The past six weeks it has been bizarre so often seeing Johnstown, PA in the news as a major campaign stop for the Democratic primary campaigns. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and for all I know Ralph Nader, have all made several stops. Until now, Johnstown was most famous for the Johnstown floods (all three of them) and for giving us Spider-Man’s co-creator, Steve Ditko.

In my family, it’s been most famous for giving us my mother.

Whenever we would visit on family trips when I was a kid, we would take in the same two Johnstown attractions: the highwater mark on City Hall downtown, which calibrated the effects of the three floods, and the inclined plane, which to me seemed slower than a nasal drip. One thing that always impressed me was the distinct local accent. Her Johnstown heritage is the reason that my mother pronounces “tire,” “tower,” and “tar” identically — “tarrrr,” like a pirate. Johnstonians also call soda “pawp” and at some point manufactured “yins” as a contraction of “you-uns.” I am not making this up. These unfortunate locutions provided fodder for my father, who told people he’d “rescued her from the hillbillies.”

I call my mother every weekend and never tarrrrr of hearing about her “wushin’ dishes” and “arrrrn’n’ clothes.” On Saturday I was unsurprised to hear that she was cooking sauerkraut and pork, although I was surprised to hear her say that she’d burnt the fish she was cooking separately. She blamed me for distracting her. Mom is 83 and that’s probably the first fish she ever burned, and I’m sure she ate it anyway. Those Depression kids are thrifty. I should have asked her how it’s felt seeing Johnstown in the news so frequently again — at my last count, about 19 people still lived in Johnstown, so the competition for votes must be fierce indeed. This will give me something new to ask her about when I visit the first week in June. And maybe by then, the Democrats will even have chosen a presidential candidate.

Pop quiz. See if you can identify what’s factually wrong with this story from the Los Angeles Times:

It used to always be the premium of the premiums. Now the cable pack’s catching up.
By Mary McNamara, Times Television Critic
April 19, 2008
REVOLUTION is a frightening, heady and often fatal business, but it’s what happens afterward that matters most. No one knows this better than the folks at HBO. “John Adams,” which comes to a close Sunday night, has devoted seven beautifully shot hours to defying the often overly patriotic legends of our past with a toothache-and-all portrait of a man who helped define modern democracy, albeit grumbling every step of the way.

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. “I know now what it is like to be disliked,” he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

I’ll bet you got it.

As most of us learned in grade school — or as one could have learned even by watching the “John Adams” miniseries this piece touches on — Washington served TWO terms, not one.

This is something evidently unknown not only to the Times Television Critic, but also to the copy desk of what claims to be one of the nation’s most important newspapers.

I recently told a friend that I’ve felt so sorry for Times employees that I’ve stopped picking on the paper. Despite its misspelling Allen Ginsberg’s name on the front page when he died. Despite the routine errors of both commission and omission. The paper has been shedding longtime employees left and right — including some friends of mine — and I do love reading the daily newspaper, so this is the cri de couer of a wounded lover. But by God, if you can’t even get right that the Founder, the “indispensable man” of American history, served EIGHT years and NOT FOUR, then perhaps you shouldn’t be publishing a newspaper.

(With all apologies to friends still writing for the paper.)

A friend recently directed me to this video, and I’m glad he did. It’s 19 minutes well-spent. In it, Sir Ken Robinson addresses the TED Conference on the topic of learning — what it has meant in the past, and why the current system isn’t built for the future. In some ways, what he’s calling for sounds like a new entrepreneurial approach. (And by that, I don’t mean privatized education; I mean consumer-based.)

I can personally relate to this as someone who was a victim of a hidebound school system every inch of the way until college — which surprisingly offered me choices I’d never realized one could have, even though I’d always felt I should have had them.

In that selfsame issue of Reason, Ronald Bailey debunks yet again the myth that the U.S. was founded by observant and proselytizing Christians. He also reminds us just how recent and faddish evangelism is — and how it may be a fad that is ending.

Let’s hope so. Because in today’s news there was little I found quite as distressing as this piece, which shows Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama trying to out-God each other in Pennsylvania (an event that no doubt made Benjamin Franklin’s gout flare up in the great hereafter).  I don’t care which is more godly (given the history of things done in the names of so many disagreeing and disagreeable gods). I care which has a better sense of how to help us here on Earth.

Today I got a Google alert that Lee Wochner had died.

That caught my attention, so I clicked on the link.

Here’s what I learned:

Leland R. “Lee” Wochner
DECATUR – Leland R. “Lee” Wochner, 80, Decatur, retired from Caterpillar Inc., died Tuesday (April 8, 2008). Services: 10 a.m. Saturday, Brintlinger and Earl Funeral Homes, Decatur. Visitation: 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, with 8 p.m. Masonic services. Burial: Salem Cemetery. Memorials: Decatur Masonic Temple Building Restoration Fund or Macon County Animal Control and Care Center.
Published in the Decatur Herald & Review on 4/11/2008.

You can understand my relief in seeing that I wasn’t the dead person. (Although, like Mark Twain, I was curious to see what people would have said.)

In one of the many wondrous examples of the fascinating adventures one can lead through the internet, I actually “met” (virtually) Leland R. Wochner about 10 years ago. Someone emailed me something thinking that I was he, which led me back to him. I remember him as rather crochety, but I also recall being impressed with his just getting started on the internet at age 70. Ten years ago, that was noteworthy.

My full first name, by the way, is Lee. Not Leland, or Leon, or Leeward, or any of those. My mother chose the name because she had three children before me all of whom got a nickname: Raymond became “Raymie” or “Ray,” Michael became “Mikey” or “Mike” (although we family members all still call him Michael), and Lorene got tagged with “Lorie.” So my mother looked for a name she didn’t think would result in a nickname, and here I am with it. And it worked.

Given the rarity of the combination of my first and last names — “Lee” not sounding terribly, well, German, and therefore an unusual choice — it was surprising indeed (and, as Freud would note, disappointing) finding someone else with the same name. I’m just glad I’m not dead as well.

I guess the April Fool’s joke was on me: Shortly after I posted a few things on April 1st, something took down this blog, corrupted a posting, and left us with a blank white page. A big thank-you to my business partner, Amy Kramer, for reloading the database prior to April 1st.

If you’re just tuning in now, here’s a quick recap of what transpired in those blog postings, now forever lost to the sands of time:

While at the state Democratic Convention, I did get to hear Bill Clinton give a speech that utterly convinced me I should vote for… him if it were possible. He certainly has a command of the issues, and plenty of good-sounding ideas of what to do about them. I did wonder what this has to do with his wife (translation: nothing), and I did wonder, um, just why he didn’t roll out these solutions when he was president. Oh, that’s right: He was too busy dicking around with, to name one thing, impeachment, which stemmed from his lying under oath. While I certainly preferred Bill to the current occupant of the White House — and, to keep noting it for posterity, at least one can say that Bill Clinton actually got elected and didn’t steal the presidency — I wish I could remember all the great achievements for which he will be remembered. (There was one: balancing the budget. That was a good one. That was also with a Republican Congress.) Even though ordinarily Bill Clinton could talk the varnish off prized antiques, no one was buying the thrust of his argument: “I can solve everything — so you should vote for my wife. I vouch for her.” As I said to a client that week, “You hire me for my skills. If I get hit by a bus, would you hire my wife?” Because, let us note, Hillary Clinton has precisely zero of her husband’s skills. And not a whole lot of others instead.

I blogged about a short play I wrote while at the convention. I saw something on MSNBC, went in to my hotel room bathroom to wash my face, looked in the mirror and then heard myself thinking, “But what happened after that…?” And there was the play. I went back to my laptop and wrote it and emailed it out and now it’s going to be produced his summer. More about that soon.

I also wrote what I’m sure at the time seemed like funny postings about forthcoming vacation trips to, oh, Mars and other places. It was April 1st, after all. Now it’s a week later and it doesn’t seem funny and I wonder if it was something I linked to that took down the blog.

Since then, I’ve been caught up in producing the 2008 USC MPW One-Act Play Festival, which previews tomorrow night and then runs Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at a beautiful mid-sized theatre in the Little Tokyo area of downtown Los Angeles. Here’s some info about it. (And there’s a link for tickets at the bottom of the page; Wednesday is sold out, but Tuesday has a few seats left.)

And that about brings us back to… now.

It’s good to be back.

My family and I are up in the mountains in a rented log cabin at an elevation of 6000 feet. We have no cellphone access — but there is WiFi somewhere around here, because I’m using it.

“Log cabin” doesn’t really do this justice. It’s a beautiful two-story house (that happens to be made out of logs), with a commanding view on all sides of… trees. Luckily, I like trees. We are also directly abutting a trailhead with hiking trail and thunderous stream. And although it’s about 50 degrees at the moment (perhaps warmer), there are large patches of snow on the ground. I take it to mean that there was a lot of snow here until very recently.

I’ll take some photos and may put one or two up. If we run into a bear, which we’ve been warned about, and you don’t later see a photo here, you’ll know what happened.

Today the chair of the California Democratic Party announced that Bill Clinton will be addressing us this Sunday at the Convention. When I shared this with various people today, the news elicited these responses:

“Ugh.”

“I used to like him.”

“I liked him better when he wasn’t campaigning for his wife.”

“(a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a groan.)”

Whether or not Bill’s having a positive effect on Hillary’s campaign, he’s sure not doing himself any favors lately.

Today in my playwriting workshop there were a couple of scenes that didn’t (yet) convey enough character desperation. Ideally, characters want things, and the more badly they want them, the more desperate they become, and the greater the impact. Just like real life.

At one point I heard myself talking about how desperation colors one’s perceptions. My example came from an experience I had last night.

After seeing the musical “The Dead” at Open Fist Theatre Company, I took my wife to Amoeba Music in Hollywood. I say “took,” because Valorie had never been there. When I told her where we were going, she asked, “Can we buy the new Gnarls Barkley CD?” And I said, “That’s why we’re going there.”

We parked in the underground lot and as we ascended a dank stairwell liberally spattered with band stickers and strewn with giveaway music rags, that feeling came over me again, that feeling I always get when I go to Amoeba. I was instantly reunited with the 16-year-old me who was desperate to get to places like this but had no way to get there. That feeling of my adolescence returned: that feeling that other, far more interesting things were nearly within reach — 60 miles away, in Philadelphia — but so far away, and that already I was missing interesting conversations about important things. I was desperate to get there, or to New York City, and looking back I’m surprised how often I was about to wheedle some way to get there. (Including getting on a bus by myself when I was about 12, for which I’ll always be grateful to my father.)

So last night I said to Valorie, “Isn’t this great? Just look at this!” As far as you could see, there was music — aisle upon aisle of CD’s, new and used, and LPs, and even, as Valorie pointed out, 45s — rock, hip hop, punk, soundtracks, wide swaths of everything from the popular to the obscure. I picked up the out-of-print “Datapanik in the Year Zero” Pere Ubu boxed set, new and unopened, for fifty bucks, as well as a David Bowie disk I’d never heard of, “The Buddha of Suburbia.” Discovering a “new” non-compilation Bowie album seemed astonishing. In fact, all of Amoeba seems astonishing to me. Paul McCartney recently played in the store, and Michael Eisner had to wait in line along with everyone else.

Valorie was less impressed. She was amazed by the presence of vinyl, especially 45’s, but to her it’s a music store. To me it’s something else: a personal achievement, a promise to myself that was delivered. I can go to Amoeba any time I want. I rarely do — perhaps twice a year — but it’s always there. It’s valuable to me because long ago I was so desperate to have it and things like it (book stores, and museums, and speaking tours, and art galleries, and music clubs, and concert venues, and theatres, and conversations with people who read books).

One day last week I left my office to come home in the middle of the day for an hour and sit on my lawn in the back yard with my shoes and socks off and my toes in the grass and drink a glass of chardonnay and eat a salad and read a magazine. It wasn’t the best use of my time, but it was. That also felt like a promise paid, the promise I made to myself when young that that I wasn’t the traditional job-holding sort and I wasn’t the routine 9-to-5 sort either. The flip side is that I couldn’t tell you what my schedule is without checking my Treo because it varies so greatly from day to day, but it isn’t routine.

There are lots of ill-defined goals of my youth that I haven’t achieved, and several things I have achieved that I didn’t set out to. But I still deeply feel the presence of that 14, 15, 16-year-old who wanted to be somewhere else, doing something else. He’s with me most days.

So I can’t help noticing that at this moment most of the sponsored links off to the right of this page are for the sort of hate-filled anti-immigrant screeds I’ve been condemning. My first thought was that I hate seeing them there, so I was going to block them. But I’m not the sort to so readily block opinions I don’t like, so I didn’t do that. Then I had a better idea. These are all pay-per-click sponsored links — so everyone who really dislikes them should just click on them and make these guys pay.

See? Capitalism does work.