Thoughtful - Some Things Are Not All That Funny
Columns that are a little more contemplative, including the 2003 Erma Bombeck Award-winning column, Just A Little Bike.
Ryan's Song
The 2010 Concert for Lost Voices is just around the corner. We'll be hitting the stage at The Barnstormer at 6 PM on Friday, August 27 with Josh White, Jr., Kitty Donohoe, Annie & Rod Capps, Charlie Allen Martin, Salem Witchcraft, Backstage Pass, Dr. Mike & The Sea Monkeys, Cliff Gracey, Soulstice, and more. We'll enjoy a round robin of blues and folk music until about 9:00, then the great '70s era bands Salem Witchcraft and Backstage Pass will take over and rock the night away!
Of course, there will be good Barnstormers food and drink, rounding out what may be the best entertainment value of the year. And it all goes to support the important work Lost Voices does with incarcerated and at-risk youth.
If you can make it, we'd love to see you. You can buy advance tickets online ($20, students $15) and you can get more details at lostvoices.org. Tickets will be $25 at the door.
If you can't make it, please consider going to the Lost Voices Web site and make a small donation. In any case, we would appreciate it if you would forward this to all your friends.
The column below is one story from our Lost Voices work.
Thanks for your support!
- mike
Ryan's Song
His name was Ryan, and he was not the most popular guy in the group. He was a big country boy with big farmer arms and a big farmer face, the kind of kid some people might call a "bumpkin." On this particular day he was outnumbered nine to one by street smart city kids.
We were sitting in a circle on a dimly lit stage in the maximum-security WJ Maxey Boys Training School for incarcerated young men, working on a collaborative song about a guy who is, coincidentally, being released after serving time in a maximum-security facility.
Eddie's Choice
"So what's on your minds, guys?" It was a really open-ended question to ask a group of incarcerated teenage boys, and the range of answers I got pretty much lived up to my expectations;
"Eatin' Pizza;" "Girls;" "Eatin' Pizza with girls!" There were a few other topics that I am probably better off leaving to your imagination.
Josh White, Jr. and I were working our way through the first session of a new idea we were developing, helping severely troubled young people explore some of their deepest feelings by writing and performing folk and blues songs. At the time we were calling the program "Project Roots," referring to the fact that traditional folk and blues, or "roots music," forms the foundation on which all other American music is built.
A Bad Seed?
Who'd have thought good crops
Could come from a bad seed?
It was a pretty good line in a really good poem, entitled "Look At Me," by a seventeen year old African-American poet named Donald. This young man was theoretically every bit as dangerous as he was gifted; he was incarcerated in the WJ Maxey Boys Training School as a violent offender.
I was working with Donald on a documentary called "Young Poet Incarcerated," helping him polish some of his work and rehearse it before we rolled the camera. We had been given some money by the National Endowment for the Arts through the Michigan Humanities Council and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs to cover some of the costs of making our movie.
Love Is Not Hard To Find
She wore a baggy purple shirt over baggy purple sweat pants. Her hair was chopped short and her body was padded with a layer of soft flesh that bore tribute to the starchy diet of incarceration. She had her arms folded across her lap, her gaze fixed on the floor in front of her, and she was almost imperceptibly rocking to a rhythm that only she could hear.
She was maybe sixteen years old.
I can't use her real name here. Let's call her Krissy. I have no idea how she came to be locked up. It is not a question we ever ask. We can safely assume that at some point in her short life everything just spun out of control, to the point that it no longer worked for her to be out in the world.
Donna
Yesterday, one of my favorite people left our world behind.
Her name was Donna Lemon. She had a gentle voice, kind eyes, blue hair, and a sometimes unnervingly knowing smile. She also knew enough about finance and economics to fill the kind of books people carry around just so other people will think they are smart enough to actually read those books.
Since the day I moved in next door, Donna's husband Harold and I have enjoyed a special friendship, something along the lines of the wise and infinitely tolerant elder and his younger protégé who doesn't know enough to keep his head out of the paint bucket.
Guess which one I was?
