Groundhog Day - Location Tour

This past Sunday, Jenna and I traveled to the quaint town of Woodstock, Illinois, to celebrate Groundhog Day...and to begin our series of movie location tours. The list is quite extensive, consisting mostly of childhood favorites, such as Back to the Future, The Goonies, Rocky, and The Princess Bride, to name a few.

The first, however, was close by, and the experience was, to say the least, a lot of fun.

Groundhog Day (1993) remains one of my favorite comedies of the 90s, balancing good humor with a lot of heart and emotion. Bill Murray is fantastic, and we catch an early glimpse of some of the great acting skills he'd commit to film later in his career. In addition, the script compliments Murray's acting style, affording him chances to be funny and sad, sarcastic and romantic, sometimes even within the same scene. Murray isn't the only one who shines here, though; the supporting cast is also quite good, and flesh out the film nicely.

However, for this blog, I'm focusing primarily on the backdrop of the film: Woodstock.

I don't have much to write here, as Jenna and I created a video of our experiences Sunday, which I've posted below (Jenna also wrote a wonderful blog about the experience for the NIU web site, which can be found here). If you have eight minutes and enjoyed the film, why not give it a watch? If you've never seen it, consider renting it this weekend. As I said, it's one of those few comedies that manage to hit all cylinders. And if you enjoy our little video, be on the lookout for our next one, as we visit the UW Madison campus for our location tour of Back to School!

***Please excuse the quality of the above video. I had to lower the quality quite a bit to have it fit onto the the blog.

What I Think and Feel at 28 - Part One

"If you believe in anything very strongly--including yourself--and if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house in the block, according to what you started after. If you don’t believe in anything very strongly--including yourself--you go along, and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow’s son, and you marry if you’ve got time, and if you do you have a lot of children, whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, "What I Think and Feel at 25"

* * *

While reading F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Short Autobiography, I came across an essay Fitzgerald penned just a few years into his writing career. Aptly entitled “What I Think and Feel at 25,” the essay catalogues the young author’s views on growing older, the exchange of one’s callowness for vulnerability, and the consequences of ignoring the self in favor of following what’s expected. The joy in reading this essay is difficult to put into words, but the enterprise of exploring one’s thoughts on the world at a particular age is quite fascinating. As we grow older, Fitzgerald says, our notion of who we were at certain times is increasingly skewed, until the persona we’re left with would be almost unrecognizable to those who knew us then. By putting his views onto paper, at least part of him can be free from time’s revisions.

So I thought I’d do the same. And because the breadth I’m looking at is rather large, I’m hoping to make this a series of three or four blogs (of course, with the rate at which I post blogs, this could take me until sometime in 2016. Only time will tell). Hopefully, the following vignettes can find some kind of cohesion over such a span; if they don’t…well, perhaps that’s accurate to how I feel at 28, as well.

The Expected: “Adulthood”

As I near thirty, I’m beginning to hear the same two questions over and over, from friends, family, coworkers, and even students: 1) When are you and Jenna going to buy a house? and 2) When are you going to have kids? Depending on the audience, the responses will vary dramatically. In truth, neither my wife nor I have a definitive answer to either of those questions, particularly the second; our views ping-pong back-and-forth on an almost daily basis. Typically, the answers hover somewhere around “sometime in the future…maybe.” That’s a comfortable area for us, an indecisive, lack-of-conviction that keeps us from constructing a permanent road toward…wherever.

The conclusion of that last paragraph might suggest my wife and I are merely treading water, unable to commit to anything definite outside of each other; however, I feel such a reading stems mostly from the expected path so many of us are expected to walk once we hit a certain age. Across the Internet, I read a lot of essayists ruminating on twenty- and thirty-somethings prolonging “adulthood” in favor of “trying to figure it out” or “having fun.” Some support such enterprises, while others lambast it; personally, I resent the idea that delaying parenthood is merely shirking responsibilities or an indication of apathy.   

Now, this shouldn’t suggest that I will never buy a house or have kids (actually, when people tell me they think I would make a great parent, I take it as one of the nicest compliments I could ever receive, as it lifts me to that larger-than-life level my own parents occupy); however, I just don’t know when those dates will be, and hammering down such details now seems unfair, especially when considering it’s “what’s expected of you at a certain age.”

“It’ll just pop up,” many will say, smiling that I-used-to-think-like-that-too smile. “You can’t control these things.”

True. Trying to delay parenthood is often an act of futility. Sometimes, “these things just happen.” And when they do, well, the scenic route will end abruptly, and I will have to find my way to the beaten path. However, I always was one to linger, so unless I have to make my way back, maybe I’ll wait just a moment and concern myself with the scenery.

Oh, I’ll make my way to the path the others are walking, eventually.

…maybe.

However, despite when we find that path, I’m not sure our walk together will be marred by our tendency to dawdle; in fact, I think it will make our particular journey all the more sweet.

* * *

Of course, the above shouldn’t suggest I think young people, including those younger than my wife and I, should forego having children or buying homes (or both!) if they feel they’re ready and they want these things. These paths are different for all of us, and really, that’s the point. When you’re ready, you’re ready.

When you’re ready.

“Unless it just pops up.”

Of course.

To Be Continued

Relics

I’ve stared at the picture above many times, searching for similarities—not between my childhood counterpart and my father’s younger self, though; rather, I seek commonalities between my father’s smile then and my own now. I look for traces of what’s been handed down, hoping I’ve managed to catch some semblance of that indescribable quality that has raised my father to an almost mythical status in my eyes.

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Over the summer, I managed to transfer most of my home movies over to DVD, my ongoing campaign to ensure my recorded past never deteriorates. Obsession is a somewhat strong word, but the process of recording these VHS tapes to DVD and then recording those to my computer only to copy those files to a harddrive suggests something along those lines.

However, I didn’t stop at my home movies. My wife and I cataloged our extensive family photo collections, as well, readying them to be scanned into our computers, hoping to preserve each image before time wears away its clarity. In addition, we’ve boxed away receipts, letters, and knick-knacks, each telling its own tale of our lives together. In fact, I’ve become so enamored with relics like these that I wrote a short story about a son stumbling across a relic of his father’s, a letter that changed the dynamics of their relationship forever (this was the story picked up for publication last month, so at least my obsession has led me in the right direction when it comes to writing).

But I wonder why I obsess so much over these pieces of history; after all, as so many stories, movies, and after school specials tell us, our memories are the most important records of these events, the images we’ll take with us long after other relics are gone, lost or destroyed by age.

Knowing this, though, does not quell the obsession; in fact, it rages harder now than it ever has before. And more than ever, I study these relics, searching for answers, rather than simply enjoying them. Like an archaeologist, I try my best to preserve these artifacts for future study, perhaps when I’m old enough to uncover their meaning, perhaps when I experience enough to understand their tale.

And although I’ve copied countless movies and photos and I’ve cataloged these relics in chronological order and carefully filed them away in a closet, I come back to one of these more than any of the others: a picture taken when I was six and my father was thirty-two, both of us smiling one summer’s evening. However, unlike it did in the past, my attention now moves away from my own smile and the happiness I felt in my father’s arms to strictly the smile on my father's beaming face, and I wonder: Will my own son or daughter find such safety in my arms? Will I have the strength to inspire such a feeling? Do I have the strength now to be the legend my father has become in my thoughts? To many sons, I’m sure, their fathers become the paragons of manhood, the models upon which they must be molded. In the beginning, that time of molding lies far in the unrealized future, a hazy endpoint we shoot for without ever really thinking we’ll find, until one day you’re looking through old photos and realize: I’m almost that age now, and I don’t feel legendary. I don’t feel mythical. I feel ordinary, like I did last year and the year before. I feel no different than when I did when I was twenty or even fifteen.

When do I become that larger-than-life figure?

Sometimes, the questions fade, usually after I’ve shared a good laugh with my old man, and my vision can pull back and focus on both of our smiles, and I can find satisfaction in knowing we still smile like that now. However, pulling back becomes more difficult as I near his age, and I can only hope that when my picture is taken then, my smile looks something like his.

The Mercury Theatre Presents...

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S.”

-Orson Welles

My obsession with Orson Welles began when I was sixteen, after my mother had asked me if I wanted to listen to a radio broadcast. For her birthday, my father had given her a set of the twenty greatest radio shows put on air during the first half of the twentieth century. Assembled and introduced by Walter Cronkite, this collection catalogued a multitudinous offering of programs, ranging from the vaudeville antics of Abbot and Costello to the heart-racing thrills of The Shadow.

If we had started with anything other than the first broadcast in the collection, I perhaps would’ve listened once, maybe twice, to appease my mother’s wishes, and then moved on to other things. However, she didn’t start with one of the comedies (although, we’d eventually get to Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, and I Love Lucy) or even one of the thrillers; she started with The Mercury Theatre’s production of The War of the Worlds. She started with Orson Welles. And although I didn’t know it when I sat down that evening, I would forever be changed when that baritone voice introduced us to the apocalypse that followed.

If you’re unfamiliar with this broadcast, I urge you to look it up on Youtube. Before doing so, though, look up its history. (Or just read the next two paragraphs. This isn’t a detailed summary of what happened, by any means, but it’ll serve as a nice Cliffnotes version.) On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles (who was only 23) and his theatre troupe broadcasted their version of the H.G. Wells novel, updating it to fit a modern audience. Instead of telling the story as a standard radio drama, though, Wells depicted it through a series of news reports, interrupting an orchestra broadcasting from atop a high-rise in New York City to bring its listeners in an alien invasion. As the reports gained in frequency, they began relaying information about an unidentified flying object landing in a remote town somewhere in New Jersey. Twenty minutes into the broadcast, while they reported and investigated the crash, new reporters, police officers, and unlucky citizens who were just too nosey for their own good screamed as a creature emerged from the structure. Several seconds later, the UFO began firing a ray into the crowd of people, and just as the screams reached their apex, the broadcast went dead. The next twenty minutes cut between news throughout the east coast, reporting the alien attack.

Of course, we can look back on this now and see it for what it is; however, radio was still new in 1938, and no one had exploited it in such a manner. Of the six million people listening, an estimated one million thought the report was real. Welles had timed his alien invasion to coincide with the break of a more popular show on a rival station. When the break came and listeners began circling the dial, Welles ordered his alien invasion to commence. Unfortunately, some listeners didn’t make it to the end of the broadcast (they were too busy fleeing into the night with their families), when Welles comes on the air and admits this was simply a good-old-fashioned horror story and was not meant to be taken seriously. But he knew what he had done. He had just committed the best prank still to this day.

My mother told me all of this before playing the CD. I nodded, wondered how people could have been so stupid to believe such a thing, and stretched out on the floor next to our dog. I was tired and figured I’d probably fall asleep. As Orson’s voice vibrated through the speakers, my mother turned off the light. “Why’d you do that?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“For effect,” she answered.

We said nothing more.

When the aliens first attacked, I imagined the poor schmucks listening to the radio, their eyes widening, their lips trembling. When I heard the screams, I saw mothers and fathers weeping as they grabbed their children and raced for their cars. When the news reporter described people dying in the streets of New York, my mind raced back to the horrors of 9/11, and I knew exactly what must have been going through their minds as they drove their cars toward the black horizon, wondering if they’d see another day.

After it finished, I asked my mother if there were any other radio shows like that.

“Well,” she said, turning on the light and leafing through the booklet, “there’s a few more by Welles and the Mercury Theatre. There are some comedies, too. Abbot and Costello come next. Wanna listen to that tomorrow night?”

My weariness had worn away, and an anxious, childlike enthusiasm had replaced it. “Let’s listen now,” I said, smiling. “But let’s listen to another one by Welles.”

She laughed, found another Mercury Theatre production, and turned off the lights.

For the next few months, we’d listen to radio broadcasts throughout the week. Eventually, I’d find my way to Citizen Kane and The Third Man, but for a while, movies took a back seat to an art form that has long since been forgotten. Sometimes, while teaching in class, I mention The War of the Worlds story, and students take interest; however, I know most think nothing more of it after leaving my classroom. Still, there are those who come back, wide-eyed and smiling, and tell me they listened to it over the weekend. Some of them still say they wouldn’t have freaked out if they had heard it live; others, though, are like me, and were freaked out even after knowing the truth.

If you haven’t listened to it, give it a try. Maybe you’ll find a new medium of entertainment. There are so many great programs from this era that no one will ever experience; it would be a tragedy to let these forgotten gems fade away.

An Introduction (of sorts)

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“It is myself that I portray.”

-Montaigne

I used to blog.

During college, I’d post my blogs on Myspace. Some dealt with whatever bugged me at the time (I recall many of these lambasting one of my classmates, who wore nonprescription, black-rimmed glasses and constantly name-dropped obscure Russian authors, even when they had nothing to do with our discussion), while others reviewed music albums and novels. Some were analyses of movies I had seen recently (the most obscure films I could find—all of them foreign, most in black and white), and some were ramblings I labeled as art.

I guess the black-rimmed glasses kid and I shared more than I wanted to admit.

However, when Myspace faded away, my spirit for writing blogs faded with it. Facebook’s notes were clunky at best, and with student teaching just around the corner, my time for writing anything other than lesson plans was nonexistent. I thought my free time would return once I got an actual job, that this frantic workload was only temporary.

What the hell was I thinking?

My first year of teaching provided little time for anything outside of school. During the day, I taught three classes, and at night, I helped with theatre, coached speech team, and even appeared onstage. Some nights, I got home around eleven, fell into bed, and woke up early the next morning to grade, surviving on two cases of Diet Coke a week (a habit that persists to this day).

That first year was a haze. Everything that had pushed me into English fell by the wayside. I read maybe three books for pleasure that year; my writing came to a crashing halt; and I didn’t see a single movie in theaters. My life was teaching, and sadly, I was still figuring out what the hell that word meant.

After my first year, though, my free time slowly returned, and I picked back up some of my favorite hobbies. The number of books I read increased. I started writing again. And I found myself in theaters more and more.

Sadly, though, some hobbies remained college pastimes.

Before today, the last blog I wrote was about deleting my Myspace and Facebook accounts as I readied myself for student teaching. The date on that blog is August 15^th, 2007, the day after NIU’s student teaching orientation. A number of noted professionals in the teaching community addressed this new thing called “social networking.” In so many words, they said it would get us fired, get us sued, and land us in jail.

Sweating bullets, we all hit delete and smashed our modems.

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Introductions are hard. I usually don’t write them until the end, and I urge my students to do the same. I figure once I know more about my paper, once it’s evolved past the point of a preliminary outline, I can effectively introduce it. However, with blogs, it’s different.

How do I introduce myself?

Hi, I’m Tim. I teach high school English and coach speech. I’m 27, married, and enjoy writing fiction.

Awful.

However, with anything more in depth, I run the risk of sounding narcissistic…although, that would be an accurate introduction to who I am, as well.

But not really.

It’s a part of me, yes (and I feel many of you who know me nodding your heads), but not the whole. In other settings, I’m horribly shy. In others, I’ll carry on a conversation after a while. And yet, in others still, I won’t shut up. I suppose this is true of almost everyone, but it’s one feature I obsess over, making it noteworthy to my introduction.

I also love chicken tenders.

Along with teaching and being happily married, I write. After my second year of teaching, I made a promise to write five pages a day, even if it meant a few hours of sleep. For the most part, I kept that promise, and ended up writing a novel I’ve shown all of one person (my wife). I wouldn’t consider submitting it, but it taught me a lot about crafting narrative, lessons that I’ve since included in my creative writing course.

I drink at least three Diet Cokes a day. My colleagues and friends have considered enrolling me in a twelve-step program. I wish I were exaggerating. A student once painted a Diet Coke can for me to hang on my wall, a testament to my addiction.

It still hangs there.

And still, none of these really “introduce me.” They give parts, but I guess that’s really what a blog is supposed to do. Is it a story? A series of essays? Diary entries? Random musings appearing below a rather pretentious title stolen from a book?

The answer: Yes.

However, introducing anything before it is written has never been my strong suit. In short, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to write after this, but I think whatever it is will do a better job introducing me than any introduction I write at the outset.

Whatever I write, though, will differ greatly from the blogs I wrote when I was 22. Only five years have passed, but the kid I was then and the person I am now are quite different, and the content will most likely be much different, as well. Except for when I write about Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à Part, a French film from the 1960s and a great example of the Nouvelle Vague.

I guess I still have some things in common with my college self, after all.

And the kid who wore nonprescription black-rimmed glasses.