Books: Monarch

I finished reading Monarch by Candice Wuehle over a week ago and I still don’t know what I think about it. While I was never bored and I regularly found myself eager to find out what happens next in the plot as I read, the book lingers in my brain as just … a lot. A lot of stuff that doesn’t usually go together, which is beautifully creative in itself, but that also doesn’t really connect in any meaningful—or Meaningful—way from an ironic-juxtaposition point of view.

Despite the massive library of books in my mental queue that I want to read, I was swayed by a random woman I encountered on a random scroll through TikTok who gushed so much about this book that I put it at the front of my line. Which is kind of out of character for me and my usual meticulous planning, but it certainly mirrors the abrupt barrages of chaos in the book’s premise.

I hate to give away plot points, but the book cover itself tells you that it’s a story about a young woman who ages out of the world of child beauty pageants and eventually discovers that she and many of her friends/frenemies/competitors on the pageant circuit have all along been sleeper-cell government agents who’ve been programmed to do covert (and never specified) missions that are immediately erased from their memories.

There’s obviously a lot more detail—and plenty of short-lived side plots—to flesh out an entire novel, but the protagonist’s journey of discovery from one world to the other is the only true throughline. And its absurdist connection between the two worlds never quite lands with me.

I worried as I got deeper into the story that it might have feminist-coded undertones that I just wasn’t catching, but aside from the references to the beauty pageants—which are delightfully droll and retrospectively appalling to the protagonist—her personal discoveries and the larger narrative themes are rather universal and arguably gender-neutral.

There are many, many references to circles and spheres and spirals that I worried were elements of symbolism I also wasn’t catching, but the narrator discusses them mostly in reference to the circuitous, slightly-off-linear way she tells her story.

The bulk of the story takes place in an unspecified area of the Midwest that is relatively close to Interstate 80 and Chicago, and at one point it involves a Hy-Vee grocery bag, so I’m guessing it’s in Iowa.

And during college the narrator lives in a dorm called Mayflower that’s pretty far from the campus and that looks over a river and beyond it the school’s fine-arts buildings, all of which sounds a hell of a lot like the University of Iowa. But her Mayflower has a tall bell tower—and it quickly becomes clear that her Mayflower is a metaphoric ship that takes her life to a whole new world. Which is what college obviously does, but for her it starts her journey into the aforementioned plot discombobulations.

On the plus side, Wuehle knows a lot of interesting things about a lot of interesting things, so the book takes you on mini educational journeys through the worlds of cellular preservation, photography and the development of film in darkrooms, makeup (of course), scientific taxonomy, training octopi, academic accreditation, catechismisc theory, and even Norwegian folklore.

And she’s a published poet, which certainly shows in the way she crafts sentences and summons allusions and shapes narrative imagery.

I also seem to be on an unintentional paranormal kick in my recent choices of literature. It’s clearly no secret that the child-beauty-pageant/covert-government-sleeper-agent narrative veers sharply outside the world of realism in the novel, which is all lighthearted fun. But then it VEERS. I powered through the last chapter just to say I’d finished the book.

I’ve been posting reviews of the books I’ve been reading both to help hold myself accountable to my goal to read at least one book a month and to put content on social media and my writing blog that isn’t about the you-know-who shitshow. In my innate need to not come off as mean to my fellow (and clearly more successful) writers, I try to focus on positive things—which I hope I have here—but aside from the novel’s unconventional way of describing how lives and people aren’t always what they seem—even to the people living those lives—I have to say the book is largely perplexing, I’m glad I finished it and I won’t be revisiting it again.

Do with that what you will.

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.

It's Still Here

Happy 53rd anniversary to Follies, the glorious, epic, mold-breaking 1971 musical by Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Harold Prince and Michael Bennett that ended up being too lavish and probably too jarringly mold-breaking for its own good. The most expensive Broadway production to date when it opened, it drew a full spectrum of critical reviews but didn't get the musical-theater-pantheon foothold it deserved and closed after 500 performances without recouping any of its investments.

I was unfortunately three when it opened and I couldn't get tickets, but my heart and endless fascination and I were eventually—inevitably—pulled into its magical, inspiring, gorgeous, heartbreaking world when I saw the 1987 London revival, which gave Eartha Kitt a much-needed comeback when she replaced the broken-ankled Delores Gray (just like what happened to her in 42nd Street!) to belt the iconic "I'm Still Here"—which, as coincidences never cease, was the song in the 1971 production that brought Yvonne De Carlo back from the brink of terminal embarrassment after playing Lily Munster on TV.

Thankfully—inevitably—Follies has since then finally achieved the musical-theater-pantheon stature it deserves, and I've been fortunate enough to have seen more productions of it than I can count in New York, D.C., Chicago and beyond. I'm obviously overflowing with fanboy knowledge and trivia and opinions and lyrics (oh boy, am I overflowing with lyrics) about the show, but if I even want to come close to sharing everything about its brilliance that's waiting to burst out of me, I'll have to schedule a six-week subscription-series symposium at a local college to get it all Jakesplained to you. 

Fun fact: It opened at the Winter Garden Theater in NYC, which—again with the coincidences—is the theater where I just so happen to have seen my first-ever Broadway show (Cats, the fact of which I am hard-stop-sun-comes-up-coffee-cup not willing to discuss).

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!

Bragging rights

I'm incredibly proud—and still kinda shocked—that I've run seven marathons, and while I've stopped just blurting it out in song to strangers on the street, I still get a kick out of telling people about it whenever running comes up in a conversation.

As you may have noticed, though, I'm not built like a runner. I'm tall and weighty (and unfortunately getting weightier as I age), which absolutely excludes me from ever being (or even enjoying being) a sprinter. But 18 years ago, after discovering the joys of running for fun and fitness on Chicago's 17-mile trail along Lake Michigan, I noticed that longer distances were getting easier and easier to run ... so I took a deep breath of trepidation and registered to run the Chicago Marathon. The experience was supposed to be a bucket-list one-and-done, but I was so moved to tears by what I'd worked to accomplish just to cross the starting line that I vowed I'd keep doing it until I got too bored or too injured.

Well, duh. Injured. You can't spell marathon without injured. And though I'd survived my first marathon from my first official training run all the way through to the finish line—which I did pretty much cluelessly all by myself with no official training program and no running buddies—without a single injury, I started falling apart regularly every year after that. Especially in my feet. Oh, and in my ankles. Oh, and in my knees too. But—unlike every endurance runner past, present and future—I thankfully never had to endure the misery of chafed, bleeding nipples.

I just said nipples.

Anyway, Facebook just reminded me of a particularly troubling injury I had 14 years ago—mere days before I was due to run my fifth Chicago Marathon—where the top of my right foot suddenly grew a painfully tender ostrich egg. I got an emergency appointment with one of Chicago's leading running doctors—named-for-the-wrong-body-part Dr. Chin—and learned that I had stress fractures in all my metatarsals; my body had built up a gelatinous goo of cartilage to protect them; and the muscles, tendons and fatty myelin sheathing around the nerves in my foot had started to swell in reaction to everything as though I'd had a sprain. And there was no way it was going away before the race.
But! Apparently it was a not-uncommon injury, and Dr. Chin showed me how to take care of Mr. Angry Foot by icing it day and night, popping ibuprofen like Rush Limbaugh at a rave, saying words like "analgesic" and "ouch," and lacing my right running shoe across my toes, up the sides and then across the top to minimize pressure on my precious baby ostrich while still maintaining a locked-in fit that would keep my foot from slipping and flopping as I ran.

And it worked! I was miserable for the entire four-plus (but still not five, because five is just embarrassing in the cool running circles) hours I ran, but I finished, I got my medal, I did my traditional walking-backward-down-the-steps-because-I-didn't-trust-my-knees-to-bend-forward-without-an-ugly-topple to find a cab on Michigan Avenue, and I went home to whimper. And stink. And shower. And keep whimpering. And then eat four pints of Ben & Jerry's in alphabetical order according to flavor name. Seriously. Because that's how I rolled after I ran each marathon. Or limped. Whatever.

The 2022 Chicago Marathon is this Sunday. And while I feel injured just from typing that sentence, I'm still thrilled that I was a part of it for so long. And I'm even more thrilled for all my friends from across the country who have trained all summer and are running this glorious—and gloriously flat—race this weekend. And whether you're a first-timer or a veteran and whether you're injured or in perfect working order, I hope you all enjoy every moment of the experience—from the enormous expo to the cheering Boystown throngs at the best water station on the entire route to that cruel, cruel hill on Roosevelt Road at mile 25.9 to the mountains of free bananas in the finishers corral.

You rock, I'm already proud of you ... and get ready to start blurting out your bragging rights in song to every stranger on the street.

Theater Program Notes: Million Dollar Quartet

 Published February 24, 2023, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Million Dollar Quartet

A Million to Two

Sam Phillips broke two formidable barriers on his way to the Million Dollar Quartet

By Jake Stigers

By the time the events of the fabled Million Dollar Quartet occurred, producer Sam Phillips had made an indelible name for himself as a recording impresario, a discoverer of future music legends … and a progressive thinker who effected remarkable changes in an industry, a culture and even a nation that were largely locked in a white-Christian-male hegemony.

When Phillips introduces himself at the beginning of the Million Dollar Quartet musical, he admits he “prob’ly could’a been a big wheel here. But there’s a cussedness ‘bout me.” That “here” was Memphis, TN, where in 1950 he’d opened the Memphis Recording Service—a cheap, hardly-any-frills storefront recording studio. Under the slogan “We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime,” he gave literally anyone who walked in off the street the opportunity to make an acetate recording of a song or a special message for a loved one.

But Phillips’ long game extended far beyond capturing endless renditions of “Happy Birthday” for people’s grandmothers.

In 1939, Phillips and his brother took a road trip that passed through Memphis, where he became enamored with the music of Beale Street. Yet-to-be blues and jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and B.B. King were helping define Beale Street as a vibrant, robust music scene celebrating and nurturing music by black artists … music that captured Phillips’ heart and forever defined his musical tastes and sensibilities.

Having grown up farming with his family in Alabama, Phillips was already deeply familiar with the gospel music he heard reverberating from black churches and with the songs he heard black sharecroppers sing as he worked alongside them. The world of Beale Street cemented his lifelong fascination with—and keen ear for—the music created and performed by black amateurs and artists alike.

Phillips started his career in the early 1940s as a deejay and radio engineer at station WLAY in Alabama. Unlike the prevailing standard that dictated stations restrict their programming to music only by black artists or only by white artists, WLAY employed an uncommon “open format” that at night broadcast a mix of music by both white and black artists—a practice that inspired Phillips to hammer at that artificial race barrier the rest of his career.

He moved to Memphis—home of his beloved Beale Street music scene—in 1945 to command the airwaves as an announcer and sound engineer for WREC, which gave him a bigger audience and broader access to the music, musicians and—most importantly—fellow deejays he’d work closely with as he established and built his recording empire.

By the time he left radio and opened his Memphis Recording Service studio, he’d amassed a network of industry connections and become a beacon for struggling artists—especially black artists—who wanted to get their work recorded and hopefully broadcast across the airwaves. To help facilitate this goal, Phillips launched his own label in 1952: The Sun Record Company.

In addition to creating the recording studio’s bread-and-butter “Anything-Anywhere-Anytime” recordings, Phillips and Sun Records slowly built a roster of music up-and-comers like Junior Parker, Howlin’ Wolf, and a 19-year-old songwriter and music impresario named Ike Turner.

A genuine fan of the black Beale Street artists and the music they created—particularly the blues—Phillips had hoped to both preserve their work and eventually push through restrictive race barriers to get their songs played on white radio stations instead of just black-only stations and late-night open-format programming.

But he couldn’t get anything he recorded to be played on the white stations—even with a decade of industry connections. “There were a LOTTA years when dee-jays wouldn’t play none a’my records. Back then I’d PAY ‘em, but they still wouldn’t play ‘em,” he explains in the Million Dollar Quartet musical.

So he devised a workaround.

Again, a quote from one of his fourth-wall monologues in the musical: “How would it be if I could find me a white kid who could light a fire under a song like the great Negro singers?”

Sam Phillips wasn’t the first person to put black music in the hands of white artists. And while there are endless discussions to be had about white artists appropriating black music, culture and their attendant successes, the narrative can honestly be parsed to allow that Sam Phillips was among an early few who were more interested in getting the music he loved to wider audiences and navigating a racist culture and industry to the best of his ability to make that happen. He saw music as a mechanism of democracy, and he wasn’t above tinkering with elections to give the people what he knew they wanted.

“As Sam saw it,” biographer Peter Guralnick writes, “what he was doing was to help open doors through which black artists and white artists alike—poor people deprived of education and opportunity but possessed of innate wisdom, talent, and imagination—might someday pass.” He brought to Sun an underpinned mission to make recordings that “would help knock down the wall between black and white musicians and markets” and contribute to the fall of racial segregation.

And despite deeply established racial barriers, Phillips’ philosophy and business model worked. In its 16-year run, Sun Records produced more rock-and-roll records—including an impressive 226 singles—than any other record label of its time. He slowly changed opinions, broke down barriers and got black artists to the table … and on the white airwaves.

The white singers and musicians Phillips discovered and promoted through Sun Records are a veritable who’s-who of 1950s icons including Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Sonny Burgess and the four men he assembled on a fateful December night in 1956: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and a fresh-faced Jerry Lee Lewis.

Not content with using black voices and music to disrupt current radio standards—and flush with cash from recently selling Elvis Presley to RCA Records—Phillips broke through another radio barrier in 1955 when he launched an all-female radio station with the delightful call letters WHER.

Radio stations weren’t entirely devoid of women’s voices at the time—many stations had one female announcer to cover homemaking, society events and other things traditionally seen as of interest only to women—but an all-women-all-the-time format was truly transformative and profoundly groundbreaking.

Staffed entirely with women both on-air and off, WHER was both progressive for its time and now very cringey from our modern perspective. The station broadcast from a studio he patronizingly called The Doll Bin in the nation’s third-ever Holiday Inn. (Phillips was one of the original investors in this innovative hotel-franchise concept, and it eventually earned him a fortune.) But—again from our modern perspective—the misogyny gets worse: He painted the studio pink and purple and decorated it with bras and panties hanging from a clothesline. I wish I were making that up.

To round out the cringe, he managed to objectify the invisible faces behind the radio voices with the slogan “1000 Beautiful Watts.”

But still: Women. On the radio. In the South. In the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed to open bank accounts in their own names. Phillips was incredibly progressive, incredibly brave and—if you’ll excuse the gratuitously gendered expression—incredibly ballsy.

WHER was such a hit that it quickly inspired women-only stations to pop up around the country. It broadcast continuously from 1955 until 1973, two years after the National Press Club opened its membership to women and started making the concept of women-only radio less and less remarkable.

The Million Dollar events of December 4, 1956, propelled Phillips and Sun Records into a heyday that lasted through the end of the decade. But as rock and roll slowly disappeared under the waves of pop, funk, folk, psychedelic and the other rock genres that defined the 1960s, Phillips quietly disappeared from the public eye. The artists he discovered and launched into stardom continued to produce iconic music—and the race and gender barriers he challenged continued to crumble—but Phillips turned his attention to other broadcasting, investment and development interests.

And the music he loved and the industry he changed continue to rock and roll forward as his million-dollar legacy.

Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His program notes and essays on art, history, mental illness and anything else he finds interesting are archived on TheOneWhoMumbles.blogspot.com

Theater Program Notes: Titanic

The RMS Titanic: At once a triumph of engineering and a metaphor for the the hubris of an era sailing at full speed
By Jake Stigers

The RMS Titanic was already a legend when it unmoored from terra firma and embarked on its storied first–and last–voyage across the Atlantic in 1912.

Weighing 46,328 tons, towering 104 feet high and built to accommodate 3,547 people–though only an estimated 2,224 people sailed on its maiden voyage–it was “the largest moving object in the world,” as chief naval architect Thomas Andrews declares with pride and an unmistakable air of hubris in his soliloquy prologue to the musical Titanic.

The second of the White Star Line’s three Olympic-class liners (the eponymous Olympic had launched in 1911 and the Britannic was just beginning construction with an eventual 1915 launch), Titanic represented an apotheosis of human achievement and pride: “At once a poem, and the perfection of physical engineering,” as Andrews boasts at the beginning of the musical and eventually the ship’s entire passenger manifest laments from a grim new perspective at the end.

Titanic and her Olympic-class sisters also represented a triumph in White Star Line’s luxury-liner race with rival Cunard, builders of the now dwarfed RMS Lusitania and RMS Mauretania.

But size, human achievement and Titanic’s catastrophic, conviction-defying demise–White Star Line never officially declared the ship to be unsinkable, but owner J. Bruce Ismay had reportedly declared that Titanic was so safe that it was its own lifeboat–weren’t the only catalysts that launched the ship and its wreck into the pantheon of disaster mythology. The culture that built it–and in many ways went down with it–also played a conspicuous role.

In 2004, the satirical newspaper The Onion published a wry, tongue-in-cheek special edition devoted to deconstructing the mythology and legend surrounding the Titanic sinking. It smartly–if not callously–summarized its perspective under a banner headline and multiple subheads that pulled no punches 90 years after the fact:

WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG

Titanic, Representation of Man’s Hubris, Sinks in North Atlantic

1,500 Dead in Symbolic Tragedy

Well-to-Do Dowager Gets Hair Disheveled for First Time

Stewards Kindly Ask Third-Class Passengers to Drown

The seeds of Titanic’s hubris were planted two centuries before she set sail

The first Industrial Revolution began around 1760 with the discovery of new, more efficient, more affordable manufacturing processes for everything from producing textiles to generating power from steam. It slowly but surely transformed economies and population centers in Britain, throughout Europe and across the Atlantic in the newly established United States. Along the way, it raised the standard of living across almost all populations and demographics … while it also laid foundations for an eventual explosive growth of capitalist wealth and economic disparity that very measurably thrives to this day.

New discoveries and inventions for streamlining the mass manufacturing of steel in the 1850s kick-started what is now considered the second Industrial Revolution in Europe and America. This more efficient production of steel vastly improved developments in railroads, shipping and manufacturing and eventually spread to the developments of the electricity, chemical and petroleum industries. It continued to transform the ways people lived and businesses operated … but it also continued to broaden the growing chasm between wealth and poverty.

In 1873, American writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today to satirize the greed and political corruption wrought from a century of Industrial Revolution spoils in post-Civil War America. It shone harsh light and judgment on the nation’s deeply entrenched graft, materialism, and obsession with money and power. But perhaps more memorably, it gave a name for this period of dramatic, arguably obscene stratification between rich and poor.

Across the pond, Britain’s Victorian Era and France’s Belle Époque mirrored the Gilded Age’s remarkable innovations in technology, manufacturing, science, medicine and even the arts–all with improvements in the standards of living for many populations. And all without remedying the staggering economic disparities between the wealthy and the impoverished.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, the Edwardians–named for her successor, King Edward VII–started relaxing the social strictures and pieties of Victoria’s influence and ushered in what American author Samuel Hynes eventually described as “a leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag.”


Titanic brought this Zeitgeist to life in bold, statement scale

It was in this spirit of financial, cultural and social hubris that the massive ship Titanic was conceived of and born.

Taking inspiration from London’s 5-Star Ritz Hotel, Titanic’s designers finished First and Second Class staterooms and public spaces in a range of fashionable styles from Empire stateliness to the florid indulgences of Louis XV. A squash court, a Turkish bath and 24-hour telegraph service offered novel diversions.

Thomas Andrews even added a relatively unnecessary fourth smokestack to give the ship a more grand, imposing profile.

And into the good ship Titanic strode three stratifications of passenger ready to traverse the Atlantic in the circumstances their money–or lack of it–had made them accustomed:

First Class
Titanic’s First Class manifest was a venerable Who’s Who of Edwardian society and the keepers of the Western Hemisphere’s wealth and influence. At least a generation out from the Gilded Age forebears who built their family wealth and social status, the Titanic First Class passengers enjoyed lives of privilege and leisure tempered only by intricate and often labyrinthine social rituals that demonstrated good breeding, old money and civilized superiority to the lower, more vulgar classes.

That is not to say this population did nothing beyond living off the passive income of generational wealth. Many family patriarchs–and sometimes widowed matriarchs–still kept their businesses running efficiently and profitably, but they were also actively involved in exploiting the working classes, fighting unions, building monopolies, and heavily influencing the political and financial systems that kept their family dynasties in wealth and power.

It is certainly fair to say that these families and icons of business also contributed immense amounts of money to build museums, libraries, concert halls and other civic amenities, but not without preserving the wealth and privilege they and were accustomed to enjoying.

The men of First Class gleefully clarify this perpetuation of wealth and power in a lyric sung early in the Titanic musical: “Remarkable U.S. Steel is splitting shares at five to four! Monopoly makes the industry far better than before!”

Second Class
While the demarcations between Edwardian First Class and Second Class were absolute when buying tickets on a luxury ocean liner, they were far more fluid in the real world.

Titanic’s Second Class passengers still spent a great deal of money and expected a great deal of opulence and privilege on their voyage. But for reasons extending from budget constraints to a modest lack of interest in the conspicuous pomp and circumstance of First Class, these passengers still enjoyed extravagant accommodations without extravagant costs–and still without encountering passengers of the Third Class.

That is not to say there weren’t curious lookie-loos and brazen social climbers peering around the metaphorical–and physical–walls dividing First from Second Class.

In a clever bit of narrative construction, the Titanic musical embodies this Second Class ambition in the character of Alice Beane. Based loosely on the actual passenger Ethel Beane, Alice breathlessly and without a trace of shame bombards her beleaguered husband with facts and gossip she’s memorized about the First Class passengers as they board the ship.

It’s a neat writing trick for a number of reasons: It very clearly illustrates the tacky social-climbing aspirations that many Second Class passengers had, it comically delineates the Second Class climbers from the First class noblesse, and it introduces a lot of information about a lot of passengers to the audience without forced or ponderous exposition.

And if Alice Beane’s brazen antics don’t fully establish this demarcation in the first act, John Jacob Astor IV spells it out explicitly in the second act: “A few too many climbers. … Lately I’ve noticed that anyone with a few million dollars considers himself rich.”

Third Class
While First and Second Class passengers traveled with varying degrees of conspicuous privilege and wealth, Third Class passengers traveled with a more urgent sense of purpose: escaping lives of poverty, crime and hopelessness in Europe (and beyond) and emigrating to experience the storied opportunities and dreams of living in America.

These European immigrants were traveling at the end of what historians now call the New Immigration wave, which started in the late 19th Century when President Benjamin Harrison designated Ellis Island in New York Harbor as a federal immigration station.

Earlier immigration waves established a cross-cultural tradition of coming to America to establish new lives, housing and income sources–usually in Irish, German, Jewish and other ethnic enclaves–and then summoning remaining family members to cross the Atlantic to reunite in the New World. With Ellis Island protocols and record-keeping in place, immigration became more efficient, and the numbers of reuniting family members surged well into the 20th Century.

Despite the dangers of tenement life and the poverty wages of Industrial Revolution employment, the spirit of American opportunity still lived in these immigrants’ hearts and imaginations. But as the decades around the turn of the century saw a growing establishment of business owners, professionals and even politicians rising from these enclaves, the lure of legitimate American opportunity became stronger and stronger, drawing more and more people through Ellis Island and driving the exponentially explosive growth of New York City and other urban centers.

And while the White Star Line built its reputation and socioeconomic iconography on the opulent accommodations it provided its high-profile, high-wealth passengers, its primary source of revenue was actually from its Third Class passengers. These passengers were far more economical to house and feed, and their accommodations were designed to maximize the number of people who could occupy any given amount of space.

That’s not to say they were in any way unlivable. To attract Third Class passengers away from competitors who also used this business model, the White Star Line outfitted Titanic and its Olympic-class sister ships with sleeping, eating and public accommodations that had never been seen or experienced by most of its passengers. There were flushing toilets, warm running water, steady meals, comfortable beds and even bathtubs–though the entirety of Third Class had literally two bathtubs: one for all the women to share and one for all the men to share.

Titanic’s Third Class passengers encapsulate this mix of excitement, awe and wonder in a moving set of lyrics as they board the ship at the beginning of the show:

Get me aboard
Call out my name
It’s to America we aim
To find a better life
We prayed to make this trip!

Let all our children’s children know
That this day long ago
We dreamt of them
And came aboard this ship!

These are the cultural waters–both metaphoric and literal–that Titanic navigated as she headed west into the Atlantic

History has given us an understanding of the mechanics and enormity of Titanic’s demise through newspaper accounts, books, movies, YouTube channels and devoted internet sites.

Titanic the musical takes us on a more introspective journey with the ship and its passengers and explores the very human side of the tragedy through a prism of privilege and want, hubris and awe, and shared dreams of a future that’s both collective and jarringly unequal.

SIDEBAR: Why do we use female pronouns for ships?

Throughout recorded history, people have referred to ships as she and her and grouped them with sister ships and sent them on maiden voyages and led flotillas on mother ships … but why?

The short answer is there is no clear answer. Or at least there are many possible answers, including these:

For centuries and millennia, sailors have traditionally been men who’ve often named ships after important women in their lives as a way to keep them symbolically close on long voyages.

Sailors have dedicated ships to goddesses and mother figures (like Christopher Columbus’ La Santa María and the now-retired RMS Queen Mary) to petition for safe passage on journeys.

Ships have been seen as metaphoric mothers caring for the sailor in her womb.

The Latin word for ship is navis, whose linguistic feminine gendering eventually translated to a more literal interpretation of seeing ships as feminine.

SIDEBAR: Cedar Rapids’ Brucemore Historic Site has a Titanic connection

George and Irene Douglas, who lived in Brucemore from 1906 to 1937, have a tragic connection to the Titanic sinking: George’s brother and sister-in-law, Walter and Mahala Douglas, and Mahala’s maid, Bertha LeRoy, were sailing home on Titanic after a three-month trip to Europe to celebrate George’s retirement and to buy furnishings for their Minnesota home.

Mahala and Bertha survived the sinking, but Walter–feeling an obligation to be a gentleman and not board a lifeboat–did not. His body was recovered (and identified by the monograms on his shirt and cigarette case), and he and Mahala are now entombed in the Douglas family vault in Cedar Rapids’ Oak Hill Cemetery.

Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His longtime fascination with the Titanic disaster and with Gilded Age-era history made the opportunity to write program notes for this production especially thrilling for him.

Juneteenth

Afro-American Literature (as it was called at the time) had, quite frankly, a killer reading list. In one semester we covered the major works of Amiri Baraka, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin … and those were just the writers I’d heard of. I was a junior in college, I’d just declared my English major and I had only three semesters to complete it … preferably in classes with great reading lists like this one that I could enthusiastically devour.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be the only white person in the class. And when I walked in that first day, I was. Until two white girls walked in a couple minutes later. I’d never been the racial minority before—no less the racial minority who paradoxically represented the oppressor to the people around me—and the experience made the class and everything we read and discussed and learned all the more profound.

The professor was brilliant. He peppered his lectures with names and dates and fascinating contextual histories without ever using notes. He got his students to participate with enthusiasm—even the shy ones. His influence literally transformed the way I thought and wrote, and I hear his voice in my writing to this day.

He and his reading list taught me way more than I could even hope to expect about the Black experience in America. I found myself spellbound in incredulity as I began to understand the ubiquity—the enormity—of black suffering in the name of white American “freedom” and “liberty.” I literally wept as I read the stories and absorbed the sociopolitical implications of the literature in our curriculum. And I vowed that I would always strive to be aware and understanding of racial perspectives and how they shape the lives and personal contexts of the people of color in my life and my larger orbit.

The class was truly a transforming milestone in the way I defined myself and the way I related to my surroundings. It blew open the doors of my relatively sheltered world and it energized me as a global citizen.

But it wasn't until a year later, when I ran into the professor at a beautifully minimalist staging of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and he not only remembered my name but also offered to drive me home, that for some reason I suddenly realized—to my absolute, gut-dropping horror—that those two white girls and I had slowly, gradually drifted toward each other and had eventually spent the semester sitting—rudely, arrogantly, cluelessly, cruelly—front and center in his classroom … while our Black classmates had sat behind us. In the back of the learning bus.

The professor died within a year after that ride in his car. Before I had the guts and the decency to find him and somehow apologize. I have never kept in touch with anyone—black or white—from that class. Thirty-three years later, I still feel sick to my stomach when I think about it.

As we are currently fully aware, there is racism everywhere—deliberate racism, violent racism, habitual racism, institutionalized racism, self-unaware racism. "I'm not a racist, but …" conversations happen in hushed tones where white people gather and look around furtively before they speak everywhere, every day.

 
Depending on the circumstances when I encounter these conversations, I either walk away or stand there awkwardly until the moment has passed. I've called a few people out on their racist comments a couple of times, sometimes angrily, sometimes in a spirit of hopefully changing a mind or a heart. But regrettably all just a couple of times.

 
I'm—we're all—far from perfect. Despite my best intentions, I'm not racism-free. I admit I fleetingly embraced the overgeneralized idea of "all lives matter" before it hit me like a hail of bricks how that undermined—more accurately, destroyed—the core message of and desperate need for Black Lives Matter. And while I feel a slight level of relief unloading this story on social media, it doesn't exonerate me or excuse me or even atone for my unwitting behavior 33 years ago.

 
I realize that living in my largely privileged white bubble with my white family and my overwhelmingly white friend base both in life and on social media that it keeps me safe from awkward conversations and maybe even confrontations. But I hope that maybe this admission sparks a dialogue somewhere. That it inspires other people to reach out and just talk to each other. And get to know each other. And start to care about each other. Because it's harder to hate—and harder to even realize that you're hating—when people stop being abstractions and start being, well, people.

I don’t even know how to begin to apologize to the Black people I insulted and the white people I enabled in that classroom over three decades ago. And I hope if you know me or eventually get to know me that I'm living my life in a way that you can accept as an apology … and believe that it’s a genuine, productive path to my own improvement.

As I hope everyone is fully aware, today is Juneteenth—also known as Freedom Day—the anniversary of the 1865 emancipation of the last remaining enslaved African-Americans in the Confederacy. I first learned about Juneteenth in a high-school history class, and I’d often wondered since then why it’s never really been a massive national holiday. And now—despite the devastating circumstances that have finally brought it to the country’s attention—I’m thrilled it’s officially become a national holiday … and an integral part of our larger dialogue about race.

The national-holiday designation came quickly and largely unexpectedly last week—especially given what little awareness Juneteenth had even a year ago—so federal agencies and even private companies didn't have a lot of time to plan and coordinate procedures for proper celebrations and shut-downs.

But many found a way, and they've closed their doors and encouraged their employees to take the day off to celebrate the milestone … the freedoms … the progress … and the hope for continued communion in the march toward equality in our country’s minds, our hearts and our shared American culture.