The Birds are Pissed

and when the birds get pissed, terrible things will follow.

I blame my irrational fear of (some types of) birds on my childhood. This was shaped by two things: the superstitions of my grandmother and her sister, and bible movies, like The Ten Commandments.

My maternal grandmother lived in our house, in the apartment above us, with her sister, well into their old age. For a while, theirs was the place to be, as my cousins and aunts and uncles would drop by for lunch, seemingly every day, to a spread of mortadella, prosciutto (before it was gourmet food), capicola, ham, etc. It was usually quite loud and there was always laughter, but one thing I remember, and I can't quite remember the occasion -- maybe someone died or someone had noticed a bird outside the window -- but it was either my grandmother or my aunt who said that when a bird appears outside your window, then someone's going to (or already has) die. They were southern Italians, as if that explains it. For some reason I've always remembered that.

Then of course there were those bible movies, where birds were the harbingers (no pun intended) of disease, death and darkness. That affected me quite a bit, as did a certain poem by Mr. Poe.

I like many birds -- little birds are cute, exotic birds of unusual colors fascinate me, I'll always stop to watch a cardinal (especially if they are beating the Chicago Cubs!), and I was in awe the other day when I saw a bluejay atop a stop sign. But dark birds with their dark eyes, give me the creeps, especially if, you guessed it, they're outside my window.

For the past year we've had some nesting birds on the back porch. The same back porch where I like to hang out late at night, on my 'weekends,' and have a cigar, watch the airplanes heading into O'Hare (yeah, I know, I'm a good 10 miles east of the airport but still, they come in pretty low around Uptown/Andersonville), and tool around Facebook and the Internet on my ipod Touch. For the most part they didn't bother us and we didn't bother them, since our schedules are the opposite - by the time I enter the outdoor smoking lounge at night, they're all sleeping.

But lately -- this is their second year here -- things have been getting out of hand, with bird poop all over the porch, the railings, the steps, and pieces of nesting materials strewn about, as well. So, the landlord was notified and while I haven't heard from him, it appears his handyman may have plugged the hole in the rotting beam about the porch, where the birds were nesting. Because when I got home tonight I found one bird, at the top of the stairs, chirping, incessantly, and occasionally looking up in the direction of where that hidden nest was. But no chirps came back at him. But he's still there. On the porch railing, pooping, and chirping, and looking right at me. And I think he's pissed.

I may need to self-medicate tonight to avert the inevitable nightmares. Then there will be the full-fledged attack of the surviving birds once I step outside. Better get the umbrella...

(NOTE: The bird pictured in thsi post is not the bird on my porch today. But I know that look ...)

How Great is Glee?

This great. Sure, the music makes it a unique, really great show, but moments like this, where Kurt's dad goes off on Finn when he hears him using the word "faggy," are what make it truly great. Kurt's dad speaks the same language as Finn, he played sports in high school, he's a "guy's guy," and he won't stand for someone using those words in his house. This is great television.

Alberto Zoppe, Part II

My favorite part of my interview with Alberto Zoppe -- done about six years ago by phone, with me in Chicago and he in Arkansas -- was when he recalled sleeping in his family's circus trailer, which was pulled by horses, on Italy's unpaved roads, at night when he was a child. “Sometimes it was raining,” he said, and the sound of the rain, along with the sound of the steel wheels on the unpaved country roads, “made such a nice sound, and I slept so well. That was so beautiful.”

Here's the rest of my chat with him, along with some recollections by his son and his wife.

*****

By the mid-1940s, the Circo Fratelli Zoppe had reached a pretty serious level of renown throughout Europe. Orson Welles witnessed firsthand Alberto’s riding act, and afterward told Alberto about a circus movie the director Cecil B. DeMille was working on, called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” He asked Alberto to come to the U.S. with his horse act, and become a part of this movie. Alberto, declined Welles’s offer, since, with family circuses in post-war Europe suffering from a lack of animals, his circus needed his act, as well as his guidance, to survive.

Welles was undeterred, and enlisted the help of John Ringling North, who, at the time, was owner of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus, to convince Alberto to come to the U.S. Welles brought North to Italy to see Zoppe, and beginning in 1947, North regularly pitched the idea of leaving Italy for the U.S. to Alberto. Zoppe would be part of DeMille’s film, as well as a featured performer in the Ringling Brothers circus.

“For three years he tried to get me to come to America,” Alberto says by phone from his home in Arkansas. “I was 20, 21 years old, and I didn’t care to come to Ringling’s show.” But North and Welles implored him to reconsider, telling him, “You have to come to America; we need you.”

By 1949, Zoppe told both North and Welles that he’d take them up on the offer to come to the U.S., but that he wanted to wait a year, “because they need me another year in Italy.” He also had a stipulation for his leaving the Zoppe family’s circus to join North’s circus and appear in DeMille’s film. He says, “I find out, from talking to people, that (the Ringling Brothers circus) had 40 elephants, and in Italy we had no elephants. I said, ‘OK, if you want me to come to America, you can send an elephant to my show in Italy to replace me.’” Ringling’s responded by telling Alberto, “‘if I give an elephant to every performer, I wouldn’t have any more elephants!’”

Alberto Zoppe’s family circus got their elephant, in exchange for his services, but Alberto didn’t get the year he wanted in Italy before he moved to the U.S. He met with Welles and John Ringling North at the airport in Rome one morning after they had agreed upon his coming to the U.S. and the elephant exchange, but to Alberto’s surprise, he was told that he had to leave much sooner than he had expected to.

“We were at the airport, and John Ringling North said, ‘you can’t wait another year. I talked to Cecil B. DeMille and he wants you for the movie. You have to go now.’”

Soon afterward, Alberto left for the U.S., where he trained horses for, as well as appeared in, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” He also then spent four years with the Ringling Brothers circus, specializing in horse riding and horse tricks. And the elephant that was given to Zoppe’s family circus in Italy in exchange for him? Her name was Mary, and became famous in her own right. One time, the Zoppes put on a circus parade through an Italian town they were performing in, and Mary got loose, ran through the town market, and didn’t stop running until she got to a church, which she went inside. One of Alberto’s brothers, aghast at the fact that their elephant had run away but realizing the promotional potential of the episode, “called everybody; the newspapers,” Alberto says, “and they took pictures of the elephant in the church. It was good for the show, good publicity.” The Italian newsmagazine Oggi soon featured Mary the elephant in the church on its cover. “She was a great elephant,” says Sandra Zoppe.

His work on “The Greatest Show on Earth” led to decades’ worth of film and television work for Alberto Zoppe. Other movies that he either appeared in, worked as a consultant on, or trained actors to ride horses in, include; “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (which Sandra and Alberto’s sister Ruggera were also in), “The Great Barnum,” “Trapeze,” and “Toby Tyler.”

Alberto also has the distinction of being the first person with an animal act to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. “It was a horse,” Alberto says, and its name was Pacha. Pacha would tap out answers to mathematical questions Alberto asked. Alberto also appeared on the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, Circus of the Stars (where he did all of the horse training, as well as lion and dog acts), and scores of other TV shows throughout the U.S. and Europe. In addition, he also kept doing regular circus work, either as an equestrian or with animals such as lions and bears.

Giovanni talked about some of his father’s work with wild animals. Most of the time the acts went off flawlessly, but there were a couple incidents where Alberto was injured. Giovanni doesn’t blame or say they had bad animals; the animals just may have misunderstood what was going on.

“My father had a bear one time that chased him all around the circus area,” he says. Giovanni explains that at one point of an act with a bear, Alberto would give the bear a baby’s bottle to drink from. Somehow, though, the bear evidently “thought my dad was taking the bottle away,” and because of that, the bear chased Alberto around the circus, but did not harm him. Alberto also performed with a lioness “when I was growing up,” Giovanni says. The lioness would stand up when she heard music, and she’d run up to a horse, jump onto the horse, and ride it, he said. One other thing she did was to “take meat out of my father’s mouth,” Giovanni said. One time, though, when the lioness was doing this with Alberto, “she got her tooth stuck in his lip and he jerked his head back,” tearing his lip apart, and requiring plastic surgery to his face, Giovanni says. The family has a realization that incidents such as that happen in the circus, and the animals aren’t punished or put down when such things happen. Giovanni mentioned that that lioness was part of their family for ten years, then given to a zoo.

Alberto Zoppe can’t talk about the past for prolonged periods of time these days. He remembers the conversations he had with Orson Welles and John Ringling North, the times his family’s circus performed for the Pope before he left for the U.S., he still remembers the mechanical details of the advantages of his four cupola tent over the tents that circuses previously used, he remembers how his circus family fled Cuba in the days immediately following Castro’s takeover, but he gets frustrated when he can’t remember dates and years. He’ll apologize for this, then will have to call on his wife to fill in the blanks. But when asked about his remembrances of the circus life from when he was a very young child, Alberto Zoppe’s memory is crystal-clear, and there’s one thing that he’s able to recall in the same wistful manner that ordinary working folk recall a great vacation they’ve taken. He remembers that his mother, the same women who rode horses in the ring, was in the driver’s seat of the circus’s horse-drawn trailers as they made their way from town to town in Italy. “That was about 70, 80 years ago,” Alberto Zoppe says, but he has no trouble remembering it today. “My mother was driving, and the streets were just gravel. The steel wheels made such a nice sound,” and Alberto would be lying in the trailer, sleeping, as his mother drove. “Sometimes it was raining,” he recalled, and the sound of the rain, along with the sound of the steel wheels on Italy’s unpaved country roads, “made such a nice sound, and I slept so well. That was so beautiful.”

Alberto Zoppe, Part I

This is out of order as far as the piece I wrote on the Zoppes, but I only today, while browsing obituaries, saw that Alberto Zoppe died last March. More people should know about him -- his was an incredible story. I regret I haven't been able to tell his story to a large audience, but maybe it'll get passed on now, via this blog and those who read it.

*****

Alberto Zoppe didn’t want to come to the U.S.

In the late 1940s, partly out of his own talent as a performer and horse-rider (he was called “The Prince of the Riders”) and partly out of necessity (the animals that circuses had always made a staple of their repertoire were pretty scarce in post-war Europe), Zoppe was the star of his family’s circus, the “Circo Fratelli Zoppe.” Their circus traveled throughout Italy, setting up shop whenever townspeople would let them. Established in 1842, in Venice, the Zoppe Circus was formed when Ermenegilda Zoppe, a French clown, met a Hungarian ballerina, Napoline, while he was performing in Budapest. The two fell in love, married, and moved to Italy, where they established their circus.

Alberto Zoppe is the fourth generation of the Zoppe circus family. Alberto now lives in Arkansas, which serves as a sort of base for the current Zoppe Family Circus, their trucks and equipment and horses being kept there when the circus isn’t on the road. He was born in 1922 in the Veneto region of Italy, but he says that he was part of the circus before he was born.

Alberto Zoppe’s mother, Emma, in a tradition that continues down to Giovanni’s sister, Tosca, did a ballerina act on horses, riding a horse around the ring while also standing on the horse, jumping up then landing back on her feet on the horse, and other such feats. According to Alberto, his mother was riding horses in their circus up to her eighth month of pregnancy with him. “So I was working the horses before I was born,” he says in his Italian-accented voice.

“My father and my brother taught me how to ride the horses,” he adds. “We all became circus stars,” he says, referring to himself, his two brothers and two sisters. One feat that Alberto became famous for was a horse-to-horse somersault.

Besides becoming a circus star, Alberto Zoppe has made an even more lasting effect on circuses throughout the world. He invented the four-pole cupola tent.

For a circus, the tent is their stage, their calling card, their home turf even as they find themselves in a different town every few days. It can also determine their income, as the size of the tent determines how many paying customers can fit inside. The tent that the Zoppe Family Circus had been using had two pulleys at its top, with a 16-ft. crossbow to support the top of the tent. Alberto Zoppe said that one night in 1936 “I went to bed and thought about it and thought about it,” going over the tent style and how it could be made bigger. He determined that they could double the size of the center of the top of the tent, making it 16 feet by 16 feet, and secure it by a pole in each corner of the top crossbow. In addition to doubling the size and crowd capacity of the tent, the four poles also made it easier to set up and tear down. “Just pull them up and down,” Zoppe says.

Even with such logistical innovations, traveling through Europe with a family circus in the 1920s through the 1940s wasn’t an easy ride. The small towns wanted the entertainment and diversions of a circus, but these towns weren’t in the most accessible regions of Italy. Alberto Zoppe remembers small mountain towns in Italy asking his family to bring the circus to their towns, but there were no roads into the towns that their trucks could travel down, so the circus performers, along with volunteers from the town, had to strap chests of their props and costumes, as well as every piece of equipment and they would need to set up their circus, onto their backs and carry them up the mountains into these towns. “We had to carry everything up by hand,” Zoppe says, yet just as soon adds, “That was a very enjoyable time. That was fantastic.”

Boehner, Remixed

Whoever produced this is brilliant. It is brilliant because it is true. Hate never wins. Fear never wins. They may capture the occasional victory, but such victories are always short-lived.

I don't want to gloat or celebrate in the wake of the passage of the healthcare insurance reform bill. I find it hard to celebrate because there is so much work to still be done. And it's tough to celebrate something like the guarantee of a basic level of healthcare insurance, which is no big deal in other, civilized countries. And it's not a single-payer system, so much of the burden is still on employers, for one. But it's a giant step in the right direction. I don't want to gloat, or sing, but then I remember the text message I got from my former friend on the night Barack Obama was elected president, which stated, "Hope isn't any good when planes fly into buildings." I also think of the lies that were spread by those who opposed reform from the start, and I think of all those who from the moment he was elected, devoted their lives to derailing the presidency of Barack Obama.

I think of the Congressman who shouted, "You lie!" at the president. I think of Rep. Boehner shouting "Hell no!" in Congress. I think of smug John McCain, who though he lost to Barack Obama, couldn't get the smirk off his face during the president's bipartisan meeting on healthcare reform, the same meeting in which the Republicans went to and treated as a campaign debate then got their asses handed to them, wrapped up quite nicely, by this president. I think of the police officers I sometime hear on the police scanners late at night saying things like, "tell Obama to take care of them," when a dispatcher or another officer says someone has been injured or wounded on the city's streets. I think of the editorial writers and cartoonists who have been saying for the past year that freedom as we know it would cease if Obama got his way (of course none of them offered any workable alternatives). I think of the racist imagery so often used to criticize the president, and on, and on, and on, and I can't help but think ... you lost. You all lost. You lost the election, you lost on healthcare reform, and you're going to lose again and again. "Hell no!" sounds like the last words of a movement going down in flames. We've said it before, we can say it again -- Yes, we can.

Where I Stand

I'd rather stand with those being spat on, screamed at, called names, than those who spit, scream and call others names. I'd rather aspire to people's better angels and work for something better and occasionally fall short than to play on and play to their fears for short-term victories. The win is so much sweeter when it does happen and it's easier to keep fighting the fight if you know in your heart that it's the right fight and your world, or someone's life can be somewhat better through your efforts.

When mouth-breathing, drooling hateful people scream "faggot" at Congressman Barney Frank, when they yell "nigger" at Congressman John Lewis, when they boo and scream at Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when they spit at other Congressmen and Senators, when they put the word "KILL" uncomfortably close to their caricatures of President Obama, when they vow revenge on any elected official who supported healthcare insurance reform, I stand proudly with the screamed at and spat upon.

And I know that even if Obama, Pelosi, Frank, Lewis, Reid, Dingell, Schakowsky, Quigley, Weiner and every other one who worked to make reform a reality hadn't wiped the floor with the "no" crowd, they'd still be right.

The arc is long, Dr. King said, but it does tend toward justice.

They Have No Shame, Do They?

The following is a McClatchy story today (3/19/10) out of Washington state:

***

State of health care debate: Pundits attack 11-year-old

Conservative talk show hosts and columnists have ridiculed an 11-year-old Washington state boy's account of his mother's death as a "sob story" exploited by the White House and congressional Democrats like a "kiddie shield" to defend their health care legislation.

Marcelas Owens , whose mother got sick, lost her job, lost her health insurance and died, said Thursday he's taking the attacks from Rush Limbaugh , Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin in stride.

"My mother always taught me they can have their own opinion but that doesn't mean they are right," Owens, who lives in Seattle , said in an interview.

Owens' grandmother, Gina, who watched her daughter die, isn't quite so generous.

"These are adults, and he is an 11-year-old boy who lost his mother," Gina Owens said. "They should be ashamed."

Sen. Patty Murray , D- Wash. , told Marcelas Owens' story to President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at the White House health care summit last month. Murray also has spoken about it on the Senate floor. Last week, Owens was in the nation's capital to speak at a health care rally and to meet with Senate Democratic leadership.

Limbaugh, Beck and Malkin are skeptical about the story, saying there were other forms of medical help available after Owens' mother, Tifanny, lost her health insurance. They lambasted Democrats for using the story.

"Now this is unseemly, exploitative, an 11-year-old boy being forced to tell his story all over just to benefit theDemocrat Party and Barack Obama ," Limbaugh said on March 12 , according to a transcript his show. "And, I would say this to Marcelas Owens : 'Well, your mom would still have died, because Obamacare doesn't kick in until 2014.'"

Beck, according to a transcript of his March 15 show, pointed out that Owens' recent trip to Washington was paid for by Healthcare of America, a group that has been lobbying for a health care overhaul.

"That's the George Soros-funded Obama-approved group fighting for health care," Beck said. "Since all of the groups are so concerned and involved now, may I ask where were you when Marcelas' mother was vomiting blood?"

Beck, who's from Mount Vernon, Wash. , said there were plenty of programs in Washington state that could have helped Tifanny Owens .

Malkin dismissed Marcelas Owens as "one of Obama's youngest lobbyists" who has been "goaded by a left-wing activist grandmother," promoted by Murray and has become a regular on the "pro-Obamacare circuit."

***

This would be even more sickening if it was not so unsurprising.

Beck, Limbo, Malkin and any who would defend them on this are all a-holes.

If you disagree that health insurance reform is desperately needed in this country, if you don't like this kid's story, fine. Either present an intelligent alternative, convey your sympathy toward the family then lay out just how the mom could have been helped under the current healthcare 'system,' or ... stay quiet, let them have their moment, then come out with your plan later, so you don't look like a complete jerk. At the same time, if these folks cared at all about how they are perceived in the public eye, how decent people view them, and that, they would show some class. But they're not interested in constructive debate, are they? They don't care about the sick, the uninsured, the poor, the people who watch their shows and live in their congressional districts. All they care about, all they have cared about since the night Barack Obama won the presidency, was tearing him down and defeating everything he has tried to do and defeating him and his party in ensuing elections. What a classless, despicable lot they are.