It’s 1957. A guy holding a newspaper goes into his favorite bar.  It’s my Uncle Lando, an ex-boxer in his mid-40s, but still full of vigor and still a performer.  As reported to me later, he’s excited about what he found in the paper:  a letter by one of his favorite nieces—me. “Hey, guys, my niece is in the paper!” He then proceeds to read my letter, a solid right jab in defense of Elvis against the sucker punch that was landed the week before by Spike Wallace, the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph’s music critic.

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Reading my letter across 50+ years, I concede that its logic is a little shaky, but its passion for Elvis is solid:  “When did you make your first million, Spike?  How many times have thousands of people screamed and yelled with joy over you? You are condemning a boy who is probably less than half your age, yet who has made in approximately one year more money than you could ever hope to see if you lived to be a hundred.”

So what began as an outbreak of teen-aged girls’ lust and hysterics, first infecting myself and my best friend Monica as we watched Elvis on TV that famous Sunday night in 1956, now had a public life.  I was officially an Elvis Fan (though my Elvis Complimentary Fan Club Membership Card was in my wallet long before this).  My printed defense of Elvis would become my first encounter with printer’s ink, something I love now as much as I loved Elvis then.  Elvis + Publication:  a match made in heaven.

But it was only Early Elvis I loved. Not Vegas Elvis. Vegas Elvis (1969 – 1976) was a pathetic nightclub singer, sweating in black leather or squeezed into bejeweled white jumpsuits.   By the time Vegas Elvis emerged, this Elvis Fan had spent the latter half of the 1960s and all of the 1970s as, first, an anti-Vietnam-war protester, then a Women’s Liberation activist and Philosophy teacher—Area of Specialty:  Existentialism.  Among the literati, politicati, and philosophicati, Elvis was gauche.  My lust for Elvis would have been embarrassing if it hadn’t already disappeared, thanks to Vegas Elvis.  (I still love that tender, tremulous voice when I hear it, though; it embodied all that I hoped for in a man. That and his pout.)

Yet an astonishing truth has emerged.  While my own Elvis lust vanished long ago, I’ve encountered another Elvis lust, an odd lusting for my Elvis lust: the passion of my family and friends for my legendary (if now non-existent) Elvis lust.  And that has not only survived but thrived.  Though I beg them to stop, they persist in depositing gaudy Elvis gifts on my English Tudor doorstep.

Herewith an incomplete catalogue of my Elvis gifts: a resin plastic Elvis brooch; a large Elvis neon-blue-light bar clock; Graceland: An Interactive Pop-up Tour (the most remarkable in my extensive collection of Elvis gift books); Elvis birthday cards and note cards; a cartoonist friend’s self-portrait as a guitar-playing Elvis; paper and painted tin posters of Elvis (always with plans of how-to-frame & where-to-hang); The Night of 100 Elvises Live! cd; a bottle of “The King” wine; an Elvis clutch bag and an Elvis umbrella; a framed collage of Elvis-related items ingeniously bordered in red glass lozenges to resemble a theater marquee; and of course, that famous “Elvis with Nixon” photo.  Someone also gave me expensive tickets for the 100 Elvises concert in Baltimore’s Lithuanian Hall last year—unfortunately held on a night when I had “another engagement.” There’s more, but merciful age does bring a level of forgetfulness.

I deduce, then, that by some as yet unnamed law of the physical or psychological universe, my own Elvis lust has morphed into a troubling addiction to Elvis products by people whom I love and about whose mental health I care deeply (along with my own).  So once more I’m sending out a “Stop!” plea—this time with some help from The King: “Don’t be cruel—Love me tender.  If not, you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.  And I swear on Old Shep’s grave, if it continues I’m gonna . . . Return to sender.”

Copyright © 2012 Jo-Ann Pilardi.

Jo-Ann Pilardi is retired from Towson University where she taught Philosophy and Women’s Studies for 38 years.  A working class Italian from Pittsburgh, she moved to Baltimore in 1969 and was active in women’s movement groups through the 1970s. Currently, she teaches for TU’s Osher Institute, reads and writes, gardens, travels, and studies jazz piano (with a few segues into old Elvis tunes).

Interviewed by Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron

I’m in the process of collecting my short stories. But I tell myself, What am I doing. I should be doing a play. . . . I have some interesting beginnings, but I can’t see the end of any of them. It’s usually that way: I plan something for weeks or months and suddenly begin writing dialogue which begins in relation to what I had planned and veers off into something I hadn’t even thought about. I’m drawing down the lightning, I suppose.

(T)he closer you get to any kind of political action among young people, the more they demand that the action have a certain fidelity to human nature, and that pomposity, and posing, and role-taking not be allowed to strip the movement of its veracity. What they suspect most is gesturing, you know, just making gestures, which are either futile, or self-serving, or merely conscientious. The intense personal-relations concentration of the fifties seems now to have been joined to a political consciousness, which is terrific.

I always drew a lot of inspiration from politics, from one or another kind of national struggle. . . . I lived through the McCarthy time, when one saw personalities shifting and changing before one’s eyes, as a direct, obvious result of a political situation. . . . Such a pall of fright was laid upon us that it truly deflected the American mind. It’s part of a paranoia which we haven’t escaped yet.

(I)t’s got so we’ve lost the technique of grappling with the world that Homer had, that Aeschylus had, that Euripides had. And Shakespeare. How amazing it is that people who adore the Greek drama fail to see that these great works are works of a man confronting his society, the illusions of the society, the faiths of the society. They’re social documents, not little piddling private conversations. We just got educated into thinking this is all “a story,” a myth for its own sake.

Look at Molière. You can’t conceive of him except as a social playwright. He’s a social critic. Bathes up to his neck in what’s going on around him.

I couldn’t write a play like Death of a Salesman anymore. I couldn’t really write any of my plays now. Each is different, spaced sometimes two years apart, because each moment called for a different vocabulary and a different organization of the material. However, when you speak of a strict form, I believe in it for the theater. Otherwise you end up with anecdotes, not with plays. . . . The audience has been trained to eschew the organized climax because it’s corny, or because it violates the chaos which we all revere. But I think that’s going to disappear with the first play of a new kind which will once again pound the boards and shake people out of their seats with a deeply, intensely organized climax. It can only come from a strict form: you can’t get it except as the culmination of two hours of development.

This is one in a series that will post on Wednesdays. If you’d like to read more of what people such as Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates and other famous — and not so famous — playwrights have to say about the art and craft of writing for the stage, type “On Playwriting” into the small sidebar window and tap the “Search” button. (Arthur Miller On Playwriting part X will post next Wednesday.)

Interviewed by Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron

(Senator Joseph) McCarthy (was) actually saying certain lines that I recall the witch-hunters saying in Salem . . . . For example, his holding up his hand with cards in it, saying, “I have in my hand the names of so-and-so.” Well, this was a standard tactic of seventeenth-century prosecutors confronting a witness who was reluctant or confused, or an audience in a church which was not quite convinced that this particular individual might be guilty . . . . It was a way of inflicting guilt on everybody, and many people responded genuinely out of guilt; some would come and tell him some fantasy, or something that they had done or thought that was evil in their minds. I had in my play, for example, the old man who comes and reports that when his wife reads certain books, he can’t pray. He figures that the prosecutors would know the reason, that they can see through what to him was an opaque glass. Of course he ends up in a disaster because they prosecuted his wife.

I had made a lot of statements and I had signed a great many petitions. I’d been involved in organizations, you know, putting my name down for fifteen years before that. But I don’t think they ever would have bothered me if I hadn’t married Marilyn (Monroe). Had they been interested, they would have called me earlier. And, in fact, I was told on good authority that the then chairman, Francis Walter, said that if Marilyn would take a photograph with him, shaking his hand, he would call off the whole thing. It’s as simple as that. Marilyn would get them on the front pages right away. They had been on the front page for years, but the issue was starting to lose its punch.

I was indicted for contempt for having refused to give or confirm the name of a writer, whether I had seen him in a meeting of communist writers I had attended some eight or ten years earlier. My legal defense was not on any of the Constitutional amendments but on the contention that Congress couldn’t drag people in and question them about anything on the Congressman’s mind; they had to show that the witness was likely to have information relevant to some legislation then at issue. The committee had put on a show of interest in passport legislation. I had been denied a passport a couple of years earlier. Ergo, I fitted into their vise. A year later I was convicted after a week’s trial. Then about a year after that the Court of Appeals threw out the whole thing . . . . It was all a dreadful waste of time and money and anger, but I suffered very little, really, compared to others who were driven out of their professions and never got back, or who did get back after eight and ten years of blacklisting.

I’m in deadly fear of people with too much power. I don’t trust people that much any more. I used to think that if people had the right idea they could make things move accordingly . . . . In the thirties it was, for me, inconceivable that a socialist government could be really anti-Semitic. It just could not happen, because their whole protest in the beginning was against anti-Semitism, against racism, against this kind of inhumanity; that’s why I was drawn to it . . . . I’m much more pragmatic about such things now, and I want to know those I’m against and who it is that I’m backing and what he is like.

I have . . . a psychic investment in the continuity of life. I couldn’t ever write a totally nihilistic work.

This is one in a series that will post on Wednesdays. If you’d like to read more of what people such as Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates and other famous — and not so famous — playwrights have to say about the art and craft of writing for the stage, type “On Playwriting” into the small sidebar window and tap the “Search” button. (Arthur Miller On Playwriting part IX will post next Wednesday.)

(Click images for larger views.)

By Jim Sizemore

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The “Hip Shots” series of photographs will feature images that were grabbed “on the fly,” with little or no regard for framing and focus. The object of the exercise is to create dynamic pictures, not perfect ones. With this ” shoot-from-the-hip” method the more frames exposed, the better the chances are that you’ll come up with something interesting — a related series that may be arranged as a post. If you’d like additional tips for using the technique, or to submit your own images, drop a question or note in the “Leave a Comment” section, below. This feature will appear most Fridays.

Copyright © 2012 Jim Sizemore.

By Jim Sizemore

(Click images for larger versions.)

The “Hip Shots” series of photographs will feature images that were grabbed “on the fly,” with little or no regard for framing and focus. The object of the exercise is to create dynamic pictures, not perfect ones. With this ” shoot-from-the-hip” method the more frames exposed, the better the chances are that you’ll come up with something interesting — a related series that may be arranged as a post. If you’d like additional tips for using the technique, or to submit your own images, drop a question or note in the “Leave a Comment” section, below. This feature will appear most Fridays.

Copyright © 2012 Jim Sizemore.

By Jim Sizemore

(Click images for larger versions.)

The “Hip Shots” series of Doodlemeister.com photographs will feature images that were grabbed “on the fly” with little or no regard for framing and focus. The object of the exercise is to create dynamic pictures, not perfect ones. With this ” shoot-from-the-hip” method, the more frames  exposed the better the chances are that you’ll come up with something interesting — a related series that can be arranged as a post. If you’d like additional tips for using the technique, or to submit your own pictures, drop a question or note in the “Leave a Comment” section, below. Meanwhile, click the “Hip Shots” tag above for many more examples. This feature will appear most Fridays.

Copyright © 2011 Jim Sizemore.

Some time back, I agreed to do a cartoon for a guy I knew who was a law enforcement ranger at Fort McHenry in Baltimore. The fort is where I walk most days and many of the rangers there know me pretty well, so it was no surprise when one of them asked for a favor. Almost immediately, though, I had second thoughts. I’m often asked  to do a “little cartoon” for some special occasion that turns out to be a time-consuming production, all done for nothing more than a “Thank you,” if that.

So, after giving it more thought, I decided that if I could come up with a cartoon that would somehow be pegged to the Ken Burns’ National Parks documentary series that had aired on PBS, I’d do it. My thinking was that if I’m going to go to all that effort as a favor for Ranger Chad, I should at least get a small return — a royalty of sorts — for the effort.  Once I had an idea that would fulfill both his needs and mine, I drew it up and uploaded a digital copy to my London distributor (Cartoonstock.com, see sidebar link). I also posted the image on my blog as a part of my Monday series of Gag Cartoons and forgot about it.

Then, on July 26, 2011, out of the Internet blue so to speak, I got the following email:

Hello, this is Chris Darling of Ken Burns’ office, Florentine Films. Ken would love to own the original of the Ranger Chad cartoon to display in his office, and was wondering if you’d be interested in trading the original for a collection of his films.  Is this something you might be interested in?

Christopher Darling
Assistant to Ken Burns

Thinking that the “collection” Mr. Darling mentioned might include Prohibition,  the latest documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novik, which I knew was scheduled to air in early October, I quickly agreed. Here’s my email reply:

I’m delighted that your boss would like to have the original of the Ranger Chad cartoon and would happily trade for it, except that no “real” original exists — only a digital version completed by me from a rough draft scanned into my computer. However, if Ken would like to have a high resolution digital copy of the finished art, inscribed to him and signed and dated by me, I’d be more than pleased to oblige.

Sincerely, Jim Sizemore

They agreed, and after I completed the cartoon print (see above) and mailed it, I once again had second thoughts. This time what bugged me was my lame dedication — “For Ken Burns with best wishes.” I thought that Mr. Burns, given his vast accomplishments, deserved much better. Perhaps something along the lines of “For Ken ‘Florentine’ Burns with great respect,” etc., etc. But having rushed to get the cartoon in the mail, I resigned myself to the fact that it was just another missed opportunity. Then, a few days later, I got an email from Mr. Darling saying, in the nicest way possible, that someone on his staff found a misspelling. (Check the above image again if you missed it.)

Long story short, as red-faced as I was for having made the mistake (“setting” instead of “sitting”), I was at least happy for another chance to get the dedication right. I made the correction, rewrote the dedication, signed the cartoon print and sent it back to Mr. Darling at Florentine Films. A few days later my collection of Ken Burns’ DVDs arrived in a large box via UPS. I was impressed with the resulting 21 inch stack (above), which I figured must include every documentary he ever made — except, I noted with dismay, Prohibition. Oh well, I guess it’s all about timing.

Prohibition by Ken Burns and Lynn Novik is currently airing on PBS (October 2, 3 and 4). And I’m sure it’ll be repeated many times in most markets. Don’t miss it, it’s really good.

By Kurt Vonnegut, The Los Angles Times, October 24, 2004

By Jim Sizemore

 (Click images for larger views.)

The “Hip Shots” series of Doodlemeister.com photographs will feature images that were grabbed “on the fly” with little or no regard for framing and focus. The object of the exercise is to create dynamic pictures, not perfect ones. With this ” shoot-from-the-hip” method the more frames  exposed, the better the chances are that you’ll come up with something interesting—a related series that can be arranged as a post. If you’d like additional tips for using the technique, or to submit your own pictures, drop a question or note in the “Leave a Comment” section, below. Meanwhile, click the “Hip Shots” tag above for more examples. And for another post in the series, check in next Friday.

Copyright © 2011 Jim Sizemore.