The Nutcracker Has Obviously Cracked

The dancers were laughing stage left at the Von Braun Center concert hall.  

They could not help themselves. 

No one knew what was unfolding on the stage, not even the dancers of Nutcracker Gone Wild.  All of the dancers had been performing The Nutcracker for days.  Today, after the one final performance of the popular Christmas classic, the dancers were allowed to be free.

During Nutcracker Gone Wild, the dancers of the Nutcracker are allowed to improvise, but to the score of the original Nutcracker.  

It includes everything, but not limited to: a cowboy proposing to a cowgirl, a pregnant dancer, drinks being swerved, and in the middle of the performance Madison County Sheriff Blake Dorning pronounced a character dead after a shooting on the stage. All of this was reported by Erin Dacy live on television and there was also in impromptu weather report from Gary Dobbs after which he was escorted off stage by security. Needless to say, there was almost constant laughter from the audience and the actors were having fun doing improv after a number of Nutcracker performances.

The audience, which filled about a third of the concert hall, laughed as much as the dancers.  The unexpected turns, including an impromptu magic act in the middle of the show, kept the audience wondering just what might happen next.  

The dancers even played on the sports fans in the audience with the mice wearing Auburn logos and the toy soldiers wearing Alabama’s signature red A.  The audience responded appropriately. 

In the end, everyone laughed.  

The dancers reveled in the joy of improvisation in a show many of them have been doing for years.  The audience was at the edge of their seats trying to figure out what might happen next, because the Nutcracker had obviously cracked.

Remember Those Left Alone in the Darkness

She just kept crying.  Sitting there with a baby in her arms, crying so quietly. She was a young girl from Mississippi with a four-month-old baby in her arms, in a homeless shelter. She picked at the generous portions of turkey and dressing offered her by the loving volunteers helping serve the homeless at the shelter.  Many were from church groups, but quite a few of them came to help just because they thought it was the right thing to do.

But she sat there, with sunbeam lighting her like a spotlight in the old high school gymnasium, holding her little, tiny baby and crying. One of the young volunteers talked with her for a while, I could not hear what they were saying as the girl from Mississippi just stared into nothingness, glancing occasionally at the volunteers face.  Then they held hands and prayed. The young mother from Mississippi cried as the volunteer whispered a prayer into her ear.

There were hundreds of people around them. But in spite of the clamor of dishes, the bellowing laughs, and a band playing some hopeful Christian song on a makeshift stage, these two women shared an intimate moment of prayer.  I don't know what was said, I was too far away and the din of the Thanksgiving dinner masked any whisper. I can only imagine what prayers a young woman with a four month old baby in a homeless shelter offers to God.

Recently, in the New York Times obituaries, I ran across a poem.  I know, what are the odds of reading a poem on the New York Times obit page?  I thought there must be a reason this poem is sticking in my head, so I kept the newspaper. After talking to a friend about the young mother at the homeless shelter, I was reminded about the poem by Jack Gilbert and thought of in the moment I took her photo as she cried and prayed.


A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


Most days I can stand back and make my images, using my camera to be my emotional force field for my soul.  But today, something went wrong with my usual defenses.  This young mother from Mississippi with her your-month-old baby is walking around in my mind and she will just not leave.  But maybe that's a good thing in the end?  Maybe we should all carry the image of a young mother from Mississippi holding her baby and crying as we eat our 10,000 calorie Thanksgiving dinner and watch hyper-paid athletes play football in a dome?  Maybe, like Jack Gilbert, 'we are all helpless romantics who love the world and its pleasures so much - and our failures and our loneliness.'  Maybe it's not those differences, but how we bridge those differences, that make us who we are.  At Thanksgiving, where we give thanks for the blessings we have all been given, it is important to remember those left alone in the darkness.

Aging kinda sucks.

I'm fourty-seven,
my knee is seventy-two.
Aging kinda sucks.

Burlesque In A Red State

Boobs. Boobs in every shape, size, and color you can imagine. There were feathered boobs, boobs in beekeepers outfits, there were even boobs in flames.  I was at the Alabama Burlesque Festival.  I had gone with friends to see a burlesque show. I had seen burlesque acts before but never one with so many acts. 

There were the acts you'd expect; the slow strip tease a man's suit outfit down to just pasties and a g-string.  There was the the woman with huge feather fans who danced behind them slowly teasing your as the feather waved in the air.  There was, I think it's required to be in a burlesque show, the man-dressed-as-a-woman-but-you-don't-know-until-the-last-minute-it's-a man act. (Hint: always look for the Adam's Apple.)  But then there were acts you didn't expect; The clever girl who stripped to the sound of a typewriter. (She scooted back across the stage at the ding of the carriage return.) The girl who walked out in a beekeepers outfit and was chased by a cut-out bee on a stick. (A bee gets under her outfit. You take it from there.) Then there was the girl swallowed fire. Oh, and then she BURNED HER OUTFIT OFF! (Except for the required covering of pasties and a thong. They must have been made from asbestos.) There was the very athletic young woman who stripped while hanging upside down from the ceiling.  One of my favorites was the former MTV VJ who stripped out of a wedding dress after she'd been left on her wedding day. 

Now, this show went on for over two hours.  Not all the acts were great.  Most were quite clever.  The host, a large-busted and large-afro'ed very brash former burlesque dancer from Minneapolis, Minnesota who liked to swear introduced all the acts like they were family. She was like the naughty aunt a family might not ever acknowledge but was loved by anyone who ever met her.  The night went on and the acts went on. And on. And on. By the end of the show I think I had seen 43…no, 44 boobs.  They were all blurring together. 

The last act, an older woman wrapped in bullets and holding fake guns dancing to Pat Benatar's 'Love is a Battlefield', brought in the senior element to the show.  While I appreciate the fact that you shouldn't discriminate based on age,  burlesque may be an exception to that rule.  She was gasping for breath while walking back and forth on the stage and I was worried she might need oxygen before the end of the act. I think the guns and ammo were a little heavy for her. That part of the show might go over well in the retirement home right after the early-bird dinner in the activity room, but at Lowe Mill?  I was looking around the room for the portable defibrillator, just in case she didn't make it through the show.

But, back to the boobs. By the end of the show you've seen a lot of them. The women are every shape and size and so are the boobs. It's what is the hook that draws men (and women) to the show.  But the acts are what keeps you interested.  Burlesque is a unique kind of live performance that is just fun to watch.  It's racy, yes.  Is it dirty? No. Is it pornography? No. Is it erotic? Sometimes.  It's an act you might see in New Orleans, or Paris.  A little 'willing suspension of disbelief' and you won't even think you are in a Red State.

All you have to do is write one true sentence.

I read this today and I thought I'd use it as inspiration to write....

"'Do not worry.  You have always written before and you will write now.  All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence you know.' So finally I would wrote one true sentence, and then go on from there.  It was easy then  because there was always one true sentence that I knew or I heard someone say."

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

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Searching For Hope In The Storm

I spent the day shooting tornado damage.  While driving between assignments, I was trying to remember how many tornadoes I have seen or at least worked the aftermath. The first tornado I remember was the 1974 tornado outbreak.  We were under our house as the storm hit. The roof was ripped of part of my grade school. I saw the '89 tornado move down Airport Road, wrapped in rain. I had been working as a photojournalist for just over a year.  I've seen the aftermath of more than a dozen smaller tornadoes which hit communities from New Hope to Fayetteville.  I figure I have seen or been in the path of two dozen tornadoes, most since working as a photographer. 

I'm no expert, but I feel fairly confident when working around tornadoes.  I have taken storm spotter training.  I keep very aware and listen to the police and emergency management folks on the radio, they are always pretty much on top of it. A couple times I have been closer than I would have liked.  Once, I was on an overpass and really shouldn't have been.  Another time, chasing a rare December tornado, I was right behind it and almost wrecked my car. On Friday, I had rushed to the path of a tornado that had just passed, only to find myself in the path of a second tornado. As the hail fell all around, I realized I was in a bad spot. I just wasn't expecting the back to back tornadoes. I think the second tornado passed within a half a mile, it flipped an 18-wheeler just down the road from me.  I owe my guardian angel a beer.

It sounds jaded, I know, but the images are always the same.  There is pink insulation covering the ground like a surreal snow. The trees are jagged and broken. The homes look like matchsticks. Cars are crushed like cans. As much as I hate to say it, the looks on the people are the same. The stunned, empty look as they try to figure out what happened, where there house is, and sometimes, what street they are walking down. You look for the rescuer making their way through the rubble, the homeowner salvaging what they can from the rubble, the hugs and the tears.  If they are lucky, they just lost their home or a car.  At worst, they lose a loved one.  

Some tornadoes are worse than others.  The April 27 tornado wiped the earth clean wherever it touched down.  It was like demons took an eraser and just cleaned a mile wide strip of land.  There was just nothing left, nothing at all.  The tornadoes on Friday, while awful, damaged a much smaller path and the level of destruction was much less.  But, if it was your home in the direct path, it didn't matter. 

It is unbelievable these tornadoes took the exact same path as the April 27th tornadoes.  While shooting the damage and clean-up, I had a hard time telling what damage was from this tornado and from the April 27th tornado.  Finally I started to see the color of the wood as the indicator of recent destruction.  If it was yellow, clean wood - it was the latest tornado.  If the shattered homes were showing darker, weathered wood - they were destroyed in the April 27th storms.  I was shooting on the same roads as before, Yarbrough Road, Jeff Road, Anderson Hills.  This is the third time Anderson Hills has been hit by a tornado.  It's just chance that it happened this way, but people have come up with all sorts of theories why these three tornadoes would follow the same path - gravity waves, the shape of the land, and proximity to the mountains.  I think it's just chance, but don't tell that to someone's home that has been hit twice by a twister. 

A few years ago I found my film from the '89 tornado on Airport Road.  I was looking through the images of the destroyed Goldbro, Holy Spirit Church, Winn Dixie, the Westbury Apartments.  Most things I remembered.  The images stick with me in my mind - it was the first major natural disaster I had ever photographed.  To this day it is one of the biggest news events I have ever covered. 

While looking through the images, I kept finding these photos of dead pets.  A dead dog in the rubble or a dead cat in the road.  I had a handful of these photos.  Horrible photos.  I don't remember shooting any of them.  Not at all.  I was quite shocked, in fact, when I saw I had shot them.  I just didn't remember them.  It's funny how the mind can block the bad from our memory.  I think that is a good thing. I don't know if we could survive if we remembered the horrible things with the intensity with which they happened. 

What we do remember are the people helping one another.  The way the neighbors help clear the property.  The meal cooked for the family that lost a home.  The tree cut down off a house. All theses acts of kindness weave together to make us stronger than the destruction. It make some sense of the chaos, and to give us hope for something better.  So, tomorrow or the next day, when I'm shooting the tornado recovery or the next tornado I won't be looking for images of destruction.  I'll be looking for images of hope. 

Ash Wednesday

lightning, thunder.
rain falling, hard.
whispers of prayer.
lightning flashing in the darkness.
looking into the dark places in the soul.
prayers.
"remember that you are but dust - and to dust you shall return."
dark matter, matter, thinking of stardust.
rough scraping of ashes on skin.
cross of ashes.
prayers.
rain falling hard, cleansing souls.
Bless The Lord My Soul.
the blood of Christ, salvation.
The Peace that passes all understanding.
blessing.
Just As I Am.
rain stops.