Monthly Archives: June 2009

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Martha Ullman West on Dance United: a personal take

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Like so many great art forms, dance is a series of interlinked relationships and memories, a tradition that continually redefines and reinvents itself. It lives in the past, and the present, and the future, and its story is written in the memories and associations of open-hearted observers as well as the muscles of dancers and the patterns in choreographers’ minds.

Dance writer Martha Ullman West, one of our best observers, took in last Friday’s Dance United, and for her it was like biting into a madeleine: The reminiscences and connections just began to flow. Somehow, no matter how far-flung, they all looped back to Oregon Ballet Theatre, its history and successes, and this extraordinary event to keep the company alive and vital.

Here is the link to Martha’s review in The Oregonian of the performance. And here, below, is her more personal report on what it all meant:

———————————————————————-
Daniel Ulbright, New York City Ballet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTReally, it was a cross between a potlatch and an Obama rally, a gathering of the clans.

Dancers came from Texas, Utah, Massachusetts, Canada, Washington state, California, Chicago, Idaho, and that other geographical location, in New York called Downtown, here designated as Portland’s modern and contemporary dance community.

The gifts they brought were generous: their talent and their time. And they were welcomed to Keller Auditorium with the same enthusiasm as Obama’s supporters do and did, reaching into their wallets with many relatively small donations to keep Oregon Ballet Theatre alive. On Tuesday, OBT had in hand $720,000 of the $750,000 it needs to make up THIS season’s deficit.

I’ve been watching dance in Portland and elsewhere for more decades that I wish to reveal, and professionally since 1979, when I wrote an essay on postmodern dance in New York for Dance Magazine. In so many ways, this gala triggered some Proustian moments, also making me think of all the ways that dance and dancers are connected to each other.

Linda Austin’s thoroughly postmodern “anybody-can-dance, any-movement-on-stage-is-valid” Boris & Natasha Dancers (on catnip) took me back to New York’s SoHo and a performance created by Karole Armitage consisting of a group of dancers on their hands and knees, painting stripes on the floor, in humorless silence. They were not skilled at either painting or dancing, but it was the same democratic approach to the art form as Austin’s new dance, which featured such pillars of the Portland community as two Bragdons (Peter and David), Scott Bricker, James Harrison and Peter Ames Carlin galumphing across the stage, one of them wearing red sneakers that I wondered if he’d borrowed from White Bird’s Paul King. (Armitage, you may remember, also made work on OBT’s dancers on James Canfield’s watch.)

Sarah Van Patten Damian Smith, SFBallet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTThe Joffrey Ballet’s Aaron Rogers, performing Val Caniparoli’s Aria, recalled for me the profound pleasure of watching Val work with Portland dancers, first at OBT’s precursor Ballet Oregon, and then at OBT. Caniparoli’s kindness and courtesy in the studio turned out to be extremely productive when the company performed his Street Songs and other work. Rogers looked like he was enjoying himself, flirting with that mask, and certainly seduced the audience in the process.

And I thought about Mark Goldweber, ballet master at OBT under Canfield, then for some years at the Joffrey, and now at Ballet West. (He gave the only authentic performance in Robert Altman’s dance film The Company, in my view.) I wondered what Mark thinks about the way Adam Sklute, now Ballet West’s artistic director, staged this version of the White Swan pas de deux.

When I encountered this ballet’s real-life Prince Siegfried, Christopher Ruud, at OBT’s studios earlier in the week, I spoke with him about his father, who had helped Todd Bolender at Kansas City Ballet (Bolender is the subject of a book I’m working on). Ruud told me he had staged one of his father’s pieces on the company several years ago.

Continue reading Martha Ullman West on Dance United: a personal take →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket

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Hansel and Gretel, illus. Arthur Rackham, 1909. Wikimedia CommonsThe smashing success of last Friday’s Dance United gala benefit notwithstanding, it’s a Grimm world out there right now for Portland’s arts organizations: There go Hansel and Gretel, trailing bread crumbs as they traipse into the thick of the woods, and here come the birds, pecking away at the crumbs so there’s no trail out again.

There must be some way out of here. What Hansel and Gretel and the Oregon Symphony and Oregon Ballet Theatre and all-classical radio and Portland Center Stage and the rest need is a financial GPS.

For arts groups here and elsewhere, the fissures of the global economic meltdown have become a chasm, a canyon carved by the raging River Deficit. Given the state of the financial union it’s astonishing that Oregon Ballet Theatre has managed to almost wipe out its $750,000 emergency shortfall in less than a month. Celebrate this as a victory, because a victory it surely is.

But the sobering truth is, it’s only the beginning. Now the hard, tough work begins. And it’s going to be extremely difficult keeping up the sort of adrenalin that has at least temporarily pulled OBT back from the brink.

This string of financial crises has predictably pulled out the trollers, the mocking wise guys who laugh and declare that if arts groups can’t survive in the marketplace, they deserve to die (presumably, like Bank of America and General Motors). These loudmouths understand nothing about the not-for-profit world, or if they do understand it, they despise it with every fiber in their rugged-individualist, social-Darwinist bodies. Ignore them. They are happiest when someone shouts back.

Even among arts people the current crisis has inspired a lot of hand-wringing about “dead art forms” and the possibility that in an age of radically new media and runaway-success popular art forms,  people just don’t care any more about things like dance and serious music.

I don’t buy it. In a way, the “traditional” arts have never been more popular. The Oregon Symphony, which has piled up a $1.5 million deficit in the just-ending fiscal year, sold more tickets in the just-past season than ever before. OBT is playing to packed, enthusiastic houses. Portland Center Stage keeps extending its Storm Large musical hit, Crazy Enough. Radio market share at KQAC, Portland’s all-classical station, is booming. As I make the rounds I see good-sized crowds at fringe events, too, from puppet shows to new vaudeville to cold readings of new play scripts. Dance and classical music, for all their financial woes, are undergoing a renaissance sparked by rigorously trained and exquisitely talented young performers — the very people who are supposed to have defected to American Idol and Twitter and “reality” TV. What’s more, they’re extending the boundaries of their art forms, reinterpreting them for today’s world even as they keep their heritages alive.

And audiences have responded. If there’s a crisis — and there is — it isn’t a lack of enthusiastic audiences, who are finding ways to continue to participate even in the midst of their own financial travails. The thirst for art is real, and our greatest hope for long-term optimism.

So what’s the problem?

Continue reading Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket →

Vernon Peterson

All the news that’s fit to stink

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“My breakfast over, I paid a visit to Professor Jameson and proposed to him to give an account of the habits of the Turkey Buzzard instead of the Wild Turkey. He appeared anxious to have either.”
-John James Audubon in his London journal (mid 1820s)

I finished the last book I carried with me on this trip to the Midwest and with nothing else to occupy my mind I scatter-shot the internet. (Nothing in the way I swim or compute could ever be mistaken for “surfing.”) Hereâ’s what I found in 30 minutes, give or take.

mg913Who would have thought? Google “smelly boys” and in the first dozen entries you will find adverts for scents and refrigerator magnets, videos of boys smelling their socks, and an article about the protest over smelly boy products such as tees and magnets, etc., as demeaning to boys. “Harmless fun or a fashion faux pas?”

Here’s a site new to me, The Art & Crime Gazette, which explores the intersection between art and crime, featuring a quotation from the 2003 book, Crimes of Art + Terror, by Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, professors at Duke University: “There is a small dark place in Western Civilization where great art stands side-by-side with terrorists and petty felons.” The book, reviewed here last year, argues at its most extreme that the impulse to create art and the impulse to commit violence “lie perilously close to each other.” L + M compare “literary explosives” and “actual explosives,” equate “imaginative acts” to “bloody deeds.” The Gazette is more balanced, and is very interesting. In the blog section they note a Barry Johnson Art Scatter post about bronze statues stolen and sold as scrap metal. Check out the Gazette and see what you think.

Conservative and liberal are meaningless terms in American thought. That limp mind on the Right, Rush Limbaugh, apparently claims that President Obama is doing such a good job of destroying the country that: “If al-Qaeda wants to demolish the America we know and love, they better hurry, because Obama is beating them to it.” The America he loves has no substance. He has a thought and it must be Good. Confidence of opinion based on total absence of fact. It reminds me of Ted Hughes’ poems about Crow, especially “Crow’s Theology”:

Crow realized God loved him-
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.

Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.
And he realized that God spoke Crow-
Just existing was His revelation.

But what Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.

And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realized there were two Gods-
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Theater

Hair today, gone tomorrow: Ugly on the face of it

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Credit: THE DAILY BEAST

When I was not quite 19 and in fall term of my sophomore year in college I returned home for Thanksgiving dinner, bringing a housemate with me. I’d been growing a beard since beginning of term, two months before.

At dinner (and beforehand, while bustling over the Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes in the kitchen) my mother kept staring at me oddly, as if something strange was going on and it just wasn’t quite computing. Finally I asked her what was wrong.

“You have a smudge on the side of your face,” she said.

She wasn’t kidding. I was crushed. So much for my hirsute abilities — and I heard that line repeated, with guffaws, for the rest of the school year from my turncoat housemate.

At last Monday’s Drammy Awards I ran into actor Todd Van Voris, who’d been playing Andrey Prozorov, the henpecked brother, in Tracy Letts’ adaptation of Three Sisters at Artists Repertory Theatre, and was sporting a suitably Chekhovian growth.

“How long until you get to shave?” I asked him.

“One more week!” he replied enthusiastically.

Then he added that it never fails: In the dead of winter he’s cast as someone clean-shaven and maybe even bald-pated; once the weather turns warm he’s cast as someone with facial hair in full sprout.

Apparently he can do full sprout.

In the movies, of course, you don’t have to grow ’em, although of course you can if you want. If you don’t, makeup will cheerfully slap a facial growth on you. That’s why I liked this post (the photo montage above is just a sneak peek) from The Daily Beast, of the worst movie facial-hair moments. You could adapt this to country-western singers and male perfume and underwear models, too — those guys who have the perfect two-day stubbles around their gorgeously dimpled chins no matter what. John Travolta is a double winner (or double loser) in the Daily Beast sweepstakes, but I’m quite fond of the Jack Black growth, too.

P.S.: I’ve been wearing a beard for most of the past 40 years. Every now and again someone looks at me and says, “When did you start growing a beard?” I refer them to my mother.

General, Laura Grimes

Toilet plungers really do suck: They stick to faces

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By LAURA GRIMES

Call the health department. Plumbing disease is contagious.

We left town and all our drain problems behind and headed to the coast. I lugged everything into our tidy little place and made a bee-line to the bathroom when a guest* large smelly boy said, “Oh, that toilet is weird.”

I flushed it. It burbled back at me.

We have lugged everything to this tidy little place** for nearly 18 years. It has two toilets, two tubs and four sinks. Never, in all that time, have I had to plunge a large clump of goo.

The Mini Pro Sink and Drain Plunger: like a joystick. Monument ToolsAs I realized I was having another plumbing panic — my third in a week — part of me was in a suspended state of disbelief while the other looked for a plunger. In vain.

Here I had a lovely view of the Pacific Ocean, but I was roughing it. I did not have my impressive array of drain-cleaning implements.

I rummaged under sinks and in closets until I found one pathetic-looking plunger. It wasn’t a designer model. No sucky lips. No caddy.

I was embarrassed for its nakedness so I searched through the cupboards for a proper caddy. But remember, we’re roughing it. I didn’t find even a cheap Tupperware container.

I pushed the plunger up and down to no avail. It had a big problem. It didn’t suck. That’s when I did what any sensible amateur plumber would do. I went to dinner.

On the way home we stopped by a one-stop shopping store (yes, the very chain where the flashy, brazen garden nozzles are lined up in a red light district). My grocery list? Milk. Eggs. Juice. Plunger.

And cookie dough. We have a tradition at the beach of baking cookies each night. But remember, we’re roughing it. So we don’t actually make the dough. We just bake it. After we buy it.

One of the large smelly boys and I were picking out what kind of cookie dough to buy in a package when we both said, “Look, it comes in a tub!”

I compared prices. Sure enough. The tub was cheaper by volume. Then I realized we’d gain a bonus. We’d gain a plunger caddy. But we’d have to bake a lot of cookies.***

Continue reading Toilet plungers really do suck: They stick to faces →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Missing the ballet: Looks like it was a barn burner

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danceunited_finalbows

I’ve been out of town but eagerly scanning for news on Dance United, Friday night’s gala benefit to help Oregon Ballet Theatre dig out of its financial hole. According to these front-line reports from Culture Jock at Culture Shock and Barry Johnson at Portland Arts Watch, it was boffo — an absolute night to remember.

And, they report, it was announced at the gala that OBT’s emergency fund drive had hit $690,000 of its $750,000 goal, which makes it highly likely that it will have hit the goal and, if all goes well, more by its June 30 deadline. That’s excellent news — and everyone needs to understand that this is just the beginning, the even-ing of the keel so the tough, unending work can begin of raising enough money on a consistent basis to provide the economic stability and means for growth that this excellent artistic organization needs and deserves. There’ll be lots more news out of OBT in the months to come.

I know that dance writer Martha Ullman West, a charter Friend of Art Scatter, will have extensive coverage of the Dance United gala in Monday’s editions of The Oregonian. Look for it then in print and online at Oregon Live.

In the meantime, Friday night was spectacular, as Blaine Truitt Covert’s photo above, from the grand finale curtain call (that’s OBT artistic director Christopher Stowell in the center with the dancers) attests. Those are some happy faces!

Congratulations to all. Thanks to all the big-time companies from across North America that sent dancers to perform. And many happier days to come.

Bob Hicks, Books, Environment, General

Going native on the Oregon Coast: a hair-raising tale

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Tonight is the gala Dance United in Portland, the all-star benefit to help get financially ailing Oregon Ballet Theatre out of its fiscal sinkhole, and under any other circumstances I would be there with bells, cheering the dancers on.

13733bBut on Wednesday the large smelly boys were paroled from a nine-month sentence in the Portland public school system, and Mrs. Scatter and I had a longstanding deal to whisk them to the Oregon coast to the four-way-split shared getaway we’ve been holding in our own tenuous economic grasp for close to 20 years. And on that subject, just one question: What sort of fool would pay actual money for a share of a piece of property in the shadow of a place called Cape Foulweather?

So here I sit, staring at the oddly quiescent cape (the sun is out, sort of), with a copy of Vince Kohler‘s Eldon Larkin mystery Rising Dog at hand, thinking about this shaggy stretch of oceanfront I’ve come to love. Not that I get out here very often. Regular readers may recall this post about Vince, a kind of forgotten hero of Oregon literature, and his shambling news-hound hero, Eldon, as introduced in the first Larkin mystery, Rainy North Woods.

Rising Dog (the title comes from the curious case of a mutt that’s been run down by a 14-wheeler on busy U.S. 101 and then seems to have risen from the dead) came in 1992, and like the late and lamented Mr. Kohler’s other mysteries, it really ought to be better-known.

Eldon’s stretch of the Oregon Coast, though mythical (there is no actual Nekaemas County), runs south of these parts, nearer Coos Bay territory, where life is less touristy and more hardscrabble, although Newport this week seems in desperate want of those recently disappearing city spenders. Wall Street has not been kind to small towns that rely on the whims of visitors.

Still, I feel I must pass on this description of life in the mythical Port Jerome on a rare day when the rains have ceased and the sun has come a-wandering in:

“The sun had drawn the town’s population from hiding. That was the worst thing about good weather. In the streets were women fifty to eighty pounds overweight, squeezed into blue jeans or blue or white knit polyester slacks. There were stringy, hard-faced men in grubby denims and crushed, grimy baseball caps. There were potbellied salesmen with long sideburns and lined, pouchy faces, and adolescents reveling unaware in their brief season of physical beauty before declining into the sleazy hardness of their elders.”

As I sit here I am wearing a pair of aged, faded jeans, gone stringy at the cuffs and with a hole in the pocket that encourages a trickle-down theory of fugitive pens and pennies. I have on a faded purple T-shirt, a little spongy at the collar, and a gray sweatshirt that is unaccountably my favorite piece of upper-body wear. My “Mo’s West” baseball cap, bearing the emblem of a favored chowder shack, is flung casually close to hand. I make no claims or excuses for the lazy paunch floating beneath my belt. My socks are semi-clean, and my hair has taken on that wild dry look of straw that’s been electrocuted in a summer storm. It does no good to brush or comb it. It’s gone native, and it ain’t comin’ back, not as long as I’m within spitting distance of the ocean. In certain ways, once a small-town boy, always a small-town boy.

Vince meant that description of coastal folk ruefully, but with a certain affection. Eldon’s no Adonis himself. I saw the Adonises, six of them, yesterday, in their black rubber bodysuits, drifting out from the beach by Otter Rock on their surf boards. I’m guessing none of them was a logger or a commercial fisherman or one of those incredible samurai-skilled women who so swiftly gut and clean the salmon and halibut coming in from the tourist fishing-excursion boats to the docks on the Newport waterfront.

One more thing I can’t resist passing along: Vince’s not-so-standard legal disclaimer from the beginning of the book:

Rising Dog is a work of fiction. The novel’s characters inhabit a stretch of the southern Oregon coast that is entirely a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, places, or institutions in the real world is an enormous and shocking coincidence. In particular, the Sons of Eiden Hall and its denizens are not intended to represent any actual Scandinavian group.

Skoal to all that.

General, Language, Vernon Peterson

Plains speaking: POET in the corn rows

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grassssdateline willow lake – Kum ‘N Go is gone, replaced (in name sign only) by Super X. In my South Dakota hometown the once “Ye Olde … Whatever” signs have been replaced by vintage-script “Whatever . . . Shoppe” ones. And I forget how delightful it is to name the surrounding towns: Letcher, Loomis, Woonsocket, Ree Heights, Yale, Carthage, Carpenter and Iroquois, and the still barely 300+ Willow Lake, where I spent most of my first fourteen years, and where today I visit my Aunts Gloria and Rose, my only remaining relatives of my parents’ generation, who live a block apart, or, almost across town from each other.

I got here via Rapid City, with a detour to climb to the face of Crazy Horse Memorial, part of a 6.2 mile “Volksmarch” allowed two days a year in early June, and a quick jaunt across the state, with a detour to touch a corner of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands (above) and then drive through Badlands National Monument to Interior, S.D. (listening to Kronos Quartet’s new album Floodplain), and then through Mitchell, S.D., and a quick circuit around its claim to fame, the Corn Palace, and finally directly north to the James River Valley, an area of the state that is as flat as anything I’ve ever seen, so that you wonder what meaning the word “valley” can have in this context, and where grasslands have been replaced by corn. In other words, all things familiar to me from infancy and revisited perhaps twenty times since 1975 when my wife and I picked up and moved to Oregon.

So many Strong Words, so many Memories.

But then, what is this?, short of our hometown, a new sign:

POET BIOREFINING.

cornfieldA website away, I find that POET, LLC has spent twenty years “defining the art of biorefining,” that is, the production of ethanol from corn. POET began as a family farm operation in Wanamingo, Minnesota, in 1983, turned commercial operation in Scotland, South Dakota in 1986, and now has some two dozen plants in seven states throughout the Midwest. How have I missed this?

POET brings together disparate politicos such as General Wesley Clark and Newt Gingrich to support agriculture + ethanol and, in the words of General Clark, a “moral purpose” organization like POET, which is set to redefine our country’s freedom (from petroleum products). POET’s new venture, project LIBERTY, marks the transformation of the industry from corn as the primary ingredient of ethanol to “cellulosic” ethanol, a “new frontier,” involving the use of corn cobs, switch grass, wood chips and refuse.

But enough; or, my Words are not enough.

You really must meet POET.

So this is the Prairie POET.

And it is the dream of POET to leave a lasting impression. If I dare summarize such a breathtaking combination of “energy inspired” classic photos, Muzak, Plains-speak language and frog-throated narration: “Just as a poet can take simple every day words and give them new meaning,” POET fuses the energy and inspiration of the “creators,” those who “blend soil, sun and sky,” the “cultivators,” those who use “hearts, minds and hands,” and the “composers,” those who build “harmony between nature and invention,” all in the name of keeping new fuels flowing.

American poets from Emerson to Whitman to Ginsburg have been about new namings, I guess, so why not POET, too.

“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” said William Carlos Williams, yet women and men “die every day for lack of what is found there.” Difficult to get commerce from poems, too?

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

OBT’s ‘Rush + Robbins’: Some further thoughts

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Fund drive as of Wednesday, June 10THE LATEST NEWS FROM OREGON BALLET THEATRE, which is struggling with a life-threatening deficit that has it feverishly trying to raise $750,000 by June 30 to keep from going out of business: The campaign hit the $524,000 mark by Wednesday. That morning OBT’s Erik Jones said 900 tickets were still available for Friday night’s gala benefit performance Dance United, which will bring star performers from across North America to raise money for OBT. Buy your tickets here — this could be the event on the season!

At Portland Arts Watch, meanwhile, Barry Johnson reports on the challenges OBT faces AFTER June 30.

And prominent national dance critic Martha Ullman West, who plies part of her trade (the pro bono part) here at Art Scatter, has some things to say below about last weekend’s season-ending program and how it revealed the necessity of keeping this company alive. She even took time to give her Scatter editor a scolding for something he posted on the subject: When you’re pro bono, you get to do that!

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When I wrote on Monday in The Oregonian that the way Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s dancers performed The Concert last weekend clearly and painfully demonstrate how much we have to lose if the company folds, I didn’t mean the same assessment couldn’t be applied to the rest of what was a very difficult program.

Artur Sultanov in The Concert. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTOBT’s season-finale program was designed to accomplish several goals, one of which was to challenge the dancers. And there is no getting around the fact that the work those dancers had performed most often — Rush, Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert — was polished to the accomplished shine you see only in major companies: New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Houston Ballet and the like. These are troupes with far bigger budgets, many more dancers and far more opportunities to perform than OBT.

What Christopher Stowell, as artistic director, and Damara Bennett, as OBT School director, have accomplished in Portland in six years is truly remarkable. And it’s known throughout the country, which is why, when OBT announced its life-threatening financial emergency last month, so many artistic directors answered his call for help in the affirmative.

This company is extremely well-schooled. That was abundantly clear in Rush and in the second performance of The Cage on Saturday afternoon, as it was in the spring performances of William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, which OBT’s dancers will perform in Friday’s benefit gala. I was startled when I returned from Kansas City last spring, having seen Kansas City Ballet the night before, by the contrast. KCB celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, but it’s OBT that has a true company style.

That’s an achievement for which Stowell, Bennett and ballet mistress Lisa Kipp can take credit. Most of these dancers had quite different training. Sure, there’s a cadre that has been to the School of American Ballet that includes Gavin Larsen, Adrian Fry, Lucas Threefoot (summer program), Christian Squires and Javier Ubell. But a number were trained in OBT’s school, at PNB or SFB. And the excellent Ronnie Underwood trained in Tulsa, so is part of the Ballets Russes strand of American ballet style. Artur Sultanov’s schooling was Russian, at the Vaganova Academy, and Chauncey Parsons, who joined as a soloist last fall, trained at the Kirov Academy in Washington, D.C. Parsons will show us some bravura Kirov style dancing at the gala. Yuka Iino — hardly second string, Mr. Hicks, as the Novice in The Cage at the matinee (nor was Grace Shibley in Faun) — trained in her native Japan, as did Ansa Deguchi.

Continue reading OBT’s ‘Rush + Robbins’: Some further thoughts →

General, Laura Grimes

Confessions of an amateur plumber, or, Hey, at least my pants stay up

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Auger label. Photo: Mrs. ScatterBy LAURA GRIMES

I thought I was done with my impressive array of drain-cleaning implements after the previous plumbing panic.

I was going to stash them in the basement and let them collect dead spiders, but when I put the plastic bin at the top of the stairs it fell over. I peered around the corner in time to watch the bin plonk, plonk, plonk down the stairs and roll away, leaving the plastic thorny thing, the big auger, the little auger and (my personal favorite) the hose blaster up and down the steps.

I did what any sensible amateur plumber would do. I shut the door to worry about it the next day. Or the next time I had to go to the basement to do laundry, whichever came later.

Little did I know one of the large smelly boys would have to go to the basement first thing in the morning to fetch frozen waffles and a loaf of bread.

“It’s booby trapped!” I yelled.

He figured out what I meant. I could tell by the “Ewww!”

As unluck would have it, I had to go to the basement the next day to do laundry. I’m not sure if my bigger motivator was not wanting to look hideous in a leg cast or risk a higher premium on hazard insurance, but I picked up the impressive array of drain-cleaning implements.

As unluck would have it, the plastic thorny thing had landed in a cat litter box.

Yes, I unscrupulously manipulated that line for maximum gross-out effect. The litter box was actually clean and empty. It was in place to catch drips from a bathroom flood when a large smelly boy didn’t properly place the shower curtain (on the second floor!). But that’s a plumbing woe for another day. As is my shameful bout with garden nozzle envy.

As I picked up my impressive array of drain-cleaning implements I remembered I actually had to use them again — a banner week!

The toilet in the bathroom that belongs to the large smelly boys didn’t flush properly. I had plunged it and plunged it. It didn’t work. Even though I was using a designer plunger. It has such high style points that it comes with its own caddy. So it’s much more fashionable than our other one, which sits in a Tupperware container. And it’s certainly more fashionable than the one it replaced — a plunger that had a carved duck head with googly eyes. My dad made it. But the head fell off. Making the handle action uncomfortable while plunging. I hate it when my plunger duck heads fall off.

All I can say is it’s a good idea I was doing the plunging instead of my (nameless) husband. I’m a quiet plunger by nature. He, on the other hand, uses words that start with e-p-i-t-h-e-t.

But even my quiet plunging nature didn’t work this time. So I took my impressive array of drain-cleaning implements upstairs and, well, it all augered well. Maybe because I read the directions:

Loosen thumbscrew. Insert boring head [not the interesting one, apparently] through crossbar and push into pipe until stoppage [the technical term is not “large clump of goo,” apparently] is reached (if head can’t pass through strainer [I can’t remember the last time I tried to put mine through one], use bent tip at other end of spring.)”

It also says:

Don’t force the snake! Let the boring head do the work.

I learned a few things:

1. My big auger is called a “clog chaser.”
2. My little auger says that it “retrieves wash cloths, diapers, toys” [you can’t make this stuff up].
3. When I auger out a toilet my husband hollers, “What’s that wippity wappity noise?”

— Laura Grimes