Opinion

“No War 2022, July 8 – 10,” hosted by World BEYOND War, will consider major and growing threats faced in today’s world. Emphasizing “Resistance and Regeneration,” the conference will feature practitioners of permaculture who work to heal scarred lands as well as abolish all war.

Listening to various friends speak of the environmental impact of war, we recalled testimony from survivors of a Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin, Sachsenhausen, where over 200,000 prisoners were interned from 1936 – 1945.

As a result of hunger, disease, forced labor, medical experiments, and systematic extermination operations by the SS, tens of thousands of internees died in Sachsenhausen.

Carmen Szukaitis, a 21-year-old transgender fashion model attending Ohio University, will be profiled in Here-TV’s upcoming docuseries, Road to the Runway, premiering this August 5th.

The series profiles twenty hopefuls competing in this year’s annual Slay Model search. Slay Model Management is the premier management company representing transgender fashion talent.

Cameras followed the twenty women to their hometowns, including Athens, Ohio, to uncover their roots: the environments they were reared in and the circumstances that helped shape them into the beautiful, statuesque, fashionable young women they are today. 

Rural Ohio and transgender people go together like oil and sweet water. But thankfully this is Athens, an island of open mindedness.

Nonetheless, Szukaitis, who was raised in Wooster, has faced a lifetime of scrutiny and judgement no “cis” could ever imagine. But after all the sour glances and cold shoulders, she suddenly finds herself on the cusp of stardom.

Playwright Willard Manus’ The Funny Man is a one-man show starring Sam Aaron as the Oscar-winning humorist S. J. Perelman, who ​The New York Times called “an artist whose nonpareil gift of ridicule, dazzling verbal effects, polished style, and keen observation made him a unique and precious figure in our literature.” The conceit of this solo show is that Perelman has been invited to the University of California at Santa Barbara in order to deliver a lecture on creative writing in 1976, when the screenwriter/playwright/author/essayist was 72. The Brickhouse Theatre’s stage is adorned by Zad Potter with a lectern, from which Aaron as the ersatz Perelman holds forth on the literary life, as well as Hollywood, Broadway, comedy, monogamy, travel, The New Yorker magazine and about what one suspects is the guest lecturer’s favorite subject: Himself.

In this day and age of superheroes deluging the big screen with their derring-do, it’s a delight to discover a production performed on the live stage about three very real women grappling with the various vicissitudes of everyday life. This revised revival of playwright Ernest Thompson’s The West Side Waltz is about a trio of females of different ages who reside in an apartment building on Manhattan’s West 72nd Street. The Waltz part of the title refers to the fact that widowed 70-ish Margaret Mary Elderdice (Ellen Geer) is a former classical concert pianist, while her 50-ish neighbor Cara Varnum (Melora Marshall) accompanies her on the violin for household duets. And I suppose that Waltz could also refer to the dance of life that this play poignantly choreographs on the outdoor stage of Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum.

I call for 19th-century urban reforms and an early 20th-century Progressive Era for Columbus, Ohio in 2022.

Columbus clamors for an unimaginable future alternatively as the Columbus Way or Opportunity City. But it has no sense of its past or even its present. If I turn to allegory for the city’s failing infrastructure, this is like building a 32-story skyscraper beside the historic North Market (once the home of city offices) or the ludicrously named Junto Hotel on the banks of the Scioto River without a foundation. Or, to turn to another relevant ecological metaphor, the City engages in slash-and-burn agriculture with no replanting.

We may combine these threads into a plea for sustained attention to the missing contexts of the city’s human and natural ecologies. We may then follow their intersections into the makings and breakings of the lives and the life chances of differently-situated Columbus residents.

The Columbus Black Theatre Festival (CBTF) celebrates its 10th Anniversary this July 9th and 10th in Central Ohio. The theme this year is Speaking Truth That Heals. Mine 4 God Productions (M4GP) kicks off our tenth year of bringing the Columbus Black Theatre Festival (CBTF) to Central Ohio with a free Anniversary Recognition & Celebration event held this July 9th at the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Main Auditorium, from 1:30 to 3:30 PM.

The CBTF is produced by Mine 4 God Productions and has brought playwrights and actors from around the world to Columbus, Ohio for the past ten years. This year the festival is sponsored by the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Wild Goose Creative and Lady Butterflies-Ohio.

(Dedicated to the memory of Ghassan Kanafani, an iconic Palestinian leader and engaged intellectual who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on July 8, 1972)

 This is, according to the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci, the ‘interregnum’- the rare and seismic moment in history when great transitions occur, when empires collapse and others rise, and when new conflicts and struggles ensue. 

 The Gramscian ‘interregnum, however, is not a smooth transition, for these profound changes often embody a ‘crisis,’ which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. 

 “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” the anti-fascist intellectual wrote in his famous “Prison Notebooks”.  

Comfest returned this year. Comfest celebrated a 50 year anniversary last weekend.

Comfest began in 1972 as a community concert founded with a group of political activists, artists, craftspeople, local business owners, musicians, and plenty of dreamers near 16th avenue off the Ohio State Campus.

Our Columbus Free Press was amongst the founders of Comfest.

Comfest’s principal goal aims for elimination of prejudice against people on the basis of age, class, ability, income, race, sex and sexual preference/orientation.

In 1983 Comfest relocated to Goodale Park in the Short North.

I know I like freedom, justice, and equality, and outdoor drinking.

Last year, Comfest existed virtually last year because of COVID.

It was really weird thinking about the fact all of Columbus wouldn’t drink together in 2021.

Everyone was stuck inside.

Last weekend, I looked at the Comfest program guide as 2022’s Comfest returned to the Short North.

I didn’t know which music group I would watch but I knew I would find vegan food.

The necessity of food insured this.

I took the number 1.

The need has not been greater to help the homeless, especially during the pandemic and recent clearing of homeless camps, such as the one at Heer Park on the City’s far South Side. With rents rising, and the cost of living going up due to inflation, the mission of The Open Shelter is “To Stay Behind With Those Left Behind,” all while serving the homeless and marginally housed in Central Ohio, as affordable housing is a scarcity for those who are living in poverty.

On June 23, The Open Shelter had an open house at their new location on Parsons Avenue. There were remarks made by local dignitaries, as well as Shelter Staff and Board Members. The new facility, according to The Open Shelter’s website serves as a “hub for (the Shelter’s) Outreach Services, which are desperately needed” for the homeless and marginally housed in the community.

The first step of the intake process, as the Open Shelter’s Resource Development Coordinator Harry Yeprem Jr. explained while giving a tour of the new facility, is to serve a person with a warm meal that is prepared in the kitchen before being given an orientation and introduction to the Open Shelter’s services.

I’ve made my own choices along the path of life — spiritual, mental, physical. I declared myself a non-believer in my parents’ religion at age 16. I’d just read the book Exodus, by Leon Uris, and couldn’t tolerate the church’s teaching that all non-believers, including all Jews, were going to hell.

Bye bye, church on Sunday. My mother was devastated, but we slowly came to terms with one another. On a family vacation that summer, as we were driving on the Chicago Skyway, the radio announced a tornado warning. Mom later wrote a published essay that ended thus: “Three Christians and one agnostic prayed.”