Look, a picture! (yet more Alaska!)

I thought that I would continue with the Alaska theme this week. This picture (taken by my father) is from the top of the Mt. Alyeska ski run just south of Anchorage. A few moments after this photo was taken, paragliders started flinging themselves off the top of the mountain.

BTW, I know that I missed my last sermon entry, and you poor souls have now gone two weeks without my words of wisdom. I'll make up for it this weekend. In the meantime, stay on the meds.

Look, a picture! (less past, more blast)

This picture is from about nine years ago (hard to believe), during my second trip to Alaska for dissertation research. It was taken in beautiful Sitka, AK, sometime early in December during my winter break from UO. I'm looking southeast along the shoreline back toward Sitka itself. I originally took these pictures with my old one-shot kodak camera and had them developed by Seattle FilmWorks, which at that time also sent back the pictures in a propietary format, which I have converted to jpeg here. (Aren't you all proud of me?)

No Sermon Today

No Sermon today--it is tech weekend, and I am just too tired. Watch the Olbermann commentary again instead.

Olbermann on the anniversary of 9-11

Well said, Keith. This administration has squandered every ounce of good will to come out of the tragedy that was 9/11 with a web of lies and deceit. Our children and our children's children will be paying the price--let us pray it is not too high.

Look, a picture! (request edition)

Never let it be said that I don't try and please my adoring public (such as they are.) As requested, another blast from the past--Christmas 1972, to be exact. Yes, that is a purple velour leisure suit. No, the years of therapy haven't yet helped me cope with this--thanks for dragging up painful memories. I may have to self-medicate--I hope I have enough scotch for drowning this image out tonight.

This will be the last "blast from the past" on Picture Day for a while--I don't want to go to the well too often, and all these ancient pictures are making me feel like I was born in another century....oh, crap. I was born in another century....

All the Great Books--Coming Soon

Well, All the Great Books is coming soon, so I thought I'd better post something about it so the throngs of adoring fans who flock to this blog can make their plans to come to see it. I know that making the trip to Romeoville every year to see one of my shows is the equivalent of a hegira to Mecca for many of you, so start preparing now!

The show runs 9/22-9/24, then 9/28-10/1. Thurs. through Saturday, there are evening shows at 8:00. The Sunday matinee is at 2:30. We have added a Saturday matinee for the second weekend this year at 4:00. If you would like to come see the show, which I think will be pretty funny, let me know, and I'll reserve you some tickets. If you want to see me after the show, don't come on Sunday, as I have show responsibilities after each show. I'll also have an adjudicator for the American College Theatre Festival coming in at some point, and I wouldn't be available after that show either--I'll try to post in the comment section as to when that will occur. I'm sure you will all be waiting with bated breath!

Today's Sermon--Jack Benny

I'd like to discuss another of my heroes for this Sunday's sermon--Jack Benny. Although our lives barely overlap, Jack has been an enormous influence on me. In fact, his portrait was the first I bought for the "Hall of Fame" that I'm still putting together for my office. The title of today's sermon: "On Making Everyone Else Funny--Jack Benny."

I discovered Jack Benny when I was still in grade school. I have always loved old radio programs. I owned (and still own) recordings of radio shows like "The Shadow," "The Green Hornet," "Jack Armstrong--All-American Boy," "Quiet, Please," "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," "Dimension X," "X Minus 1," and many others. I would ride my bike to the Oak Lawn library, which had a better selection than my own, and check out tapes of old shows. It was in this way that I discovered Jack Benny.

It can be very hard for comedy to preserve its laughs over the years. Comedy is usually very topical, very dependant on references and events. Benny's show still made me laugh (still makes me laugh) forty to sixty years later.

Jack had a gift for the slow burn, for the reaction"shot", and an impeccable timing that made him a consummate performer. What really puts him on my Wall of Fame is his willingness to share the spotlight, to make others around him funny. Benny often plays the straight man to his cast of characters, or makes himself the but of the joke. His skinflint, fussy, cowardly, miserly, petty persona--so lovingly cultivated on the show--was completely the opposite from the real Jack. Benny understood that the real key to comedy, particularly in an ensemble, is giving gifts to others, setting up the people around you. I learned first hand how important this was when I was training in improv, and it is the first and most important lesson that I try to impart to my students today.

Moral: The great performer, like the great person, is a generous performer.

Further deponent sayeth not. Go forth and sin no more.

Look, a picture! (A blast from the past....)

This week's picture harkens back to the early 1970s--yes, kids, the "olden times." That is me on the far right, with my mom, my sister Claudine, and my brother Ken (who doesn't seem to be enjoying that lollipop.) Only extensive therapy has allowed me to get over the psychic scars left by years of plaid pants....

Today's Sermon--Ketchup

"Sermon Sunday" once again comes late this week--blame the holiday. Today, I shall sound off against one of the great ills of our society: ketchup (or catsup, I don't care.) The title of today's sermon: "On How I Learned to Stop Kowtowing to Society and Hate Ketchup."


Ketchup, my friends, is evil. There, I said it. Money has been said to be the root of all evil--it is as nothing compared to the festering sinkhole of corruption and calumny which is catsup.

Now some among you may think that I am expressing a hate of tomatoes, or of vinegar, two hapless, helpless participants in the perfidy which is ketchup. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love tomatoes: red, green, heirloom, I don't care. (And I love tomato juice, which has the same relationship to ketchup that a pure, sweet drink of spring water has to a swig of carbolic acid.) I have a cooler relationship with vinegar--we have a nodding aquaintance, mostly confined to salad dressings and the occasional shake of the malt variety over fried fish and chips. Vinegar is always welcome at my table...as long as it behaves itself.

Ketchup, however, embodies everything I dislike about our culture. It is applied, without wit or consideration, to foodstuffs that can survive perfectly well, nay, thrive, without it--often in heaping amounts. Its cloying, sickly sweet taste overwhelms and eradicates the savour of anything it is applied to. It stands as the fervent symbol of the "ugly American," who hastens to cover the slightest soupçon of unfamilar flavor with a red viscous shroud of pat routine. In short, if any condiment is emblematic of the soft bigotry of lowered culinary expectations which pervades this country, it is ketchup.

Therefore, I implore you, dear readers--set your french fries free! Cover your burgers no longer with a layer of the red devil! Apply it not to your fried fish, to your onion rings, to--sin of all sins, calumny of calumnies--your hot dogs! Banish ketchup (and catsup) to the nether reaches of the furthest, darkest, hottest circle of Hell!

Further, deponent sayeth not--go forth and sin no more.

Look, a picture! (Part Deux)

Another picture from my vast digital hoard. This is another selection drawn from my time on the Orkneys--The "Old Man of Hoy," a seastack (no, not sleestak) on the north coast of the island of, you guessed it, Hoy. I had a very pleasant hike to this sight--what you can't see are some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe, which I am perched on at the moment this is taken (as opposed to hiding behind the Old Man.)