Scout Moves

This might be old news to some of you, but it's new to me. Prisoners in the Philippines, some of them convicted of very serious crimes, dance as part of a daily regimen of discipline and exercise, and the program has cut down on jail violence, drug use and a general feeling of hopelessness. I stumbled on a video tribute to Michael Jackson at Salon, and I thought it was one of the most unusual things I'd ever seen. And I wondered if these prisoners were being forced to dance against their will. But after doing a little digging, I have now learned the prisoners in the prison in Cebu, Philippines audition for this group, and they spend up to four hours a day in rehearsal. Their dancing troupe started out as an exercise class and turned into a dance class with a visiting choreographer, and now they have quite a repertoire. A NY Times article here explains it all. A security consultant for the prison system, Byron Garcia, has uploaded their performances, which they give to audienc...

My father with his brothers (third from the left). I have an article in Small Town Newspaper today. It isn't on line, so here it is as a belated Father's Day thing: Father’s Day can seem only half full when your father is no longer living. My father died November of 2000, and since then I have spent this designated day focused on encouraging my children to make the day special for their father and only thinking about my own now and then. This year, the girls gave their father a gift, and we all spent the day being leisurely and enjoying the occasional sunshine. We relaxed in the backyard for part of the afternoon reading books, chatting about this and that and watching the clouds float by. And in the quieter moments, I thought about my father and what he taught his daughters back when we were teachable. My father, a hard-working construction worker who would have done well with sons, had four daughters all vying for the same bathroom he used, asking to use his car or painting o...

With all this talk about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying, and on the same day, people seem to have forgotten the third in the series of celebrity deaths (and yes, they do happen in threes). Ed McMahon was barely mourned. I harbor no ill will toward the man, but I never understood his place in television history. He seemed to have no discernible talent other than to be able to read cue cards with proper emphasis and without stammering. In the mid 80s, the in-laws had a huge reunion in Pasadena, and we spent a week together doing things like watching the Cubs against the Dodgers, taking the kids to Disney Land and figuring out how to feed over 30 people three meals a day. We also sat in the studio audience for TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes hosted by Dick Clark and Ed McMahon. We were coached to follow the applause signals, so if the hosts said something slightly funny, we knew to chuckle a little, but if they said something knee slapping, we would have to guffaw visibly ...

I went for a ride in the woods yesterday with some old friends. These people, Randy and Koral, are self-employed foresters, and they agreed to take me for a tour of their own private forest and talk to me about trees for a newspaper story. I'm an inside girl, as they well know, so it really was kind of them to indulge me. We drove about 45 minutes south of Small Town to reach their property—they don't live out there, but they manage the forest and hang out there sometimes when they want to get away. Once we got to the barn, we got out of the nice comfy SUV and got into this, an 1983 Jeep: The Jeep doesn't idle, apparently, and every time you stop to look at a tree or maneuver around a rut, it has to be restarted. We maneuvered around a lot of ruts. We followed what the tree people were calling a trail, but it really was more like a space without trees and overgrown with plants the height of the Jeep in places. We just barreled through with Randy's assurance that he hasn...

I was held prisoner at lunch yesterday, and I could only beg privately for my release. Here's what happened: A while ago, a woman from Small Town Next Door called me to introduce herself and to tell me how much she appreciated my editorials in the Small Town Newspaper. Who doesn't like to hear a compliment? So, I said "thank you" and chatted for a few minutes. The woman, it turns out, occasionally writes poetry and wanted me to read some of it, so I agreed to meet her for coffee. Normally, I would be leery of meeting strangers who call out of the blue, but the woman is elderly and an active citizen with a compelling personal story, so I saw no harm. We met for coffee, and I read her poetry which I will not condemn because I couldn't write a decent poem for anything. Since then, the woman has been persistent in asking me to meet for lunch, so we finally met yesterday at a place she chose, one of the worst restaurants in town by my judgment. This woman can be a swee...

Do you remember Art Day? We used to have that around here on a regular schedule, but then I stopped making "art." Eustacia has picked up the practice, though, and has made some interesting things. She calls them Heads On a Stick, but No. 1 calls them Head Kabobs. Eustacia made the two on the right from Crayola Model Magic. The bald man is Henry, and he used to be an Elvis impersonator. The woman with the pink scarf was a flapper from the 20s, and her stage name is Lily. She has aged in way she is uncomfortable with, her creator said, so she does what she can to spruce up, a bit like Norma Desmond. The other two characters were made with the kind of clay that you bake to harden, and they were commissioned by No. 1 who wants them for her new apartment. I knitted the tiny hat for the happy woman, and the colorful guy who looks a little warrior-mask-like is a contemporary head with no real story to tell.

What do you do with a couple of college students who are bored out of their skulls from having to live in their tiny home town for the summer? You rub their noses in it by taking them to the Alpine Museum in Sugarcreek, The Little Switzerland of Ohio. Here are No. 1 and Eustacia so happy to be here. The main floor of the museum has a series of displays about Amish life in the 1800s. This represents the typical austere Amish kitchen. The museum featured a wood-burning stove and an old ice box chilled with actual blocks of ice. These days, the Amish have modern stoves and refrigerators that are gas powered because they don't believe in using electricity. Cheese making is a big deal here, and there are competitions for Swiss cheese making. This is an old cheese vat in a display of an 1800s cheese-making shop. And here is an old Linotype machine that was used into the 1900s by The Budget, a national Amish newspaper that is printed here. I know an older guy who writes a regular column f...

Last night, the family had dinner in Canton, which is the larger town about 25 or 30 minutes north of Small Town depending on how important speed limits are to you. We have dinner there quite often, but last night we chose a privately owned restaurant over the usual—Bravo, Carabbas, Macaroni Grill... We went to Iris , a wonderful little place with a father/son team as chef and sous chef. The menu is varied and interesting from sandwiches and salads to creative entrees. I had grilled moi served whole on a bed of rice with a red curry coconut sauce and topped with a grilled plantain. The plate was lined with a banana leaf (or plantain leaf), and the entree was garnished with a thin slice of coconut cut with a creative design. Every element of the meal was wonderful. For appetizers, we ordered artichoke spread and dates stuffed with chorizo, both absolutely wonderful. Iris is not cheap, but the atmosphere is friendly and casual, and if you live anywhere near Canton, I think you should add...

While at the farm market on Wednesday, I picked up some baby yellow squash from an Amish family that grows some great looking produce, and here's what I did with it: Pasta with Baby Squash and Caramelized Onions 1/2 to 1 pound fettuccine six slices bacon, diced 1/2 large onion, sliced thin 5 small or two large yellow squash, sliced thin 2 -3 cloves garlic, crushed 1/2 cup heavy cream 4 ounces feta, crumbled 1/2 cup chiffonade of fresh basil salt and pepper Parmesan, shaved • Sauté bacon until crisp and drain on paper towels. Cook onions in 1-2 tablespoons bacon fat on medium to low heat until caramelized, about 10 minutes. • While onions are caramelizing, cook pasta according to package directions and drain, reserving 1 cup of cooking water. •Add sliced squash and garlic to the onions and cook five minutes or until just cooked through. Stir in cream and simmer until thick, 2 to 3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. • Return drained pasta to cooking pot off the heat and s...

Eustacia and I volunteered with the farm market yesterday afternoon. It was supposed to be an all-day affair from 2 to 8, but they didn't need us past 3:30. We wore neon-green vests and directed traffic—and to Kyle, I say "thank you" for the loan of the vests. I know mine went well with my oversized J. Jill robin-blue linen shirt. The market is held at the fair grounds every Wednesday, and since this is just the second week for it, people still aren't sure when it starts or where to park. The signs at the entrance say it opens at 3:00, but that doesn't stop people from pulling in at 2:20 and asking, "is the market still open?" So, I took the east gate, and Eustacia took the west, and we directed people under threat of rain. At first, it was just cloudy, but then the assorted clouds turned into one looming gargantuan mass of black swirling anger with thundering tantrums and foot-stomping lightning. We each had an umbrella, and I was sure the metal handles...

We have interesting conversations in our house from time to time, mostly because Eustacia thinks about interesting things. Not long ago, she asked if mermaids eat fish. While she and I discussed the notion, and I said that if humans, being mammals, eat other mammals, then it seems fitting that mermaids would eat fish. The subject seemed reasonable to us until Husband said quite plainly, "Mermaids don't exist." Bubble popped. Now, with No. 1 home for a few weeks, bringing with her a different perspective, we can completely exhaust the subject of whether or not mermaids eat fish and whether or not they exist. No. 1 introduced the philosophical idea that if an object doesn't exist, any statement about it can be true. Santa Claus is bald, for example, can be true because he doesn't exist. To that, I asked how do we know if he's bald or not because no one has ever seen Santa without a hat? Eustacia agreed, but Husband and No. 1 think we're nuts. Back to the mer...

Daughter No. 1 graduated from The Ohio State University on Sunday with a chemistry and philosophy major(s), and we were privileged enough to witness the whole thing. OSU is a monster of a school, and this year they graduated over 8,000 students all at once. They thought they might have set a record. It took 35 minutes for all of the graduates to parade into the stadium, and once they were seated, they looked like this, although not all of them fit into the shot: John Glenn was the key note speaker—Ohio loves its John Glenn—and he had wise words for the students about pursuing life with a "why not" attitude, not limiting themselves with self-doubt and apathy. Here is No. 1 receiving her diploma from the dean of her college: Here she is with her extremely proud mother: And here she is as a wide-eyed two-year-old girl giving her mother a kiss:

I posted this picture on Facebook the other day when I was making broiled trout for dinner, and my friend Shannon M. suggested the lyrics to this song by Art and Artie Barnes as the caption. Apparently, Rolling Stone magazine has named the video in their list of top 100 videos of all time. Eat them up, yum.

I haven't played the piano for you in quite a while—I haven't played the piano for myself very often either, but sometimes I walk past the thing and remember that I like to play. I don't play in public because I'm mediocre at best, and what I really like is getting lost in old music I learned in high school. Make me learn something new or be concerned with accuracy, and I just get frustrated. Mr. Stevesand, my piano teacher in high school, was an old bachelor math teacher who lived out in the country with two mangy Himalayan cats and a grand piano. He was a slob and left filthy pans on the stove, and the cats would eat what looked like old beans and tomato sauce out of them. His hair stood up on end, and his fingers were chubby enough that he had trouble playing as cleanly as he would have liked, but he was a great teacher. As a teenager, I was drawn to melancholy pieces (which means I like to play them now), and Debussey's Rêverie was one of my favorites. The notat...

Talking about trains by way of metaphor yesterday made me reminisce about the train line I used to ride from Indiana to Chicago called the South Shore. The old trains that rode the rails were known as the Little Train that Could. I grew up east of Chicago in the Indiana dunes. You could drive into the city in about an hour without traffic, but when my sisters went to college in Chicago, we started riding the train. It was cheap and easy, and we could make the trip by ourselves. The South Shore line ran from South Bend, Indiana to downtown Chicago and was started in the early 1920s. The cars were electric and got their power from overhead lines, and the ones I rode were built in 1929. They were orange and maroon on the outside with worn, brown leather seats on the inside. You know how the interior of an older car has a certain smell, the smell of age and wear and tear? That's what these train cars smelled like, and I loved them. Our station was a little hut out in the dunes painted ...

Since I quit my job as a graphic designer, I wouldn't say I have created a new life—the one I've been working on all these years has just switched onto a different set of tracks. And now I find myself in the presence of people I wouldn't have met headed in the other direction. I get to be with women who have risked everything and trekked from the remote regions of Guatemala to find something better in America. We read and spell, and they let me hold their babies and eat their food on occasion, and we laugh a lot. And I get to spend time with people eager to tell their stories to all of Small Town. I met a Vietnam veteran who planted minefields outside of Saigon and now counsels Iraq war veterans because he knows what it's like to be taught as a child to kill and then be dropped back into society as if you hadn't just turned yourself inside out. It's all for politics, he says. I met a man who got drunk at a party 25 years ago and finished the evening with a bulle...

I like exaggerations, similes and metaphors. They allow you to be expressive and create word associations that add an extra layer of description. I've talked about spiders enough for you to know I hate them, and because I hate them, I like to overstate their size by suggesting they're as big as a state in the union just so you know I'm not talking about any old house spider you could squish with your thumb. There was a hairy one the size of Montana in the pool last week, and the men who were treating the water and folding up the winter cover laughed when I said that I could never go outside again. My news editor sent an email the other day asking me to write about an event in Small Town, and she said we need to cover it "like dew on Dixie." That simile was new to me, and now I can't seem to stop using it. "Like white on rice" means the same thing, but that has been used up, and it doesn't have the bonus of alliteration that the Dixie line provide...

As a gift for Friday, here is a my favorite scene from Jaws, one that was unfortunately cut from the final film. When someone insists on saying something I don't want to hear, I like to clamp my hands over my ears and sing Stars & Stripes Forever until they stop. I can belt out the melody or the 2nd horn part, whichever comes to mind first. After seeing this, though, I'm considering changing my I-can't-hear-you-is-somebody-saying-something tune.

This post originally appeared October 13, 2006 There used to be this show on WLS in Chicago called The Prize Movie with Ione. Every day, Ione would sit on the set and host a movie, and by "host," I mean she would introduce the film, and then with each commercial break she would completely break the train of thought with chit chat about no particular subject with people who called in. Sometimes callers would talk about the movie, and sometimes they would talk about anything but. Sometimes Ione would do exercises on a mat with this fluffy, white immovable dog beside her. And sometimes a man in an ape suit would rush the stage pretending to be her husband. And if there was too much talking or too many crunches or too much ape and not enough time to show the full film, they would just not show the end—you could miss the last ten minutes if time ran out. During the summers, my sister and I never missed a morning with Ione. I think I was twelve before I ever saw a movie straight th...

This time of year, I can open up the porch doors in the morning and listen to a chorus of birds like you wouldn't believe, each bird trying to claim its own tree and force the other birds to scram. It can stay like that for hours until some neighbor cranks up a lawnmower or decides to trim a tree with a power saw. I remember summer mornings like this when I was growing up, and my mother would assign me the task of moving the lawn while she was away at work. I couldn't stand to do it—I didn't mind the chore of mowing, but I hated pulling the chord on the mower and cutting through the peace of the outside world where all you could hear were birds and agitated squirrels and the wind in the trees. I always waited until later in the day or after someone else in the neighborhood had revved up some other obnoxious man-made machine. This spring season, the big, scary owl was no deterrent, and we were visited by a baby robin that chose our patio as his place to grow up and learn to ...

The local strawberry farm is just now open for picking, I understand, but over the weekend, I wanted to make a strawberry tart, and I would not be put off for the sake of local berries. In March, I picked up a copy of Gourmet magazine, and a photo of this incredible tart was on the cover, and for the last two months I have had to look at the thing. Finally, I caved. Here is my finished tart. It's not cheap with the cost of mascarpone and port, but remember that you only need a little port, and the rest you can save for drinking. It turns out to be perfect at night by the fire—or anywhere, really. Enjoy. Strawberry Mascarpone Tart with Port Glaze Serves 8 For tart shell: 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour 3 tablespoons granulated sugar Rounded 1/4 teaspoon salt 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces 1 large egg yolk 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice 3 tablespoons cold water For filling: 1 1/2 pounds strawberries (about 1 1/2 quarts), trimmed...