Citizen of the Year

Posted on April 20, 2013 by RegenAxe

Anne is Awarded MRH Citizen of the Year

Last night was a big night in the RegenAxe household. We went to the school district’s annual awards banquet that was held at the golf clubhouse in Forest Park. Anne was named Citizen of the Year by the Maplewood-Richmond Heights School District. She was awarded this honor for personal dedication to the school district and the community at least that is what her plaque says. Actually, I can’t count the number of teachers and administrators that told me how great she is, like I really didn’t already know it and they were telling me something new. Our longtime friend, Nelson, and now school board member presented the award. He extolled the years that she has substitute taught in the district, the years of long-range planning committee work that she has done and her tireless campaigning for numerous school bond issues and tax propositions.

Anne had prepared an acceptance speech that had an Academy Awards theme to it, “Thank you members of the Academy, I mean school district.” This opening line was paired with a closing one that after enumerating her many school accomplishments ended with, “I think that I hear the music, so I’ll get off the stage now.” That was her rehearsed speech, instead she went ad-lib and successfully joked, “I was a street-walker for MRH”, referring to her many tax and bond issue campaigns. She got a lot of laughs with this line.

There were a couple of hundred attendees there. They were all district stakeholders, or like me spouses. Most of them were her fellow teachers. After dinner, the first awards that were handed out were the service awards, for five, ten and fifteen years of district service. Most of the people who received awards, received one of these. Then it was on to the main event, which was followed by recognition of the retiring faculty.

Anne was first up among these main awards. Next came the Volunteer of the Year, Family of the Year and an award for the Spirit of MRH. Each school named their Teacher of the Year, ending with the overall District Teacher of the Year. Her acceptance speech really did need some move along music, like in the Academy Awards, but she ended with a funny story. When she learned of this honor, she told her young daughter about it. The daughter seemed rather nonplussed about the award. The next day, the daughter asked her mother, “Who is going to be Teacher of the Year today?”

A Manifesto Against Momism

Posted on March 4, 2013 by RegenAxe

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, blier, limer lock
Three geese inna flock
One flew east,
One flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest

In preamble I should state that I really hate this story! It viscerally tears at my psyche. Anyway, the kids did alright. Hell, they were fantastic. I loved McMurphy (Miguel Hernandez) and hated Ratched (Anna Wermuth). Please take no offense dear, it was your role, not your performance that offended me. You did your job to perfection. The rest of the cast also ably portrayed their characters. By the end of the show, I was glad that Anne had dragged me along, on Saturday night to see Maplewood-Richmond Heights High School’s production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

“Nurse Ratched, who is so inflexible, so unseeing, so blandly sure she is right, represents Momism at its radical extreme, and McMurphy is the Huck Finn who wants to break loose from her version of civilization.”, wrote Roger Ebert. “Cuckoo’s Nest” is much less about insanity and much more about rebellion to authority. I cannot think of a better staging local for such a drama than in a high school, because it is in high school where America’s future rebels are bred to question authority.

I was first annoyed, but then came to love the audience’s giggling, like whenever a cast member exhibited spastic behavior. This is a small close-knit high school, everybody knows everybody else’s business.

Running this school puts the real world facility’s talents for growth, in direct contrast to Big Nurse’s destructive reign of terror. She would have never condoned this play. The behavior of Big Nurse in another venue, say a prison or say Gitmo, would easily fall within the guidelines of torture.

Nurse Rat Shit made Billy commit suicide and then she first degree murdered McMurphy. Chief Bromden only later sort of unplugged the still breathing corpse.

I’ve vented here, but the play still portrays an evil woman, but then so are men. We are all sinners. In the real world, men are tagged as the perpetrators of most of this world’s wrongs. Men are still the world’s majority power brokers, so the blame fairly falls at their feet. This play illuminates the truth that women, given unchecked power are just as sure to abuse it as their male counterparts.

I’d rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.

A Night at the Museum

Posted on January 11, 2013 by RegenAxe

The Eads Bridge on a Dark and Foggy Night

It was a dark and stormy night, well it was. Thursday night we went down by the river, not in a van, but to the Arch. We attended the grand opening of the Maplewood-Richmond Heights Elementary School’s exhibit at the Arch’s museum. Last night, was more party than education. I guess Anne, her colleagues and their students, had already done all of that heavy lifting. In addition to the great social vibe of the evening, there were also cookies and free Arch tram rides.

The photo with this post is of the Eads Bridge, the oldest bridge across the Mississippi in Saint Louis. It demarcates the northern boundary of the Arch grounds. For once, I can claim fog as an excuse, instead of focus, for the fuzziness of this photograph. Still, I think that it makes for a great effect.

After the show, Anne and I retreated to the Tap Room, for a light supper and a brew. The Post-Dispatch had a great article about the school’s exhibit, that I’ll link to here. Individual students are interviewed and their commentary on the exhibit is priceless. We managed to dodge the occasional rain storm, on the Arch grounds and at the Tap Room, but our luck ran out, when we finally returned home.

Anne’s Explorers

Posted on December 29, 2012 by RegenAxe

Today, Anne led Rey, Dave and I down to the Arch to view the Maplewood Richmond Heights Elementary School’s exhibit that is now on display there, School as Museum. For those not familiar with the place, underneath the Arch is the Museum of Westward Expansion. In cooperation with the National Park Service, MRH Elementary has taken over one of the galleries there.

The Arch Grounds Under a Dusting of Snow

The overall purpose of this project is to give the students an opportunity to explore museum functions and practices. Students in grades 2nd through 6th worked with National Park Service staff to learn more about museum functions and practices. The following three questions were posed as guidelines for this exploration:

How does a museum collect and protect artifacts?
How are museum exhibits designed?
What does a museum curator do?

Through a series of visits to both the Arch and the Old Courthouse, students learned about the roles and functions of museum personnel and how they preserve, exhibit, collect, interpret and document museum artifacts. These experiences tied into the actual design and development of an exhibit by each grade on a topic of their choice.

This fall Anne worked with the fourth graders. They chose to study European exploration. In this unit the students learned about European exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. They examined artifacts, read secondary sources about different explorers and analyzed the dominate motives for European exploration.

The display they choose to share is of the inside of an explorer’s ship. This portion of the overall exhibit is intended to be walked through, as though you are actually on a ship. Once aboard this vessel, you are introduced to five explorers; you can stop and admire their portraits or stop and listen as their bust comes alive to tell you their tale. Anne is seen below, posing before the 4th grade exhibit.

Anne In Front of the 4th Grade Exhibit

After the Arch, we walked over to Laclede’s Landing. Once, a warehouse district, it is situated along the Mississippi, just north of the Arch grounds. It is now a restaurant and entertainment district and we headed to one of the older establishments there, Hannegan’s. Named for Robert Hannegan, a Saint Louis politician, Hannegan’s interior decor is modeled after the US Senate’s dining room.

I don’t know what the connection between Hannegan’s the restaurant and Hannegan the politician is, except that there are some of Bob Hannegan’s artifacts on display in the restaurant. The most interesting one that I saw was a letter to Hannegan from FDR saying that he would be happy to run with Hannegan’s suggested running mate, Harry S Truman. Hannegan was the Democratic chairman in 1944. Then we sent Rey on his way back to Tennessee.

The Laramie Project

Posted on October 20, 2012 by RegenAxe

Rainbow Saint Louis City Flag

The Laramie Project is Moisés Kaufman’s play about the tragic death of Matthew Shepard and the events that surrounded his murder in Laramie, Wyoming. The 1998 murder of this University of Wyoming gay student made national news and left the towns people of Laramie in the center of a media firestorm. Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project made repeated trips to Laramie for more than a year and they eventually interviewed over 200 people. These interviews and the recitation of the words spoken and recorded form the basis of this play.

It starts shortly after Matt Shepard’s nearly lifeless body was discovered and encompasses the arrest of the two men that perpetrated this hate crime, Shepard’s eventual death from his horrible wounds and subsequent funeral. In the funeral scene the Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas is portrayed. The play goes on to cover the trial, conviction and subsequent commutation of the death penalty to life imprisonment of Shepard’s two attackers, at Matt’s parents request. A brief epilogue closes this nearly three-hour play.

Maplewood-Richmond Heights High School produced this performance of The Laramie Project. Their performance run only encompassed four shows. The first two on Thursday and Friday conflicted with the Cardinals. Late this week, the school district published a letter informing parents, students and faculty that they had been informed that the Westboro Baptist Church planned to protest the play.

If you have not heard of these awful, awful people, Westboro loves to protest at the funerals of fallen American service people. They hold up signs that say that it was God’s will that this soldier was killed, because this country condones homosexuality. Many of their placards are much blunter and cruder. I saw this for myself today. Westboro has actually made a business from being so offensive. No one wants them to appear and may municipalities have tried to limit their freedoms of religion, association and speech. They sue, win and collect punitive damages that fund their church. Another Saint Louis municipality, Manchester, is currently in litigation over these arguments.

Rather than try to limit these people, Maplewood decided to fight fire with fire. A counter demonstration was organized and Anne let me know that in no uncertain terms we were going. “But Honey, what about the basement?” Why do I try, more importantly, why do I even question her wisdom. We had a great time. The morning’s gloom had cleared and bright blue skies greeted us. By my unscientific count there were at least 200 people on our side, maybe more. I counted and recounted Westboro’s half-a-dozen.

Like I said, we had a great time. We met old friends. Anne introduced me to more people than I could keep track of and we had a party. We had signs that spoke of love and acceptance and we had all of the best songs. We sang America the Beautiful, Kum bay ya and Imagine. We rocked! Meanwhile across the football field the half-dozen visitors were fenced in by traffic cones and enough police to go man-to-man, and still keep the bench warm.

After the rally we went in to see the matinée performance. By MRH standards the cast was huge, twenty students and four teachers. Even so, most of the cast had to double or triple up to cover the sixty plus characters. On Friday, at work, I was trying to describe this gathering storm to one of my co-workers. He dabbles in Community Theater, so I thought that he would be sympathetic. This was not to be. He recommended Guys and Dolls. Maybe he is just partial to musical theater? He has a good voice. As a MRH taxpayer, I am extremely pleased with this production.