We'll take you to The Other Side for one more round & one more song, visit two performances you'll want to catch, & ask why Molly is live Tweeting the War of 1812.
Merry Lepper, first American woman to run a marathon: 1963, Culver City
12/9/2013 UPDATE: Tonight at 7, the Culver City City Council will honor Merry Lepper for her accomplishment, which came 50 years ago this month. Lepper will be on hand to accept her commendation. We'll have more on this weekend's Off-Ramp.
In "Marathon Crasher," a great longread on Kindle released today, LA-based sports journalist David Davis tells a story few people know, about a woman everyone should know about. "Marathon Crasher" is about the day in 1963 that Merry Lepper became the first American woman to run a marathon. His story is also about the absurdity that patronizing, un-scientific, misogynist (pick one or all) track and field officials kept women from participating in all but the easiest races for decades. Here's an excerpt that takes us to December, 1963 (Merry's friend Lyn Carman had planned to become the first woman to run a marathon and trained with her husband Bob):
Merry dressed in clothes that were more appropriate for a day at the beach: a light-green blouse, with half sleeves, buttons and a collar, and a pair of white shorts. Over that she pulled on grey warm-up sweats. She had a new pair of white sneakers, flimsy compared to today's cushiony models.
In her haste she forgot to have breakfast. En route, she ate a Baby Ruth candy-bar. That would serve as her fuel—her protein and carbs--for the 26.2-mile race.
Outside Veterans Memorial Park in Culver City, the smallest Western Hemisphere field in years–just 67 men--bunched together by the starting line, stretching their legs, rotating their necks, windmilling their arms, and eyeing the competition.
Bob Carman was a last-minute scratch. Days before the race, he had suffered a fractured skull after tripping and falling inside their home. He had been discharged from the hospital, but he was unable to run or provide his usual support.
Merry and Lyn did not linger at the starting line. After removing their sweats, they hid in the bushes across the street, out of sight from the officials.
Merry felt nervous. "What have we got ourselves into?" she whispered to herself. "They don't want us here, we're not supposed to be here."
She took a deep breath and drew strength from Lyn's grim determination. At the gun, the pair hesitated for a moment as the men began their journey. Then, they jumped from the bushes and took off after them, chasing the field down Overland Boulevard.
Today, Merry lives along the border between Arizona and New Mexico, and Lyn lives in Northern California. They had lost touch until David reached them for his story. As Culver City continues its revitalization, perhaps it's time for a statue commemorating the city's place in history, and Merry Lepper's.
RIP Marcie Page
On this weekend's show, you might have heard me dedicate the episode to Marcie Page. Marcie was a good friend who died of cancer Saturday morning at her home in Highland Park.
I called Marcie a passionate advocate for the arts for her long career at the Craft and Folk Art Museum and at Pacific Asia Museum. I also mentioned she was one of LA's best unknown cooks, a fact I can attest to, from wonderful paella cooked over on her family's patio on hot summer nights, to astoundingly rich and delicious cassoulet in the wintertime.
Marcie was irascible, tough, plainspoken to the point of brusqueness, but loyal and, at heart, loving. Listening to her in this 2009 Off-Ramp segment - talking about going back home to Paris, Tennessee, for Thanksgiving and about her most memorable Thanksgiving - it's hard to believe that voice has been stilled. But I'm glad we captured it, so that when we miss her, we can bring back those memories.
Rest in peace, Marcie.
Longtime Kings fan Ian Adams asks the bandwagon for a little consideration
(Ian Adams works in KPCC's IT department.)
Hello, new Los Angeles Kings fans! Welcome to the club. As you’ll find out, those of us who have lived and breathed Kings hockey since before the Lakers and Clippers lost in the playoffs are a pretty obsessed bunch.
I, for example, have a dog named Lord Stanley Pup, named for the man who founded the Stanley Cup. The deal we have is that he gets half a Milk-Bone for every playoff goal the Kings score. So now even my dog is a hockey fan.
Being as obsessed as we are, you’ll understand if we’re a little leery of the “bandwagon fans.” Me, I don’t mind bandwagon fans, except for a couple things.
First, those brand-new fans who pretend to be longtime fans. We can smell you a mile away. If you’re 18 years old and wearing a Wayne Gretzky jersey, something doesn’t quite add up. I’m not mathematician or anything, but he stopped playing for the Kings when you were 2 years old. I’m not buying it.
So, if you’re new to the Kings, by all means, go get yourself a jersey! Just get one with the name of a current player stitched across the back. Between Kopitar, Brown, Doughty, Quick or any of the others, you can’t go wrong. Yes, someday that player will retire or get traded to another team, and you may feel like your expensive jersey is outdated. But, it’s not. Like a bottle of fine wine, your jersey is actually maturing into a “vintage” jersey, and proves which year you become a Kings fan.
For example, I became a Kings fan in 1998, so I still proudly wear my #22, Ian LaPerriere jersey -- even though he hasn’t played for us in over eight years. It’s a badge of honor.
My second “bandwagon fan” complaint is how you feed into basic supply and demand. A regular season ticket in the nosebleeds will run you about 30 bucks. That same seat, for the Stanley Cup finals, is going for over $400! C’mon! I work in public radio! I can’t afford that! Sure, I could try to divert the funds, but my mortgage is due, and my dog insists I keep the Milk-Bones coming.
14 years of following the Kings’ every up and down, and I’ll be watching my team go for the Stanley Cup from my couch.
So, if you’ve suddenly become a Kings fan in the past few days, could you do us a favor and leave the playoff tickets to the longtime, and usually long suffering, Kings fans?
But really, those are my only two complaints. I want to welcome you into the Kings family, with the provisional title of “bandwagon fan.” If you’re still with us in October, when the next hockey season starts, you have my permission to drop “bandwagon” from that title, and just call yourself a “Kings fan.”
Go, Kings, Go!
$100k Mohn Award raises ante for Hammer's 'Made In LA' 2012 exhibit
With the non-profit LAX ART, Saturday the Hammer Museum opens a delicious new exhibit highlighting dozens of new and emerging artists from LA. It's the Hammer's biennial event, called "Made in LA 2012," but this year they're sweetening the pot and upping the exhibit's prestige with a huge cash prize for best work of art. The Mohn Family Foundation (a major supporter of KPCC) is giving $100,000 to establish the Mohn Award, jumping Hammer's biennial into the ranks of the Tate and the Whitney. An outside jury will pick five finalists, but then the public will vote for the winner and the result will be announced in August.
60 artists are participating in "Made in LA," after curators -- like the Hammer's Anne Ellegood and Ali Subotnick -- visited hundreds of artists' studios across LA. Subotnick says, "Getting into the studio and seeing what's happening and talking with the artists about their work is the most exciting part of this process." The say they didn't have any set criteria. No check-boxes for demographic, medium, or subject. Instead, it was a gut feeling. "It's gotta rock your world," as Subotnick says.
Made in LA is happening at three venues: the Hammer, Barnsdall Art Park, and LAX ART, and runs through September 2d. Check the website link for the cool app you play in your car, featuring art talks at specific geographic points, and Dublab music the rest of the time.
The Other Side, LA's last gay piano bar, to close
The sign went up last week: after 15 years, the owner of The Other Side was selling the business. As one patron says, "it's a landmark the city doesn't even know existed."
The Other Side, on Hyperion in Silverlake, is LA's last gay piano bar. There used to be many, but after June 24, there won't be any. Over 40 years, it was a refuge from homophobia, a last preserve for pro-am show tunes, and just a reasonably quiet neighborhood bar where the bartenders made the world's best well drinks.
Bryan Miller plays piano and encourages shy singers on Wednesday nights. He started playing at The Other Side in 1978, when it was called The Toy Tiger, and has played, on and off, for twenty years in this long, rectangular room, which nowadays is filled mostly with men on "the other side" of 50. Many are in their 70s and 80s and survived police raids and beatings in the 1960s and 1970s, and after that, the AIDS epidemic. Now, he says, "whole community is going to disperse."
Jane Cantillon is just wrapping up production of her documentary, "The Other Side, a Queer History," and now is shooting an ending she wishes she didn't have to. The bar's demise mirrors Silverlake's waning status as a gay community. "The gay population slowly, quietly migrated to the West Side, to unincorporated West Hollywood, where the Sheriff's department wasn't as cruel or harsh," she says. Her film features many men recounting LAPD raids, where a stray look or a hand on the shoulder would be willfully misinterpreted as a lewd and lascivious act by vice cops looking to shut down an undesirable gathering place.
Times have changed and now The Other Side may not be strictly necessary, unless you want a bar where everyone remembers your name, and you can hear them say it.
As one 84-year old (straight) patron put it, "It's like a death in the family."
The Other Side's name doesn't just refer to the average age of the patrons. It's also about gays being on the other side of society, and the fact that it's on the other side of The Flying Leap Cafe, also set to close June 24.
There's one happy update: the Showroom at The French Market in West Hollywood will be hosting many of The Other Side's piano players on the days they used to play at The Other Side.
Even today, American Indian powwows bring tribes together
The 27th annual UCLA powwow kicked off this spring as many powwows do: with a Gourd Dance. Half-a-dozen men circle a large drum, singing as they pound it with mallets. Next to them, in a circle of grass, four older men in dress shirts and pants, draped with blue and red blankets and crowned with fur caps, shake rattles and bounce to the rhythm. A couple dozen families and friends watch from beneath canopies rimming the arena.
Others mill about at food and craft booths. When the dance is done, one of them--actor Saginaw Grant--addresses the crowd.
"These songs are very old songs composed by different ones throughout the years," said Grand. "They’re for everyone around this arena, even our relatives who aren’t here today our loved ones these songs are for them. I feel I’m following in the steps of my elders. I’ve heard many times when they talk about this drum they say it’s the heartbeat of our people."
The Gourd Dance comes from the Kiowa and Comanche tribes. The steps are minimal. But other powwow dances—the grass dance, the women’s fancy shawl—are more intricate and showy.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the US government tried to suppress Indian dancing, but only succeeded in driving it underground. Today men from many tribes perform the gourd dance, like Manny Mandivill, a Vietnam vet from Arizona’s Tohono O’odham tribe.
"When I go out there and dance, I dance with pride I want to make people feel inside that we’re still thriving and we’re getting stronger," said Mandivill.
Mandivill says he introduced his 17-year-old daughter to powwows to connect her with her Indian heritage, even though the dances come from the American Plains not the Southwest.
Powwows trace their origins to dances performed by social groups within and across various tribes of the plains, from north Dakota to eastern New Mexico. The dances were often shared among tribes. And many honored warriors. Historian Clyde Ellis of Elon University says many were revived during World War II as Indians sought to honor their servicemen.
"These moments of sending men off to service also encouraged the use of particular songs, prayers and rituals that had not been lost," said Ellis. "But they had not been practiced as much in the 19th century.
And after the government stopped suppressing the dances, they spread across the country.
"By the 30s and 40s these dance traditions begin to get exported as Indians for example begin to get automobiles and travel more widely," said Ellis. "And we begin to see a number of urban Indian association. Taking on powwows as a form of gathering that brings Indians together and allows them to share this inter-tribal ethic of singing and dancing."
By the 1950s, the majority of American Indians lived in cities. Powwows allowed people from various tribes to assert a collective indigenous identity.
Today, California is home to more American Indians than any other state and LA County boasts the nation’s largest urban Indian population. Powwows like those held at Cal State Long Beach and the Morongo Casino can draw a lot of people.
Last year’s Miss UCLA Powwow, Nora Pulskamp, is a Navajo woman who grew up in the San Fernando Valley.
"For the most part Navajo customs are kept in our homeland," said Pulskamp. "When my mom came out here she was introduced to the LA urban native community and it was being connected with them we started dancing. We went through the proper protocol of having someone sponsor and teach you."
Today as the Navajos, California Indian Casinos, and others sponsor powwows, new traditions are cropping up. With dainty hops and flowing gestures, Whitney Bower of the Cahuilla Indian Reservation performs a dance from a cycle that chronicles the history of Southern California’s Cahuilla people.
Steven John Garcia is a member of the Tongva tribe. He's also part Apache and Yaqui from Mexico. Dressed for the powwow, he looks more like the Lakota family he married into: in a feathered headpiece, beaded collar, and deerskin loincloth and moccasins. Deer and elk hooves jangle around his ankles.
"Mostly what I have on is things given to me by a lot of my elders for the way I carry my life, the way I lead my life," said Garcia. "Whenever my uncles go hunting I say make sure you bring me those hooves. Everything I wear has a meaning to me. If you look at people, if you look at their outfits you see subtleties in where you’re from. I’m definitely Northern traditional but I’m wearing this elk shoulder blade with a dolphin inlined with my tribal insignia--that’s a Southern California symbol. "
As powwows have changed--doling out trophies and prize money, incorporating plastic beads and dancers indigenous to Mexico, even becoming popular in Germany--historian Clyde Ellis says some question their authenticity. "My answer is that it’s an institution that from the very beginning collected all sorts of influences, there's no one way to do it," he said.
Chuck Narcho, a Tohono O’odham man who participated in the Indian occupation of Alcatraz, is aware of the contradictions but still frequents powwows. "It takes me back, I get lost, I think what it was like 200 years ago," he said. "I think what it was like way back when."
In many ways, American Indians have assimilated into white culture. But as Manny Mandivill said when talking about bringing his daughter to powwows: “There are two worlds: the white world and the Indian world. I want her to know both.”
KPCC's Molly Peterson to recount the War of 1812, our teenage war
If Team Off-Ramp cares about one thing, it's passion. So, if KPCC's environment reporter Molly Peterson is working on something that really has nothing to do with Southern California, we'll give her a pass if there's passion, which there is. Also, nobody else seems to be doing much with the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, which James M. Lundberg calls "America's most bumbling, most confusing, and most forgotten conflict." Molly will be blogging about the war, starting Friday, which is when President Madison officially aired his grievances with Great Britain. Why will she be doing so? Bill Murray. As she writes on her blog: The War of 1812, Bill Murray, and America itself have more in common than you think, and if you like one of those things, the other two aren’t so bad either.
“We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1!” Bill Murray tells his unit. “We’re Americans. With a capital A, huh? You know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers…were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts.”
John Winger was wrong about 10 and 1. But I think Bill Murray was right about plenty else. The War of 1812 happened at a time in our history when we don’t like to admit that we had no idea what we were doing, and we were screwing up all over the place.
Sometimes it’s good to be made humble. Because that’s when you remember that you’re maybe more like the people around you than you think.
Performer Tammy Lang channels late singer, Velvet Underground collaborator Nico in "Chelsea Mädchen"
UPDATE: Chelsea Madchen ist zurück! The show is worth catching, and it's being performed at Largo on Wednesday, June 6.
She sang for the Velvet Underground, acted for Fellini, and posed for Warhol, but Nico the German-born singer also led a chaotic life -- she was a heroin addict for years -- and died in 1988. Singer Tammy Lang, who made a name for herself playing a country singer named Tammy Faye Starlite, is bringing Nico back to life with a show called “Chelsea Mädchen,” where she channels the late rock icon on stage. She talked with Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson.
Lang first came across Nico while reading a biography on Edie Sedgwick, who along with Nico, was one of Warhol’s “superstars.” Immediately after, Lang hit up her local record store to buy the Velvet Underground’s debut effort “The Velvet Underground and Nico.”
After that, Lang was hooked.
“I had never heard a female voice so deep,” she said. “[Nico’s] accent just gave it so much more allure.”
Nico’s German roots shone through in songs such as “Femme Fatale,” where her pronunciation of “clown” sounds more like “clon.” In her cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” the word “dolphin” also takes on a new sound.
“That song just made me love her more for saying dolphins that way,” Lang added.
The inspiration for “Chelsea Mädchen,” Lang said, struck when she heard one of Nico’s interviews from the mid-80s. Lang transcribed the interview, then dissected and rearranged it to her liking.
“I tried to incorporate what some may call her less-loveable tendencies,” she said.
Lang said that Nico is someone who she has long imitated and admired.
“I would love for people to get into Nico,” she said. “She was so underappreciated as a composer and as a singer … [I] also, just [want others] to enjoy all aspects of her humanity, whether they be what is deemed negative or positive.”
“Chelsea Mädchen” takes the stage beginning this Thursday at the Bootleg Theater on Beverly.
D is for Dog, Dark, and Daring
UPDATE: "D is for Dog" returns starting June 8th as part of Hollywood Fringe, at the Hudson Mainstage Theater, 6539 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038. Check the links below for more info.
"D is for Dog," written by Katie Polebaum with Rogue Artists Ensemble, is a dark combination of stage acting, video, and puppetry that might leave you a little shaken, if you care about the nature and future of man ... and his best friend. Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with director Sean Cawelti, actor Nina Silver, and puppeteer Ben Messmer.