A Teacher’s Way Inside "The Outsiders"

The Outsiders, first novel by then - 16 - year - old S. E. Hinton, is hard for an upper - middle - aged teacher to identify with. The narrator is 14 - year - old Ponyboy, and the conflict is mainly about guys who grease their hair and fight the Socs with neat haircuts and fancy cars who look down on them. But the character of Darry, the narrator’s 20 - year - old brother, gives me a way into the novel.

[Photo: Promotion for the 1983 movie, with Patrick Swayze as "Darry," Rob Lowe as "Soda," and C. Thomas Howell as "Ponyboy."]


When we first read about Darry, we’re told how strong he is, how he works to support his orphaned brothers. But he’s “hard” (2). Ponyboy writes that Darry’s “always hollering at me” and that he “rarely grins.” A bit later, when Socs have jumped Ponyboy, Darry rescues his little brother and shakes him too hard. Darry keeps asking “Are you all right?” (6) Ponyboy doesn’t like the shaking, and Darry says “I’m sorry,” but Ponyboy doesn’t believe it: “Darry isn’t ever sorry for anything he does.”

Darry is sorry again when he slaps Ponyboy (50). Ponyboy has come home late, and both Darry and the middle brother Soda are waiting up, worried. When Ponyboy says “I didn’t mean to” come home so late, Darry mocks him, “I didn’t mean to!...I didn’t think!...Can’t you think of anything?” Seconds later, he slaps Ponyboy, who runs from the house. Darry “screams” after him, “I didn’t mean to!”

When they meet again, it’s in the hospital where Ponyboy has been treated for injuries from rescuing children from a fire. Ponyboy has a joyful reunion with Soda before he notices Darry leaning in the doorway, fists “jammed in his pockets,” and his eyes “pleading” (97). Ponyboy realizes, “horrified,” that his brother is crying. Suddenly all the words that he’s heard from the rest of the gang come back to him, that “Darry did care about me” and “was trying too hard to make something of me” (99). This time, when Darry says, “I’m sorry,” Ponyboy hugs him tightly.

Any teacher can look back on times when he said something in the moment that was hurtful, usually thinking that he’s saying it for the student’s own good. When the damage has been done, it feels awful, and when the student forgives, it’s a huge relief, so much so that I can name the times this has happened over decades in the field. This very real moment in the book helped me to connect emotionally to the story.

[Composed in thirty minutes to be a model for students, who will write about their own "way into" the novel, showing how a character, theme, plot line, or something else, develops throughout its chapters.]

My 39th First Day of School

On the first day of classes, I often wear the tie given me 20+ years ago by 8th grader Ryan Sullivan, purchased with British pounds that he borrowed from me during our class trip to London. It reminds me how funny middle school can be, and how grateful teachers and students can be for each other. I always start the day thinking about contingencies and gaps in my opening statements, and I always end feeling relieved, because the kids responded and it went well despite my over planning.

This 39th time, I thought I'd planned it just right. There would be a discussion of the difference between a teacher's grading students' work and a student's earning credit for work, how my job was to en + courage students to do their own best work for full credit. After a few minutes of that, we'd get into a "getting to know you" activity that involved themselves as subjects and some object of importance to them.


But the discussions bogged down, and time ran out. At least other years there'd been a frenetic amount of activity from my over - planned lessons. I was discouraged when my colleague Mary Ann asked how the day had gone.


She empathized. "I didn't want to face the crickets this year," she said.


Her approach was to create work stations for each of her objectives. At one, students removed strips of wood from a tower without the tower's collapsing; each strip of wood prompted a getting - to - know - you type of question that they answered on a single page - where other students would see what they liked in common. Another station required students to read a portion of the syllabus and to generate norms for the class. At another station, students wrote on Post - Its about positive and negative writing experiences they'd had, then stuck those in quadrants for experiences at school, at home, etc.


I didn't get all the details, but I get the approach. In fact, it's the approach I'd already planned for the second day. an activity that I'd tried last year, "Out of the Box," to teach that the essence of creativity is to find connections between things that don't seem to relate, and that it's fun; but you have to search the box to find things to connect! Our boxes this year will be books and life experience.


Another teacher I admire, Katherine, had also been stymied by student reticence. Reflecting, she understood that, while the kids want to make a good first impression, they're also scared of making a bad one, so "they're not going to put themselves out there." She welcomed Mary Ann's model.


I need to put up a Post - It to remind me of this for my 40th first day.

Cass Elliot's Voice

I was the only one to gasp in theatres this summer when two hit movies made allusions to Cass Elliot. Rocketman recreates a party at the home of "Mama Cass" following young Elton John's American debut, where her rich, golden singing voice mixes into other ambient sounds during the scene. Then that voice lends its distinct timbre to the harmony in recordings by the Mamas and the Papas featured in the soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and, in another scene of a Hollywood party, an unnamed character is clearly intended to be Cass: fat, eating pills like candy, in miniskirt and go - go boots, dancing with "Michelle Phillips," who was the other "mama" in the group.


Cass Elliot died of massive heart failure following a sold - out concert at the London Palladium, where she no doubt sang the lyrics written for her night club act, "I'm coming to the best part of my life." She was only thirty - two years old.


I'm nearly twice that old now, and for fifty years her voice has been what I hear when I sing - in the shower, at the piano, or in church. I first heard "Mama Cass" on my radio in a cheerful but pretty stupid song, "Move In a Little Closer, Baby." The highly repetitive refrain was an earworm, but her voice was equally memorable. It matched the quality of the song's brass fanfare - bright and maybe a little cutting in the highest register, warm and smooth at the low end. A year or two later, my dad introduced me to another of her songs, "It's Gettin' Better," because he liked the sentiment:

Once I believed that when love came to me,
It would come with rockets, bells, and poetry.
But with me and you,
It just started quietly, and grew.
And believe it or not,
Now there's something groovy and good 'bout whatever we've got.
'Cause it's gettin' better...

That's how Dad thought of his marriage, to his dying day. It's a pop tune stuck in its g - droppin' groovy time, never covered or played anymore, but it remains an anthem for me.

Both "Move in a Little Closer, Baby" and "It's Gettin' Better" were on the first of several LP's I collected that featured Cass Elliot, both as soloist and as member of the Mamas and the Papas. I sang along, matching my voice and inflections to hers, and began to fancy myself a great singer. I didn't get a lot of feedback on that from my long - suffering family, but that didn't quell my inner Cass.

Only now, through some internet research, I've discovered that this most uncool of all my uncool enthusiasms in middle school was actually closely connected to the coolest icons out there: Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. A documentary told about drugs, rock - and - roll, and, yes, sex. Cass's sunny music is eclipsed in the documentary by tales of Cass's unrequited desire for "Papa" Denny, bitter resentment of Michelle, illnesses caused by substance abuse and starvation diets, and unconsummated marriages of convenience. Cass never identified the father of her daughter.


I prefer to think of a triumphant arc to her story. Cass Elliot, born Ellen Naomi Cohen, came close to the career she wanted when she was called back for the comic role of the secretary in the Broadway musical I Can Get it for You Wholesale, but the show is remembered now for making a star of the singer who beat Cass for that part, Barbra Streisand. On the rebound, Cass joined folk groups in coffee houses, then found huge success with the Mamas and the Papas in folk - rock. The surprise success of her solo recording of an old Bing Crosby song "Dream a Little Dream of Me" gave her the chance to go solo, with modest success. She recorded pop, some country - inflected songs, and an album with rock guitarist Dave Mason. She was a frequent guest on variety shows.  She found her true voice at the very end, when she made a live recording of her night club act, "Don't Call Me Mama Anymore." For me, even though I loved the upbeat numbers most, the song in that set that made the most lasting impression was Cass's voice at its warmest doing a sensitive, heartfelt reading of  "I'll Be Seeing You." At last, a song for grown ups!  CBS TV featured her in a "special," a pilot for a series of her own.





Perhaps because she had tried on so many personae -- pop girl, folky earth mother, glamour queen -- and because she kept going despite the derision, she became a gay icon. An English play A Beautiful Thing and the movie made from it make Cass Elliot's voice the soundtrack to a love story for two young men who find each other and find acceptance among working - class neighbors in public housing. Lyrics to some of Cass's songs seem to be directed at the Stonewall Generation of gays who finally came out of the closet to tell the world that they wouldn't be afraid anymore:

Make your own kind of music
Sing your own special song
Make your own kind of music
Even if nobody else sings along.
 -"Make Your Own Kind of Music" by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill

This summer's posthumous appearances by Cass remind me of one time that she appeared in a film, one I rushed to see fifty years ago, Pufnstuf, an Oz - like fantasy. Cass played a witch, first appearing in a bathtub, up to her neck in bananas, grapes, and other fruit. She sang a song by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, even more "Stonewall" --

At first I'd wonder
What hex I was under.
What did I do to be so different?
Then I discovered
Some others like me.
Wonder no longer,
Together we're stronger.
It's not so bad to be different.
Be truly yourself,
That's what you must be.

Cass, you lifted up a lot of second - rate material with that beautiful voice.  The songs may be gone, but the sound and the feeling remain. I'm grateful.

Re - Branding Hate Groups as Fear Groups

I wonder if "hate groups" and "hate crimes" would lose their cachet for young men if they were re - branded as "fear groups" and "fear crimes?"

Indications from the El Paso shooter's online essay are that he came to the border fearing something like this:

[Photo: Still from the film World War Z. If this is what a young man pictures when he thinks of a wall at our southern border, what is the rational, heroic thing for him to do?]

I'd be scared, too, given the narrative of hordes of "murderers, drug dealers, rapists" from "s---hole countries" who are "invading" our Southern Border in a "caravan" of "tens of thousands."

As the El Paso shooter reportedly wrote, this nightmare scenario long pre-dates the President. It's a narrative called The Passing of the Great Race, bestseller by Madison Grant in 1916, an idea now called "White Genocide." [See "White Nationalist Changes His Mind: Heart Came First" in my blog (12/28/2018] Before that, when Lincoln was a candidate for President, the "Know - Nothing Party" saw immigrants from Roman Catholic countries as the same kind of threat. An even older narrative lies behind all of these, the one we heard in the chant at Charlottesville, "Jews will not replace us." According to that narrative, Karl Marx and other Jews use political liberalism to open borders and dilute the "great race." That was the narrative behind the mass shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue last year.

The President is right to connect the El Paso crime to video games. Some teach us it's okay to target Zombies or Nazis because they're so dangerous, they don't count as human. Mowing them down gets likes and laughs. For the same reason, I and the audience at a showing of Tarantino's latest movie laughed at horrific violence visited upon Nazis and zombie - like cultists.

When the President asked what he can do about the "invasion" at a rally in March, someone said, "Shoot them." The audience laughed; the President quipped, "Only in the Panhandle" to more laughs and cheers. That's not the reaction of insane people or haters; it's the reaction of decent, sane people coming together in a pep rally to face something that frightens them.

The El Paso shooter, fearful of the imminent white genocide thinks of himself as a hero standing up for decent real humans against the Zombie Apocalypse. The foolish young man in the basement of the church in Charleston a few years ago said as much about himself, that someone had to stand up for the white race. The insanity isn't in the shooters; it's in the narrative. But let's not call that narrative anything cool like "pure evil" or "hate"; it's fear.

Iron Lake: Debut of Detective Series, 20 Years Later

←← | ← || →

Moved by William Kent Krueger's stand - alone novel Ordinary Grace to investigate the mystery series touted on the back cover, I'm ready to dive deeper into the series.

Though I didn't give the novel my full attention this summer, and thus missed the fine points of who did what, and why, the novel enveloped me in its place and its community. We're in the town of Aurora, MN, wintertime, where old and modern, Christian and Ojibwe, mix.


Our focus mostly remains on Corky O'Connor, former sheriff, fighting to regain self - confidence lost in the incident that lost him his position. He's also fighting to get his family back together, though he's also having an affair. His relationship to his eldest daughter is especially rich in its push - and - pull. His estranged wife Jo is also a strong character, and portions written through her point of view have their own flavor; she grows to be a full - fledged co - protagonist by the end.


Corky, part - Roman Catholic and part Ojibwe, learned as a boy about the Ojibwe legend of the Windigo, an avenging spirit. Is it only an old legend, a real supernatural presence, or a manifestation of the Ojibwe characters' own fears? Krueger manages to play it all ways, heightening the atmosphere of his story.


I'm ready for more.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

←← | ← || → Use arrows to follow the series in sequence.

Hal Prince Lives

Theatre Director Harold Prince rarely appears in my blog, though his most frequent musical collaborator Stephen Sondheim gets a whole page, my curated list of reflections on Sondheim's shows, music, and lyrics. But Prince's presence is pervasive in how I think of theatre, whether I mention him specifically or not.

Harold Prince brought texture to theatre, a rich layering of metaphor with story, character, song, and design. He pushed his collaborators to give live stage shows the fluid transitions of film. See still photos of any Prince show, not just Sondheim, but Evita and Phantom, and you'll see how striking visuals reflect the content of the story. While he died this week at age 91, he lives on in the work of theatre professionals who now take those qualities for granted.

[Photos: In Follies, we see the show's theme of reflection in a song about mirrors, the singer in the foreground doubled by a "ghost" of her younger self in the background; a favorite scene transition from Phantom; Prince with collaborators Andrew Lloyd Webber above, Stephen Sondheim below.]

Sondheim writes in his memoir that he was the "romantic" of the two, while Prince was an "ironist." The clash made their collaboration strong, inventive, but also, he acknowledges, "cold." The audience often felt they were observing from a "distant" vantage point. (Finishing the Hat, 165-166). He adds that there seems to have been a "thaw," as perhaps time has opened audiences up to what Prince was doing.

Read more in this blog for demonstrations of Prince's ideas in his work:

• Every Minor Detail is a Major Decision (07/19/2016) is my blogpost about Everything was Possible and an early edition of Sondheim & Company, books that go behind - the - scenes for an in - depth look, respectively, at the creation of Follies, and at all the Prince - Sondheim collaborations of the 1970s. Prince made sure that every member of a show's creative team made every choice in support of a unified vision for the show.
  
• Learning from Harold Prince: A Director's Journey (07/19/2014) is what I gleaned from Carol Ilson's study of the director's career. Prince's use of a controlling metaphor on each show is explained here, along with others' appreciation for his enthusiasm and even his ability to "wing it" when he worked.
  
• Joy of Pacific Overtures (05/11/2017) studies how Prince's ideas brought out beauty and joy in a Broadway musical improbably focused on the industrialization of Japan.
  
• Prince with other collaborators.
  • Cabaret had book by Joe Masteroff, score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, but the look, feel, and shape of the show is all Hal Prince, to this day. I responded to a local production in "Cabaret Still Fresh" (06/22/09).
  • Parade was Prince's collaboration with book writer Alfred Uhry and composer / lyricist Jason Roberts Brown, concerning the notorious lynching of Leo Frank. I responded to a disgruntled audience member with my blogpost, "So You Want Theatre to be Uplifting?" (08/04/2008)
• Failure (12/26/2017) concerns the crash of high expectations for the Prince - Sondheim - Furth collaboration Merrily We Roll Along. Cast member Lonny Price directed a moving documentary, The Best Worst Thing That Ever Happened, which I wrote about at Christmastime in "A Merrily Little Christmas." The show, about the crumbling friendship of two musical collaborators, led to the crumbling friendship of its musical collaborators. The documentary does reach a happy ending for us, for Sondheim, and a visibly moved and gratified Prince.
  

Reflection Near the End of Summer Vacation

Yesterday was the last Thursday of summer break, and I'm in a reflective mood.  Since school let out in late May, I've visited all the people on my check list, read some of what I'd intended, developed some of the blog posts that I drafted.  I rode my 60 miles for my 60th birthday, 2000 miles for the year - to - date, and, at this rate, I'm less than a year away from 25,000 miles on my bike, one lap around the earth..

[Photo: End of a 32 mile ride yesterday, at my lowest weight of the summer (146) and fastest average speed of the summer (17.0 mph)]

Every third thought of the summer concerned my beloved Mia. Before May was out, I learned that she would have only weeks left.  Each morning I looked for signs that her energy and interest were flagging.  She remained her loving, happy self until mid - July, and she bounced back a few times, even then.  [Photo from May]

After Mia was gone, I prepared the house for another little spirit.  From a local rescue operation called "Our Pal's Place," I've adopted Brandy, three years old.  She's learning to love rides in the car, walks, sleeping upstairs, tummy rubs on the carpet, late nights reading on the patio, and some hours alone every day while I'm at work or on my bike.  After a couple of weeks, OPP will take her back for heart - worm treatments. Then I hope to adopt a playmate for her.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Ominous Comedy

Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood starts as a comedy along the lines of Wodehouse's episodic stories about posh Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. "Rick Dalton" (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the pretty boy movie star who suffers one embarrassment after another, trying to resuscitate his career with guest appearances on TV in 1969. "Cliff Booth" (Brad Pitt) is his rugged, competent stunt double, but also his valet, chauffeur, repairman, and life coach. DiCaprio and Pitt appear to be having so much fun with each other that we root for both characters in their episodes.

We laugh all the way through the movie, at "Rick Dalton's" self - absorption, at spoofs of 1960s TV and movies, at reminders of pop music and ad jingles. Some moments I want to remember: Kurt Russell as a producer excoriates "Cliff" for fighting with "Bruce Lee" (Mike Moh); Cliff's Pit Bull dog "Brandy" so happy to see him, so fascinated by the plop of foul - looking "mean dog" dog food into a plate. There are moments to enjoy with sheer admiration for recreations of LA at the time, the cars, the highways, the airport, the neon signs of the drive - in restaurants -- all in that slightly orange - tinted color of that era's films.


The most touching scene is also one of the funniest, a conversation between has - been middle - aged actor Dalton and precocious 8 - year - old actress "Trudi" (Julia Buttress). DiCaprio tears up when she advises him, and again, when she affirms him.

[Photo: The fun of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood begins with spoofs of 1960s-era design -- poster, clothes, make - up, that Kodacolor quality]

Tarantino introduces an ominous undertone for his comedy when we learn that the perky young blonde woman next door to Rick Dalton is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). We remember her less from her small roles on TV and movies of the day, than from her notoriety as the most prominent victim of Charles Manson's cult of killers in August, 1969. Tarantino and the actress Robbie build our sympathy as Tate enters a theatre to watch herself in a film. It's touching how she hopes to be recognized, and how she relishes the audience's reactions to her antics onscreen.

Tarantino plays up that tension when a teenager calling herself "Kitty Kat" (Margaret Qualley) hitches a ride with Cliff to Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson ran his cult. One emotional anchor of the movie may be a strange and tense encounter between Cliff and his old, somewhat demented friend Spahn (Bruce Dern) with Squeaky Frohm et. al. waiting outside like zombies.

Tension builds as the neighbors' stories move us nearer the time of Tate's horrific fate. The comedy seems to be over when the radio plays the Mamas and the Papas eerie record "Young Girls are Coming to the Canyon" in the car of Manson cultists driving up to the home of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.


The suspense built, not just because I knew that the Manson murders were approaching, but because the length of the film had pushed me past what my 60 - year - old bladder can endure. The movie is delightful, episode - by - episode, but not compelling; what pulls us forward is the question of what these comic characters will be doing when the violent night comes. Figuring that Tarantino had a surprise in store helped me to make it to the credits before I had to spring for the men's room.