by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 25, 2019 | Featured, HAA, Personal
For me, the “future” is like a churning cement truck going to a job. The “present” is the dump of the watery mixture and its slow and permanent hardening. The “past” are the hardened roads I travel on again and again and again. Only the gift of “accident” can break apart all three and only with “creativity” do I become released and reborn to grow into a maturing perspective.
Over the last six years, I have been chosen to help The Alumni Association at Harvard put on graduation. I look forward to this and accept with pleasure each year when it is offered. I dress up in a silly top hat and tails to escort the honorary degree recipients and their families at Harvard’s graduation. It is an unusual and informative experience.
Rick, my son, and I are very close. After graduating from Dickinson College, his high school asked him to return to Baltimore to teach and help coach their football program. During these years Rick continued his commitment to education by getting a Master’s Degree from the night school at Johns Hopkins University, which allowed him only one night a week free. During these years Rick and I had dinner together every Monday night.
Rick has always been a very kind and socially conscious person. Rick also has an encyclopedic understanding of football and its rules and strategy. Because there is a deep divide in the opportunities provided in our city, after several years of teaching and coaching at his private high school, Rick elected to join his former head coach and teach at Saint Frances Academy in downtown Baltimore.
The year before Rick joined this school, it had only won one game. The next year, they were undefeated. The following year, they were ranked fourth in the nation.
All of the students on the football team went on to established and respected universities with mostly full scholarships. Rick told me several times that they were the most committed group of young men he had ever met. The school is located in the shadow of the penitentiary.
Rick continued his commitment to both education and football by accepting a graduate assistant position at the University of West Virginia, then followed his coach to the University of Houston. The last two years he has been working 24/7 as a GA for University of Houston’s football team and I never see him anymore.
So those are my hardened roads leading up to this year’s Harvard graduation. Here comes the cement truck: The week before my graduation duties this year, Rick called and said he had a free week. I wanted to see him desperately but I had made my commitment months ago. I asked him, “Do you want to come to Boston?” I couldn’t think of anything more boring for him but he said, “Sure.”
Was this a disaster about to happen or was this a gift of an accident? Rick would not know anybody…
We did everything together. A wonderful lunch with Rick and Lindsey Shepro and John Bowman at B&G oysters (Boston’s best oysters), and a dinner after graduation with Sam and Wendy Plimpton at No.9 Park (Boston’s best restaurant).
It is not easy to be shocked as you watch your child become, before your eyes, more sophisticated than you are. My old friends became his new friends almost instantly. And then we slipped back to our welcome past and beer and a Bruins game on TV and a Red Sox game at Fenway… and a stunning and subtle speech by Angela Merkel in the afternoon of graduation.
So often now, as I become older and easily set in my ways, I look for the gift of the “accident.” It breaks my safe world apart. From broken expectations comes the unexpected rebirth.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 18, 2019 | Featured, Personal
I’m extremely fortunate to have had a class with Elizabeth Bishop, who was one of our great, late 20th Century poets. She taught us that any two poems, no matter where they are from, when placed side-by-side will cause an unintended contrast that will illuminate both. Once grasped, this is an eye-opening idea with endless potentiality for creative thought.
I grew up between two schools, two cemeteries, and Harvard Square. The Cambridge cemetery was relatively flat, had few trees, was wide open, and pretty much existed to hold the military dead of foreign wars and the citizens of that city. In contrast, behind the impenetrable black iron fence and gate of Mount Auburn Cemetery, spread a small and elite universe of acres of hills and valleys with shaded walkways and still ponds, as an arboretum of carefully preserved trees and as an aviary for local and migrating birds. These two cemeteries existed side by side divided only by a single two lane road.
As children we would freely ride our bikes among the military dead in the Cambridge cemetery but we were strictly prohibited from even entering Mount Auburn. It wasn’t a place designed for us. However, when the gates were open adults were permitted to walk among the graves and in its verdant splendor. Mount Auburn rested like a shared understanding of what a patrician heaven might be while the Cambridge Cemetery was a plebeian limbo.
When I visited after last Memorial day the Cambridge cemetery had rows and rows of flags. One at each grave. No one was there except a lone bagpiper striding along one of the empty roads. Unexpectedly, I could find only one flag in all of Mount Auburn and it was guarded by a wild turkey that had become domesticated by the place. There was a quiet urgency as groups of horticulturalists or birdwatchers clustered as they whispered observations to each other.
Miss Bishop, as she called herself, was right. The accident of the unintended contrasts caused by my time and location that day opened up worlds for me about the two cemeteries, about the living generation and the predeceased, as I walked between the four.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | May 7, 2019 | Featured, Law, Personal
Several years ago Professor Mike Millemann, on the left, contacted me to see if I wanted to help him fulfill a grant made to the University of Maryland Cary School of Law to teach law differently by using the theater.
We signed up Elliot Rauh, of Single Carrot Theatre and decided the class should write plays about prisoners who had been released from prison after they had been determined to be absolutely innocent after years of incarceration. One of those plays was about Michael Austin, at the center, who was imprisoned in Maryland for over 27 years for a murder he did not commit. He was freed through the brilliant legal work of Larry Nathans, Esq., of Nathans & Biddle.
Last week we got together again at Lexington Market in downtown Baltimore as a reunion of old friends to help Michael because Michael had just found out that due to a typo in his arrest record he was never exonerated and that has kept him from getting work. This will be resolved but the reunion between friends nonetheless was wonderful.
In Michael’s case, and in most of the cases that we turned into plays, the process was remarkably similar. On the first day of class we brought Michael in to meet the class and answer questions. He was calm, collected, and despite the injustice of his incarceration not angry but very wise. In prison he had perfected himself and along the way he had become quite a remarkable musician.
Throughout the following weeks of the semester, the first third of the class was used to do deep research on what went wrong and what led to his conviction. The class went through trial transcripts, records of an incompetent defense lawyer, and files of prosecutors that withheld evidence and a transcript recording of the judge that sentenced an innocent man to life in prison.
The second third of the class the students wrote the backstory, and in the third and final part of the class, Elliot Rauh taught acting and turned inexperienced law students into the actors of their own play which was performed before the law school.
Michael stayed with the class from the beginning. One of the students said that he should provide music for the play and he agreed. Another one of the students suggested that at the end of the play, Michael should leave his instruments behind and identify himself as the Michael Austin about whom the play was written. The audience gasped and some wept.
At first I thought this class might have limited value so we asked that the students provide a one minute clip to the people who had provided us the grant to state whether they thought the grant money had been used appropriately. I became convinced when one student faced the camera and said “I wrote the part of a defense lawyer who was unprepared, acted the part of the prosecutor who withheld the time card that would have exonerated him, and read the exact words 30 years ago when an innocent man was pronounced guilty by a state court judge in the circuit court of Baltimore city and sentenced to life and I have never been in a courtroom.”
At that point we were convinced that the class worked. People were learning from mistakes made before they were fatal. We taught the class for seven years and it was ranked as one of the most appreciated classes at the law school during that time.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Nov 20, 2017 | Featured
KGB-TV Job Interview, Another Plot Study (The Monologue)
To answer your question, yes we are a subsidiary of FOXNews. “We be Putin it where the sun don’t shine.” We have a target market reserved for Viewers that believe in tax cuts for the rich, healthcare as unconstitutional, and a God that loves the NRA because we need weapons to protect churches from people with weapons.
Yes, you’ll be asked only to read tweets on the air. The rest is advertising because our viewers are so stupid they’ve proven that they’ll buy anything….like our propaganda/ news from the last election. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Have you provided us with the signed affidavit that you have never been sexually harassed by anybody, ever? No, don’t date it. We will date it if we need it.
Now please look into the camera and read the following tweets: “News flash! Hillary did not disclose Girl Scout cookie Income!” Don’t forget the smile and long knowing stare after you finish, thank you. All right now do this one: “Bill also does sheep !” Smile – that’s it!. Now the next one: “ Obama Birth certificate proves he’s Putin’s grandmother! “ OK, that’s good. Now before we go to the advertising .” News Flash! Surprise -you don’t have to take the Pampers off of your head after Halloween. You can give them to a Democrat with a dirty mind, for Christmas, and get a 501(c)3 religious organization pass-through tax deduction.”
No wait give it to me like we are in Moscow baby: “News Flash! Democrats seek to tax prenatal care for the born-again!” Keep that stare. Keep that knowing stare. Keep smiling. Good! Watch Pat Robertson prey’n on the Christian Broadcast Network. Listen and learn.”
OK, now sell this:
“Because yer such a good American — Free Trump miniature combover piggy banks! Holds two pennies (“your two cents”). Remember when Republicans shut down the government because they wouldn’t vote for any deficit increase? You don’t? Good, you qualify for “The New Contract with America” and new 1.5 Trillion deficit increase that your great-great-grandchildren are going to be paying off… even if they are Russian citizens of West Virginia. And Just remember this: Your free gift from all of us at KGB-TV and the Citizens United Foundation’s offer: 50% off of on our IQ increasing suppositories. Now installable with your thumb.”
Congrats, you‘ve got the job! We pay in Rubles because after the upcoming recession and increasing deficit the dollar won’t be worth shit. Welcome to KGB-TV! We be Putin it where the sun don’t shine.”
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Oct 24, 2017 | Featured
We continue our study of theatrical forms about our present political culture in the form of a Marvel comic book with nine picture frames.
1) The opening frame contains the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln saying: “You can fool…” and Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, and a cast of grinning Fox News panelists universally agree: “The hell you can’t. Cut taxes for the rich, take away their healthcare, promise them lost jobs, and give every idiot a gun… Its the new GOP” (Grotesquely Opportunistic Policymakers).
2) Next: There are two little men in loincloths with little hands. In the bubble above the North Korean’s head: “I will launch heat-seeking suppositories is how I will trump you, Trump!” Behind him are millions of people cheering, in unison, in one bubble over their heads, their approval. The bubble above the orange comb-over: “I’m clenched and ready. It will unify my base.“Behind him stand millions of people (no immigrants) each holding millions of guns all aimed at liberals who point at them as they warn: “Fear the suppositories from all sides” and then do nothing which causes the millions holding guns predictably to unify the Comb-over’s base.
3) The next is a tweet which says: “Second amendment – No hunting license required – shoot people for free! “And “First Amendment is about disrespecting soldiers it’s not about Freedom of political speech.”
4) Next the Bolshevik United Republican Party (BURP) screams: “ You are Americans. You have ‘freedom of choice,“ and Lincoln on his knees says: “No, that’s Burger King.”
5) Next the Korean leader leads his millions in a chant: “We win War! We Win War!!”… death to Americans by suppository special sauce on your toasted bum.
6) Next BURP puts up banners which say: “Keep Liberals angry with ‘false news ‘and you stand for ‘freedom of choice!’ We understand for nothing! To gather we fall.” The Liberals continue to be astounded and do nothing.
7) The Fox commentators stand and slap high-fives and misquote Lincoln: ”Divide and conquer the House and Senate!“ The Comb-over tweets: ”Always been colorblind. The flag is not red, white and blue it is white — salute and retweet?
8) Next is of a hurricane building in the shape of a mushroom cloud as the Self-Anointed Televangelists About Nothing (SATAN) and BURP point at it and drop to their knees and confirm: “There you see the Bible told us so: There is no climate change change.”
9) Is blank in case there is an encore.
This is another entry in my series of plot studies. Click here to read the previous one.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Sep 14, 2017 | Featured
Act One
A young student of American history goes to a job interview. The employer who interviews him tells him: “Your job, like this country, requires that you tell the truth because all of us are relying on each other. You can debate the facts but you cannot make up false facts” and then she asks him one question: “What is the difference between a football player who fakes an injury to stop the clock and a baseball catcher who moves his mitt to try to convince the umpire the pitch was a strike?” The young student knows the answer instantly: “The football player is breaking the rules by creating ‘false facts’ with his false injury, but the baseball player is not changing the fact of the pitch because the umpire can see it from beginning to the end. The baseball player is only an advocate but not dealing in false facts.”
Act Two
Convinced that he has a clear understanding of “America’s pastime” and that he will get the job, he goes to a baseball game that afternoon and sits in the bleachers with the fans of both teams. Surrounded by his fellow Americans he happily joins in and argues each ball and strike and catch and call made by the umpires at the game. He sees the same game as the fans of the different teams but all afternoon they enjoy the discussion and their debate and he concludes not only the baseball game but also the debate and discussion are “the American past time.”
Act Three
On his way home he turns on the radio and he hears the home team’s broadcast and then switches to the radio station for the visiting team’s broadcast and he hears an entirely different story. He notices it is not at all what he saw at the game because both radio stations are making up a story of the game for the fans that are listening to them. As he switches back and forth between the stations he realizes that the broadcasts are coming up with an entirely different score and in the wrap-up of the game entirely different league standings.
He is angry when he gets home but he finds both of his parents weeping. He tells them about the conflict between the broadcasts and he asks them: “What are they doing to America’s pastime ?”
Both parents look at him and ask him: “What are they doing to America?”
This is another entry in my series of plot studies. Here’s the previous one. And the next.
