Can't believe I haven't posted anything since May!

Check out Ben Goldman's artwork. Go see his stuff at Deviant Art website. Very cool!
Go Ben!

The Atomic Bazaar

To read the first chapter of The Atomic Bazaar click here.

New York Times Book Review
May 20, 2007
The Nuclear Threat
By JONATHAN RABAN
THE ATOMIC BAZAAR
The Rise of the Nuclear Poor.

By William Langewiesche.

179 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.

One need read only the first three pages of “The Atomic Bazaar” to be reminded of William Langewiesche’s formidable talent as a journalist whose cool, precise and economical reporting is harnessed to an invigorating moral and intellectual perspective on the world he describes. In a single paragraph, he lucidly explains the basic physics of the uranium-based atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a professional pilot, and the author of “Inside the Sky,” Langewiesche then leads the reader inside the “pressurized, well-heated” cockpit of the Enola Gay, flying at 31,000 feet in “smooth air,” piloted by the young Colonel Paul Tibbets, and vividly reconstructs the evasive maneuver taken by the B-29 as it banks steeply to minimize the coming shockwaves, while the bomb, named Little Boy, falls for 43 seconds before igniting several miles below, lighting the sky with “the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen.” Tibbets’s subsequent career, from Air Force general to Internet purveyor of autographed souvenirs of that momentous flight, is adroitly sketched. The bombing of Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima, with a plutonium device, is handled in brisk but sufficient detail. Langewiesche counts the total killed in the two attacks (around 220,000), then delivers his own one-sentence bomb: “The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”

There’s no missing the incendiary effect of the word “terrorize,” slyly linking the American attacks on Japanese cities in 1945 and Al Qaeda’s attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon in 2001. Terrorism as a means of warfare is not confined to so-called nonstate actors like Mohamed Atta and his colleagues, but is habitually employed by nation states, including the United States. In 1958, Albert Wohlstetter, the cold war strategist (and guru to many current players on the scene, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), published an influential article whose title, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” succinctly characterized the cold war itself. The chief purpose of nuclear weapons is to terrorize: “mutual deterrence” is simply a euphemism for mutual terror.

On our comprehensively terrorized globe, almost everybody, from covert, stateless bands of jihadists to accredited members of the United Nations, believes himself in need of either ready-made atomic bombs or the technology and expertise with which to manufacture them. “The nuclearization of the world,” Langewiesche writes, “has become the human condition, and it cannot be changed.” It is with that grim but realistic assumption in mind that he sets out on a long expedition, from Washington to Holland, Pakistan, Russia, Georgia and Turkey, in order to discover just how hard or easy it now is for a nuclear aspirant, private or national, to gain possession of such weapons or technology.

First, he adopts the mindset of an imaginative and resourceful jihadist in search of a single device, powerful enough to devastate a city’s downtown. The famed black market in Soviet-era “loose nukes” and “suitcase bombs” turns out to be probably a myth, so Langewiesche, in terrorist disguise, has to shop elsewhere. Plutonium won’t work, for reasons that Langewiesche explains with his usual fluent grasp of technical detail; what’s needed are two small but immensely heavy brick-shaped or hemispherical pieces of highly enriched uranium (H.E.U.), huge numbers of which are stored in Russia’s closed nuclear cities in the southern Urals.

He flies to Ekaterinburg (often spelled with an initial Y in atlases) and from there scouts out one such closed city, Ozersk (population 85,000), a relatively prosperous enclave in a hardscrabble landscape of decrepit farms and toxic lakes and rivers. The 50 square miles of Ozersk and its nuclear facility, Mayak, are contained within a continuous double fence of chain-link and barbed wire. The guards who protect this atomic treasury have a reputation for drinking and taking drugs on the job, and for sometimes killing one another in brawls. Moreover, the United States-supplied radiation detectors are usually switched off, because they’re too sensitive for Ozersk’s radioactive environment, where a fish from the lake, carried in a worker’s bag, is enough to trigger a full-scale nuclear alert. All of this is good news for someone planning an armed raid, but Langewiesche rejects that option: the hue and cry raised after the theft would make escape from Russia with the precious bricks of H.E.U., though not impossible, uncomfortably hazardous.

He falls in with a garrulous American technician, who is escorted daily under guard into the nuclear cities but forbidden to live in them — a rich source of human intelligence and just the kind of contact a prospective terrorist would need. The technician describes the ramshackle security arrangements in the facility, how and where H.E.U. is kept and transported from building to building by truck. When he talks of a strange recent flood of money — the supermarket, transformed from Soviet-style bare shelves to a cornucopia of luxury goods, the sudden appearance of large houses with swimming pools, said to be owned by “plant managers” on government salaries — Langeweische scents his opportunity. “A culture of wealth without explanation” signals the “related culture of corruption.” So he imagines an inside job, with $5 million apiece to two workers eager to join the new gravy train.

With his blocks of H.E.U. in hand, as it were (and they have to be kept at least three feet apart), Langewiesche looks for an escape route. Kazakhstan, though temptingly close, is out for political reasons. He explores other likely crossing points, in Georgia (“one of the most corrupt nations on earth”) and at the Turkish border with Iran. Both frontiers are promisingly porous. In Georgia, the United States Department of Homeland Security has built a state-of-the-art port of entry, complete with a new six-lane highway, which smugglers cheerfully bypass, taking paths so well marked that they are almost roads. The Turkish border is controlled not by the government but by Kurdish tribal chiefs. One way or another, it will be no great feat to transport the stolen H.E.U. to Istanbul, where assembling it into a workable bomb will require a machine shop, a nuclear scientist, several technicians and up to four months of work. Then comes the problem of delivering the device to its target, either in a shipping container or aboard a chartered plane with a dedicated, suicidal pilot.

The most alarming thing about “The Atomic Bazaar” is its utter lack of alarmism. At every point, Langewiesche stresses the difficulties that confront the determined nuclear terrorist. Between Ozersk and an explosion in an American city lies an epic string of daunting obstacles. The terrorist would need to be gifted with an extraordinary run of luck. But none of these obstacles are, in themselves, insurmountable and, in the nearly lawless parts of the world described by Langewiesche, luck comes easily to anyone with millions in his pocket.

For nation states, it’s a different matter. The second half of the book is mainly devoted to the career of A. Q. Khan and his successful manufacture of the H.E.U.-based Pakistani bomb. Khan, a metallurgist, not a nuclear scientist, just happened to find employment at a Dutch consortium where uranium is enriched for peaceful purposes in a “cascade” of linked centrifuges, each spinning at a dizzying 70,000 r.p.m. With shocking ease, Khan copied the plans for centrifuges and bought parts for them mostly on the open market in Europe, marvelously unhindered by either nuclear proliferation treaties or export controls.

A vain man, with a taste for extravagant vacations and large houses, as well as an ambition to be known as a lavish philanthropist, Khan then set himself up as the Sears Roebuck-style supplier of packaged bomb-programs to the world. For sums of around $100 million (assembly required) Khan offered his wares to Libya, North Korea, Iran, either Syria or Saudi Arabia and probably other nations. As the result of a British and American interception, in 2003, of a shipload of centrifuge parts bound for Libya, bearing the clear signature of Khan’s operation, he is now under benign house arrest in Islamabad. But, as Langewiesche writes, there is a “likelihood that much of the network he established remains alive worldwide, and that by its very nature — loose, unstructured, technically specialized, determinedly amoral — it is both resilient and mutable and can resume its activities when the opportunity arises, as inevitably it will.” To quote the title and refrain of Tom Lehrer’s unfortunately evergreen 1965 song about nuclear proliferation: “Who’s next? Who’s next? Who’s next?” Lehrer’s prediction was Luxembourg, Monaco and Alabama. He was not far wrong. A Russian nuclear bureaucrat tells Langewiesche: “At some point this change occurred. The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.”

The Atomic Bazaar” is an important book, but not a perfect one. The best nonfiction books, like good novels, have their own organic structure: chapter flows naturally into chapter, the architecture of the whole sustained by a multitude of subtle foreshadowings of what’s to come and subtle echoes of what has gone before. That is not how any book by Langewiesche works. Like its predecessors, “The Atomic Bazaar” comes with the curse of The Atlantic Monthly all too visible on its pages, its chapters like free-standing boxcars, loosely coupled by a large general theme — much as they appeared in separate issues of the magazine between November 2005 and December 2006. Too little work has gone into its translation from journalism to book. Though short, it’s littered with clunky repetitions and recapitulations, as when we’re repeatedly told what H.E.U. is and does, and A. Q. Khan twice falls from public grace. Again and again I found myself scribbling “Been there, done that” in the margins. This is a serious pity, for Langewiesche is such an outstandingly able writer that he owes the world a proper book, and not another piece of bookmaking whose individual parts are splendid but ultimately fail to compose a shapely, aesthetically satisfying and conclusive whole

Jonathan Raban’s most recent books are the essay collection “My Holy War” and the novel “Surveillance.”

Jonah House Website

Carl video posted on the top of the Jonah House website! Click post title to go there.

And Carl Laughed. the trailer!

the "inward urgency" of the artist

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

To him...
a touch is a blow,
a sound is a noise,
a misfortune is a tragedy,
a joy is an ecstasy,
a friend is a lover,
a lover is a god,
and failure is death.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
-Pearl Buck-

New Skills for a New Century

Project-based learning teaches kids the collaborative and critical thinking abilities they'll need to compete.

By Bob Pearlman

Let's assume the No Child Left Behind Act works fine and that by 2014 every student meets the targeted standards and passes his or her state's exit exam. Will those students be successful as citizens and workers in the twenty-first century?

Not a chance.

Let's further assume that each state's governor gets the one-on-one computer bug and equips all of each state's students with top-flight portable PCs. Will these students now be successful as citizens and workers in the twenty-first century?

Again, not a chance.

No matter how sophisticated the tools we put in classrooms, the curriculum designed to educate students to meet the new standards is sorely inadequate to help them after they leave school. In short, learning -- and schooling -- must be totally transformed.

"Today's graduates need to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, and effective communicators who are proficient in both core subjects and new, twenty-first-century content and skills," according to "Results that Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform," a report issued in March by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

These include learning and thinking skills, information- and communications-technology literacy skills, and life skills.

Students of today enter an increasingly globalized world in which technology plays a vital role. They must be good communicators, as well as great collaborators. The new work environment requires responsibility and self-management, as well as interpersonal and project-management skills that demand teamwork and leadership.

Enter project-based learning, designed to put students into a students-as-workers setting where they learn collaboration, critical thinking, written and oral communication, and the values of the work ethic while meeting state or national content standards. Homewood School, in Tenterden, England, in that spirit, calls its PBL program Total Learning.

In traditional classrooms, students typically work on simple assignments that emphasize short-term content memorization; they work alone, write for the teacher alone, and rarely make presentations. But don't confuse PBL with simply doing activities injected into traditional education to enliven things as a culminating event for a learning unit. Real PBL, by contrast, is deep, complex, rigorous, and integrated. Its fundamentals are fourfold:

Create teams of three or more students to work on an in-depth project for three to eight weeks.
Introduce a complex entry question that establishes a student's need to know, and scaffold the project with activities and new information that deepens the work.
Calendar the project through plans, drafts, timely benchmarks, and finally the team's presentation to an outside panel of experts drawn from parents and the community.
Provide timely assessments and/or feedback on the projects for content, oral and written communication, teamwork, critical thinking, and other important skills. ?????SOUND LIKE SRM???????



Instructors start each unit by throwing students into a real-world or realistic project that engages interest and generates a list of things they need to know. Projects are designed to tackle complex problems requiring critical thinking. The strategy is simple:

To learn collaboration, work in teams.
To learn critical thinking, take on complex problems.
To learn oral communication, present.
To learn written communication, write.
To learn technology, use technology.
To develop citizenship, take on civic and global issues.
To learn about careers, do internships.
To learn content, research and do all of the above.

PBL gets even stronger when projects, and courses, fully integrate two or more subjects, such as English and social studies or math and physics.

Good projects engage students on their own need to know in tackling complex problems and working in teams to generate solutions, products, and presentations. In every project, they touch all the bases the Partnership for 21st Century Skills considers fundamental outcomes of a successful PBL program.

Measuring Results How do we know PBL is working? Project- and problem-based learning doesn't work unless learners obtain feedback. Current assessments don't do the job. State testing and accountability are aimed at schools, not individual student learning, and reports are released once a year, after students have moved on to other teachers. Periodic assessments in managed curriculums mainly provide information to teachers. Students can't improve or become managers of their own learning without constant, real-time assessment and feedback, referred to in PBL instruction as assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment for school, district, or classroom accountability. (See "Healthier Testing Made Easy,"April/May 2006.)

Assessment for learning starts with outcomes, proceeds with projects, products, and performances that map to the outcomes, and completes the loop with assessment and feedback to students.

Rubrics, or scoring guides, delineate the criteria. But they are not just a way for teachers to evaluate student work. In the best PBL classrooms, students see the rubrics when they start the project and deploy them as tools to both self-appraise their work in progress and direct their own learning.

Most schools give students a single grade for a course, often losing important data about their skills and abilities. At New Tech, by contrast, the grade report shows separate grades for content, critical thinking, written communication, oral communication, technology literacy, and any of the other Learning Outcomes appropriate for the course.

New Tech has developed unique ways to assess certain modern skills. At the end of every project, students assess their team members, anonymously, using the online Peer Collaboration rubric. Scores go into a database, where students, through a secure password, can see them. Students can then publish these scores as evidence in their digital portfolios. Teachers and visiting community experts, meanwhile, score the similar online Presentation Evaluation rubric.

PBL comes alive when schools go beyond one-to-one computing and provide a technology platform that serves as a collaborative learning environment. ????????FACEBOOK???????? At New Tech, that environment, the New Tech High Learning System, includes the curriculum and the standards, as well as assessment, reporting, and collaboration and communication tools.

The Learning System immediately and dynamically publishes all project materials to the Internet. And because all projects are housed online, they are available year to year even if teachers leave. Also, instructors can share projects between schools. Fourteen schools throughout the nation based on the New Tech model are doing so. That number will nearly double this fall.

The PBL Challenge

PBL has one factor in common with traditional education -- it takes good teachers to make it work well. It's hard work designing effective projects, scaffolding activities, benchmarks, rubrics, and culminating products and events. And it's a challenge to manage the PBL classroom and orchestrate all phases of the project. But PBL leaves traditional education in the dust. It sets students to work on their own juices, as self-directed learners. It enables them to master state standards and a lot more.

Today's new efforts in PBL are fully standards based and methodologically sound and utilize some form of technologically based collaborative-learning environment to support these students-as-workers classrooms and schools.

New research demonstrates that PBL makes a difference. A recent study of eight New Tech graduating classes shows that 89 percent attended a two-year or four-year postsecondary institution, 92 percent applied some or a great deal of what they learned at New Tech to their postsecondary education or career, and 96 percent would choose to attend the school again.

Researchers in Singapore, who published the book Engaging in Project Work, have found a significant value add in student learning achieved from PBL since its nationwide implementation in 2000.

NCLB tells students that mastery of core subjects will lead to success. By contrast, Thomas L. Friedman, author of the bestseller The World Is Flat, tells his daughters an updated version of the old eat-your-supper-children-are-starving story: "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

What do you tell your children, and your students? Just this: Globalization is flattening the world and challenging the United States as never before. Students here and in other advanced countries must move up the value chain and lead a new era of global cooperation as twenty-first-century learners.

Tell them this, too: You, students of today, need a lot more than core academic subjects. You need to also learn teamwork, critical thinking, and communication skills. Look for a school where you can do real-world projects, where you are given assessment and feedback on all the skills essential in this century, and where you and your fellow students are provided with the workspaces and technology tools to become successful citizens and knowledge workers.

‘Virtue Is Not Its Own Reward’ and Other Lessons for a Life in Art

April 24, 2007

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Edward Albee likes to tell about the time when, at 18, having fled his adoptive parents’ stiflingly conservative household to begin a more expansive self-education in Greenwich Village, he knocked on W. H. Auden’s door. Mr. Albee, frequently referred to as America’s greatest living playwright, thought himself a poet then.

“I thrust my poems in his hand and said, ‘I’ll be back in a week,’ and then I ran,” he recalled. “A week later I showed up, and he invited me in. He spent two hours talking about my poems.”

Thus began the Gospel According to Albee, a two-hour master class on Sunday evening at the Museum of Modern Art’s education building for four high school seniors in the writing division of YoungArts, a program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts.

Mr. Albee had joined a who’s who roster including the artist Julian Schnabel, the musician Wynton Marsalis, the dancer Desmond Richardson and the filmmaker Martin Scorsese for this weekend’s inaugural round of mentoring sessions offered to YoungArts participants in New York.

Founded in 1981 by Ted Arison and his wife, Lin, YoungArts offers six-day intensive workshops in Miami each year to 140 or so creatively inclined high school seniors from around the country and has distributed more than $84 million in prize money.

Beginning in 2006 the top students have been sent to New York for an additional four-day session, capped by a performance and an awards ceremony. Tonight at 6:30, the students are to present a variety show at the Ziegfeld Theater, after which Mr. Albee, Mr. Schnabel, Frank Gehry and Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others, will hand out achievement awards of $5,000 and $10,000.

“For the students, it’s not so much the money as it is the master classes in helping them to decide whether these are paths they want to pursue for the rest of their lives,” Ms. Arison said. “This is what really impacts them.”

Whether Mr. Albee’s young listeners — Asher Frankfurt, Michael O’Brien, Phoebe Rusch and Kristofer Wellman — will be writers for life is anyone’s guess, but he had plenty of advice for them.

“I think every writer has a different time when they decide they’re a writer,” he said. “George Bernard Shaw wrote his first play at 42. He was a music critic until then. For that matter, Mozart knew he was going to be a composer at 4, but he was special.”

Mr. Albee was a sage 8 years old when he began writing poetry as an escape from a household in which he said he never felt quite at home. By his teens he had completed what he called two very bad, very lengthy novels, now hidden among the theater stacks at the New York Public Library.

In his early 20s, he carted along a trunk full of his poems to the MacDowell Colony, where on a late night over a bottle of bourbon, Thornton Wilder asked him if he had ever considered writing plays.

“I’m not suggesting Wilder saw a playwright in me,” he said. “I think maybe he was just trying to save poetry from me.”

Mr. Albee said he stopped writing poetry at 28: “I was a better imitator than a poet. I never felt like a poet. And you can’t do what you don’t feel.”

“I think all of us have a moment when we figure out what kind of writer we are,” he went on. “Should I have started writing plays sooner? No. Everyone has a different age when they are capable of writing what it is they’re meant to write.”

For Mr. Albee, that was his first play, “The Zoo Story,” which he completed in just three weeks in 1958. Still, not even William Inge and Aaron Copland were able to help him get it produced in the United States. It wasn’t until after the play’s German premiere, when a critic from The New York Times happened to comment that it was a shame a young American playwright couldn’t get attention back at home, that it made it to Off Broadway.

“Virtue is not its own reward,” Mr. Albee went on. “There is a huge difference between popularity and excellence. As playwrights you are going to be encouraged not to hold the line, to simplify, to make things not the way you intended. You are going to be encouraged to make plays perfectly happy at three and a half hours into two hours.”

How long should a play be?

“As long as it should be,” Mr. Albee said, nearly roaring. “Everything has its duration, which has nothing to do with commerce. Do what you have to do to make a living, but figure out if you’re going to be a hack or your own person.”

“Can’t writers be allowed a certain amount of creative fluidity?” asked Ms. Rusch, whose own efforts waver between poetry and prose.

“Yes, but people are generally better at one thing than another,” Mr. Albee said, ticking off a list of offenders. “Henry James was a great novelist but a rotten playwright. Arthur Miller wrote a novel. Don’t go near it. Sam Beckett was a great novelist and a great playwright. He reinvented both forms, which is why people can’t touch him.”

Did he think that true art and true writing came with experience and life, Mr. Frankfurt asked?

“You’re using terms I don’t understand,” Mr. Albee said.

Mr. Frankfurt began again. “I mean coming out the way we want to say it,” he said.

“Then say it,” Mr. Albee said. “That’s your job, to change things and bring people around to your point of view. You’re either right or wrong. Creativity begins in the unconscious. Don’t write too soon. Get to know your characters. You should be writing absolutely real people in real situations. That’s the only way actors can act your stuff.”

There were practical matters, too: never lecture, don’t be obscure, never become someone’s opinion of you, and remember that every line has two purposes — one, to delineate character, and two, to advance the plot. Everything else is a waste.

There was also a reading list of the four essential 20th-century playwrights (Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett and Brecht) and a warning.

“If you only read the great writers, you’ll be in trouble,” he said. “Read junk. It’s enormously encouraging to tell yourself, ‘I can do better than that.’ ”

And finally, a word of encouragement.

Mr. Albee recalled his dismay in 1962 at finding 75 people — actors, understudies, stage managers, costume designers — in the room on the first day of rehearsals for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“There’s only one reason that there are 75 people sitting here,” Mr. Albee said the producer told him. “Never lose sight of the fact that the play begins with you and that it can never be done without you.”

Class dismissed.

Canceled by Principal, Student Play Heads to Off Broadway

April 12, 2007


By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
Students at a Connecticut high school whose principal canceled a play they were preparing on the Iraq war are now planning to perform the work in June in New York, at the Public Theater, a venerable Off Broadway institution, and at the Culture Project, which is known for staging politically provocative work. A third show at a Connecticut theater is also being discussed.

“We are so honored and thrilled, there’s no words to describe how excited we are,” Bonnie Dickinson, the teacher whose advanced theater class at Wilton High School put the play together, said yesterday.

After barring the scheduled performance of the play, a series of monologues mainly from soldiers titled “Voices in Conflict,” school officials have cleared the way for an off-campus production. In a letter Tuesday, Thomas B. Mooney, a lawyer for Wilton’s board of education, wrote that the district and its superintendent, Gary Richards “have no objection to students privately producing and presenting the play on their own.”

While defending the school’s initial decision to halt production pending “concerns about balance, content and copyright,” Mr. Mooney wrote that “school officials have no interest in interfering with the private activities of students.” The letter goes on to say that the teacher of the advanced theater class that initiated the project, Ms. Dickinson, could also participate in an independent production “as long as she makes clear that she is acting as an individual and that the play is not sponsored in any way by the Wilton Public Schools.”

In canceling the play last month, the school principal, Timothy H. Canty, cited concerns about political balance, sourcing, and the possibility of hurting Wilton residents “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving.”

But administrators have said in recent days that they might yet allow the play to be performed on school grounds in some modified form, but probably not this spring, when about half the 15 cast members are scheduled to graduate.

The Public Theater, which is tentatively scheduled to stage the show June 15, and the Culture Project, where it is slotted for the prior weekend, were among scores of off-campus venues, including church basements and college auditoriums, that offered the students a platform after the play’s cancellation.

“We started in the school, but we don’t have to finish in the school,” Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member, said yesterday. “Wherever we do the play, I think we will all be happy and grateful that that venue has allowed us to do so.”

The students were also awarded a “Courage in Theater” award last month for their “non-performance” from Music Theater International, a New York agency that licenses many high school productions. And last week, theater greats including Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, John Weidman, Marsha Norman, Doug Wright, John Guare and John Patrick Shanley, under the auspices of the Dramatists Guild of America, joined the National Coalition Against Censorship in calling for the school district to allow the play to go on.

Martin Garbus, a First Amendment lawyer who has been working pro bono with Ms. Dickinson and several parents of cast members said yesterday that schools are allowed to regulate speech that has the potential to disrupt learning. But canceling the initial production only increased the likelihood that its eventual performance on school grounds might stir up trouble, he said. “Had the school not done any of this stuff, it would have just gone through uneventfully,” Mr. Garbus said.

Ms. Dickinson said the script was a work in progress, and that students would now be rushing to polish it and rehearse amid other spring concerns, like the prom.

“We’re looking forward to finishing writing the play or putting it together, as it were, and coming up with some kind of ending that feels right with the kids and then rehearsing it,” said Ms. Dickinson, adding that the show may be performed on-book, with the cast reading from scripts, to relieve anxiety about memorizing lines before their Off Broadway debut.

Good Day, Mr. Kubrick...

This is a real audition video - funniest thing you'll ever see! MUST WATCH!

Colin Graham, Opera Theatre's artistic director, dies

By Sarah Bryan Miller
POST-DISPATCH CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC
04/06/2007

Stage director, librettist and Opera Theatre of St. Louis artistic director Colin Graham, 75, died Friday of heart failure. He had more than 400 opera, theater and TV productions to his credit, including 48 works staged for Opera Theatre. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire at Buckingham Palace in 2001 for service to British and American opera.

He did not want a funeral; a memorial concert is being planned for June. He had no survivors.

"Colin was not only a mentor for me but a good friend," said renowned soprano Christine Brewer, who is honorary chair for the concert. "I was always inspired by working with him. Those experiences were among the best of my life, and I will miss him."

The day before he died, he was working on the world premiere of composer David Carlson’s "Anna Karenina," for which Mr. Graham wrote the libretto. He had turned over stage directing duties to his assistant, Mark Streshinsky. "Anna Karenina" will be performed this month at Florida Grand Opera and in June at Opera Theatre.

"His presence will be very much felt in the production of ‘Anna Karenina,’ and for several seasons to come," said Opera Theatre general director Charles MacKay.

Mr. Graham was born in London in 1931. He attended Stowe School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His first ambition was to be an actor; his second was to sing opera. On his third try, directing, he got it right.

He started as an assistant stage manager at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 1953, he began a long association with composer Benjamin Britten and the English Opera Group, quickly working his way up to directing. Britten’s "Noyes Fludde" was the first of the 56 world premieres Mr. Graham directed. Opera Theatre spokeswoman Maggie Stearns said that’s an operatic record.

Mr. Graham had a keen interest in Japanese theater and studied its forms in Japan. He commissioned Minoru Miki's kabuki opera "An Actor's Revenge," directing both the world and American premieres (London 1979, St. Louis 1981). That led to "Joruri," which had its world premiere in St. Louis in 1985 and its Japanese premiere in 1988, and of "The Tale of Genji," which premiered in 2000 in St. Louis and in 2001 in Tokyo.

"I find working on a new piece very challenging and stimulating, especially if one is involved a little bit in the creative process, not just taking a fait accompli and being told to get on with it," Mr. Graham said in a 2005 interview.

He worked at the Aldeburgh Festival, Sadler's Wells Opera/English National Opera and Santa Fe Opera, and staged productions for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Washington Opera, San Francisco Opera and New York City Opera, among others. He came to Opera Theatre of St. Louis as director of productions in 1978, becoming artistic in 1985.

He directed a new production of Britten’s "Gloriana" for Opera Theatre’s 30th season in 2005, which starred soprano Christine Brewer. Other major Opera Theatre productions included "Beatrice and Benedict," "Il Viaggio a Rheims" (in its U.S. premiere), operas by Britten including "Paul Bunyan" (in the U.S. professional premiere) and the U.S. premiere of Bernstein’s final version of "Candide."

Mr. Graham was a prolific author of librettos, for composers including Andre Previn, Britten, Stephen Paulus, Bright Sheng and Miki.

He designed and directed a new production of Britten's "Death in Venice" for the Metropolitan Opera and Covent Garden; it was nominated for an Olivier Award in London.

Mr. Graham, who wrote a training handbook for opera singers, made a specialty of training them. He was a U.S. citizen, lived in St. Louis and held honorary doctor of arts degrees from Webster University and the University of Missouri.

Mr. Graham became a body builder relatively late in life, in 1991, and a champion in his age category soon after.

"I always used to laugh at the huge and hideous trophies they gave out" at competitions, he told the Post-Dispatch in 1999. "Now I’ve got four of them standing in a corner of my living room."

Donna Wilkinson, chair of the Opera Theatre board, said: "He leaves a legacy of creativity and excellence, and we will miss him terribly, both personally and artistically."

MacKay added: "He’s given us so much. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of opera, and there isn’t anyone else like him in the world."

Along with his knowledge of theater, "he was such a kind man, in addition to being a forceful, and at times demanding, presence. … He was a kind and generous man, and to the end he had a twinkle in his eye."

Day 2 Humana Festival

1:30

STRIKE-SLIP
by Naomi Iizuka
directed by Chay Yew
March 8 - 31
in the Pamela Brown Auditorium

In the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, three diverse families each carry a dream, but a recent shooting creates an unexpected seismic shift that rocks each family's foundation. Faults that were once inactive or dormant suddenly appear and abruptly change the way they think about themselves, their community and their dream.

4:30

dark play or stories for boys
by Carlos Murillo
directed by Michael John Garcés
March 2 - 31
in the Bingham Theatre

A teenage boy’s fictional Internet identity begins as a harmless game. But the game takes on a frightening reality when real emotion overtakes his online relationship. When Nick’s virtual world online collides with the real one, his fantasies of love, intimacy, obsession and betrayal spiral into consequences that lead him to the brink of death.

9:00

10-min Plays
Clarisse and Larmon by Deb Margolin
A middle-aged couple receives a visit from an anonymous soldier bearing the news of their son’s death and a photograph of his leg. A searing look at the nature of language and truth, and what happens to the value of bodies in the face of war.

Mr. and Mrs. by Julie Marie Myatt
Once newlyweds learn who they are, are they sure that they "do?"

I am not Batman. by Marco Ramirez
A streetwise kid with a stomach full of grocery store brand mac-and-cheese lives out his Batman fantasy. Accompanied by live drums, crashes, bangs, and justice.

Day 1 of the Humana Festival

LOt's O' tHeater today...



10:00 am

WHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL ENDS
by Sherry Kramer
directed by Tom Moore
March 10 - April 1
in the Victor Jory Theatre
Produced in cooperation with InterAct Theatre Company

After the death of her mother, Sherry's family home goes up for sale. Sifting through memories of a seemingly simpler time as she packs up her baby-boom childhood, Sherry begins to connect the dots between her Barbie collection and America’s place in the rest of the world. A touching, funny, deeply personal and daringly global play.

3:30 pm


THE UNSEEN
by Craig Wright
directed by Marc Masterson
February 25 - April 1
in the Bingham Theatre

Imprisoned by a totalitarian regime and mercilessly tortured for unknown crimes, Wallace and Valdez live without hope of escape or release. When an enigmatic new prisoner arrives and begins communicating in code, both men develop new relationships to each other, their captors, and themselves. A darkly humorous examination of faith in an uncertain world.

8:00 pm

BATCH:
An American Bachelor/ette
Party Spectacle
Conceived by Whit MacLaughlin and Alice Tuan
With Text by Alice Tuan
Created by New Paradise Laboratories
Directed by Whit MacLaughlin
March 21 - April 1
Performed offsite at The Connection, 130 S Floyd St. at Market St.
Bar service available.

Your friend is getting married. Wants to say goodbye to single life forever. You throw a party. A real bash. Does the sky break open? Do you summon the divine? Change? Or just get drunk? Speak now, friends, or forever hold your peace. This collaboration between New Paradise Laboratories and playwright Alice Tuan is the second in NPL's series examining rites of passage.

10:30 pm

The Open Road Anthology
by Constance Congdon, Kia Corthron, Michael John Garcés, Rolin Jones, A. Rey Pamatmat and Kathryn Walat
with music by GrooveLily
directed by Will MacAdams
March 23 & 25
in the Bingham Theatre

The call of the open road has reverberated since the founding of our nation: the wind in our hair and promise of a new life around the corner; or in the legacy of land taken, communities divided and the increasingly guarded borders behind which Americans drive. Comic and thought-provoking, these writers examine how America's yearning for unfettered freedom resonates today and where it rings hollow.

Good Morning America & my letter to the editor

Wilton Bulletin
Editorial Page


Dear Editor:

I am a 1988 graduate of Wilton High School. I valued my education at Wilton so much that I knew I wanted to be a high school teacher by the time graduation rolled around. In fact, in my senior year I facilitated a theater class for my peers because we did not have a theater teacher on staff. During the last months of high school in 1988 twenty-five of us wrote a play and performed it during lunch hours. No credit. No grade. We just had something to say.

I have now been teaching at Clayton High School in St. Louis, Missouri, for eight years. Clayton has a very similar demographic to Wilton. I read about the “dramatic” conflict at Wilton High just this morning. I was appalled and slightly embarrassed to admit that this was MY high school. I was proud, however, to admit that these were the “theater kids” at my alma mater who, like me, just had something to say. The difference is that twenty years ago I don’t remember an administrator even reading our script prior to performance, but today, these students are not just being censored; they’re being systematically silenced.

I immediately downloaded the Voices in Conflict script for my first day back from spring break. I have just finished reading it with my Advanced Acting class. My students, assessing the script as well-balanced and fluid, could not believe that the production of this script would be stopped. Most of my students are themselves currently in a production that I have co-written about a 73-year-old priest who is in prison for protesting against nuclear weapons. It is a politically and religiously charged play that we produced at Clayton High School to sold-out houses and are taking to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer in Scotland. (www.andcarllaughed.com)

Unlike Wilton’s Voices, our play was welcomed by the administration and Board of Education, who have made it their mission to support student free speech. In fact, Clayton students and administration worked together to pen an award winning policy that supports students’ freedom of speech “on a level that is almost unrivalled nationally.” (Student Press Law Center, 2002) The policy reads, “Because Clayton High School student journalists historically have exercised their powers and skills in a responsible, respectful and appropriate manner, the board encourages the administration to allow its student journalists to function with minimal oversight consistent with the trust and respect that its student journalists have earned.”

I live in the Midwest, and while we in the Midwest have been the butt of many jokes about unsophisticated conservatism, how sad that, as one of the top high schools in the country, Wilton does not trust and respect students enough to see when they are being intellectually responsible in exercising their right to engage a community in honest dialogue.

I hereby publicly invite the cast of Voices in Conflict to come and perform their wonderful script here at Clayton High School in St. Louis in conjunction with my own students in our play about peace. We would welcome you with open minds.

To everyone involved, be glad that the youth of our nation care.

Respectfully,

Kelley Anderson Ryan, Wilton Class of ’88

Controversy at my high school over political play- hmmm....

CLICK ON THE POST TITLE TO READ THE CURRENT FULL VERSION OF THE SCRIPT.


March 24, 2007
Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School

By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
WILTON, Conn., March 22 — Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year’s “West Side Story,” performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” on stage last fall in the school’s smaller theater.

For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.

“In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member. “What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the play might hurt Wilton families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,” and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students.”

“It would be easy to look at this case on first glance and decide this is a question of censorship or academic freedom,” said Mr. Canty, who attended Wilton High himself in the 1970s and has been its principal for three years. “In some minds, I can see how they would react this way. But quite frankly, it’s a false argument.”

At least 10 students involved in the production, however, said that the principal had told them the material was too inflammatory, and that only someone who had actually served in the war could understand the experience. They said that Gabby Alessi-Friedlander, a Wilton junior whose brother is serving in Iraq, had complained about the play, and that the principal barred the class from performing it even after they changed the script to respond to concerns about balance.

“He told us the student body is unprepared to hear about the war from students, and we aren’t prepared to answer questions from the audience and it wasn’t our place to tell them what soldiers were thinking,” said Sarah Anderson, a 17-year-old senior who planned to play the role of a military policewoman.

Bonnie Dickinson, who has been teaching theater at the school for 13 years, said, “If I had just done ‘Grease,’ this would not be happening.”

Frustration over the inelegant finale has quickly spread across campus and through Wilton, and has led to protest online through Facebook and other Web sites.

“To me, it was outrageous,’’ said Jim Anderson, Sarah’s father. “Here these kids are really trying to make a meaningful effort to educate, to illuminate their fellow students, and the administration, of all people, is shutting them down.”

First Amendment lawyers said Mr. Canty had some leeway to limit speech that might be disruptive and to consider the educational merit of what goes on during the school day, when the play was scheduled to be performed. But thornier legal questions arise over students’ contention that they were also thwarted from trying to stage the play at night before a limited audience, and discouraged from doing so even off-campus. Just this week, an Alaska public high school was defending itself before the United States Supreme Court for having suspended a student who unfurled a banner extolling drug use at an off-campus parade.

The scrap over “Voices in Conflict” is the latest in a series of free-speech squabbles at Wilton High, a school of 1,250 students that is consistently one of Connecticut’s top performers and was the alma mater of Elizabeth Neuffer, the Boston Globe correspondent killed in Iraq in 2003.

The current issue of the student newspaper, The Forum, includes an article criticizing the administration for requiring that yearbook quotations come from well-known sources for fear of coded messages. After the Gay Straight Alliance wallpapered stairwells with posters a few years ago, the administration, citing public safety hazards, began insisting that all student posters be approved in advance.

Around the same time, the administration tried to ban bandanas because they could be associated with gangs, prompting hundreds of students to turn up wearing them until officials relented.

“Our school is all about censorship,” said James Presson, 16, a member of the “Voices of Conflict” cast. “People don’t talk about the things that matter.”

After reading a book of first-person accounts of the war, Ms. Dickinson kicked off the spring semester — with the principal’s blessing — by asking her advanced students if they were open to creating a play about Iraq. In an interview, the teacher said the objective was to showcase people close to the same age as the students who were “experiencing very different things in their daily lives and to stand in the shoes of those people and then present them by speaking their words exactly in front of an audience.”

What emerged was a compilation of monologues taken from the book that impressed Ms. Dickinson, “In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive”; a documentary, “The Ground Truth”; Web logs and other sources. The script consisted of the subjects’ own words, though some license was taken with identity: Lt. Charles Anderson became “Charlene” because, as Seth Koproski, a senior, put it, “we had a lot of women” in the cast.

In March, students said, Gabby, the junior whose brother is serving in the Army in Iraq, said she wanted to join the production, and soon circulated drafts of the script to parents and others in town. A school administrator who is a Vietnam veteran also raised questions about the wisdom of letting students explore such sensitive issues, Mr. Canty said.

In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests. A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”

Seven characters were added, including Maj. Tammy Duckworth of the National Guard, a helicopter pilot who lost both legs and returned from the war to run for Congress last fall. The second version gives First Lt. Melissa Stockwell, who lost her left leg from the knee down, a new closing line: “But I’d go back. I wouldn’t want to go back, but I would go.”

On March 13, Mr. Canty met with the class. He told us “no matter what we do, it’s not happening,” said one of the students, Erin Clancy. That night, on a Facebook chat group called “Support the Troops in Iraq,” a poster named GabriellaAF, who several students said was their classmate Gabby, posted a celebratory note saying, “We got the show canceled!!” (Reached by telephone, Gabby’s mother, Barbara Alessi, said she had no knowledge of the play or her daughter’s involvement in it.) In classrooms, teenage centers and at dinner tables around town, the drama students entertained the idea of staging the show at a local church, or perhaps al fresco just outside the school grounds. One possibility was Wilton Presbyterian Church.

“I would want to read the script before having it performed here, but from what I understand from the students who wrote it, they didn’t have a political agenda,” said the Rev. Jane Field, the church’s youth minister.

Mr. Canty said he had never discouraged the students from continuing to work on the play on their own. But Ms. Dickinson said he told her “we may not do the play outside of the four walls of the classroom,” adding, “I can’t have anything to do with it because we’re not allowed to perform the play and I have to stand behind my building principal.”

Parents, even those who are critical of the decision, say the episode is out of character for a school system that is among the attractions of Wilton, a well-off town of 18,000 about an hour’s drive from Manhattan.

“The sad thing was this thing was a missed opportunity for growth from a school that I really have tremendous regard for,” said Emmalisa Lesica, whose son was in the play. Given the age of the performers and their peers who might have seen the show, she noted, “if we ended up in a further state of war, wouldn’t they be the next ones drafted or who choose to go to war? Why wouldn’t you let them know what this is about?”

The latest draft of the script opens with the words of Pvt. Nicholas Madaras, the Wilton graduate who died last September and whose memory the town plans to soon honor by naming a soccer field for him. In a letter he wrote to the local paper last May, Private Madaras said Baqubah, north of Baghdad, sometimes “feels like you are on another planet,” and speaks wistfully about the life he left behind in Wilton.

“I never thought I’d ever say this, but I miss being in high school,” he wrote. “High school is really the foundation for the rest of your life, whether teenagers want to believe it or not.”

Private Madaras’s parents said they had not read the play, and had no desire to meddle in a school matter. But his mother, Shalini Madaras, added, “We always like to think about him being part of us, and people talking about him, I think it’s wonderful.”

Red Noses Day! Africa Relief

A silly day. A serious day.

Every year the British charity Comic Relief has a special day for raising money. This day is called Red Nose Day because shops sell funny red noses and people wear them to school or work. Last year over four and a half million people wore the noses and the money they spent went to help special causes in the UK and in Africa. But noses are just a small part of the day.

Comic Relief uses humour and the comic talents of Britain’s best comedians to produce very funny shows on TV. During the shows the presenters ask the public to telephone and send money to help people all around the world. On the same day schools and people at work or home organise events to raise money for the charity. In 2002 the Harry Potter author J K Rowling wrote 2 books to raise money, the British group Westlife gave the money from their number one record and millions of television viewers sent donations. Sixty one million pounds were raised to help orphans in Rwanda, Aids victims in Africa and disabled people in the UK. And everyone had fun raising the money!

Each year the red noses change. In 2003 the nose was hairy. This year the theme of Red Nose Day is the ‘big hair day’. The charity wants people to do something silly with their hair to raise money. Some people are going to wear a silly wig to work or colour their hair a strange colour. One man is planning to have all his hair cut off and friends and family will pay him to do it. This haircut money will go to the charity. So if you are in the UK on March 11th do not be surprised if you see lots of silly people with strange hair and red noses. You might even see a car or a bus wearing a red nose. They might seem a bit silly but it is all for a good cause!!

Amazing Grace: See the Movie - Make a Difference

Take some time over break to go see Amazing Grace, the film that chronicles the story of abolitionist William Wilburforce and his campaign to end the slave trade in England. Then go to the Amazing change website and see what you can do to become an abolitionist. It is estimated that there are 27 million people still suffering at the hands of slavery. Whether young boys kidnapped and forced to fight in war or a young woman forced to be a prostitute or whole families forced to work in rice mills, slavery exists today.

Make a Donation to the Fringe Scholarship Fund

All donations go to help support scholarships to help offset the cost of the trip to Scotland for the theater students performing "And Carl Laughed." www.andcarllaughed.com for more information.

New domains make it easier to get information for CHS theater students!

Check out:

www.claytonhightheater.com

and


www.andcarllaughed.com

Go See StraY Dog Theatre this weekend! $5!!

'THE BALTIMORE WALTZ'
By Calvin Wilson
POST-DISPATCH THEATRE

Deeply moving

Grief and the challenges of coping with it was
the inspiration for "The Baltimore Waltz," Paula
Vogel's semi-autobiographical play about a brother,
a sister and a crisis. But seldom has such a potentially
depressing subject been approached with such
exuberant wit. This Stray Dog Theatre production of
the celebrated comedy-drama is likely to elicit as many
laughs as tears.

Michelle Hand turns in a winning performance as Anna,
whose devotion to her brother Carl (a wonderful B. Weller)
is reaffirmed when they're confronted with a deadly disease.
In response to the threat, the siblings decide to go on
a long-deferred trip. Along the way, they encounter quite a
few quirky characters all of them spiritedly played by Will Ledbetter.

Satirically addressing the AIDS crisis and the early response
to it, Vogel delivers a play that's at once smartly observant
and deeply moving. And director Gary F. Bell brings out both
aspects of the material in fine style.

BY CALVIN WILSON

Calling All Playwrights!

SPECTRUM, a new one-act play competition

First Run Theatre in association with St. Louis WritersGroup
is proud to announce we are accepting submission for
the Spectrum competition. Spectrum is a festival of short
plays up to 6 a night. Plays should be from 10 minutes
to 30 minutes long, new unpublished plays by St. Louis
regional playwrights. Must have a simple set and small
to moderate number of characters. Plays will be fully staged
with minimal sets, costumes and props.

Submission period is from December 1st to March 31st.
Selection announcement to be made by mid April.

The Spectrum Festival of plays will be performed on
June 15, 16,17 and 23, 24, 25 at
Thomas Hunter Theatre, DeSmet High School,
233 N. New Ballas Road, Creve Couer 63141.
Script may be submitted in one of two ways.

Hardcopy:
3 copies without playwrights name on cover or any pages.
1 cover sheet with name and contact information.

Mailed to
Spectrum Festival
5215 Winona Ave
St. Louis, MO 63109

If playwright wishes scripts returned then a
self-stamped enclosed envelope must be included.

Softcopy:
Microsoft Word (.doc), Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), or Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Playwrights name should not appear in this file. A separate file with
contact should be submitted.
Email to info@firstruntheatre.com

Bono's acceptance speech at the NAACP Image Awards

Children's Defense Fund - Campaign for New Priorities

One Year in the Life of American Children:
2,243 children and youth under 20 commit suicide.
4,941 children and youth under 20 are killed by firearms.
112,230 children under 18 are arrested for violent crimes.
531,591 babies are born to teen mothers.
613,514 children are corporally punished in public schools.
1,200,000 latchkey children come home to a house where there is a gun.
1,977,862 students are suspended from public schools.
2,695,010 children are reported abused or neglected.
Meanwhile...between 1995 and 1999 the Defense Department will spend $150 billion on nuclear weapons alone. That money could fund:
4.4 million low-income college students
2 million summer jobs for youth annually
Head Start for 1.4 million kids
Tutoring for 9.8 million students
Treatment for 30,000 drug addicts in one year
Infant care for 2 million families...
and much, much more.
Sources: Children's Defense Fund, Center for Defense Information, Defense Budget Project, and Campaign for New Priorities.

She sang and the earth moved a little...

Prehistoric Rome Lovers Found in Embrace: any ideas for a play?

ROME, Feb. 7, 2007
By ARIEL DAVID Associated Press Writer
(AP)
It could be humanity's oldest story of doomed love.

Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua, just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of "Romeo and Juliet."

Buried between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric pair are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, as their teeth were found intact, said Elena Menotti, the archaeologist who led the dig.

"As far as we know, it's unique," Menotti told The Associated Press by telephone from Milan. "Double burials from the Neolithic are unheard of, and these are even hugging."

The burial site was located Monday during construction work for a factory building in the outskirts of Mantua. Alongside the couple, archaeologists found flint tools, including arrowheads and a knife, Menotti said.

Experts will now study the artifacts and the skeletons to determine the burial site's age and how old the two were when they died, she said.

Luca Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome's National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum, said double prehistoric burials are rare _ especially in such a pose _ but some have been found holding hands or having other contact.

The find has "more of an emotional than a scientific value." But it does highlight how the relationship people have with each other and with death has not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in villages and learning to farm and tame animals, he said.

"The Neolithic is a very formative period for our society," he said. "It was when the roots of our religious sentiment were formed."

The two bodies, which cuddle closely while facing each other on their sides, were probably buried at the same time, possibly an indication of sudden and tragic death, Bondioli said.

"It's rare for two young people to die at the same time, and that makes us want to know why and who they were, but it will be very difficult to find out."

He said DNA testing could determine whether the two were related, "but that still leaves other hypotheses; the 'Romeo and Juliet' possibility is just one of many."

Keepin' Up with the Kabat House

Brentwood Police Arrest Occupation Project Group

4:50 Seven members of the Cabat House affinity group were arrested Thursday, February 8 by the Brentwood police at Representative Carnahan's office charged with trespass, and in the case of two who chose to go limp, resisting arrest.
10:00 UPDATE: All seven members of the Cabat House affinity group have been released after posting a total of $4500 in bond.

Those arrested:
Jonathan March, computer programmer
Carolyn Griffith, refugee worker
Teka Childress, homeless worker
Mary Harojodan, refugee worker
Sarah Sunseri, teacher
Leilani Castleman, health worker
Jorj Arteaga, refugee worker



Anti-war protestors arrested at Carnahan's office


Associated Press
ST. LOUIS - Police arrested seven war protesters Thursday while they conducted a sit-in at Rep. Russ Carnahan's office. The protesters refused to leave the office unless the Democratic congressman promised to vote against any additional funding for the war in Iraq.

Brentwood Police Chief Rick Knight said the demonstrators were arrested for trespassing when Carnahan's office closed at 5 p.m. and they refused to leave. Two of the protesters decided to lie down, and were charged with resisting arrest, Knight said.

The protesters were in Brentwood jail Thursday evening while bond was being set, Knight said.

Spokesman Bill Ramsey said the demonstrators are part of a national campaign called The Occupation Project that aims to end new funding for the war through civil disobedience.

Carnahan spokesman Glenn Campbell said Carnahan won't promise to vote against new money for the war until he is sure the vote won't deprive troops in the field of equipment they need to protect themselves.

Ramsey said his group thinks there is plenty of money to bring troops home safely, and all new funding will simply extend the war.

Campbell said Carnahan opposes the plan to "surge" more U.S. troops into Iraq. He said Carnahan might support proposals from the Democratic Party to limit funding, although none has been put forward.

Ramsey said the sit-in is part of a national effort and the St. Louis group plans protests at other federal offices.

Kevin Wall says that there are Clowns in Town!

Thursday, February 15th at the Jewish Community Center
Buy tix at Metrotix

CLOWN THEATRE LICEDEI, St. Petersburg, Russia

Licedei is the first and the only clown-mime theatre in Russia, which is engaged in the clownery genre. World-acclaimed clown Slava Polunin created the theatre in 1968 in Leningrad in association with a few other prominent actors. Some of theatre’s founders are still working in Licedei and, along with Licedei’s workshop graduates of 1984, represent the main creative group of the company.

For the last 10 years the theatre toured and participated in the most prestigious festivals not only all over Russia and the former Soviet Union countries, but also in the U.S., Brazil, Germany, France, Spain, England, Holland, Denmark, Austria, Japan, New Zealand, Cuba, Hong-Kong, China, Vietnam, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Finland, Israel, Canada, Korea, Tahiti and Luxembourg. Theatre actors have been featured in many outstanding performances including world-famous Canadian Cirque Du Soleil (Allegria and O).

Prizewinner of the most prestigious Russian National awards (Lenin Komsomol, Golden Ostap Festival of Satire and Humor in St. Petersburg, Constellation Festival); theatre also won numerous international awards at the notable art festivals in Germany, Holland, France, and China. The theatre actors are The Honorary Citizens of city Lexington, VA, USA. Among the celebrities, amazed by their art, we can call, among others, Sir Paul McCartney and Carlos Santana.

Not amazingly, Licedei. have drawn many full houses in grand concerts produced in their native Russia. There are always sold out the Kremlin Palace (Moscow) and the Tavrichesky Palace (St. Petersburg) concert halls. Besides, they performed practically in all the largest show stages in Russia (up to seven thousand spectators) as well as at the Russian main sports arena, Luzhniki, which may incorporate up to 70-thousand audiences. But amazingly, Licedei attracts the same huge audience abroad. Actors have always been warmly and enthusiastically welcomed when touring in the countries mentioned.

A show-program, called The Russian Roulette (Pokatukha), is compiled of the best fragments taken from performances of various periods. At present there are also three theatrical performances in the theatre’s repertory. Katastrofa (Catastrophe) is an outdoor spectacle designed for spacious areas. Ocean is the newest performance, a poetic clownery act dedicated to love, freedom and sea. Semianyuki – a full size comic performance, full of twists and turns. This hilariously funny performance gained rave reviews and incredible success during Avignon Theatre Festival-05. After that Licedei were invited to perform at prominent Edinburgh Theatre Festival-06 in Scotland.

The unique feature of a dumb clown- mime performance is that it can be understood both by adults and children of any age and nationality. It is not like circus in the usual sense of the word; it is a theatre on the borderline between clownery, variety show and tragic farce. Critics call it poetic clownery. No words - instead there are plastic movements and mimicry, music and expressiveness. Laughter and tears, joy and sadness, the good and the evil - these are the simple emotions and truths of Licedei’s art, which can be understood by anyone from any place at any country. In the current world’s theater charts, Licedei are among the very best international groups performing in the clownery genre

The RFT cover story about Carl's Friends - The Catholic Worker Community

Cool to be Kind
Voluntary poverty, sustainable agriculture, helping one's fellow man. A Catholic Worker community quietly grows in north St. Louis.
By MOLLY LANGMUIR

The sky over north St. Louis is overcast as Carolyn Griffeth straps Finn Mateo, her two-year-old son, into a car seat in her beat-up station wagon. They're headed to Walgreens, a store Griffeth would rather not support, but she needs a low-flow nipple for a baby bottle.
"You could make one," her friend Trish Grim had suggested.

"How?" Griffeth had asked.

Walgreens it is.

The house where Griffeth and her family live has a huge garden, a picnic table in the yard and "Instead of War" posters affixed to the fence. It is a few blocks north of downtown, near where Tucker Boulevard curves abruptly and becomes Florissant Avenue. Not long ago a young woman's body was left in a Dumpster down the street, but the event didn't attract much attention in the neighborhood, a place where houses are crumbling in on themselves, posters on rusty billboards are left to peel off and entire blocks are covered over with grass.

This wasn't the life that Griffeth, a small woman with auburn hair and freckles, imagined for herself. More than a decade ago, at age 21, she enrolled in the medical school at Washington University. She'd been raised in Pecatonica, Illinois in what she describes as a dysfunctional middle-class family. Her mother was a social worker, her stepfather a horse trader.

Three years later Griffeth embraced religious faith, anarchy and voluntary poverty. She dropped out of med school, leaving behind a $70,000 debt she intended never to pay. Instead of becoming a doctor, she became a Catholic Worker.

CLICK ON THE BLOG ENTRY TITLE TO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE.

Audition for Joseph

JOSEPH & THE AMAZING T E C H N I C O L O R DREAMCOAT
Auditions for the all youth Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
will be at COCA (Center of Creative Arts) on Monday, Feb 5 &
Wednesday Feb 7th from 5-8pm.
Dance callbacks will be on Thursday Feb 8th from 5-8pm.
Prepare 32 bars of sheet music in your key. All roles are open.
(Must be between 6-18 to audition)
Email Auditions@DramaRamaTheatre.com for an audition appointment.
Performance dates are March 29-April 1st in the Orthwein Theatre on
the campus of Mary Institute Country Day School (MICDS).
Rehearsals will also be on the campus of MICDS located at 101 N.
Warson Rd. in Ladue.

Nicole Trueman
Executive Director
DramaRama Theatre Company
www.DramaRamaTheatre.com

Cappies Review Carl

Action, Reaction!
By Tess Brenner
EUREKA HIGH SCHOOL
01/28/2007

The proceedings of a heated trial launch a story of starving children, brutalized indigents, nuclear warfare and a man who believed he could change the world.

Father Carl Kabat devoted his life to bringing justice and joy to the world based on the idea of a simple phrase: "Action, Reaction!" Clayton High School recently staged his story of dedication and passion with the world première of "And Carl Laughed."

This original piece, written by Clayton theater director Kelley Ryan and associate director Nick Otten, explores Kabat's personal growth and self purification, from his 1960s missionary work in the Philippines to the raids and protests he led and his current imprisonment in the United States.

The most impressive aspect of the show was the versatility and chemistry among cast members. Many in the cast of 13 played more than one character. The students' use of space, simple props and their bodies — both physically and audibly — added an artistic level to interpretation of the story.

Click on post title to read the whole review.

Review of "And Carl Laughed."

“And Carl Laughed,” a production by Clayton High School, was the talk of everyone this Monday at a regular peace vigil in front of the military recruitment office on Lindell in St. Louis. All gathered expressed their amazement at the quality of the production, the talent of the actors, the fantastic original music, and uncommonly creative script and direction. Perhaps it is no surprise that those standing with signs protesting the war would be enthusiastic towards a play about a priest who has spent his life resisting war and decrying “nuclear insanity.” In fact, about half of those protesting are personal friends of Carl’s and part of the Catholic Worker community where Carl dwells when out of prison; a few of us, including myself, are even characters in the play. Yet, from my perspective, this is the most surprising thing about Clayton High’s production: Somehow this wildly creative and artistic play, performed by high school students, and written by those who have never known Carl, adheres so closely to the spirit, personality, and life-story of Carl that those who know and love him most are the most impressed with it. As one of Carl’s dear friends from his seminary days asked, “How have they (Clayton High) come to know Carl so well?”
It all started with an article written about Carl by the Riverfront Times' reporter, Ben Westhoff, in the wake of his last action in which he and two other Catholic Workers poured blood on and symbolically attempted to disarm an intercontinental ballistic missile silo. Intrigued by the article, Kelley Ryan decided that this would be the play they would write. Soon thereafter Ryan, Clayton High’s drama director, contacted me and my husband who are founders of the Carl Kabat Catholic Worker, a peace-community and hospitality house for the homeless in north St. Louis. Soon thereafter Kelley and her co-writer Nick Otten met with members from our community to talk about Carl. Kelley and Nick left this meeting with articles, pictures, stories, and many questions about Carl’s paradoxical personality: What kind of seventy four year old man (or Catholic priest for that matter) dresses as a clown to perform the Eucharist on nuclear missal silos, lives in a shelter for homeless women, avoids Church (when out of the joint), and spends his days between actions both serving and provoking his friends with irritating jokes and behavior? What kind of man, who loves to hang-out, drink wine, and sunbathe, would willingly spend nearly seventeen years in jail, simply to say that nuclear weapons are insane, a sin against the earth and a crime against humanity?
Their response to these questions is brilliant. In And Carl laughed, Carl is played by not one, but two talented actors, generally simultaneously in dialogue or play with one another. One is the priest Carl-- passionate, serious, responsible and opinionated. His youthful idealism and righteousness would certainly have been familiar to Carl’s priest-friend (also of the Oblate order) who told me, “Carl was once pretty orthodox.” The other is the clown Carl, full of life and silliness and played by a strapping young man who apparently has taken his clowning classes very seriously. While never dominating the stage, Carl the clown is a constant freeing presence pulling Carl the priest out of paralysis and analysis and into action, or in biblical terms, out of the old man and into the new. In a fantastic clown-dance, Carl seems to discover his true self: a fool for Christ and humanity’s sake, as he describes himself.
Besides developing the character of Carl, the play does an impressive job developing the issues at hand: poverty, hunger, military madness, and nuclear armament. Scenes from Carl’s life as a priest in the Philippines and Brazil make clear that Carl’s objection to war is rooted in his love for the poor and for all humanity and his realization that so much poverty in the world is linked to our governments sponsorship of war through the building and selling of weapons (our number one export) at the expense of the poor. Through the narrative of Carl’s life and the lines of an often repeated original song “you can have a one night stand with your dirty little bomb, or you could feed the hungry for years to come,” few in the audience could go away without questioning our national history of spending on war and domination rather than humanitarian aid or programs of social betterment. Bringing the issue even closer to home, the student actors ask: “How can we criticize Korea and Iran for their nuclear weapons and turn a blind eye to our own?” I left the play feeling that this question was truly their own, that these young men and women had come to see our times and our nation with unsettling clarity and that they were asking for both answers and conversion from their elders and their nation. This said, the performance was at times spontaneous, joyful, serious, and silly, but never preachy. In this, the play fulfilled its own message taken from the life of Carl Kabat: To live joyfully not out of denial but out of love of life itself and faith that together we can find a way out of this mess.
Upon seeing the play for the first time my husband turned to me and said, “I’ve heard so much about this play. What if it is better than the real thing?” At the time I laughed, but since then the question has become a serious one for me. I question not whether the “Carl Kabat” of the play is more endearing than Carl (impossible!), or the “Carolyn” actor is more sweet and good than me (yet undoubtedly she is), but rather if this production is a more compelling witness to peace, joy, and community, than we, the “peacemakers” have recently been. When I saw the play for the second time, I took note of the energy in the audience (which included many high school students) both during and afterwards. There was a sense of excitement and empowerment that comes from participating in something great and meaningful. My hunch is that for this play will be just the beginning for many. I hope to be meeting activists and individuals of conscience in the near future who tell me they were conscientisized by this play by Clayton High School.

Carolyn Griffeth