Category: General

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Degrees of Separation–Lateral and Ladderal

Many of us are familiar with the “six degrees of separation” theory.  This is the idea that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by no more than five other living people, including strangers, who have social connections with either you or the others.  In the culture this theory has taken root in the parlor game, “Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon,” for the movie industry.

There is some support for this theory.  So you should be connected to both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump by some combination of five or even fewer others.  Our politically divided population is more deeply connected than we could have imagined.

But I have been thinking about a different version of this lateral idea, which connects living people to each other at one point in time.  I am thinking that the theory can be revised to address degrees of separation over time.  That is, a connection I might have made years ago is connected to a recent connection through an improbable series of links.  Let’s call this ladderal degrees of separation,1 in contrast to the lateral theory. Continue reading “Degrees of Separation–Lateral and Ladderal”

  1. A play on words, “ladder” here representing the movement of time as climbing from past to present,[↩]
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Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968

     I was still too young to vote.  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer.

The convening of the Democratic National Convention last night in Chicago takes me back more than five decades, to that other Democratic Convention in Chicago.  It was August 1968, and I was 18 years old that summer before my sophomore year in college.  I was just coming of age politically.

By that August, 1968 had already been a very rough year for the nation.  Martin Luther King, Jr., the country’s civil rights and moral trailblazer, had been assassinated on April 4, shocking the conscience of the country.  Two months later, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, just a day after he had seized the momentum in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.1 The country–and the Democratic Party–were splintered by nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality.  More than 100 cities had erupted into riots and arson after the King assassination.

I was a high school freshman when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, an unimaginable event.  Perhaps I was too young then–13–to feel the full effect of that national trauma.  But the events of the spring and summer of 1968 had landed more heavily against my idealistic self.

I was still too young to vote.2  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer. Continue reading “Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968”

  1. On June 4 Kennedy, who had announced his campaign only that March, won the Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota.[↩]
  2. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution changed the legal voting age from 21 to 18 when it was ratified in 1971.[↩]
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Language Habits V (A series of occasional rants)

 Occasional readers, here is the first rant of 2024, taking aim at the mistakes, massacres, and misuses of the American tongue.  Please do not take offense if you find entries below that befoul your own speech.  It is not your fault, up to this point in time.  After you read this post, though, any such repeated use of any of these annoying constructions will be scored against you.

So read at your own risk. Continue reading “Language Habits V (A series of occasional rants)”

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Equities and Ironies: Trump, Law & Politics

[Note to Readers:  In this era of wayward ‘truths,’ the field of play for irony has both spread and thickened.  Every now and then, it is worth noting the spawn of this fertile soil, for the record.]

Let’s begin with this one.  In the same week that a former US president is being tried in a criminal court for the first time in history–for the alleged crimes of falsifying business records in his effort to hide incriminating sexual evidence from his voters a scant few weeks before the 2016 presidential election–he is  fleecing these same voters with a new stock scam meant to support financially his deepening legal fees and his 2024 campaign to return to the White House. Continue reading “Equities and Ironies: Trump, Law & Politics”

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The US Supreme Court Cannibalizes Its Own Legitimacy

On February 28 the Supreme Court of the United States did what many legal experts thought  improbable:  it decided to consider Donald Trump’s arguments that American presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for any acts committed while they are in office.

That is, in effect, that presidents’ behaviors while in office are beyond the reach of our laws, that the Rule of Law–the bulwark of our democracy that asserts that laws apply equally to everyone without fear, favor, or position–is simply suspended for the most powerful individuals in the nation, that in fact presidents do enjoy the rank privileges of monarchs and despots.  The nation’s founding generation fought a war to ensure against this result.

One would think that the Court’s justices would cringe at such a notion, not least because it suggests that they themselves could be vulnerable to the punitive machinations of an angry president.  As the old boxing saying goes, protect yourselves at all times, men and women of the Court! Continue reading “The US Supreme Court Cannibalizes Its Own Legitimacy”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity

The last of four parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here]

Broom Street Theatre reconnects with the University. Author again in the back row of photo.

Soon after our return to Madison, we began a series of performances there, along with a few around the state. In Madison we played three shows a weekend for three weeks in October, all of them in the large hall at the Eagles Club.  We also did a live, in-studio two-hour radio interview and demonstration for the Madison affiliate of NPR.  I thought the radio show was going well until the host asked which one of us had never acted before.  He knew damn well, and I hesitated to answer, instead preferring to avoid the subject.  My castmates interrupted the brief silence by whispering loudly and in unison, “Peter.”  I don’t recall the host’s follow-up questions or my answers.

But I did pass that doctoral qualifying exam despite all.

Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here]

We looked pretty much like this.

We left Madison August 28, 1976, nine people in a white van pulling a trailer with our props, costumes, clothing and camping gear.  We would average almost 500 miles a day over four days, and camp in tents three nights along the way at such locations as Billings, MT, and Coeur d’Alene, ID.  Our technical director, John Miller, did most of the driving.  In the rows of seats sat Joel and six of the actors: Kelly Henderson, Max(ine) Fleckner, Melanie Sax, Frank Furillo, Gary Aylesworth, and Adrienne Rabinowitz.  I resided mostly on the platform behind the seats, at the very back of the van.

I hadn’t been consigned to that space.  I had asked for it. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here]

Joel Gersmann addressing the audience before a show, and soliciting contributions to Broom Street Theater

In addition to our cast-in-waiting for a play to do, we had one of American experimental theater’s magicians.  Of course I had no sense of this as we gathered for those first meetings.  Truth be told, I knew very little about theater at all, let alone this new experimental form that had bloomed around the country as part of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s that had shaken many of our institutions, from art to politics to religion.  But given that we needed a finished play in a little over two months, I thought that we were dithering in those first meetings. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet

In celebration of the passion of our younger family members who are currently pursuing their love of theater in venues ranging from high school and summer shows, through national tours, to Broadway: Ezra, Chloe, Lizzie, Allison, and Julie. And in fond memory of Joel.

The first of four parts.

Broom Street Theatre bought and converted an old radiator repair shop on Madison’s Williamson Street in 1977, where it has operated since.

One sun-filled day in June 1976, near the beach and sailboats of beautiful Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, I suggested to a friend that we walk over to watch auditions scheduled that day for the city’s prominent experimental theater group, Broom Street Theatre.  I had never seen one of its plays, but I had read and heard that it was a gonzo outfit producing plays ranging from wild adaptations of classical scripts to outrageous original satires of the human condition.  I was not aiming to audition myself.  Instead, I simply wanted an inside look at this operation during its audition process.  At age 26, I had just completed my third year of doctoral studies in sociology at the University and, after having colored for so long between the lines, I was hoping to have a look at some measure of creativity, even if only briefly. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder

Until recent years I had never thought much about spirituality, let alone my own, whatever that might be.  Instead, I have spent more time thinking about organized religion, and about my flight from it that evolved over my early decades.  As I have described that journey in the earlier essays in this series, from my teen years onward I increasingly experienced the Catholicism that I had been taught to be a source of personal unhappiness rather than liberation from it.  This experience certainly did not seem in line with the Resurrection story.

But what would fill the space in my life created by my abandonment of the faith of my youth?  That I never thought to even consider this question is itself worth considering.  My exit from religious practice and my growing agnosticism could have left me alone in the existential sense.  What to believe in if not my Church and its creed?   What to think if the Church shamed members for sexual orientations and identities, condemned them for marrying outside of the faith, and forced females into second class status?  If the religious guidance that had been drilled into me since age five was no longer meaningful to me, what was to direct and even comfort me on life’s infirm road ahead?  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder”

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