I know it’s been a slow news week, but I’ve been impressed with how many column inches have been printed about J.D. Salinger shedding his mortal coil this week. It speaks to the devotion so many people have about his writing, with a little dash of human interest story about the talented artist forced to become a hermit because of the demands of the public.

If I might abuse the cliche, if we didn’t have J.D. Salinger, we’d have to invent him. (In fact, he was reinvented in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and the movie “Field of Dreams” in the character of Terence Mann.) He’s the archetype of a pure artist, disgusted by the commercial demands of the marketplace and the slavering adoration of the masses. Whether this is really true of Salinger, we want it to be true. I think that’s why he’s remembered so fondly by so many. In some ways, it’s a penance that readers are paying, a guilt-ridden offering for living in the crass and conniving world and not sacrificing themselves to change it. Because of the deep mark Holden Caulfield made on them in their impressionable youth, readers have been forced to feel a little like “phonies” themselves in their lives, by doing regular things like growing up, getting jobs and raising families. To some, every little compromise in adult life is a betrayal of Holden.

Ah, but as long as Salinger was still alive, living in seclusion and too pure to share his writing with the world, there was still a connection with the hero of The Catcher in the Rye. Someone out there was still fighting the good fight for honesty and integrity and all those good things. Art will triumph over commerce! The pure soul will live on!! This is exemplified well by the legend that he kept writing these past 40 years and kept all his manuscripts in a safe. There certainly are some crazies out there that would break into a person’s house for holy-grail-type manuscripts, but a safe? A walk-in kind like Scrooge McDuck’s, with piles of papers neatly arranged for each novel and short story? Were there alarms on it like Jack Benny’s?

Now that Salinger is dead, who will be the repository of all those adolescent aspirations? Bob Dylan? Sherwood Schwartz? I can’t think of any writer who would fill the bill. We’ll all be sad when Phillip Roth dies, but he won’t be as beloved, both because his prickly personality has resulted in difficult and thorny books, and because he lacked the good sense to go into hiding when his career was taking off.

Salinger never made a big impression on me, though I certainly admired his prose. His characters and their concerns seemed too rarefied for me, too East Coast, too boarding school. His obsession with children and their inner lives also didn’t grab me, and in fact seemed a little creepy. It was all of a package: characters who were too special to survive in this crummy world, and a writer who couldn’t bear to have anyone sell his babies. You want to be left alone, Jerry? Fine by me. I was always more into Kurt Vonnegut anyway.

One big reason I never much liked The Catcher in the Rye is how I was exposed to it. In my Catholic high school in the mid 1970s, the English Department was a little schizophrenic. The younger teachers wanted us exposed to as much new and stimulating literature as possible, while the older guard was wary about getting parents riled up about “objectionable” books (some memories of the church’s official sanctioning of proper books likely stayed in these priests’ minds long past the time when it was a real concern). So for example, we couldn’t officially read Catch-22, but Mr. Witucki highly recommended we read it during Christmas break because we were likely to be discussing it for a week or two after. In this climate, Catcher was one of those objectionable books. Looking back, I can’t really remember what it was (and still sometimes is) that would get the censors into a lather. Did he visit a prostitute? Did he masturbate? I can’t remember–but I do remember members of our class sharing tips on how to get into the local strip club, the El Mocambo, with a fake ID card, and we treated it like no big deal.

We still read Catcher, but no one could take a book home. Father Enright had 30 copies of the book in his room, and we all read it together in class. Out loud. Paragraph by paragraph. You want a surefire formula for sucking the life out of a book? This one worked like a charm.

Go have a gander at my etymological and rhetorical prowess. William Safire wanted to write this column before he died.

The Water Wonderland. The Great Lake State. The Mitten and the Rabbit. My home state was admitted into the Union 173 years ago today.

A get-rich place of boom and bust. First furs, then lumber, then copper, then autos. And through it all, a crazy race of people. Where the nickname “Wolverine” came from, no one is certain. It’s been speculated that the Native Americans called the white settlers that because of their rapacious attitudes. It may have been coined during the border war with Ohio in 1836 (often called the Toledo War), because of the ferocity of the citizens insisting that we deserved that little strip of land (we were appeased by Congress when they offered us the Upper Peninsula in exchange–a good trade). But the mysterious origin of the word only makes it more endearing to its folks.

I moved out of there just after college, and I still feel a little guilty about it, but in 1982 things were pretty tough, and I didn’t see any jobs there for a writer. Besides, I wanted to try Chicago for its city living and its public transportation. (Well, I didn’t move here for the El, of course, interesting though it was, but because I could survive here without a car.) I also had family roots in the Windy City, so it wasn’t a big dislocation. But often I feel the pull of moving back to Michigan. Why not trade one bankrupt state for another? I know I could never move very far from it, in any case, because I’d miss those cool summer nights, shocking fall colors, and cold winter mornings over the rolling hillsides. There’s something different about the landscape there. The hills move just a little bit looser and dreamier there than they do in Wisconsin, Ontario, Ohio, or Minnesota. Those big expanses of Great Lakes water allow for so much thinking and feeling awestruck. And the people! They have so much pride in their state that it makes the rest of you all look like sneaky carpetbaggers.

So here’s to the Great Lake State! The Yoopers and the Trolls, the stiff-necked Dutch and the factory rats, the displaced Southerners and Middle Easterners, the hunters and the professors, the casino operators and the industrial designers. Your fortunes will rise again, and fall again, but through it all, you’ll always have hunting holidays and Tiger baseball.

It was a very busy weekend just past, with a lot of cleanup, cooking and preparation for the pomp and circumstance of my ever-lovin’ wife earning her Master’s Degree. (BTW, w00t, my dear.)

On Friday night, in the midst of cooking pork-poblano stew for 50, my daughter came down stairs with a tense look in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what it boded, since she had been very sad and secretive about something earlier and wouldn’t confide in me about it no matter how much I yelled and threatened. Certain things can only be shared with Mom, so I conceded defeat and returned to the stove.

When she came down to the kitchen, she tried to speak but had a lump in her throat. I asked her to repeat it, since my ears have long since reached obsolescence. She rose up on her tiptoes and repeated, “I’m a published author!”

And what do you know? She pulled out the latest copy of MUSE magazine and showed me. Last summer she had entered a contest at the magazine for “The World’s Greatest Prank,” with illustrated instructions. She’d forgotten all about it, until she was reading in bed and happened to spy her work in the magazine:

(If you can’t read it clearly, Here are the steps for the “The Great Fortune Teller”:
1. Make a towel turban.
2. Convince your friend that you can tell the future by his/her shoes.
3. Get them to give you a shoe.
4. Look super-mystical.
5. Say, “You…will…go…on…a…long…journey…”
6. Throw shoe far. Run away.)

There were lot of hugs and kisses all around. I was so happy for her that I waited a full minute before I asked the other members of the household, “So, what’s the holdup with YOU?”

Be sure to pull this prank on someone soon. The more you do it, the quicker it will become a staple of Western lore, along the lines of the “Hertz Donut” interrogatory. It’s especially funny if you do it with someone’s boot while it’s slushy outside.

Congratulations, Liesel! Looking forward to going to NYC together and tearing up the Monkey Bar for your first book contract.

So the news comes that Mark McGwire
On the subject of juice was a liar.
Plus, it’s a good bet
That water is wet
And it hurts to grab something on fire

“I’m not here to talk ’bout the past,”
Mark blurted to Congress so fast,
Whatever the pride
He had that day died
To give a defense so half-assed.

To get a job working for Tony,
Mark had to confess his baloney.
He was juiced to the ears
The homer-derby years,
A fame-drunk, preposterous phony.

To get in the Cooperstown Hall,
McGwire will wait for his call
Til Hell freezes over,
The sea swallows Dover,
And Sammy parleys like Bill Engvall.

UPDATE: Here’s another from Friend of Bardball Doug White:

He once chased Aaron and Ruth
With the callow aggression of youth,
But from his head to his toes,
Just like Petey F. Rose,
McGwire won’t face up to the truth.

Back in October, in anticipation of the holiday season, I went on a little binge with the internet and the credit card. The newspapers were running ads about the new “Broadway in Chicago” shows, and who was I to Scrooge things up and refrain from supporting live theater in town that was destined to move on to NYC and earn silos full of cash?

So, as a final Christmas treat for the kids — after Cirque de Soleil’s “Banana Shpeel,” Goodman’s “A Christmas Carol” and a little skiing jaunt to Breckenridge in Colorado — I took the fam to see “The Addams Family Musical”, which is wrapping up its fun at the Oriental Theater this upcoming weekend. And the final verdict: really pretty good. As good as I expected.

It’s hard to imagine that someone hadn’t thought of adapting these characters for Broadway before. I mean, c’mon — Batman and Spider-Man musicals have been talked about for almost a decade. Can you imagine a guy in red spandex breaking out in heartfelt song? Well, sure you can, it’s musical theater, you droll thing! But aside from Spidey swinging on a tether and singing “Watch Out, Dr. Octopus,” it’s hard to imagine any reason to pay $85 to see such crap.

But Gomez, Morticia and Uncle Fester are a different matter. They’ve been covered in comics, television and a couple of movies, and yet they still seem very consistent and intriguing. Hell, I’ll say it: for those of us who watched the TV show as kids, they are like old friends. A house with a trampoline in the living room? Filet of yak for dinner? Exploding model train sets? Who wouldn’t want to visit there?

Playing the Addams patriarch, Nathan Lane was a little too subdued, but he can throw off a funny line with as little effort as someone brushes off lint. His accent teetered between Spanish and Transylvanian frequently, but after a while, it didn’t matter. At least there was no way for him to channel Lou Costello and Ralph Kramden, as I’ve seen him do too many times.

Bebe Neuwirth has been in the role of Morticia, but she apparently wanted to watch the final Bears game Sunday and left us with her understudy. Rachel De Benedet was fine, I guess, but having never seen Bebe Neuwirth live, I wanted to see what all the fuss has been about all these years.

The big news last week was the importing of Jerry Zaks as a show doctor. His presence is a welcome development, I think, because while the show is pretty good, it could be great. The story line is flexible and serviceable: Wednesday has finally grown up and wants to marry a boy she met in school, and the boys’ parents come in from Ohio to meet the Addamses. (Kind of a switcheroo on having a normal member of the family, like Marilyn Munster.)

Unfortunately, Gomez and Morticia are only sort of interesting, hobbled by their concerns about growing old. In fact, one of Morticia’s big musical numbers is a lament about how she doesn’t control the spotlight anymore. The most endearing qualities of Gomez and Morticia, as I see it, are their self-confidence, their passion for each other, and their acceptance of the weird. Contemplating change and age with these two is a difficult task: They are ageless, in a way, and wedded to a mildewy past of family mansions, old clothes, and torture chambers in the basement. I’m not saying they CAN’T contemplate these issues, but the characters have to come alive first. They’re a little languid at the beginning, and despite Morticia lopping the heads off a bouquet and Gomez playing with swords, the energy of young Wednesday, her lover, Fester and even the Ohio couple makes them pale in comparison. Hell, even Grandmama comes off with consistently funnier lines. A little spark of genuine joie de vivre weirdness from Morticia and Gomez at the beginning (maybe even before the opening number, “Clandango”, which adds a complicated new facet to the family dynamic) would give the show a very solid footing.

I hope the musical does well in NYC. I have great affection for these characters, and think they will survive well the necessary volume and energy that Broadway requires. (It’s a lot closer to success than “Banana Shpeel” was when we saw it in November.) The Addams’ individuality and optimism always strikes me as truly American, so much so that I can completely believe that their mansion (a wonderful use of staging, BTW) is located in the middle of Central Park. And to see a musical celebrating genuine, deep-rooted eccentricity and be successful at it would be one of the coolest things to happen onstage since “Urinetown.”

Man, what a year. I can’t imagine anyone is very sad to see 2009 in the rearview mirror. Teabaggers, climate-change deniers, Balloon Boy, Octomom, vampires and zombies, Milton Bradley, Joe “Blow” Lieberman, and Wall Street bankers “doing God’s work”. Unemployment, foreclosures, swine flu, bankrupt companies, disappearing newspapers. “You Lie!” “Imo let you finish, but…” “Common sense solutions for America.” Yeesh, there might be something good to look back on, but I don’t have the stomach for it now.

And don’t even get me started on the whole previous decade. Everyone in the media with time on their hands has been asking what should be the standard way to refer to the past ten years–the aughts, the naughts, the Oh’s. I’d be satisfied calling it the “Double-Bunghole Decade” and leaving it at that.

So that’s enough for me. Vacation officially starts when I stop typing this and go make myself a cocktail. Our time off will be full of travel, but it should be the exhilarating kind. (How could Kalamazoo NOT be?) I just pray that the weather will be cooperative enough to only snow AFTER we’ve arrived at our various destinations.

While it’s been a busy week here, I still managed to write a pretty good Christmas story for my wife for 2009. It’s a tradition that goes back to before we were married. The first story I wrote for her, about a cabbie late at night in Chicago on Christmas Eve, is probably still my favorite. It also was the first thing I ever had published, by the now-departed Chicago Tribune Magazine. I still remember my father-in-law buying up all sorts of copies of that paper around Western Michigan.

I’ve posted a Christmas story on the blogsite today, that I wrote last year. The kids liked it when I read it out loud on Christmas Eve, and though I haven’t gone back to edit it in the meantime, I’m going to put it out there for all of you. You can read “Chex Mix Confidential” by clicking HERE, or go to the pages in the sidebar on the right and look over all my Christmas stories. Hope you find something in there to your liking. Let me know in a comment how (or if) you liked any.

So to all my faithful friends and readers out there, have a wonderful holiday, and let’s look forward to a better 2010. Hey, it’s an election year! How bad could it be??

Things turn ugly as Santa is interrogated by Kiefer Sutherland. Pretty funny. Found on The Daily What.

Readers of my book “Recut Madness” might recognize a similar storyline in my Red State version of “Miracle on 34th Street”, wherein Santa is brought before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay. It has a less happy ending than this video, but then again, I wrote it in 2006. You all can read it right here.

Man, I have got to figure out how to use video editing software! How can a writer get his ideas in front of people if he doesn’t also become a videographer/producer/director/editor/sound editor? It’s nearly impossible.

An old friend just sent a good joke that is both about Christmas and about current affairs. Keep this one in your pocket to have handy at tasteful social affairs.

It is near the Christmas break of the school year. The students have turned in all their work and there is really nothing more to do. All the children are restless and the teacher decides to have an early dismissal.

Teacher: “Whoever answers the questions I ask, first and correctly can leave early today.”

Little Johnny says to himself “Good, I want to get outta here. I’m smart and will answer the question.”

Teacher: “Who said ‘Four Score and Seven Years Ago’?”

Before Johnny can open his mouth, Susie says, “Abraham Lincoln.”

Teacher: “That’s right Susie, you can go home.”

Johnny is mad that Susie answered the question first.

Teacher: “Who said ‘I Have a Dream’?”

Before Johnny can open his mouth, Mary says, “Martin Luther King.”

Teacher: “That’s right Mary, you can go.”

Johnny is even madder than before.

Teacher: “Who said ‘Ask not, what your country can do for you’?”

Before Johnny can open his mouth, Nancy says, “John F. Kennedy.”

Teacher: “That’s right Nancy , you may also leave.”

Johnny is boiling mad that he has not been able to answer to any of the questions.

When the teacher turns her back Johnny says, “I wish these bitches would keep their mouths shut!”

The teacher turns around: “NOW WHO SAID THAT?”

Johnny: “TIGER WOODS. CAN I GO NOW?”

It’s the tail end of a pretty miserable decade. Unemployment is still high, a record number of people are on food stamps, the economy hasn’t recovered yet, and we are still fighting two wars in the middle east. Most of Congress has shown themselves to be meretricious whores, when they’re not acting like WATBs, so we still don’t have national health care or any kind of meaningful oversight on the Gordon Geckos of Wall Street. The Bears completely suck, the Wolverines completely suck, the Tigers traded Curtis Granderson, and there are Asian carp lurking in the sewers. In light of all this….

WE NEED MONKEY DAY NOW MORE THAN EVER!

Just be ready for the hangover and regrets tomorrow.

The recession in Detroit has claimed another victim. The Tigers’ Curtis Granderson, who by all accounts is as good a man as he is a centerfielder, has been peddled to make room on the payroll. No more will Tiger fans see that skinny body, with the knee socks pulled up high, stretching singles into doubles and roaming the expanse of the outfield. I was hoping that this man, picked 80th in the draft a few years ago, would spend his entire career in a Detroit uniform. It was not to be.

And what’s worse, as cliche as it may sound, is that he’s been traded to the Yankees. The crucible of New York and Yankee Stadium will work hard to beat his personality to fit the Yankee standards and extinguish the fire in his beautiful eyes. After a few key strikeouts, the NY fans will turn on him like a revolving door and boo him straight outta town. I just pray that his character is strong enough to last his tenure there. Because they don’t care if you’re a team leader there, or how much good work you really do through your charities. On top of that, you have to win, all the time. How can anyone stand up to that? Why should they need to?

In honor of Curtis G., here’s a little bit of doggerel I wrote for Bardball in 2008:

Grandy!
No one with a bat is more handy,
With a stance coiled like ribbon candy.

Grandy!
His gait is smooth like aged brandy,
Stretching singles into doubles his modus operandi.

Grandy!
In any outfield, verdant or sandy,
He’ll grab more flies than the Rio Grande.
With five skills at his command, he
Picks up his team like a Starbucks grande.
He could melt the heart of Tristram Shandy.
Man o man, that kid is dandy.
Can’t you tell? I love Grandy!

Here’s an image for everyone on Black Friday! Stay safe out there!

(From Failblog.org, of course)

Last night the family and I took in the new Cirque de Soleil show at the Chicago Theater, “Banana Shpeel.” I bought the tix months ago, on a whim, when I first heard about it. Worth a gamble, it seemed.

The verdict: Still worth a gamble.

A friend in town–a PR pro in the arts–said last week on Facebook that the show wasn’t worth going to, even if someone gave you the tix for free. This was a refreshing honesty about the source of ducats, I thought, but it aroused fear and dread about what I’d really see for my hard-earned dollars. (And this being Cirque de Soleil, you KNOW there’s a pile of dollars involved.)

All in all, the show was pretty good. Stupid in a lot of parts, but often the good kind of stupid. Some performers were great, but some were basically expendable. (The big story of the show is how it jettisoned a couple of characters last month because their parts were written out. Well, one player was given credit in the program for appearing as a Pierrot. There were even pictures of him, in his whiteface and baggy white pajamas, trying to get all zany with a butterfly net. A Pierrot in vaudeville? Now THERE’S a shoot that needed clipping a long time ago.) Unfortunately, the question that remained after seeing it was, what were they doing for so many months of rehearsal (and actually years of planning)?

It seems like the problem lies in the vaudeville format itself. A variety show strung together by a flimsy storyline–sounds familiar. Sounds doable. Sounds like a platform to take things to the next level, like the troupe says it intends to do in all its promos. To fault it for that seems churlish. But when intermission arrived after 60 minutes, a slight twinge of unsatisfaction arose in me. Not DISsatisfaction, which is a real word. UNsatisfaction. Like being promised a sandwich, and being served some turkey loaf on Pepperidge Farm bread.

Luckily, the second act was better than the first, with a couple of superb circus acts: A woman who juggled large fabrics on all of her limbs, and a gymnast who twisted and writhed around what looked like a simple lamppost. These were acts that brought wondrous smiles to a spectator’s face, and brought the show up a notch.

For all the people who are curious to see it because they have an abiding interest in vaudeville, clowning and variety acts of all kinds, I say go ahead and see it. The dancing and music was very good, the circus acts were great, and the clowns in general were very good. Could it gel more, or is it doomed to be three shows in one? Time will tell.

I haven’t seen a Cirque show in more than a decade. I remember seeing three in a row, starting with “Saltimbanco”, which blew me away. Then, like Mel Brooks movies, each new one was exactly half as entertaining as the preceding one. With all the smoke machines, annoying new-age music, and ponderous and pompous pacing, the whole thing became tedious. Kind of like Doug Henning once again telling his audience to believe in **wonder!**, the Cirque began to pale against real circus shows, where the players didn’t believe in their own artistic ambitions but just got on with the business of being showmen.

Make no mistake, the circus relies on ballyhoo and hokum, but those are distinct from bombast and hype.

I wish the company lots of luck with “Banana Shpeel.” It’s always good for clowning to have exposure in legit venues. In these tight economic times, however, audiences might start to grumble that they’re not getting their **Wonder Quotient**. It was like years ago, when I ushered at the Goodman Theater’s production of “The Comedy of Errors,” starring the zany jugglers The Flying Karamazov Brothers. One old lady at the matinee came up to me at intermission and angrily complained, “That’s nothing but vaudeville in there!” Hey, no one said it was anything but.

An email arrived today from the Greatest Show on Earth, offering a discount on their VIP tix for the upcoming Chicago dates. Seems a little late in the game for such an offer, since the circus is already here in town. Perhaps they’re having trouble filling seats. Whether that’s the case or not, the family will not be headed down to the United Center this year, to take in the sights, explosions, and $17 popcorn.

This might be the first time in a decade that we haven’t gone to some sort of circus in the city. Most years it’s been Ringling Brothers, but Universoul Circus and Cirque de Soleil have also shown us a good time. And of course The Midnight Circus — whose directors/stars live on the next block down! — have always been a treat (though this year, their show in Wells Park was a rainout. Jonah’s luck!)

This fall, though, the schedule is too hectic to fit in another night when we can go. We’re already planning to see Cirque De Soleil’s new show Banana Shpeel next weekend. Add to that the Goodman’s Christmas Carol (a chestnut, sure, but the kids should see it once) and the new Addams Family Musical in January, and we will have blown our collective wad on theater for the holiday season.

Sorry Ringling, your show this year — “Zing Zang Zoom!” – while hard to type, looks pretty good. Anyway, the circus shouldn’t seem like an obligation, right? And anyway, I’m spending every morning in the circus of my brain, trying to figure out what the real secret is behind “Colonel Mars’ Congress of Freaks”, so I’ve had my fill of spangles and bombast.

But just to show there’s no hard feelings, here’s a picture of a bunch of clowns with a little boy. I don’t care if the kid is laughing or screaming — at least at the circus, you know you’re ALIVE, Junior!

Found this terrific animation this morning on Uni-Watch, a strangely compelling site covering the aesthetics of sports uniforms and logos. Check it out.

Check it out, and if you’re curious about true/slant, browse around the site and tag me as a commentator you’re “following”. It’s the future, baby!!

GOP: Justice is more than NYC can handle

The announcement from Atty. Gen. Eric Holder that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo inmates would be tried in federal court was a strong statement of the primacy of the rule of law in this country.

Predictably, the GOP leadership hated it.

Forget it. It won’t be so different….

[video][/video]

What an inspiring anniversary to celebrate this week. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic division between the vibrant, free West and the state-run, concrete-sculpted East. When the fall of the wall was covered on TV, my reaction was multifold:

1. They’re doing WHAT with sledgehammers? Yay!
2. Why is this happening now?
3. What in the world took so long?
4. Does this really mean the end of the Cold War, or will Germany be the sole beneficiary of this boldness?

And then the most important question of all:

5. How can I joke about it?

This month in 1989 was the third month I had been doing a weekly cabaret called “Theater of the Bizarre”, in the lower level of the Elbo Room (which somehow is still there at Lincoln and George, hosting musicians I’ll never learn about in my middle-aged life). The show needed a little time to find an identity, but Nick the owner was a very good guy, liked what we were doing and open to using the lower level of the restaurant in different ways. My friend Steve Ginensky had asked me to help him get this show going, the only time anyone had ever outright asked me to perform onstage. So, for that compliment, I was grateful.

“Theater of the Bizarre” was hosted by a black-clad Euro-trash art casualty named Armando von Shtuppenvald, accompanied on piano by his lacky Pepe. We smoked, wore berets and wrap-around sunglasses, had bored German accents — think of Mike Myers’ Dieter character, but actually funny. For a while Steve and I swapped these roles — usually during the show — by swapping Armando’s iconic chin beard. After a few months, though, the novelty of this wore thin, as did the amusement of me trying to play anything on piano. (My lousy piano-playing did, however, give us our theme music. Butcher the song “Konnen Sie Der Muffinmeister” well enough and it takes people a while to realize you’re singing “Do You Know The Muffin Man”.)

And with the fortuitous Fall of the Berlin Wall, we were propelled into a two-year run of the show.

The fall of the wall and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t happen overnight, we sometimes forget. It took about 20 months for the latter to occur, and in that time, we were able to milk people’s attention to Germany for all it was worth.

One of my bits was a box of “Cut-out Dolls of the Communist Party”, a kit that allowed you to dress up Deng Xiao Peng as Jobba the Hut and Fidel Castro as a Cuban infielder and a big-band leader. For the president of East Germany (a position that went through a lot of occupants before disappearing completely), instead of changing clothes, I rotated the head, from Erik Honneker to whoever replaced him, to Werner Klemperer, to Arte Johnson in his “Verrrry interestink” outfit. In the picture below, you can see me with the cutouts, while Pepe reads from our book “Kafka fur Kinder.”

And when the rest of Europe began to fear the power of a unified Germany (yeah, it had been a rough century whenever Germany got rambunctious), Steve as Pepe penned one of our best song parodies, to the tune of “We Are The World”:

There comes a time, when you have to forge ahead,
Even though, you don’t know, what you’re doin’…
You’ve got Roseanne und E.T., Disneyland und MTV,
But WE’VE GOT FAHRFERGNUGEN!

We are the World! We are the Germans!
Our men are strong, our women look like Edgar Bergen!
Uber alles said and done, we just want to have some fun….

At which point, Armando would always interrupt from offstage and go into a tirade about his going off the leash, only to be soothed when Pepe began to tinkle “Alley Cat” on the keyboard. It was a grand good silly time, and during “Theater of the Bizarre” I made a lot of good friends. I also got the idea for “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories”, but we can’t blame the Germans for that.

So, you know, it’s great that 20 years ago, millions of people began to throw Communism and their oppressive leaders out the window. Kudos. But much more importantly, it gave us lots of topical material. For that, Steve and I will be forever grateful.

Came across a nice article today at The Paupered Chef, about making hard (alcoholic) cider at home. If you’re looking for a fun, harvest-time, inexpensive food project, this is the ticket. It’s easy and inexpensive, and you can use any type of cider you find, either from the store, the orchard, or the farmer’s market.

I’ve made hard ciders a few times in the past, but they came out very very dry. Champagne seemed like water by comparison, and I’m not a huge fan of bubbly. Nick, the Paupered Chef, ran into this problem too, because whaddya know? He was using champagne yeast! On a lark, he experimented with lager yeast instead. Huzzah! Why didn’t I think of that? I was too skeered to deviate from the recipes, I guess, but I’m wiser now. Brewing is just cooking that takes a little longer to taste the results, so why not experiment? Anthony Bourdain ain’t coming to your brunch, no matter how many times he says he is.

In the comments section, a reader lays out a big cider recipe including brown sugar, cinnamon, and corn sugar. Don’t know how it will come out, but I admire his DIY ambition. Another reader also sticks up for us home-brewers when someone makes a snide remark about brew-nerds. Hey, few things in life are better than homemade beer and cider. It’s cheaper, it’s homemade, it’s fun, and you don’t pay taxes on it. What’s not to love?