on the horizon and dramatically cut transcontinental travel time and expense. To underscore this historical importance, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria nicely frames its narrative around the publication of A Night to Remember, which documented the sinking of the Titanic 40+ years before the Andrea Doria joined it at the bottom of the Atlantic. It's a clever, efficient way to compare and contrast both sinkings, offer historical and cultural perspective, and incorporate details of yet another epic catastrophe to keep me enthralled.

Happy 102nd birthday, Leonard Bernstein!

His Candide Overture is perhaps the singular most joyful piece of brilliantly scattered, wickedly intractable music ever written, with its collision of overlapping themes; fearless jumps between walls of boisterous brass, swirls of tittering piccolos and swells of velvety strings; and headstrong, disobedient asymmetries that have no doubt awakened every conductor on the planet in cold sweats since 1956.

Here he is conducting his breathless juggernaut with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1989. I know the musicians know the music. I know HE knows the music. But I fail to see any sense of dialogue between them as he conducts. It makes ME break out in a cold sweat, so I can't watch.

You can watch at your own peril. But do take four and a half minutes to just listen.

Books: Thunderstruck, Erik Larson

I've now read THREE WHOLE BOOKS since quarantine started. This one I read solely because I’ve loved everything else I’ve ever read by Erik Larson—from his gorgeously crafted prose to his exhaustive research to the deft triangulations he creates as he weaves disparate stories closer and closer to each other until their inevitable collisions into single narratives.

That said, this book starts out a bit slow and takes a tedious amount of time to pick up steam. But along the way, it provides a nuanced, meaningful understanding of the history and culture of Edwardian England and the early rumblings of the First World War. It parallels the invention of wireless communication with a gruesome murder that was at the time the international crime of the century—all as Germany breathes down England’s neck and Western Civilization is caught up in a collective fascination with the supernatural.

Larson writes sentences that are so evocative and beautifully cast that I often stop and re-read them multiple times just to admire their balance of artistry, exposition, insight and construction. I even read this one aloud—with no helpful context—to my parents because I loved it so much: “In the great conspiratorial tradition of Englishwomen of title, she invited Marconi to the island as well, this time as a houseguest.”

Theater program notes: End of the Rainbow

Judy Garland and a lifetime of chasing rainbows
by Jake Stigers

By December 1968, Judy Garland’s personal and professional résumé had amassed 30+ movies, hundreds of singles and albums, two Academy Award nominations, one Academy Juvenile Award, two Golden Globes, one Grammy, one Special Tony Award, two canceled studio contracts, four (and about to be five) husbands, three children, a lifetime addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates, multiple stints in rehab, crushing debt, and more highs and lows and crashes and comebacks than one lifetime can reasonably be expected to hold.

End of the Rainbow offers a theatrical take—and is there honestly any way other than theatrical to document Judy Garland’s life?—on the events surrounding what ended up being her final comeback attempt in a series of 1969 concerts at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub.


Once in a lullaby

Born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922 to parents who had openly not welcomed their unexpected pregnancy, the future Judy Garland got her first enticing taste of performing at age 2 when she sang “Jingle Bells” on the stage of her family’s Minnesota theater. She and her two older siblings soon formed an act they called the Gumm Sisters, and they found a respectable amount of success touring the vaudeville circuit and even appearing in MGM movie shorts.

There’s a delightful theater legend that a Chicago playbill had misspelled their act as The Glum Sisters, which was the impetus for the girls to find a more glamorous stage name. The source of the name Garland has been attributed to everything from the character Lily Garland in Twentieth Century to drama critic Robert Garland to a casual comparison of the girls’ beauty to a garland of flowers. In any case, The Garland Sisters they became. And the future Judy went even farther by adopting a glamorous new first name from a popular Hoagy Carmichael song.

The trio broke up in 1934 when the eldest Garland-née-Gumm sister eloped to Nevada with a musician and the rising-star Judy Garland found herself invited to audition for Louis B. Mayer in California. She belted her way through “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart!” and—as the stories go—was immediately offered an MGM contract without a screen test.

Judy was 13 years old, 4 feet 11 inches tall (which she’d be for the rest of her life) and immediately made to be aware that she was nowhere near as beautiful or glamorous as the other up-and-coming movie stars—like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor—with whom she shared an MGM classroom. She was the cute girl next door with little in the way of major movie-star potential except for one thing: her voice. The cherubic, pint-sized teen had an impressive set of pipes and a natural aptitude for emotional performance that made her seem wiser and more worldly than her years every time she opened her mouth.

But to Mayer, her looks—specifically her weight—made her a hard sell to a movie-going public (he called her “my little hunchback”), and his studio put her on near-starvation diets of soup and lettuce to slim her down. And once young Judy had earned enough public adoration to make her a bankable star, MGM pumped her full of amphetamines to keep her awake long enough to work her to death and barbiturates to give her short fits of sleep at night.

In the process, they also gave her a lifetime of drug addictions and crippling self-esteem issues.


The dreams that you dare to dream

In 1939, Garland was catapulted from bankable child star to mega-bankable movie star by playing Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz and—more specifically—by singing “Over the Rainbow,” a simple, soaring soliloquy inspired by Dorothy’s Auntie Em telling her to “find yourself a place where you won't get into any trouble.” The song became a breakout hit and a personal anthem of both hope and introspection for Garland that kept finding newer—sometimes profound, oftentimes heartbreaking—shades of meaning as her life and career careened through endless cycles of soaring successes, epic crashes and triumphant comebacks.

The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms—both released in 1939—earned Garland an Academy Juvenile Award, which surprisingly ended up being the only Oscar she ever won. But her star skyrocketed from there through iconic pairings with Mickey Rooney; iconic movies like Meet Me in St. Louis; and iconic affairs with other stars both single and married including Johnny Mercer, Tyrone Power and Orson Welles.

But her escalating problems with addiction and, later, mental illness eventually made her so unreliable and expensively absent from filmings that she was fired from three high-profile movies in pretty rapid succession: 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway (replaced by Ginger Rogers), 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun (replaced by Betty Hutton) and 1951’s Royal Wedding (replaced by Jane Powell). And in 1950, she was unceremoniously kicked out of MGM.


Troubles melt like lemon drops

Over the next two decades, Garland’s life and career raced up one mountain and careened down the next:

She headlined sold-out concerts and tours in London’s Palladium, Manhattan’s Palace Theatre, Las Vegas’s New Frontier Hotel and Carnegie Hall—the last of which produced a two-record album that spent 13 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal of the Year.

She survived a number of suicide attempts, committed herself to repeated stays in mental hospitals, and developed acute hepatitis that threatened to leave her an invalid who would never sing again.

She made a grand comeback with her 1954 remake of A Star is Born, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She was thought to be such a shoo-in that even though she was recovering from the birth of her son Joey, television crews set up cameras in her hospital room to televise her acceptance speech the night of the ceremony. They reported packed up and left her alone in her room before the surprise winner—Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl—even got to the stage to accept her trophy.

She signed a contract with Random House to write an autobiography with the working title The Judy Garland Story but was unable to stay focused and on-task to finish it in the nine years until her death.

She launched a successful TV variety show on CBS called The Judy Garland Show that received critical acclaim but was canceled due to poor ratings (it was slotted against NBC’s juggernaut Bonanza) and industry politics. While introducing a young Barbra Streisand to the nation on her show, she candidly told Streisand “Don’t let them do to you what they did to me. … Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a blizzard. An absolute blizzard.”

She was cast as the desperately aging, shamelessly man-hungry Helen Lawson in the 1967 movie Valley of the Dolls, but her alcoholism and unreliability—compounded by her cruel treatment by director Mark Robson, who saw her only as a source of scandal-inspired publicity—got her fired soon after production began.

She found herself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that she could never resurface from thanks to failed investments in movie projects, unscrupulous managers, gambling husbands, skyrocketing interest on back taxes and her own failures at managing her money. She even had to sell her Brentwood home at a loss to help dig herself out of it.


Happy little bluebirds fly

Garland’s lifetime quest for approval, love and stability also led to five marriages and four divorces with musician David Rose (she was 19; he was 31), director Vincente Minnelli (with whom she had daughter Liza), tour manager and producer Sidney Luft (with whom she had daughter Lorna and son Joey), actor Mark Herron (they both accused each other of domestic abuse and the marriage ended within six months), and disco manager and opportunist Mickey Deans (whom she married a month after her Talk of the Town concerts).


When all the world is a hopeless jumble …

So Garland approached her five-week concert engagement at London’s Talk of the Town—which inspired the narrative of End of the Rainbow—as a triumphant return to the adoring audiences of her 1951 Palladium concerts, as a yet-again comeback that proved she still had it … and as a source of desperately needed income to finally extricate herself from her crippling debt and start a new life with her children.

The concerts were—as End of the Rainbow playwright Peter Quilter describes it—an “emotional car crash.” She staggered and slurred—often in the sequined orange brocade suit she kept from Valley of the Dolls—through her performances. The sold-out audiences often threw food at her to show their anger over her on-stage messiness and infuriating lateness.

And the reviewers did not hold back. The Guardian said the shows seemed “like her 93rd comeback” and stated that “she evokes pity and sorrow like no other superstar. … In her we see the broken remnant of a gaudy age of showbiz which believed that glamour was a good enough substitute for genius.” Time called the performances more “seance” than “concert” and wrote a year later in her obituary that they “turned out to be the biggest flop of her life” and that she looked like a “walking casualty.”


And the raindrops tumble all around …

End of the Rainbow—though now based on the Talk of the Town concerts—didn’t start out about Judy Garland at all. Playwright Peter Quilter had written a 2001 play called Last Song of the Nightingale about a past-her-prime diva inspired by an alcoholic cruise-ship performer he had known. It starred Tracie Bennett, who said her character felt like a roman à clef for Garland in her Talk of the Town performances. Quilter reworked the play, and End of the Rainbow premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005. It won Caroline O’Connor three Best Actress awards for her portrayal of Garland. Bennett took over the role in 2010 when it came home to London, where the show won four Olivier Awards, including Best Actress and Best New Play. Bennett also received a Tony nomination when she brought the show to Broadway in 2012.

End of the Rainbow also inspired the 2019 movie Judy, which won Renée Zellweger a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Garland. While End of the Rainbow underscores Garland’s emotional and professional claustrophobia at this point in her life by confining the off-stage narrative to her Ritz Hotel suite, Judy builds Garland’s journey to catastrophe in slow claps with flashbacks to cruel adults, exhausting schedules, and a calculated, inevitable addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates.


When all the clouds darken up the skyway …

Garland made her final concert appearance on March 25, 1969—ten days after marrying fifth husband Mickey Deans—in Copenhagen, and she performed there with the same display of disorientation, collapse and horror she’d exhibited in London.

Three months later, on June 22, 1969, Deans discovered Garland dead in the bathroom of their run-down London rental. The death was ruled an accidental overdose of barbiturates. She was just 12 days past her 47th birthday.


There's a rainbow highway to be found …

Garland’s funeral was on June 27 in New York City, and an estimated 20,000 people showed up to pay their respects. That night, New York’s Stonewall Inn—a gay bar run by the mafia—was raided by police. Raids of gay bars were commonplace, and patrons always meekly and with shame let themselves be arrested and humiliated in the next day’s papers.

But this time the patrons fought back, throwing bricks and bottles, trapping the police in the bar, and effectively starting the march toward equality for LGBTQ+ people across the country.

Garland—in her personal story arc from fabulous screen ingénue to fierce survivor—had been an icon to gay men, who often used “friend of Dorothy” in reference to her Wizard of Oz character as code to clandistinely identify themselves to each other in public. Whether her funeral was an impetus for the Stonewall rising or just coincidentally on the same day is still passionately debated among historians and devotees, but it is nevertheless tied to the uprising in the minds and hearts of gay people to this day.


There’s a place behind the sun …

Of Garland’s endurance and resilience in the public’s—and not just gay people’s—hearts and minds, Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann once declared “I think Judy will always come back. She kids about making a lot of comebacks, but I think Judy has a kind of a thing where she has to get to the bottom of the rope and things have to get very, very rough for her. Then with an amazing inner strength that only comes of a certain genius, she comes back bigger than ever.”


There’s a place beyond the rain …

Of the profound endurance of the song “Over the Rainbow,” Judy star Renée Zellweger told Vanity Fair that people “have nostalgic feelings from childhood attached to that song, but in Judy’s life, it’s something different. She weathered so many insurmountable challenges in her life, and it’s about her maintaining hope. In spite of all her difficulties, she still carried on.”


Jake Stigers regularly writes about the arts for theaters in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and often makes his own triumphant comebacks on their stages.

1. 3.01 miles!

2. Or as they say in Allcapsland, THREE POINT OH ONE MILES!
3. I’m quite proud of this.
4. You know what else I’m proud of?
5. I’ll tell you.
6. Because it’s MY blog.
7. And I’m feeling braggy.
8. And I’m padding this list.
9. So I can get to 52.
10. Like my new age.
11. Anyway ...
12. This is what else I’m proud of:
13. I figured out how to make a map thingie of my running route!
14. Just like all the cool kids!
15. Finding the map view on my running app isn’t very intuitive though.
16. It’s not even in the menu on the help page.
17. This is stupid.
18. I’m talking to you, Garmin interface designers.
19. Ahem.
20. Anyway ...
21. You know what ELSE I’m proud of?
22. I’ll tell you that too.
23. Just as soon as I pad this list some more.
24. Almost ...
25. There ...
26. BAM! Halfway to 52!
27. Where was I?
28. (Though you and I both know I know exactly where I was.)
28. (Because I’m bragging about myself.)
29. (Who gets lost bragging?)
30. (Nobody, that’s who.)
31. (Plus I’m padding this list.)
32. (Plus I’m being all meta and telling you I’m padding this list.)
32. (And other parenthetical things.)
33. So I found this free meme-making/photo-editing app called piZap.
34. I highly recommend it.
35. If making memes and messing around with photos is your thing.
35. And I’m getting really proficient with it.
36. Because LOOK AT THE COOL COLLAGE I MADE WITH IT.
37. Because memes and rudimentary photo hacking are totally my thing.
38. In case you hadn’t noticed.
39. (Padding.)
40. (Padding.)
41. (Padding.)
42. (Because the Rule of Three.)
43. ((It’s a writer thing.))
44. Wanna know what I’m not proud of?
45. That 13:46 pace.
46. I might as well have been walking.
47. Backwards.
48. On my knees.
49. But still:
50. THREE POINT OH ONE MILES!
51. And also:
52. FIFTY TWO!

Theater program notes: Oklahoma!

Published November 21, 2019, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! brings a genre—and a country—up to date
by Jake Stigers

When the curtain rose for the first performance of Oklahoma! on March 31, 1943, neither the creative team and actors nor the audience members knew they were literally at a new frontier—if I may grab an obvious metaphor from the source material—of American musical theater. Until then, musicals as the American public knew them were little more than collections of songs, skits, dances and Vaudeville acts assembled loosely around a generic theme—like love, patriotism or beautiful girls with their legs showing—or sometimes no theme at all.

Sixteen years earlier, Florenz Ziegfeld had launched Show Boat, a musical with a defined narrative and loosely contextualized songs by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern. It was a radical departure from the entertainment frippery that audiences were used to, and it was well-received enough that it ran for a year and a half. But the songs were written to be catchy and popular more than to drive the narrative, and some even got changed out for new songs that were better suited to new actors over time.

With Oklahoma!, Hammerstein—now working with composer Richard Rodgers—brought this concept to its full fruition; the show’s music and lyrics were fully integrated into the story, and instead of stopping the narrative for the sake of entertainment they advanced the plot, defined the characters and established context. And while some of the show’s musical elements seem quaint or ponderous to modern audiences, the concept at the time was nothing short of an artistic revelation.

Oklahoma! takes place in 1908, sixteen years after Oklahoma was declared a United States territory and one year before it was to become our 46th state. Inspired by Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play that was in turn inspired by a folk song of the same name, Oklahoma! is at its core the story of farm girl Laurie Williams and the two suitors vying for her affections. And while through modern eyes the narrative is problematic in its attitudinal subtexts about women, race and the mentally ill, the story’s overall themes of community, potential and the excitement of destiny will seemingly always resonate with its audiences.

In addition to its blockbuster redefinition of an entire genre, Oklahoma! marked a number of other notable firsts:

It was the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers’ longtime collaborator Lorenz Hart had fallen into a state of alcoholism and unreliability, and Hammerstein was looking desperately to redeem himself after six consecutive Broadway flops. Theirs ended up being a particularly symbiotic collaboration as well—Hammerstein preferred to write lyrics before any music was composed so he could create the story he wanted, and Rodgers preferred to craft music to fit both the structure and sentiment of completed lyrics—and the two went on to create many iconic musicals together including South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.

It was the first musical-by-any-definition choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Her ballet Rodeo, choreographed the previous year to music by Aaron Copland, had pulled her from relative obscurity and brought her to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s attention. She’d constructed Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, an international company that had moved to the United States to compete with the rival company Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and the American-cowboy movement vocabulary she’d created for these classically trained international dancers became a useful foundation for her creation of Oklahoma! De Mille went on to choreograph decades of iconic Broadway musicals, most notably Brigadoon, for which she won the first-ever Tony Award for choreography when the awards premiered in 1947

The show had no stars. In keeping with their revolutionary idea to focus on telling a complete, holistic story through their fully integrated material, Rodgers and Hammersein took a bold step in hiring singers and actors who were dramatically appropriate for the roles instead of bringing in marquee names and bankable stars whose fame could be a distraction from the story’s rural, anonymous, hardscrabble setting.

Oklahoma!—originally titled Away We Go!—had done reasonably well with audiences in its New Haven and Boston tryouts, though producer Mike Todd famously walked out of a performance after the first act and predicted its failure with the words “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” But it was an immediate and overwhelming success on Broadway and ran for 2,212 performances and then toured the country for another ten years. Interestingly, Florence Henderson—the eventual ’70s TV mom Carol Brady—played the ingénue Laurie in the last company on the tour. When she was also cast to play Laurie opposite Gordon MacRae in a 1954 TV tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, she was considered a shoe-in to play Laurie opposite MacRae in the 1955 movie. But she lost out to Shirley Jones, the eventual ’70s TV mom Shirley Partridge.

Oklahoma! premiered fifteen months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged our country from a neutrality to an active participant in World War II. Nobody knew at the time that the war would be over in a year and a half, but the tide had turned for the Allies by the show’s 1943 premiere—and if the country wasn’t feeling completely optimistic, it enthusiastically embraced this musical that was bursting at the seams with the promise of new life and new opportunity and new hope told through the lens of a small town in a territory on the verge of becoming an American state.

Like the theatrical genre telling the story, our country was in the throes of mighty change. And Curly McLain, one of Laurie’s Oklahoma! suitors, sums up the shared Zeitgeist in a particularly joyous speech he makes to her in Act II as he contemplates all the exciting possibilities:

“Oh, things is changin’ right and left! Buy up mowin’ machines, cut down the prairies! Shoe yer horses, drag them plows under the sod! They’re gonna make a state out of this territory, they gonna put it in the Union! Country’s a-changin’, got to change with it!”

Movies: Midway

I think perhaps the most important purpose that historical cinema—even when it’s historical fiction or historical fantasia—serves is the time capsule of both the epic events and the mundane details of history it provides, with context and perspective that help people today and in the future better appreciate the people and events of our collective past.

To wit: Midway.

We in 2019 America probably all know the most essential fact of Pearl Harbor—that the Japanese bombed us—but even if we understand the larger significance of the event—that the unprovoked bombing of our Hawaii Naval base dragged us from being a neutral country to an active participant World War II ... and a participant who was crippled from the start with an overwhelming number of our Pacific Naval fleet destroyed—we’ve almost all but forgotten the subsequent battle of Midway, where through a LOT of strategy and a touch of miracle we managed to turn the tide of the war and keep the United States from becoming captured and controlled by the Japanese.

The new Midway movie, which opened this weekend for Veterans’ Day, tells this story with clarity, rich historical context and breathtaking CGI. But more importantly, it tells the human stories with CGI perspectives that bring to life the in-the-boots bravery and the terror and the sacrifice of our soldiers with heart-stopping clarity.

It’s so easy to see veterans of long-ago wars as the old, feeble, wrinkled people they’ve become from our current perspective. But historical movies like Midway help us see who they were when they were young and vital ... and exhibiting the bravery and the terror and the sacrifice that protected our country’s freedoms then and now.

The Midway movie is excellent cinema on its own, filled with artful drama and excitement and handsome movie stars, but more importantly it’s a documentation—again documentation through the lens of cinematic storytelling—of the historic events and lives and stories we as modern Americans really can’t afford to forget ... both as patriotic, informed citizens and as a nation grateful to the veterans who’ve served on our behalf.

Go see it.

Theater program notes: Hello, Dolly!

Dolly Gallagher Levi may very well have played matchmaker for your great-great-great grandparents
by Jake Stigers

Dolly Levi’s meddling, matchmaking story in Hello, Dolly! has origins so old that they predate the Victorian Era by two years: The 1964 musical was inspired by the 1955 play The Matchmaker, which was in turn inspired by the 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers. Both were written by Thornton Wilder, who is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer-winning play Our Town.

But Dolly’s genealogy doesn’t stop there. Wilder took his ideas from a play written almost a century earlier: the 1842 mega-titled Einen Jux will er sich machen (He Will Go on a Spree or He'll Have Himself a Good Time), which found Dolly’s original inspiration in A Day Well Spent, an English one-act written in 1835.

Though the Dolly we know and love today didn’t arrive fully formed at the dawn of this literary journey, her universally relatable joy, optimism, determination—and perhaps her employment of a little manipulation in the pursuit of love—have kept her in our hearts for 55 years … and have given her a Billboard-topping cast album, Oscar-winning movie and now four Broadway revivals along the way.

Hello, Dolly! was originally written for the brassy Broadway beltress Ethel Merman, who turned it down but six years later took over the role and played Dolly until the show closed in 1970. Mary Martin—star of South Pacific, Peter Pan and The Sound of Music—also turned down Dolly and then ended up playing her in London.

So it fell to Carol Channing, a lesser-known veteran of Broadway shows including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Wonderful Town, to bring our Dolly Gallagher Levi to life through Jerry Herman’s glorious music, Gower Champion’s direction (also not a first choice; he got the job after Hal Prince and Jerome Robbins turned it down), and what would become an iconic jewel-drenched red dress and matching feathered halo. The show ended up railroading past Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl that season to win a whopping 10 Tony Awards, a tie with 1949’s South Pacific that wouldn’t be broken until The Producers racked up 12 Tony Awards 37 years later.

The original Broadway production ran six years and 2,844 performances and saw its first revival—with an all-black cast led by Pearl Bailey—only five years after it closed. Dolly has been played by a pantheon of stars since then including Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Yvonne De Carlo, Betty White, Bernadette Peters, and (of course) Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. And she’s clearly listened to her eponymous song, because she doesn’t ever go away … and clearly nobody wants her to.

From her humble, generations-old origins to her enduring blockbuster musical, which was originally titled—and I am not making this up—Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman, Dolly Gallagher Levi looks to continue bringing hearts together and audiences to their feet for generations to come.


It’s worth noting that Thornton Wilder loved Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! so much that he promised to rewrite his Pulitzer-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth for her so she could play both female leads. He died before he finished the rewrite, but you as Theatre Cedar Rapids audience members will soon have the opportunity to see The Skin of Our Teeth in its original form in our downstairs Grandon Theatre. It runs April 3-19, 2020, so please don’t go away until you’ve gotten your tickets.

Books: Flesh and Blood

I read this book years ago in a book club in Chicago. Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then—and still to this day—preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And I almost never read a book twice.

Anyway: In Flesh and Blood, Michael Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy—mightily named Constantine Stassos—eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.

Theater program notes: Les Misérables

Published December 4, 2018, for the Broadway national tour of Les Misérables at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.

Europe and America in the time of Les Misérables:
Hearing the people sing beyond the world of Jean Valjean
By Jake Stigers

Quick: When in history did the events of Les Misérables happen?

The farther we get away from the past, the easier it can be for us to file stories about—for instance—the Black Plague, Michelangelo, Les Misérables, the Civil War or the Titanic into a singular Olden Times mental folder and not fully understand any larger historical context that might shape or define our understanding of those events.

(Before you reach for your phones to google all that: The Black Plague wiped out up to 60% of Europe’s total population around 1350. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was one of the defining artists of the Italian Renaissance in the early 1500s. We’ll get to Les Misérables in a minute, but for the sake of this rough timeline remember that it took place in France in the early 1800s. The American Civil War prevented the Confederate southern states from seceding over the issue of slavery when it ended in 1865. And the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage between Southampton and New York City just over 100 years ago in 1912.)

For the masterful way the musical Les Misérables telescopes the events and the settings of the book Les Misérables into 49 songs in two sung-through acts, an understanding of a more global context can meaningfully enhance any appreciation of it—if for no other reason than to triangulate it into the broader timeline of history.

It’s understandably impossible to cover every aspect of the history and culture surrounding the protagonist Jean Valjean’s journey through Les Misérables, and this essay in no way tries to do so. Instead, it touches on a range of events from the epic to the merely interesting that can hopefully offer useful context for understanding the world in which Les Misérables unfolds:


1796: Preamble: Jean Valjean is sentenced to prison in the Bagne of Toulon

Nineteen years before the story of Les Misérables begins, the peasant Jean Valjean is sentenced as prisoner number 24601 to serve time in the notorious Bagne of Toulon for stealing bread to feed his starving sister. During his almost two decades of incarceration, France and the entire Western Hemisphere undergo a chain reaction of revolutions and wars that radically alter the course of modern global history. But first, let’s back up a bit more ...

Just three years before Valjean entered prison, the former King Louis XVI of France and his wife Marie Antoinette were convicted of high treason and guillotined at the Place de la Révolution in Paris as a thousand-plus years of French monarchy fell and the French Revolution began. The ensuing French Revolutionary Wars raged from 1792 to 1802, first pitting the French Republic against monarchies in Europe and then spreading as far as Egypt and North America. Their end segued almost directly into the era of Napoleonic Wars that carried over unresolved disputes between Napoleon’s French Empire and a fluctuating array of European coalitions. A total of seven wars in all, they ended when the European Allies finally defeated Napoleon in the one-day Battle of Waterloo near what is now Belgium in 1815.

Aside from the expected cataclysmic destruction wrought by two decades of prolonged combat, these wars also brought explosive revolutions in European social structures, redefined international borders and relationships, and radically transformed the ways future wars would be strategized and fought to this day.

Partly to fund his eponymous wars, Napoleon Bonaparte sold France’s Louisiana Territory in North America to President Thomas Jefferson of the fledgling United States in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase, as the acquisition of this territory came to be called, stretched from present-day Louisiana to what is now Montana on land that would eventually be partitioned into 15 states—including Iowa—and parts of two Canadian provinces. It more than doubled the existing square mileage of the United States and fueled what our growing country would declare to be our Manifest Destiny: a continued and often ruthless expansion all the way west across the continent to the Pacific Ocean that involved annexing and conquering land from Mexico, Britain and the continent’s Native Americans.

Back in Europe, Ludwig van Beethoven composed his now-iconic dum-dum-dum-DUMMM Symphony No. 5 in 1808 that would help define a burgeoning era of Romanticism in music, art and literature. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—the quintessential composer of the Classical period in music—had died seventeen years earlier, at the early pre-dawn of this new Romantic period that would begin to shape almost a century of culture in both Europe and America. Romanticism was a bold new paradigm that shed the Classical era’s emphasis on structure and melody in favor of exploring emotion, imagination and the free expression of feeling—all of which spilled over into the worlds of art and literature. Case in point: Les Misérables and Valjean’s operatic journey through morality, love, sacrifice, penance and ultimately grace.

Here are a few more interesting milestones that Jean Valjean missed during his incarceration: After observing that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, Edward Jenner introduced the first successful smallpox vaccine—actually the first ever vaccine—in England in 1796. French soldiers fighting under Napoleon in the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria discovered the Rosetta Stone—a decree from Egypt’s 300 BC Ptolemaic dynasty that was inscribed in three languages and unlocked the mysteries of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs—in 1799. The Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to become the United Kingdom in 1801. The world population officially reached one billion people in 1804. And the Industrial Revolution hit its peak, radically transforming the way we produced everything from textiles to energy to physical and social infrastructure.

So the narrative of Les Misérables opens in a radically new world from the one Jean Valjean knew when his theft of a loaf of bread landed him in prison 19 years earlier. And, as worlds have a way of doing, his just keeps changing ...


1815: Jean Valjean is released from the Bagne of Toulon

Valjean is released and left homeless in the commune-city of Digne-les-Bains in the early years of France’s Bourbon Restoration, a new constitutional monarchy set in place after the fall of Napoleon. Under the new King Louis XVIII, France restored relationships with longtime allies, centralized its government in Paris and moved forward with relative stability under a Revolution-inspired motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Across the pond, the War of 1812 had ended and America was experiencing what is still called the Era of Good Feelings marked by a decline in partisan politics and a sense of nationalist identity thanks to a series of Supreme Court opinions supporting a more centralized government here. A year earlier, a lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key saw the American flag flying over Fort McHenry after an all-night bombardment by British forces near the end of the war. The sight inspired him to write “Defence of Fort M'Henry,” a poem that soon became the lyrics to our National Anthem: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Three years after Valjean’s release, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley published, initially anonymously, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in England. This gothic novel is considered to be the first work of modern science fiction for its premise that employs a deliberate use of science and technology to create a creature of fantasy and imagination. Not to be outdone in the genre of gothic literature, American author Washington Irving killed off—or did he?—poor Ichabod Crane after a terrifying encounter with the Headless Horseman in his 1820 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

And in a slight detour from this essay’s stated narrative about Europe and America in the time of Les Misérables, it’s interesting to note that in January of 1820, German explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Russian explorer Mikhail Lazarev were the first to see and officially discover Antarctica.


1823: John Valjean, under the alias Monsieur Madeleine, is now a wealthy factory owner and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer

France’s Bourbon Restoration period lasted until the 1830-32 uprisings depicted later in Les Misérables, but by 1823 the constitutional monarchy had been slowly disassembled by hard-right ultra-royalists, and with the rise of King Charles X in 1824 it lurched even farther right with severe restrictions on the press and a campaign to compensate the families of nobles whose property had been taken during the Revolution.

Here in America, we’d carved the state of Missouri out of the Louisiana Purchase territory in 1821, bringing our state count—and the number of stars on our growing flag—to 24. To assert our independence and declare our neutrality in any future European conflicts, President James Monroe introduced the Monroe Doctrine in his 1823 State of the Union address, declaring that any European attempt to re-colonize the Americas would be considered a hostile act toward the United States. And three years later on July 4, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the approval of our Declaration of Independence—both former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died.

To modern historians, the Classical era in music had officially ended by 1820, leaving Romanticism as the dominant voice in Western music, art and literature. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Symphony No. 9 in 1824 thunderously marked the occasion, as did many iconic works of art, including Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People), which depicted the goddess Liberty bearing the flag of France in its brilliant red and blue as she guides the triumphant citizenry forward over the pro-royalist bodies who fell in the victorious July Revolution of 1830.

1823 ended on a visions-of-sugar-plums note with the anonymous publication of A Visit from St. Nicholas (later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore), which introduced America to the Santa Claus we celebrate to this day with his like-a-cherry nose and bowl-full-of-jelly laugh.


1832: The Paris June Rebellion

The June Rebellion—also called the Paris Uprising—depicted in Les Misérables was an actual historical event. The last of a two-year series of violent anti-monarchist outbreaks in Paris, this battle was inspired by the cholera death of French Parliamentarian Jean Maximilien Lamarque, a popular anti-royalist and champion of the poor. The uprising lasted only two days: June 5-6, 1832.

The song “The ABC Café - Red and Black” that student revolutionaries Marius and Enjrolas sing in Les Misérables to stir the passions of their fellow students into battle has a coincidental—albeit not specific—relationship to the French novel The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir) that had been published two years earlier by Stendhal (a pen name of French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle). While the Red and the Black in the Les Misérables uprising represent “the blood of angry men” fighting on behalf of the poor who have been long oppressed by “the dark of ages past,” the novel tells the story of a poor man’s ultimately futile attempts to rise above his station in life through hard work, talent, and eventually deception and hypocrisy.

Speaking of revolutionary insurrections, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (he used this name to distinguish himself from a number of similarly named relatives), the longest-lived and last surviving signatory of America’s Declaration of Independence, died on November 14 of 1832, 56 years after the document was signed. He was 95.

But the revolutions of the era weren’t tied entirely to politics. The British sloop HMS Beagle had set sail a year before the rebellion on a five-year expedition to chart the coasts of South America, and it carried as a passenger a young English biologist named Charles Darwin. Darwin published The Voyage of the Beagle in 1839 as both a travel memoir and a scientific journal documenting the discoveries in biology, geology and anthropology he made on the trip. These discoveries inspired additional expeditions and research that supported his theories of evolutionary biology that he eventually published in his 1859 On the Origins of the Species.


1833: Marius and Cosette make their final reconciliation with Valjean

The French Charter of 1830 had overthrown the conservative government of King Charles X and signaled the beginning of the 18-year July Monarchy, where the ascending Louis Philippe conspicuously proclaimed himself Roi des Français (“King of the French”) instead of the imperialistic “King of France” and pledged to follow the juste milieu—the middle of the road that avoided radical political extremes.

As Valjean reconciles with his past at the end of Les Misérables and finally understands that “to love another person is to see the face of God,” Romanticism is at its peak celebration of both emotional life and the unknown afterlife, nature and the supernatural, the Medieval past and the infinite future. Its brave-new-cultural-world outlook mirrors his final resolution from guilt to atonement … and it indeed allows him a new “life about to start / when tomorrow comes.”

An interesting side note: After spending four years studying American representative democracy from the wide-reaching perspectives of our Constitution, economics, separation of church and state, and societal attitudes toward women, French diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville published in 1835 De La Démocratie en Amérique, which is commonly translated to Democracy in America. Tocqueville was interested in examining the successes and failings of our democratic revolution in comparison to the aftermath of the revolution in France—in particular the fall of the aristocratic class and the rise of the concept of equality. Among his conclusions: While democracy carries with it the danger of a tyranny of the majority and a loss of governmental control by the people, the promise of equality at its foundation was one of the greatest political and social ideas of his era … and the United States at the time was the quintessence of successful democratic equality.

Four years after the narrative of Les Misérables ends, Queen Victoria ascended the English throne at the age of 18 and ushered in a 63-year period of cultural influence and British expansion that lasted until the very dawn of the 20th century. While her reign saw both cataclysmic wars and monumental advances in technology, we can all agree here that the two defining landmarks of her monarchy were these: Iowa became the 29th of the United States in 1846; and in 1862, Victor Hugo introduced the world to Jean Valjean and his immortal journey through sacrifice, morality, love, penance and ultimately grace when he published Les Misérables.


Jake Stigers is a writer, singer, actor and incurable history buff living in Cedar Rapids. He hates to brag, but he saw the original production of Les Misérables in London.

Theater program notes: Canadian Brass

Written for the November 30, 2018, Canadian Brass tour concert at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.

We warmly welcome Canadian Brass to our country
In the spirit of holiday welcome, we will gladly add meaningless extra Canadian letters to our words when we say our neighbours to the north play marvellously with colour, humour and gruelling labour
By Jake Stigers, recovering trombonist

Canadian Brass is an institution. A very serious musical ensemble that plays very serious music very seriously. I could not be any different degree of seriousness about this.

As such, it is worth investing a bit of your time and interest right now to learn everything there is to know about everything related to brass music to ensure you fully appreciate the Canadian Brass performance you’re about to hear.

Fortunately for you, I have condensed the entirety of brass-music history and knowledge into the following few short and not at all disjointed paragraphs. But don’t worry: There won’t be a test.


BASIC BRASS VOCABULARY THAT WILL BE ON THE TEST
Embouchure (say it with me: AHM-boo-shure): The way a brass player holds his or her lips, tongue, teeth and even facial muscles to blow or sometimes buzz air through an instrument. Some people compare it to kissing, but those people are wrong. Most beginning brass players and all Hancher audience members who’ve never played brass instruments are slightly alarmed that this odd lip-shape-buzz-thing even has a name.

Transposing instruments: This is extremely difficult to explain to people who haven’t had a lot of eggnog, but music for many brass instruments is written so that when a player sees a note on a page and plays that note, an entirely different but still usually pleasant note comes out. Nobody who hasn’t had a lot of eggnog knows why, but the fact remains that the sounds these transposing instruments (note: they’re called transposing instruments, if I forgot to mention that earlier) waft over unsuspecting audiences is an effluvium of lies. (Note to self: Effluvium of Lies is a great name for a brass quintet.) Fortunately for you the listener, the notes on the pages in front of the musicians here have all been laboriously recalibrated and neatly tuckpointed to the point that they will all come out relatively correctly. We hope.

Awesomeness: All brass instruments are awesome. Even the flüglehorn, but mostly because it has an umlaut. Anyway, put a bunch of brass instruments together into a quintet, and the awesomeness grows exponentially. Especially if they’re from Canada. And they have a cool band name.

Woodwinds: Woodwinds are not brass; they are the embarrassing cousins of brass who always have too much eggnog at what were supposed to be pleasant, un-alarming holiday parties. We are polite to woodwinds because they can hit lots of high notes—which reduces strain on the embouchures of brass players who don’t have to play them—but most woodwind players got to carry small instrument cases on the bus in middle school, and the brass players who had to carry the huge instrument cases simply cannot let go of their lingering resentment.

Percussion: Percussion is also not brass. Percussion is Latin—I think—for GO AHEAD AND TRY TO PLAY OVER ME YOU BRASS WIMPS I DARE YOU. In case you hadn’t noticed, percussion is loud. To make the situation worse, percussionists actually stand up so they can hit their drums and other hapless instruments with full body force to make them even louder. It’s not polite, and it’s not fair.

Strings: If you want to hear Canadian Strings, you’ll have to go to Violincouver. Because that is the only string-instrument-plus-major-Canadian-city mashup I can think of.

Ophthalmologist: This word has nothing to do with brass quintets—except for a possible causal relationship to the size of those little black music notes—but it’s included here to make sure you notice that it has two l’s. Most people misspell it, but now you won’t. It will also not be on the test.


MORE MUSICAL VOCABULARY THAT WILL BE ON THE TEST
Sharp: Often called a hashtag by the trendy kids, a sharp is an impossible-to-play-because-it’s-so-small tic-tac-toe board that is used to indicate that a note is raised one half step. Which is also called a semitone.

Flat: Often confused for a London apartment, a flat is a pointy little lowercase B (or I guess I could have typed that b) that is used to indicate that a note is lowered one half step. Which is still called a semitone.

Timbre (say it with me: TAM-ber): Also called tone color, the timbre (and I am not making this up: pronounce it TAM-ber or you will feel the cruel, oppressive judgment of every known musician past, present and future) is the character or perceived sound quality of a musical note or sound. It’s how we differentiate trumpets from sopranos (depending on the trumpets) or pianos from xylophones or the music that all these kids are listening to nowadays from rusty air horns.


NOW THAT YOU’RE UP TO TEMPO, LET’S GET DOWN TO BRASS TACKS. OR BRASS INSTRUMENTS. WHATEVER.
Here is a comprehensive, meaningful, fully representative dissertation on every Canadian Brass instrument you’re about to hear. Or maybe just four of them.

THE TRUMPET
Used to signal charges (cash was also accepted) in battles as far back as 1500 BC, the trumpet is now the go-to brass instrument for people who are too weak to carry tubas around. Trumpets are made with curves and swirls of metallic tubing that are not unlike Iowa State Fair funnel cakes, but with three vertical piston valves right in front of the trumpeters’ faces, which would make my eyes cross if I had to look at them.

Grossest feature: The spit valve. It’s exactly like a spigot on a pitcher of refreshing lemonade except instead it dumps accumulated trumpeter spit on the floor. Which is in no way refreshing. Or lemonade. A spit valve is called a water key in more polite circles. And also because the stuff that comes out of a spit valve is mostly condensation from a player’s breath, but I dare you to convince every English-speaking brass player ever to stop saying spit valve.

Etymology: The Old French trompe means, poetically, "long, tube-like musical wind instrument.” So old French people who play the trumpet are called “longtubelikemusicalwindinstrumenters.”

Linear length of straightened trumpet tubing: 6 feet.

Fun fact: The original Olympic Games involved a five-foot trumpet called the Salpinx. My research does not clarify with absolute certainty whether the Salpinx was actually played like a trumpet or instead thrown like a javelin.

Mutes: As with all brass instruments, trumpets employ mutes to alter their sound. (Do you remember our discussion about the sound-changing differentiations of timbre? DO YOU REMEMBER HOW TO PRONOUNCE IT?) Mutes fit into the bell of a trumpet and and often get mistaken for standard barware like orange juicers and martini shakers. Which explains everything you need to know.

THE HORN
Often called the French horn, the plain-old horn is the only orchestra or band instrument that blows all of its sound backward in a direction where nobody can hear it except for the band moms who are waiting backstage with hugs and cookies. Whenever someone points out this ridiculous (I’m sorry but someone had to say it) design flaw, players of other brass instruments usually nod knowingly at each other and politely change the subject.

Grossest feature: While the spit valve—ahem, water key—is always totally gross, the horn has another gross trick up its sleeve … which is a pun because a horn player holds the horn by sticking one hand up its bell where all the humid horn air comes out, leaving the bell-holding hand what we will politely call clammy. Never high-five a horn player after a concert. You’ve been warned.

Etymology: The French made hoop-shaped hunting horns (alliteration runs rampant!) in the 1600s that they called trompes de chasse (which, as we can carry over from our trumpet etymology lesson, means “hunting long, tube-like musical wind instruments”). Because the French invented these horns, the English called them French horns. There’s no hiding stuff from the English.

Linear length of straightened horn tubing: 17 feet.

Fun fact: As I’ve pointed out earlier in the politest terms possible, the horn’s bell faces backward where I’m sorry but the audience could probably hear you better of you just hummed. As such, the horn is especially inefficient at blaring to the home-team crowds in a marching band. Enter: the mellophone! Not only does the mellophone have a forward-facing bell like all self-respecting marching-band instruments, but the bell has a huge, view-obstructing diameter that can leave its players tripping or wandering into the middle of the field without realizing it. Which serves them right for choosing an instrument that plays backward.

Mutes: Horn mutes probably look like trumpet mutes. I think. Since they’re used in backward-facing horn bells though, there’s really no way to know.

THE TROMBONE
The trombone is the long slidey brass instrument that has to sit back a few extra feet in a band or orchestra so it doesn’t hit the bassoons or saxophones or other lesser wind instruments in front of it when it stretches out to hit the low notes. While its shape should logically be a T (for Trombone), the consensus among people who discuss these things is that it’s shaped like an S (for Should Be A T But Whatever). Some trombones also have trumpet-type valves attached to the backs. Those are for trombonists who are too lazy to extend their long slidey things all the way for the low notes.

Key term: The long slidey part of a trombone is called a telescoping slide mechanism by the band kids who aren’t as cool as the other band kids. Which is really saying something.

Grossest feature: The spit valve on a trombone is also called a water key by people who are squeamish around the word spit. Because it’s at the far end of the telescoping mechanism, it leaves its spit puddle the farthest away from the musician—as opposed to other brass instruments that plop their spit right in front of the musicians and create serious actuarial hazards.

Etymology: The Italian tromba (trumpet) and -one ("big") make a trombone literally a "big trumpet.” But with a “telescoping slide mechanism.” And a “puddle of spit” that’s “really far away.”

Linear length of straightened trombone tubing: 9 feet. 13 feet if you measure with the slide fully extended. But why would anyone do that?

Fun fact: During the Renaissance, people called the trombone a sackbut. I am not making this up.

Mutes: Mute-as-in-shhh! mutes for trombones look like genie bottles or traffic cones sized for golden retrievers who drive. Wah-wah mutes (yes, that’s a thing) look like little toddler hats. Or the business ends of toilet plungers. Because some trombonists actually use the business ends of toilet plungers as wah-wah mutes. So wash your hands after you greet a trombonist after a muted performance. Or ever. (And this is no doubt the first time toilet plunger has appeared in a Hancher program. Three times, actually!)

THE TUBA
You will likely encounter three kinds of tubas in your lifetime, if you haven’t already: A concert tuba sits in a player’s lap and points straight up and politely doesn’t bump into other players. A hélicon is a tuba that wraps around a player’s body like a hug from a long-lost aunt at an awkward family reunion and points kind of upward so as to be heard as it’s being played while (and I am not making this up, though it sounds impossible to play a tuba in this situation) horseback riding. And a sousaphone is a super-round, super-curvy tuba that wraps around a player’s body and points its bell at the football stands and makes super-loud, super-awesome tuba noises.

Grossest feature: Have you ever seen a tuba spit valve? It looks like the Hoover Dam of the brass world. You could drown in the ensuing catastrophic deluge if it breaks. And that would be tu bad.

Etymology: Tuba is latin for “trumpet.” Latin was never good at measurements or perspective.

Linear length of straightened tuba tubing: 16 to 26 feet, depending on the type of tuba.

Fun fact: Two men named Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and Johann Gottfried Moritz patented what they called a “bass tuba” in 1835 with valves that they called “Berlinerpumpen.” All of those consonants are exactly the reason tubas are considered to be the spittiest of the brass instruments.

Other fun fact: Around 1900 there was some kind of spittin’ match (ahem) to build a tuba that played lower than the contrabass tuba, whose sound was already so low that it could only be measured on the Richter scale, which wouldn’t even be invented until 1935. So in 1913, some guys built what they called a “subcontrabass” for the World Exhibition in New York. It needed two players: one to blow in the mouthpiece and one to operate the valves. And six to clean up the spit.

Mutes: Tuba mutes are the same size and shape as Iowa tornadoes. Tuba Mutes is also a great name for a band. Especially a band of brass instruments. With five players. From Canada. Or not.


So congratulations! You can now count yourself up to speed on all things brass. And some things Canadian. All that’s left now is to enjoy the concert.

And to take the test.

Jake Stigers is a writer, singer, actor and recovering trombonist living in Cedar Rapids. He still harbors resentment toward all the flute players who could hold their instrument cases in their laps on the bus in middle school.

Litany of Complaints

• Our Disney vacation is over
• I didn’t win the marathon
• Perhaps because there was only a half marathon
• Perhaps not
• But now we’ll never know
• Will we?
• No, we won’t
• Anyway ...
• Disney water
• It tastes like History and Safety First
• Turning it into ice and putting it in Diet Coke doesn’t help
• And it CERTAINLY doesn’t help the Diet Coke
• Speaking of ...
• A large cup of Disney History And Safety First ice with a splash of a Diet Coke costs less than $6
• But not much less
• Disney has stopped using lids on its fountain sodas
• Which is awesome from an environmental standpoint
• And I assume from a cost-overhead standpoint
• Plus an ordering-supplies-and-dealing with-invoices-and-delivering-stuff-to-all-the-restaurants standpoint
• But definitely not from a don’t-spill-your-tiny-splash-of-Diet-Coke-on-yourself-when-you-get-jostled-in-the-crowds standpoint
• Safety First!
• Anyway ...
• Runner dudes with muscularly lean, distractingly shapely calves
• Who didn’t ask me on dates
• Probably because they didn’t want to make things weird in front of their wives and kids
• BECAUSE ALL OF THE RUNNER DUDES WITH MUSCULARLY LEAN, DISTRACTINGLY SHAPELY CALVES HAD WIVES AND KIDS
• I am developing a healthy animosity toward wives and kids
• People who wore their race medals to the parks
• Three days after their races
• Really?
• Was a full day of wearing a rigid, itchy ribbon around your neck with a heavy, clangy medal bouncing against your chest a productive enhancement to your sweaty Disney joy?
• Asking for a friend
• Also:
• Also!
• People who stopped in the middle of a crowd of moving people to do something vitally important like take a selfie or scratch an elbow or clap on 1 and 3 or whatever other pressing needs really stupid, rude people face in their center-of-the-universe days
• Grrrrrr
• I bought three race shirts and zero other souvenirs but I somehow couldn’t get my suitcase closed this morning
• My cargo shorts are out to get me
• Or perhaps they wanted to stay a few more days
• And I broke their eminently-practical-and-yet-appropriate-as-always-multiple-pocketed hearts
• Now I’M the bad guy
• Speaking of my eminently-practical-and-yet-appropriate-as-always-multiple-pocketed cargo shorts ...
• I finally stopped having little panic attacks every time I realized I couldn’t feel my car keys in my front right pocket
• When I get home tonight, I’m going to start having an unsightly key bulge in my front right pocket again
• And it might be uncomfortable since I’m not used to it anymore
• WHEN
• WILL
• MY
• SUFFERING
• END
• ?
• We got our bills from our Magic Bands that we wore all week to buy food and charge it to our room ...
• Ouch
• Not OUCH
• But still ouch
• (I’m talking about the final tally of charges and not the bands themselves; the bands were actually quite comfortable)
• Remember our fancy, four-princess dinner in Cinderella’s castle where we got to see the fireworks show outside the quatrefoil-gothic castle windows?
• We were told our dinner was vaguely “already taken care of” at the end
• We assumed that meant it had been automatically charged to our Magic Bands, so we blithely went on our merry way
• But ...
• There was no fancy-four-princess-dinner-in-Cinderella’s-quatrefoil-gothic-window-castle charge on our bills this morning
• Was it an oversight?
• A surprise Summer Of Running Away From Being 50 birthday gift?
• A random act of Disney benevolence?
• Pre-emptive compensation for not winning the marathon?
• Do we need to contact them to see which option it was?
• THIS SITUATION IS NOT COVERED IN THE DISNEY PROTOCOL HANDBOOK
• Not a complaint: Our entire Disney stay was a beautifully immersive experience of colors and ethnicities and accents and physical abilities and sexualities and gender fluidities and ages and family sizes
• Especially on It’s a Small World
• ESPECIALLY on It’s a Small World
• That ride gives me hives
• On my runner-chafed unmentionable locations
• Anyway ...
• We never encountered an instance of racism or xenophobia or hostility or even poorly hidden frustration over our differences
• During the entire week of our stay
• In fact, we all seemed to celebrate each other and gladly accommodate people in wheelchairs and families with excited kids so we could all enjoy our collective Disney experience together
• For a whole week
• Except, of course, for the people who stopped in the middle of a crowd of moving people to do something vitally important like take a selfie or scratch an elbow or clap on 1 and 3 or whatever other pressing needs really stupid, rude people face in their center-of-the-universe days
• MAJOR. PET. PEEVE.
• Anyway ...
• We’re re-entering the ugly, not-Disney-égalité-fraternité world of our shithole president and his shithole orbit today
• I don’t know how all of you survived it over the last week
• But re-enter we must
• In a cloud of voter optimism and hope
• And three new race shirts that make my suitcase uncloseable
• My flight home is at 5:14 tonight
• Erik’s is at 2:31
• So we took the early Disney bus to the airport for him to catch his flight and for me to chill with a couple of books and a fully charged phone for a while
• I’m currently typing this as I sit in a comfy chair in front of the airport Chick-fil-A
• Speaking of non-Disney-égalité-fraternité
• My browser app keeps crashing on me, so I’m obsessively select-all-ing and copying this post after every other bullet I write
• Just so I don’t lose this freaking endless list of rambling, mostly pointless litany-of-complaints line items
• Freezing and crashing apps are many-times-a-day occurrences on my iPhone X
• I am SOOOOOOO not impressed with the iPhone X
• Save your money and get an abacus and two cans with a string
• Much more reliable
• And affordable
• Anyway ...
• I had an awesome vacation with an awesome friend and an awesome surprise finish of a half marathon I’d fully expected to choke on and possibly even have to quit
• And now I’m chilling in a bustling airport seated near two hip and cool teenagers who are using hip-and-cool-teenager patois like “brah” to talk to each other and “my boy” to talk about their (presumably male) friends
• It’s both charming and amusing
• And I’m in a happy place, both in my head and in this airport
• Except the airport’s escalators look like they were installed in a columbarium
• Brah

1. Last training run of the season!

2. My second and last half marathon is in eight days.
3. And no, I won’t be training any more for it.
4. Because after my summer of chronic injuries and my aborted NewBo half marathon, I’ve kind of given up.
5. But I’ll start next weekend’s half marathon with optimism and see what happens.
6. I’ll also start with a super-cute outfit.
7. So there’s that.
8. Rob and Scott joined me this morning for our last hurrah of 2018.
9. They’ve been awesome running buddies and all-around friends all summer.
10. Now that training season is over, I’m sure we’ll revert to our usual state of evil, backstabbing nemesises.
11. Those poopyheads.
12. See? It’s already started.
13. It’s impossible to say nemesises without sounding gay.
14. Same with cilantro citrus salad.
15. Sssssssssssssss.
16. David also ran with us.
17. But he’s either an overachiever or a showoff because he kept running when we stopped so he could do more miles.
18. So he didn’t get to be in the selfie.
19. The poopyhead.
20. Nemesises.
21. I’m sweaty.
22. And sleepy.
23. And sworn to secrecy about my cilantro citrus salad recipe.
24. So shhhhhhhhhh!
25. I saw a show long ago that took place on a gay ship named the SS Sibilant S.
26. I don’t remember where I saw it, but it was silly.
27. Anyway.
28. We chose a pretty tree as the background for our final selfie today.
29. Which is so low-concept that it forced me to wander off on a whistley-lisp tangent here.
30. Whistley lisp.
31. Cilantro Nemesis and the Whistley Lisps.
32. I’ll take Polka-Punk Bands I Would Never Listen To for ssssssix hundred, Alex.
33. Sssssssso sssssssleepy.
34. My knee injury is apparently NOT as healed as it had led me to believe.
35. I don’t see it causing me any problems for the Disney races, but it will certainly make its presence known.
36. I may have a goofknee, but at least I don’t have a plutoe.
37. I just made that up.
38. You owe me sssseven dollars if you found it amusing.
39. Good jokes don’t write themselves.
40. And a GOOD joke would cost you a whole lot more.
41. Mom made a peach pie while we were out running.
42. I bought my folks some fancy pie fillings when I was in Galena.
43. And my dad’s birthday is Tuesday.
44. Which is more than enough reason to spontaneously bake a pie.
45. So is the fact that the jars of pie filling were still sitting on the counter where they couldn’t be ignored.
46. Since he’s blind, we’re getting him an Alexa (or one of her smart-speaker sisteren, I forget which) in the hopes that she’ll make it easier for him to listen to the news or play music or bake a pie or whatever else it is that those things do.
47. Since he’s blind, he also can’t read Facebook so I can say what his gift is here and he’ll never know.
48. AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BLAB TO HIM.
49. Because Alexa will find out and hunt you down and make you listen to Polka Punk.
50. Smart speaker sisteren.
51. You thought I was gonna let that one slide, didn’t you?
52. Ssssslide.
53. To review:
54. Nemesises.
55. Cilantro citrus salad.
56. Sweaty.
57. Sleepy.
58. Sworn to secrecy.
59. Cilantro citrus salad recipe.
60. SS Sibilant S.
61. Silly.
62. Whistley lisp.
63. Cilantro Nemesis and the Whistley Lisps.
64. Smart-speaker sisteren.
65. Ssssslide.
66. Sixty-six.
67. Well THAT was a surprising coincidence.
68. Surprising coincidence.
69. Sssssssso sssssssleepy.
70. See ya!

1. I finally ran the Nordic Fest Elveløpet 15K

2. But not really.

3. There were probably 100 15K runners overall.
4. I was clearly dead last of the runners by mile 4.
5. Seriously. Just me and the very lonely road.
6. And the nagging worry that I’d end up running the wrong direction for miles and miles without knowing it.
7. In writing, we call this foreshadowing.
8. So there are lots of hills in Decorah.
9. OH MY ODIN THERE ARE HILLS.
10. But they’re nothing compared to the all-but-literal MOUNTAIN that started about mile 5 1/2.
11. MOU. NTAN.
12. Just hills and hills and trees and the road and me.
13. And at one point two startled deer.
14. Plus my irrational worry that I’d encounter a marauding band of feral gnomes who’d abduct me and I’d never be seen again except for occasional sightings of me in a chin beard and gnomey hat under a bridge.
15. Irrational.
16. Except it WAS Nordic Fest so the gnomes might have been emboldened and hungry.
17. But let’s not think about that.
18. Because there’s no such marauding bands of feral gnomes, right?
19. Anyway ...
20. The mountain kept going up and up and up.
21. And then you’d go around a bend and there’d be even more up.
22. But finally there was a plateau.
23. With a rough-hewn rock that had been mowed around in a figure 8.
24. Again: foreshadowing.
25. So the road started going downhill.
26. Finally.
27. FINALLY.
28. The road eventually came to a fork.
29. The official Elveløpet directional arrow sign that had been stuck in the ground at this fork CLEARLY said to go left.
30. Which felt wrong, but I was so turned around that I had no faith in my sense of direction.
31. Foreshadowing.
32. There’s that word again.
33. So I went left.
34. And the road started getting uphilly again.
35. Let me interrupt this gripping narrative to mention that I’d been maintaining an 11:30 pace through my entire Alpine adventure to this point.
36. I’d expected to run a 12:00 pace, so 11:30 was both an awesome surprise and a genuine motivator to maintain my sprightly clip.
37. Though it was clearly epically slower than the collective pace of the other 99 Elveløpet 15K runners.
38. Because they were so far ahead of me that I was ALL ALONE on this winding, forest-of-trees mountain.
39. That was surely crawling with marauding bands of feral gnomes.
40. But back to our story ...
41. So I’m going up and up the mountain of hills, thinking it’s awfully odd that I’ve run a good two miles almost entirely uphill and it’s already mile 7 and I’d better get downhill soon so I can get all the way back to the finish line, which doesn’t seem at all like it’s only 2 miles away.
42. Oh, yay! I seem to finally reached a plateau.
43. Look at that interesting rough-hewn rock that’s been mowed around in a figure 8.
44. Hey—wait a minute ...
45. FUCK.
46. Yup.
47. That left-pointing arrow just sent me on mile-and-a-half repeat loop.
48. So I am no longer running the 15K course that had been mapped out.
49. So I am officially no longer running the race.
50. And now I’m so behind that the finish line may be dismantled and abandoned by the time I get there.
51. Again with the damn foreshadowing.
52. But at least it’s new and different foreshadowing.
53. In the mean time, I have no other option but to keep running and hoping I circle back to that FUCKING WRONG left arrow and see what happens if I go right.
54. Which I did.
55. Still having no clue if it would get me back on course or get me totally lost.
56. In the land of marauding bands of feral gnomes.
57. It’s amazing what a volatile mix frustration, uncertainty and mounting anger can be when you need extra power to fuel a long run.
58. Long story short: Turning right got me back on track.
59. For a whole mile.
60. Then the arrows just disappeared entirely.
61. But I had no way of knowing that.
62. Until a dude on a bike saw me and told me I’d run way past the turn to the finish line.
63. I had to trudge through a hay field to get to the trail I needed to be on to get back on track.
64. A FUCKING HAY FIELD.
65. By then I’d on-good-faith run 10.3 miles of a 9.3-mile race.
66. I was exhausted.
67. And hot.
68. Because I was finally out in the sun.
69. And pissed.
70. Because through no fault of my own I technically hadn’t run the race I’d been dreaming about running for 20+ years.
71. So FUCK IT.
72. I walked the rest of the way back.
73. Which ended up being a whopping 1.5 miles.
74. Which almost adds up to a 12-mile journey.
75. Remember that foreshadowing about the finish line?
76. Well, it hadn’t been dismantled and abandoned, as I worried it would have been.
77. But it HAD been pulled off the street onto the grass so the street could be reopened to traffic.
78. Some dude was fucking still standing there with a fucking bullhorn and he fucking announced to fucking NOBODY that I crossed the finish line.
79. At this point I was furious.
80. Plus I was far enough from the long-abandoned starting line that I had no idea where I was.
81. But after I finished my Gatorade—I always run with a Gatorade in my hand—and found a bathroom, I calmed down a bit.
82. Because my half-marathon training schedule had me supposed to be running 10 miles this weekend.
83. Which I totally did in today’s 9.3-mile race.
84. And by the transitive power of holy shit when will these hills ever end, that number is more like 13.1.
85. Which—coincidentally—is the exact distance of a half marathon.
86. So I’m totally on track for rocking the half I’m running over Labor Day.
87. Eyes. On. The. Prize.
88. So I’ve decided to look at all of this as I ran the Elveløpet ... plus a lot more.
89. I’m sorry I don’t have an actual finishing time.
90. Because this race was ROUGH and BRUTAL and OTHER ROUGH AND BRUTAL WORDS so it’s totally a one-and-done.
91. But the shirts are awesome.
92. And I know I conquered some killer terrain at a better-than-expected pace for a good 7 miles.
93. Which I’m really thrilled about.
94. And also a little proud of.
95. Plus I rewarded myself with gluttonous amounts of sweet rømmegrøt pudding afterward, which was my only other goal of the trip.
96. Plus the Nordic Fest parade was more delightful and fun and even stirring than I had any idea it would be.
97. I love my cool-fun-proud-and-sometimes-goofy Norwegian heritage.
98. Except for its inability to point simple arrow signs in the right direction.
99. And ALL THOSE HILLS.
100. And it goes without saying its penchant for stirring up marauding bands of feral gnomes.