The Devil and/in Miss Jones Prank

It’s the biggest stunt I was ever in on. The Devil and/in Miss Jones Prank went over so well, sometimes it’s hard to believe it really happened in Richmond, Virginia. “...To Stop Worrying and Love Getting Bombed” is a section of a work-in-progress to document the times of the Biograph Theatre. For April Fools Day here’s my story of a one-of-a-kind hoax -- performance art? -- that made headlines coast-to-coast in 1974:

“...The next day a press conference was staged in the Biograph lobby to make an announcement. Every news-gathering outfit in town bought the premise and sent a representative. They acted as if what was obviously a publicity stunt was actually 24-carat news because it served their purpose to play along. After Dave DeWitt -- who represented the theater as its ad agent -- introduced yours truly to the working press, a prepared statement was read for the cameras and microphones. The gist of it was that based on the demand, the crusading Biograph would fight the TRO in court and The Devil in Miss Jones was being held over for a second week. During the lively Q & A session that followed, when Dave scolded an eager scribe for going too far with a follow-up question, it was tough to hold back the laughing fit that would have surely broken the spell.”

Photo: SLANT

Mason Nation Swelling

The out-of-the-shadows history of the university is being told far and wide. It began in an old elementary schoolhouse with 17 students in 1957. Now George Mason University's sprawling Fairfax campus serves nearly 30,000 students. The jolly tale of George Mason's march through this spring's version of annual hoops madness -- which will end happily, or not, in Indianapolis -- has captivated the nation.

As well, sports fans everywhere are now discovering the subtle charms of Jim Larranaga (pictured left), the author of the NCAA’s best Final Four underdog story ever. That’s good because Coach Larranaga, who has been doing his job the same way for a long time, deserves this time in the spotlight.

While most other college head coaches occasionally whine or show anger after games in the media room -- for some it's more than occasionally -- Larranaga's habit is to praise what he sees as praiseworthy and skip the rest. Yet, he is at the same time quite forthright in answering tough questions. This is a coach who consistently sets a good example for his players.

Like the rest of the greater CAA family, VCU Rams coaches, players and fans here in Richmond have been familiar with how rugged Larranaga's teams have been/always are for a good while. In the Big Dance's competition it's said the referees frequently allow more contact -- they let 'em play. For savvy teams that aren’t shy about a little contact that can be a boon.

For well-coached players who can adjust their moves to how closely the officials are calling a particular game another advantage can be taken. For example, nimble Jai Lewis (pictured right) has been using his 275 pounds quite deftly to get his way on the floor, just on the right side of what is being allowed. All the Patriots have been working this aspect of the NCAA tournament so adroitly it’s been quite a treat to watch.

Sportsbook.com says 16 states are betting more on both UCLA and LSU to win it all. Florida is the favorite in 12 states. Mason has only six. Each school's own state is backing it. Curiously, the states other than Virginia that lean toward the underdog Patriots are Hawaii, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island and South Dakota. South Dakota? To see the color-coded map of all 50 states click on this link -- Not Larry Sabato.

With the tipoff of Saturday’s 6 p.m. tilt pitting George Mason against Florida only one day away, after defeating Connecticut in overtime there's no reason for the swelling Mason Nation to fear the Florida Gators. Meanwhile, here are some links to stories that might help with savoring the anticipation of April Fools Day:

AP: Larranaga loving Cinderella ride to Final Four
USA Today: Larranaga well-equipped to orchestrate Mason's run
The Charlotte Observer: Larranaga turns to UVa days for strategy
South of the James: For Black Alumni, George Mason’s Basketball Success is Even Sweeter
Richmond Times-Dispatch: GMU, before the big time
Yahoo Sports: Mason means business

Photos: Larranaga - USA Today; Lewis - SLANT

Music Memo from Page Wilson

This notice came in from my friend Page Wilson:

"We just celebrated our 10th anniversary at our current Swamp home. Twice a year we come to you looking for support in the form of your becoming a member of Your Community Idea Station, 88.9 FM WCVE. For two hours, this Saturday evening is your magic moment.

"T'were it not for WCVE, the Out O' the Blue Radio Revue would not be on the air. I hope you will pick up the phone and become a member.

"VCOM, the Virginia Coalition of Motocyclists, will be answering the phones once again. You don't have to break the bank to have an impact, letting the folks who make our show possible that you appreciate our little Saturday evening foray into the Chickahominy Swamp world of Purebred American Mongrel Music.

"Thank you in advance for your support on this very important mission: to keep great music on the airwaves. 1-800-478-8440."

Insulating Bush

Here’s an eye-opening National Journal article by Murray Waas (thanks to a heads-up from Waldo Jaquith) that's worth a look. In “Insulating Bush” Waas shines a new light on the spy-outing aspects of the Bush administration’s pre-invasion propaganda to sell WMDs-in-Iraq as reality, come hell or high water.

“...The New York Times later reported that White House aides ‘had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the Mission Accomplished banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot.’

“On May 6, in a column in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof quoted an unnamed former ambassador as saying that allegations that Saddam had attempted to procure uranium from Africa were ‘unequivocally wrong’ and that ‘documents had been forged.’ But the column drew little notice.”

A Brief History of Future Shock

by Travis Charbeneau

As our scene opens, we live much like our ancestors lived, in the fixed and perfect world God made. Then the aliens arrive. Their technology is nothing short of miraculous. Their values, to the extent they seem to have any, are appalling. We expect God to blast them at any moment, but He doesn't -- evidence of either God's favor or (can it be?) His impotence before the alien God/gods (again, if they have any).

But worst of all is the sheer culture shock: so many ancient assumptions abruptly dashed.

The Sun, for example, clearly circles the Earth -- yet the aliens convincingly demonstrate the opposite. Then they show how our obviously flat planet is in truth round. Further, Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of many worlds circling one of many stars. Perhaps worst of all, the aliens say we are not the center of the universe; not even mini-gods as we'd been taught for millennia. No, Man is just another animal ... descended from monkeys!

It's too much. We feel ... alienated. Our fixed and perfect world has been yanked from beneath our feet. We wish we could go back to the happy days before the aliens arrived. Their dizzying assertions and proofs are convincing, but even if they have the truth, we'd really prefer some comfort.

Minor variations on this scene replayed throughout the 15th century and Europe's "Age of Discovery." Columbus played the alien to indigenous America; Magellan to the Pacific. Etc. But less noted is the fact that the "Age of Discovery" itself was playing the alien to Europe. Beginning in that same 15th century with The Renaissance and continuing with Galileo, Newton, Darwin, we were speedily deprived of our flat Earth, our center at the universe, our divine exceptionalism. Natural science played the alien to Western Civilization. In many respects, Columbus was only marginally less befuddled by culture shock than the "Indians" he mistakenly discovered.

Natural science was sufficiently alien to the faith-based medieval mind that those who got too far out in front were burned as heretics. Unlike Galileo, Newton didn't face the Inquisition, but both overturned their respective worlds. Darwin likewise escaped the stake, but remains so radically offensive that many "moderns" still prefer comfort to his truth, just another skirmish in our notorious "culture wars."

The Bottom Line, however, has forever had the last word. However offensive, natural science enabled technologies that made for industries that created the Universal Comforter: wealth.

Natural science would therefore win many friends to further the terrible upsets of the Industrial Revolution, regularly overturning our world. From the Renaissance onward, humanity has been increasingly alienated by "too much change, too fast." In 1965 Alvin Toffler branded this variety of culture shock "Future Shock," and eventually published a best-selling book of that name.

"Future Shock" itself came as a shock, especially in America. Americans had invented the future. We loved the new and disdained "the Old World." Americans were supposed to take accelerated change as the norm and be very comfy indeed with the technology, consumerism and "progress" that had so powerfully raised our standard of living. And in 1965 we were still riding the crest of post-war prosperity and global economic hegemony. Apart from the stale Cold War, a new Civil Rights movement and early tremors from Vietnam, there wasn't much to be upset about.

Of course, "The Sixties" had not quite happened by 1965.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement had only begun the previous December. The "Summer of Love" was two years off. What we'd come to see as the fruition of Beat sensibility, "the Movement" against "the Establishment," had yet to grow long hair and head out for the commune "back to Nature," a Hippie take on "traditional values." Among those values were doubts about technology and suspicion of consumption and "progress." The Sixties were very much an effort to come to terms with Future Shock.

In vital respects, the effort failed. Hippies morphed into Yuppies. Boomers came to power. Idealistic Aquarian values, to the extent they existed, were co-opted by orthodontia bills, tuition for the kids, and by 2005, the woes of retirement planning. Doubt and suspicion yielded to the Universal Comforter, plus stock options. But Future Shock persists and accelerates. Terrorists knock down New York.

We owe Communist China 242 billion dollars. Cell phones sprout from our very ears. The upset of "too much change, too fast" today provokes extreme "traditional values" reaction, complete with the old desire to "get back" to this or that Golden Age.

Western fundamentalists long for a return to the Fifties at least, if not some version of the 19th Century. Fundamentalists in the "Developing World," assaulted simultaneously by Western "progress" and the Future Shock that comes bundled with it, long for a return to the 10th Century. Neither can return even five minutes, leaving both to suffer violent, perhaps terminal nostalgia.

Should genuine, ET-style aliens land tomorrow, we might expect to be well-prepared as 500-year veterans of culture shock. But, clearly, we're not. Bred by natural science, the aliens have already landed, and they are us. And, despite all the nice, cozy money -- for those who have it -- many still prefer comfort to truth.

-- 30 --

Note: The photograph of the author and the copy below are from Charbeneau's web site.

"Travis Charbeneau is a freelance writer and musician living in Richmond, Virginia. As an essayist, Travis has written for Alternet and Copley News Service and appeared independently in Utne Reader, Newsday, Esquire Magazine, In These Times, The Detroit News, Keyboard Magazine, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and many other periodicals. His essay 'My Story' won a 1985 PEN award."

No Slack for SubGenius Mom

It's 2006, already, and yet we read this: "Mother pokes fun at religion; loses son."

Outraged by a Church of the SubGenuis parody of a Mel Gibson movie with a relgious theme -- "The Passion of the Christ" -- a Rochester judge with a black hole where his sense of humor ought to be took a mother's child away from her. The woman, Rachel Bevilacqua, was subsequently ordered by the judge, James Punch, to stop blogging about the case. For an off-the-wall story that will leave you wondering -- what the hell?! -- go to Beginnings.

J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, depicted right, is the cartoon pipe-smoking SubGenius logo/mascot. Although he was said to have been killed in 1984, the Church claims he has returned from the dead on numerous occasions.

Picasso and Powell

by F. T. Rea

In February of 1981 I saw Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” with my then-11-year-old daughter. When the Museum of Modern Art’s elevator doors opened the sight of the 25-foot wide masterpiece was so stunning the doors began to close before the spell was broken.
A few months later, what remains history’s most celebrated piece of anti-war art was packed up and sent to Madrid, Spain, upon the 100-year anniversary of Picasso’s birth (1881-1973). There it remains. However, a large copy of “Guernica” hangs on the second floor of the United Nations building -- a tapestry donated to the U.N. by Nelson Rockefeller’s estate in 1985.

On the occasion of then Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation -- underlining his president’s impatience with U.N. members seeking to avoid, or delay, war in Iraq -- the tapestry was completely covered that day by a blue drape. Powell apparently realized that even a replica of that particular piece had to be avoided for a backdrop of any photographs of him on that fateful day.

With the recent passing of the third anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, when I think of what has been uncovered by investigations into the run-up to the invasion, I still wonder how much of what Powell said that day he knew had been ginned up by propagandists to sell a dangerous policy based on bad ideas.

*

In some ways little has changed at the heart of arguments concerning war and occupation since France's army -- as driven by the empire-building vision of Napoleon Bonaparte -- was an occupying force in Spain.

Overwhelmed by the brutality of France's campaign of terror to crush the Spanish will to resist, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) -- a well-connected artist who had much to lose -- took it upon himself to remove the romantic veil of glory, which had always been draped over portraits of war in European art.

Documenting what he saw of war, firsthand, the images Goya hurled at viewers of his paintings and prints radically departed from tradition. Instead of heroic glorification Goya offered horrific gore. The art world hasn’t been the same since.

Following in Goya’s footsteps artists such as Honore Daumier (1808-1879), Georges Rouault (1871-1959), Frans Masereel (1889-1971), Otto Dix (1892-1969), among many others, created still more haunting images illustrating the grittier aspects of modern war.

In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, with the storm clouds of World War II gathering, Spaniard Pablo Picasso created “Guernica.”

On April 27, 1937, to field test state-of the-art equipment, Adolf Hitler loaned a portion of Germany's air force, the Condor Legion, to a fellow fascist dictator -- Spain’s Francisco Franco. The mission: to bomb a small town a few miles inland from the Gulf of Biscay; a Basque village that had no strategic value whatsoever.

The result: utter terror.

Bombs rained on Guernica for over three hours; cold-blooded machine gunners mowed down the poor souls who fled into the surrounding fields.

Four days later with grim photographs of mutilated corpses on the front pages of French newspapers a million outraged Parisians took to their streets to protest the bombing of Guernica.

That same day Picasso, who was in Paris, dropped everything else and began sketching studies for what became “Guernica.” As Spain’s government-in-exile had already commissioned him to create a mural for its pavilion in the upcoming Paris World’s Fair, the inspired artist already had the perfect place to exhibit his statement -- a shades-of-gray, cartoonish composition made up of a terrified huddle of people and animals.

When the fair closed “Guernica” needed a home. Not only was the Spain of Generalissimo Franco out of the question, Picasso decided it wouldn’t be safe anywhere in Europe. Thus, the huge canvas was shipped to the USA and eventually wound up calling MOMA its home until 1981.

*

Colin Powell, a former four-star general, who, unlike some of Bush's frisky neoconservative experts, knows war from the inside out. It seems the Secretary knew something about art history, as well. Six weeks before the invasion of Iraq, he apparently retained a firm grasp on the potential of “Guernica” to cast a bitterly ironic light upon his history-making utterances. That, while he lost his grip on what had been his honor.

Instead of resigning because he disagreed with the Bush policy, Powell said, “We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities...”

Powell accomplished his mission, such as it was. Now he lives with what it wrought, three years later, and counting.

-- 30 --

Webb Endorsed by Clark

The Daily Press reports: “Gen. Wesley Clark, former democratic presidential candidate and NATO Supreme Allied commander, today endorsed Jim Webb in his race for the U.S. Senate.”

According to Webb's campaign web site, Clark said, “Jim Webb is a real leader Virginians can count on. He will put the interests of the people of this great state first and will take his fight to the floor of the Senate. He won't back down from any challenge and he will focus on the job he is elected to do. The people of Virginia deserve a full-time Senator and there is no doubt Jim Webb is the most qualified person for the job. Jim is the only candidate with the experience and skills to broaden our party and defeat George Allen.”

This news buffs Webb’s already impressive military/public service credentials. It’s also easy to believe that Virginians who were attracted to the retried four-star general’s 2004 run for the presidency will probably like Webb.

Photo from Webb campaign web site

Motordrive Kitty

In the spring of 1985 I visited New York City. While there I bought a 35 mm Nikon, to replace a camera that had been stolen, and something I'd wanted for a long time -- a motordrive. For the first month or so back in Richmond, I took the Nikon with me all the time, aiming my new lens at whatever I came across.

These two almost identical prints of a sleepy cat in a storefront window on Main Street, taken a fraction of a second apart, probably made better use of the rapid fire capability of the motordrive than most of what I shot then.

Mason? Why Not?

You say you’ve broken out in green and gold? Have you caught Mason Madness? Maybe you’re looking for a reason to believe the Patriots could win it all? Look no further.

It says right here that with what Jim Larranaga’s suddenly Cinderella assortment of players from the DeeCee/Baltimore area -- a hodgepodge? -- has already accomplished, there’s no real reason for them to fear Florida. After Connecticut, sure, bring on LSU or UCLA.

In covering VCU basketball over the years I’ve seen Mason play at the Siegel Center and at the Coliseum during the CAA tournament a bunch of times. While this year’s team must be the best one Larranaga has assembled, chemistry-wise, this Mason team is a lot like every squad that he has coached -- they beat their opponents in many small subtle ways. They hustle.

To tell the truth, it’s always been a little baffling to me when they win. The top teams in the CAA usually seem to have the Patriots out-manned, but they are consistently one of the best teams in the league, anyway.

Consequently, I’ve figured for some time that Larranaga must be a hell of a coach.

While most other coaches occasionally whine, or even show anger after games in the media room, Larranaga praises what he sees as praiseworthy and skips the rest. Following a win, or a loss, he acts like a man -- a gentleman -- who is grateful to have a good job doing exactly what he likes best. And, he is at the same time forthright in answering tough questions. This coach consistently sets a good example for his players. His "sudden" success is the product of doing it the right way for a long time.

Below are links to a few stories about George Mason’s dream run to the Final Four:

Yahoo Sports: Why Not George Mason?
Richmond Times-Dispatch: Seniors' moments carrying GMU
Sports Illustrated: Don't bet against them

Photo from GMU

Illegal immigration = cheap labor

It seems every news story about illegal immigration I hear or read contains at least one sentence tantamount to this odd phrase -- “they (meaning illegal aliens/guest workers) are here doing work Americans are unwilling to do.” It doesn’t matter if it's NPR or CBS, the Richmond Times-Dispatch or the Washington Post. They all are using that language.

Well, it seems to me that obligatory disclaimer is propaganda, and little more. Even stories willing to challenge the bizarre Bush administration's border policy, which is happy to wink at America's mounting illegal immigration problem, don’t seem willing to question whether our society truly needs these hungry workers from parts unknown.

Moreover, are we to blindly accept the presumption that the American economy’s need for these foreign workers trumps other concerns, such as national security, or worries about the effect this phenomenon is having on the take-home pay of American citizens?

Why don’t the news stories say what's what? Aren't undocumented workers frequently willing to work less money? America's labor force is more than willing to work for a living wage. Then again, desperate people will always do what they must.

Bottom Line: Isn’t it also true that lowering the standard wage for blue collar jobs in this country is a lot more important to the Bush administration and its corporate bedfellows than guarding our borders?

20 Answers from Webb

Raising Kaine presents 20 questions of, and answers from, Democratic senatorial hopeful James Webb.

Mason Madness

The last weekend of March and CBS was broadcasting an Elite Eight overtime game, a George Mason vs. Connecticut match-up. Whoa! What could it mean?

Yes, that George Mason, somewhere up in Fairfax. The underdog Patriots, coached by rather unglamorous Jim Larranaga. You remember straight arrow Larranaga, don't you? He was an assistant under straight arrow Terry Holland at Virginia -- the only coach and school from the Commonweath of Virginia to have made it to the Final Four, until now.

Cinderella is still dancing and having a ball. It's the last weekend of March and now preseason polls don't matter any more: Geo. Mason 86, Connecticut 84 (OT).

The Patriots big man, Jai Lewis, shown above rebounding in 2006 CAA tournament action, scored 20 points, grabbed seven boards and dished out three assists in 41 minutes on the floor against the Huskies.

Links to stories about Mason, the first CAA member ever to kick in the door to the Final Four, are below:

AP Story
Box Score
The Mason Gazette

Art Gallery at the Biograph

This story comes from the Biograph Archives, the web site devoted to the history of the Biograph Theatre (1972-87), where a number of new posts are up.
The staff art show that hung during the Biograph's second anniversary party on Feb. 11, 1974 -- which featured the well-attended "The Devil and/in Miss Jones" prank -- included various works by several then-current employees and some former staff members, too. Most of those who worked there in the early days were artists of one stripe or another. This piece, by yours truly, was made to hang in the space of the lobby’s gallery that usually featured the artists' statements.

I also had a couple of pieces in the show. One of them sold and that was fun. Another piece was stolen. That was a bummer and a weird kind of violation.

Although most of the art shows that hung in the gallery displayed the work of local/VCU-connected artists, that was not always the case. In the first three or four years, when the walls of the lobby regularly featured shows that changed every couple of months, or so, occasionally art by then-renown artists, usually printmakers, was on display. Among them were Ernest Trova, Robert Indiana and sculptor George Segal.

From Ernest Trova's Falling Man series

In the summer of 1978, the same time as the Rocky Horror Picture Show began its five-year run at midnight, we had a show up that was memorable for an odd reason. It was a group of silkscreen prints and paintings by Barry Fitzgerald, who drove a cab and sometimes played keyboard in a popular local band, Single Bullet Theory.

Fitzgerald’s work had a pop art, reaction-to-advertising look. His droll sense of humor showed in a series of a half-dozen similar paintings. Each had a large line drawing in black against a background of a flat field of a single color. The renderings were done in the sparse style of a government pamphlet. Each had the same girl, Lois, coughing as she faced the viewer. Each had a caption written across the bottom of the colored panel which explained that Lois was choking on something. I think Barry was asking about $100 apiece for them.

Let’s say the first one was blue. It might have said, “Lois chokes on a gumdrop.” I think one of them did say that. The next one could have been yellow, it would have said something like, “Lois chokes on a pocket watch,” and so forth. The only other caption I remember had Lois choking on an Egg McMuffin; that one I’m sure of.

One day a man claiming to be a lawyer called me to say I had to take the Egg McMuffin piece down, pronto. He told me he was a local guy, who’d been talking that day with an attorney for the McDonalds fast food empire. He asserted that if I didn’t take it down McDonalds was going to lay some legal action on the artist, the Biograph and me.

For my part, I said something like, “What!”

The caller explained that it wasn’t a matter of Fitzgerald saying anything against McDonalds’s signature breakfast sandwich, which was fairly new then. No. The problem was that McDonalds wanted to protect the use of the words “Egg McMuffin.” They didn’t want it to become a generic term for a sandwich made by anyone using the same ingredients, etc.

Then I must have said something like, “What!”

Anyway, the threat finished with how I better do what the caller said, because all the law was on McDonalds’ side.

Well, I called a friend who is a lawyer to ask him what he thought. He said I ought to buy the painting. Then I told Fitzgerald what had happened. He loved it. We decided to leave it up.

So, what happened? Never heard from the wannabe McDonalds lawyer again. For a long time I've wished I had bought the painting.

Mason Wins!

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Carrying the ball for many college basketball fans who enjoy seeing Billy Packer and other business-as-usual hoops experts made to look/smell like windbags, after they carped about a mere CAA team receiving an at-large bid, George Mason methodically finished off Wichita State: Mason 63, Wichita St. 55.

Now Mason advances to Sunday's NCAA action, the Elite Eight. Below are links to stories about the Patriots' Sweet Sixteen victory over the Shockers:

Associated Press: "...There were questions on Selection Sunday about whether the Patriots belonged at the Big Dance as an at-large choice from the Colonial Athletic Association, in part because the team lost two of its last four games. Think they belong now?"

AP Box Score

The Mason Gazette

Oxymoron: Modern Afghanistan - Updated

In the American political game winning points is frequently a matter of opportunism. Any story that flashes across the wire is another chance to bash one’s opponent. When "shit happens" it's always the other guy's fault. There’s a bunch of people earning a good living because they can take almost anything that happens, on any given morning, and turn it into a little bomb to throw at the other side of the aisle in time for the afternoon news cycle. Almost.

Every so often a story comes along that must baffle even the most hardened of spin doctors. Don't believe me? Try this one: Where’s the red state/blue state angle on the bubbling brouhaha in Afghanistan over Abdur Rahman’s trial, set to begin next week? Rahman is apparently facing execution for committing the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity. Click here to read the story from Reuters.

“...Virtually everyone interviewed in a small sample of opinion in several parts of the deeply conservative, Muslim country on Friday said Rahman should be punished. Several clerics raised the issue during weekly sermons in Kabul Friday, and there was little sympathy for Rahman.

“‘We respect all religions, but we don't go into the British embassy or the American embassy to see what religion they are following,’ said cleric Enayatullah Baligh at Kabul's main mosque. ‘We won't let anyone interfere with our religion, and he should be punished.’ Analysts say they doubt the man will be executed and his case could hinge on interpretations of the new constitution, which says ‘no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam.’”

While I can’t say Rahman’s problem makes President George Bush’s policy in Afghanistan look bad, neither can I say it makes it look good. All it does is make me shake my head with wonder at how different that part of the world is from what makes sense to me. It seems to me that people from the Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan region of the globe are more different from us in America, culturally, than people from China, or Peru, or Iceland, or you name it.

It reminds me of listening to a woman who had just come home from a Peace Corps tour of a year or so in Afghanistan in the early 1970s. Here’s how it went: She was quite disillusioned, not so sure the mission of the Peace Corps was even workable in some places. Her story was that the people she met, at various levels of society in Afghanistan, would all steal anything of hers she turned her back on.

This woman, who was about 25 and a liberal, said the people there -- even those who needed help from the modern world the most -- generally considered Americans to be fools for coming there to try to change anything. Anything.

That was then, this is...

Update (TUESDAY, Mar., 28): Afghan Convert in Hiding After Release

"...Abdul Rahman, 41, was released from the high-security Policharki prison on the outskirts of the capital late Monday after a court dropped charges of apostasy against him for lack of evidence and suspected mental illness.

Irish Festival

This note about the Irish Festival came in from musician/radio host Page Wilson, the emcee for the Irish Festival, which will take place on Richmond's Church Hill, Saturday and Sunday (March 25 & 26):

Benefiting St. Patrick's Church, at Broad & 25th Streets. This 21st annual two-day street festival is full of music, food, dancing, children's activities, and general foolishness, involving celebrations of the Emerald Isle. Your last chance this year to get green!! There's a small cover charge; I think it's $2 or $3. I'll be playing a set around 4 p.m. on Saturday, Recklessly Abandoned onstage with Jay Gillespie, Brian Sulser, and Charles Arthur; and will be there both days helping emcee the main stage.

Saturday’s Main Stage Schedule:
10:00 a.m. -- Parade
10:35 -- Irish Dancers
11:00 -- King Golden Banshees
11:40 -- Irish Dancers
12:10 p.m -- The Sommervilles
12:45 -- Powder Keg
1:20 -- Tinkers Dam
2:05 -- Ex-Patriots
2:50 -- Poisoned Dwarfs
3:35 -- Kelly Kennedy
4:15 -- Page Wilson with Reckless Abandon (pictured above)
5:05 -- Bart Chucker Band
6:00 -- Uisce Bethea

Sunday’s Main Stage Schedule:
10:00 a.m. -- Blue Line Highway
10:35 -- Floating Folk Festival
11:15 -- Dave Alltop
11:50 -- The Atkinsons
12:30 p.m. -- Crossroads Dancers
1:00 -- Ominatago
1:30 -- St. Baldrick's Headshaving
2:00 -- Harrison Deane Band
2:45 -- Susan Greenbaum Band
3:25 -- Gary Gerloff Band
4:05 -- Janet Martin Band
4:55 -- SUAS
5:45 -- Andy & Cindy

Photo Credit: F.T. Rea

A Look at Perspective

by F.T. Rea

After decades of driving small station wagons over the same city streets, about four years ago your narrator switched to using a bicycle as his primary ride. Perched on the seat of my 30-some-year-old ten-speed, exposed to the elements and staying alert for signs of a physical threat, I began to notice things mostly ignored rattling around town in metal boxes on wheels.

Now, with my legs in a little better shape, I'm often struck with how much difference a change in perspective can make.

Last year I came upon an accident involving several vehicles. As I negotiated my way around the debris on Floyd Avenue the sobbing of a young woman caught my attention. She was seated at the wheel of one of the wrecks; her hands clutched her face. When I came within a few feet of her mangled vehicle, the sound of despair pouring out of her caught me off-guard; it pierced my practiced detachment. Although I didn't know her, for a few seconds my heart raced as if she was dear to me.

If I'd been in a car I probably wouldn't have seen or heard her. Pedaling away it dawned on me that it had been a long time since I had been that close to a young woman crying inconsolably.

A few days later riding across a small bridge over the expressway, a car nudged me close to the railing and I glanced over at the traffic going by under the bridge. The sense of being up high and close to the drop-off flipped a caution switch in my head.

After a deep breath I enjoyed a private laugh at how much I've changed over the years, with regard to heights. Somewhere in my mid-30s, the daredevil boy who had once climbed the WTVR tower for grins was body-snatched; he was replaced by a nervous bozo quite uncomfortable with heights.

Where we are provides a specific perspective. A high perch can allow us to see more, in a way, but that obscures small details which can mean a lot. An automobile expands our range, but it also seals us off. While time can reveal new truths, the process usually puts a new set of blinders on us, obscuring the old truth.

As the bicycle chain churned smoothly, I wondered if I'll ever get too scared to ride my bike across bridges like that one.

Photo Credit: F.T. Rea