Janice Robinson is a dental hygienist and for a time worked at an office in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Hyde Park.

For reasons she could never quite fathom, she seemed to have a following of gay patients who would ask for her specifically when they made their appointments. Some of them would bring her cookies and other treats, and though she brought them home to her family, she wouldn’t eat them herself because, she said, they had “gay cooties.”

“I was ‘Miss Pompous’,” she says now. “I believed that anyone outside my tunnel-vision is not a good person, and I associate my anti-gay feelings with my religious upbringing. I just grew up that way.”

Robinson was raised Catholic, she said, and was “born again” in her 20s. Since then, she’s attended Nazarene, Methodist and Vineyard churches, but none of them anything to help her broaden her world view, she said.

So when her son Carl Schottmiller came out as a gay man during his senior year of high school, that world view was set askew, and it’s taken her a long time to come around.

“I cried for three months,” she said. “When I told my sister, she scoffed. ‘We knew since he was 5 years old,’ she said.

“So it was OK with my family. With my Christian friends, not so much. I only heard my son would burn in hell for his homosexuality.”

Schottmiller, now 26, said that the conflict between Christianity and homosexuality drove him away from the church entirely.

“I am not a part of any organized religion,” he said in a telephone interview from California, where he is working toward a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance. “I would describe myself as a Christian, but a lot of Christians don’t feel that gay people can be a part of that.”

He said that going through puberty, when he began to be aware of his sexual orientation, the things he was being taught went against with what he was feeling.

“When I realized I was queer, there was a real conflict of interest there,” he said. “At the time, I pulled away from church because all I saw from the Christian perspective was there was no exceptions, just condemnation and judgement. I felt that it was impossible to be queer and a Christian, so I pulled away.”

Robinson said that it took her three or four years to start accepting that her son was gay. She quit her job for a while to go back to school to get a degree in Humanities to help her understand.

“I wrote a paper on things not to do when your child comes out,” she said, “since I did them all — even trying to have him brainwashed back to heterosexuality.

“I had a lot of guilt (when he came out) because I thought I made him gay because we did so much stuff together,” she said. “He was smart enough to recognize (my conflicts). He went down through the list of things he knew I would beat myself up over.

“He said he was afraid I wouldn’t love him because I was the most homophobic person he knew,” she said. “After three or four years, I started getting over it and became very proud of my son for becoming who he is.”

But the conflict between Robinson’s Christian faith and her son’s sexual orientation still gnawed at her.

Then, “Three months ago, I was reading the newspaper and saw a blurb about a symposium on ‘Homosexuality and the Bible,’ and thought I should take that because that was my whole dilemma,” she said. “I don’t know that I could put up a good argument (either for or against homosexuality) because I was raised Catholic and never learned that much about the Bible.”

That seminar was led by the Rev. Mike Underhill, pastor of the Nexus Church, which happened to meet just down the road a little from Robinson’s home in the East Butler YMCA, and eventually she started attending there, but it was the symposium that finally allowed her to reconcile her faith with her son’s homosexuality.

Underhill was raised in the Methodist church, the son of a pastor, in the racially-segregated city of Memphis, Tenn. When he was a young man in the 1960s, however, he pulled away from the church because he felt that Christianity was a conspirator in many of society’s ills.

“During the Vietnam and Civil Rights era, I saw at the time the church was part of the problem, not the solution,” he said. “They weren’t doing anything to change the situation.”

So he entered the corporate arena, and retired in his early 50s from Amoco, now part of BP, where he was where he was the manager of global diversity.

“I had a wonderful job because I had a secular pulpit to speak about discrimination in the workplace,” he said. “I helped change some policies and made life better for a lot of people.”

After he retired, he finally answered the nagging call to the religious pulpit, but being an openly gay man, the only church where he could be ordained was the United Church of Christ, a relatively new denomination made from “a lot of old German congregations come together.”

“Coming out as a gay man encouraged me to come back to God,” he said. “That’s the way God created me. To acknowledge and celebrate that opens me to God’s call to life. Coming out allowed me that process. Some of the people who come to Nexus tell me about the experience they have that amounts to spiritual abuse, telling them that if you have enough faith, you wouldn’t be asking these questions.”

For example, a woman with a low singing voice was told in her previous church told her that if she were a better woman, she’d at least be an alto.

“The whole notion that she was not a real woman was spiritual abuse,” he said. “The same with divorced people, telling them that something is wrong with them, even if it was a woman in an abusive relationship, who might be told that they should try to remain in the relationship.”

He was assigned to the Nexus church about 18 months ago. The church had already been around a few years, the result of an effort by the UCC’s vision to plant a progressive church in the middle of conservative Butler County that would welcome gay and lesbian people of all ethnic groups “to lead a full life and leadership in the church.”

Underhill said there are around 80 people who affiliated with the church, which has Sunday attendance between 40 and 60 worshipers.

“My role as a pastor is more like that of a midwife,” he said. “We believe that all people are pregnant with possibilities with God and we challenge people to see what God is doing in your life.”

His class in “The Bible and Homosexuality,” which he presented three times in Oxford, has been a good tool to generate word of mouth interest in the Nexus Church.

“In all the Bible there are only six passages that are used to clobber gay people. In the workshop, we come together to read those six passages. When you sit down to read them yourself, people get a better understanding of what the passages are saying and what they are not.

“Today, sexual orientation is about love and a physical relationship. So we explore what exactly those passages are talking about. Are they spelling out what we understand about sexual orientation today? What it meant to have same-sex behavior then is quite different than anything we know about today.

Underhill said that the UCC is the first major denomination to ordain openly gay and lesbian people and to endorse marriage equality.

“There are many things prohibited in the Bible that most people would say are no longer applicable,” he said. “Eating pork, for instance. I call that ‘pick and choose’ fundamentalism.

When counseling people who have had a bad experience in a different church, Underhill focuses on assuring them of God’s abiding love.

“Usually, people will come out for mental health because when you’re trying to deny a huge part of what you are takes a lot of energy and is not healthy,” he said. “A lot of them who come here have begun the process, so it’s just a matter of supporting that.

“It’s really nothing to do with being gay and lesbian, but it’s a matter of exploring Gods presence in your life.”

While there may be other churches that are more accepting of gay and lesbian people, it is not written in their policies. The UCC, however, establishes in its Constitution a Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns, whose job it is to actively work “to combat prejudice and seeks justice for, and the full inclusion and involvement of, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Christians in all expressions of the United Church of Christ.”

“We have straight people who come to Nexus because they want to raise their children in an accepting environment,” he said. “Being welcoming of gay and lesbian people in important to Nexus Church, but it does not define us. The Gospel according to Jesus Christ is continually our focus.”

But mainstream denominations don’t agree with blanket acceptance of homosexuality.

“Our stance is that you have to deal with the sin while being redemptive in our behaviour toward the sinner,” said the Rev. Ken Dugas, pastor of the Allison Avenue Baptist Church in Hamilton. “Baptists would generally believe that homosexuality is wrong and anti-Bible.”

While on an individual basis, Baptists may have their own feelings of acceptance toward a gay or lesbian individual, but the church’s stance is pretty clear, he said.

“We have some families who have been touched by that, but we don’t have any openly gay members,” Dugas said. “That would be highly unlikely. Being a part of the congregation would mean that you would have to accept the teachings of the Bible and be baptized, and that would be a problem.”

Michael Graham, pastor of the Village Church, said, “As a church, we love gay people, we love adulterers and we love murderers. We love people who get it right and we love people who get it wrong.

“Gay people are welcome to come and hang out with us, but as far as being Christian and gay, we have issues with that because we believe it contradicts God’s word. We will treat (homosexuality) like any other sin that’s described in the Bible.

“You can be Christian and be gay just like I can cheat on my wife and be Christian, because it’s all part of the battles that rage in our hearts. But if you’re gay, you won’t be a Christian. If you’re a Christian, you don’t want to walk in that lifestyle. We have sinful hearts, but to be flamboyantly gay is to walk in that lifestyle, and the Bible has tension with that.”

While “loving the sinner and hating the sin” works well for the majority of Christians, Robinson found more comfort in Underhill’s message that the Bible can be interpreted in a number of ways based on linguistic and contextual analysis and that it may not be as condemning as other denominations believe.

“It was the most amazing symposium I’d ever heard in my life,” she said, and after hearing Underhill’s message and discovering that his congregation met just down the road from her house, Robinson started going there.

“I cried the whole time because it felt so comfortable,” she said. “Now I’m at a point where everything is very balanced and falling into place. I’ve never looked so forward to Sunday coming. Maybe it’s because I’ve never felt good enough about myself to belong to a church, even though I’m very conservative and it’s not a very conservative church. But now it makes sense to me that each person needs to be respectful for themselves and for others."

Originally published July 31, 2011 in the Hamilton JournalNews

Hamilton High School senior Gabi Lindsay now works part-time at Walmart and is concerned that the economy will have an impact on her ability to get a job as a music teacher when she gets out of college.

Hamilton JournalNews, April 24, 2011

I  interviewed Hal Holbrook a couple of times and met him in person once as he was bringing his Mark Twain show through. It was the second interview in which I got on his nerves, but I handled it well, I think.

I asked him to tell me about the first time he did Mark Twain, and he gave me the terse “that’s all in the bio” response, but then he went ahead and told me the story anyway, taking about 20 minutes, talking about him and his first wife touring the West doing a program about great writers, living and working out of the back of their car doing two shows a day and so on.

When he was done, I said, “You see, Mr. Holbrook, in your bio, all that is covered in three sentences, but you gave me a real story.”

He chuckled and said, “I see what you mean,” and then we had a great chat for about another hour. He even gave me a 10-minute recitation of some politically charged material.

* * *

It’s now been 55 years since Hal Holbrook started portraying American humorist and social commentator Mark Twain.

He was fresh out of Denison in Granville, Ohio, where his mentor had booked Holbrook and his first wife Ruby to perform an educational program, performing 307 shows in a tour of schools in the Southwest.

“We did two or three shows a day and traveled over 30 thousand miles at tremendous speeds to get from one show to the next,” he said in a phone interview.

Doing Mark Twain was only a small part of that show that gave an overview of literary history and included a lot of Shakespeare, and he had to put on the makeup in 45 seconds, he said, while Ruby would do the introduction.

When he started performing “Mark Twain Tonight!” as a solo show in 1954, it took him four hours to do the aging makeup in a pre show routine that he maintained for nearly 30 years. But around 15 years ago, he said that he was doing a play in New York and was getting ready to go on tour as Twain, and while waiting for his cue backstage one night, he explored his face.

“I got out my hand mirror and saw the wrinkles, the indentations and the sagging jowls,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘You idiot! You don’t need all that makeup anymore.’ ”

Holbrook still uses a prosthetic nose to give it the distinctive shape along with the wig, mustache and eye brows.

“Mark Twain Tonight!” has been a constantly evolving program as Holbrook continues to edit from the wealth of material Twain left, not only his novels, but newspaper columns, essays and personal letters, estimating that he has about 17 hours of material to draw from every night. He said he’s able to keep the show up-to-date and relevant to the news of the day without making contemporary references because little has changed since the late 19th century as far as human nature is concerned.

“If you’re careful and spend of lot of time working on it, you can string the material together so that the audience makes the connection,” he said, and said that lately he’s been weaving portions of Twain’s essay “The War Prayer” into the second act.

“Because of terrorism, a handful of people from God knows where they can knock down two towers and we are aware now that we cannot be safe behind two great oceans,” Holbrook said. “If we want to live in a world without wars, it may be that we have to learn how to live with other people.

“I don’t think that people, no matter what their political persuasion, would have a hard time accepting that.”

 This story was originally published on May 8, 2009 in the Hamilton JournalNews.

Gandertown

I presume that I was conceived somewhere in the little town of Auburn, a little unincorporated burg on a hill along Ohio 129, the road from Hamilton and Millville to Brookville, Ind. That’s where my parents lived, and I don’t think they were much for traveling at the time.

Auburn is what it says on the signs, but my family also called it Gandertown, though I don’t recall there being an abundance of geese. Or even a goose. A few geezers, perhaps, like Cedric Waltz, who owned the general store and gave me my first puff of a cigarette, he and everyone in the store thinking it hilarious to make a little guy choke.

That’s the kind of town it was, the kind of people I came from.

I should add, however, that even though I was 5-ish, I took the drag willingly, perhaps eagerly. That’s the kind of people I am. There’s not much I haven’t been willing to try at least once in my half-century here. I declined to sky-dive, true, but I have twice gone up in an open cockpit stunt plane.

Here’s how it started:
The Lomans lived on Cochran Road. There were seven Loman children, four girls and three boys.

The Joneses lived on Auburn Lane, just a few hundred yards away. There were also seven Jones children, also four girls and three boys. And in both families, the four girls were all older than their brothers.

Barbara May was the youngest of the Loman daughters. Forrest Richard Jones Jr. was the oldest of his brothers. She was 14 and he was 18 when they were married, the Rev. Paul Pennington, the groom’s brother-in-law, presiding.

Their first home as a married teen couple was a converted chicken coop behind Grandma Stokely’s house. She also lived in Auburn, in one of the first houses when you approach from Hamilton on Ohio 129. Grandma Stokely was Grandma Loman’s mother. There was no Grandpa Stokely because Stokely was the name of her second husband Sam Stokely. I wish I had some stories about Sam Stokely because they would be good ones. I understand that he was the town drunk and quite the character. But I digress.

I don’t know if I was conceived in the chicken coop or not, because they were 16 and 20 when I was born, so that was a couple of years on. Now that I think about it, I really hope I was. Maybe when Mom reads this, she’ll text me the answer: “Was I conceived in a chicken coop?” (These essays are not about fact-finding, but about memories. I’ll add a footnote if I learn anything.)

I do have a vague memory of the chicken coop, though, but it wasn’t from living there. I was very young, maybe even a baby, and we were visiting someone, maybe one of Mom’s sisters. I remember someone was ironing. I remember irises.

If I wasn’t conceived in the chicken coop, then it was probably in the first house I do remember living in, also in Auburn, a four-room frame box set up on cinder blocks next door to Grandma and Grandpa Jones on Auburn Lane, a little gravel road that cut across a corner of Cochran Road and 129. The egress onto 129 was really steep and I only remember one or two cars making the attempt in the time we lived there and later, so the only access was from Cochran Road, making Auburn Lane, for all practical purposes, a dead end. And since there was only four houses on Auburn Lane, there was very little traffic. Still, my parents and grandparents made me deathly afraid to go out into the lane. I suspect there was some ass busting involved.

The house had electricity, but no plumbing. It was possible to crawl under it, but I only did that once. Growing up in the country, bugs were no big deal, nothing to be afraid of, but you still don’t want to be swarmed by millions if not dozens of Granddaddy Longlegs.

There was a two-seater outhouse in back, and we got water from the well pump next door at Grandma and Grandpa Jones’ house. There were people living in that well. They might have been gnomes or elves or something, but I just called them the well people. They spoke to me and shared the wisdom they’d gained from living life both underground and underwater. So in gratitude, I would take them with me in the back of the station wagon when we’d go to town so they could see what the rest of the world was like. They had a very strange language with a lot of Ls in it. I was fluent.

I was very young -- we moved before I started school -- so I don’t remember specifically any of the stories or the wisdom they passed along, but I sure could use some advice now that I’m living in a watery cave.

I remember a sandbox where I played with my cousins, which I had plenty of. They were my first friends. On Mom’s side I was closest in age to cousin Dale, with cousin Greg on the other. There were so many of us though, that family gatherings were total chaos. The sandbox was near a cherry tree. That tree seemed huge to me, and I remember climbing it in spite of the danger. The cherries from the tree were tart and bright red. Grandma made excellent pies with them.

Auburn had two gas stations. One was a Sohio, and that’s where Dad worked when he cut off the tip of his thumb slicing baloney. That was pre-memory for me, but legend says they never found the thumb. The other was Waltz’ General Store, which had gas pumps, but now that I think about it, I can’t say that they worked as I don’t remember anyone actually buying gasoline there.

The house itself was tiny, maybe 20 by 20 feet, but memory is not a reliable device to measure that kind of scale. Divided into four more or less equal rooms, the house had three doors to the outside. The room without a door was the kids’ room. It was also the first house for Cindi and Russell, and Randall Wayne, the brother born between me and Cindi and who died in infancy. I don’t remember him at all, though I do have vague memories of CIndi as a baby, and I can remember when Russell was born. In that room, I almost lynched myself playing cowboy, tying a noose to the bunk bed. Mom rushed in as I dangled and saved my life. I can still remember the panic and the relief of my first brush with mortality.

The room catty-corner from the kids’ room was the kitchen. There was a sink with a non-functioning faucet, as I recall, and a gas stove. The food was down-home and overcooked. They tried to get me to eat liver by telling me it was steak. They underestimated my genius even then. I got my ass busted for telling them, “I ain’t gonna eat this slop!”a catch phrase I undoubtedly picked up from one of the three channels on the black-and-white TV, probably a cartoon.

The other two rooms were both Mom and Dad’s room and the living room in my memories, though I couldn’t say when the change occurred or if there was only one change. There was a squarish hole cut high in the wall between the kids’ room and one of the living rooms. When they had the bunk beds along that wall and the TV in the right place, I could sit up and watch “Combat” and “Bonanza.” I think I got my ass busted for that, too.

Looking back, it seems I got my ass busted a lot, but as I said, memory tends to distort scale, so maybe it wasn’t as much as I thought. But there were certainly enough of them that the threat of an ass busting was always imminent. That is, they didn’t make threats, they made promises.

So maybe that’s why I preferred spending time next door at Grandma and Grandpa Jones’ house. Their house was right next door to ours, the only two houses on that side of the lane. There was a footpath that ran between the houses, which Dad and Grandpa later laid down a sidewalk. I learned to ride a bike on that sidewalk, and it was just uneven enough to cause many stubbed toes.

Because I was the oldest Jones grandchild, they coddled me. Grandma Jones would occasionally bust some ass -- my cousins more than me, but I felt her sting a few times. She usually whipped us with a switch from maple tree, and sometimes she made us go get one ourselves. Like little dumb-asses, we would. On the other hand, I don’t think I ever received a cross word from Grandpa Jones. Indeed, as a baby (I’m sure) and as a toddler, I always enjoyed the seat of honor, Grandpa’s lap.

I learned to read on that lap. At least partly so. I don’t think that Grandpa was a big book reader, but he did read the newspaper and magazines like Popular Mechanics, Field & Stream, and detective stories. I have pre-school memories of him helping me sound out words from the the Hamilton Journal, as I believe it was named back then. It had a picture of the old fort in the masthead, which I thought was really cool, but it was long gone before I started working there nearly 30 years later. I probably didn’t understand a word of it, but I do remember making my way through entire paragraphs. Now I write the paragraphs, and I sometimes imagine a little kid out in the world (or Butler County, anyway) sounding out the words to my stories, picking up the first skills to make him aspire to be a writer, too.

I picked up a few other things from Grandpa, too. Mostly dairy-related. He drank a lot of milk and he’d always put ice in it. I don’t drink a lot of milk, but when I do, I put ice in it, too, otherwise it doesn’t taste cold enough. I have stunned people by sprinkling pepper on my cottage cheese, but I learned to like it like that because that’s how Grandpa ate it. I can’t say he’s totally responsible for my liking ice cream (because face it, who doesn’t), but there was always some in his freezer, always vanilla but sometimes also chocolate or Neapolitan.

Grandma was different. I would spend weekends with them all the way up into my early teens. She taught me how to play gin rummy, usually while watching “Hee Haw.”But I knew I was getting special treatment because to everybody else, she was a bitch on wheels. She was the crankiest person you could ever meet and was always giving somebody, but hardly ever me, a hard time about something. I’ve had cousins in recent years tell me how much they hated her. They said she hated kids. That was hard for me to hear, but I understand. I knew how she was. She would be working in the kitchen, going off on Grandpa about something, but he would just sit in his chair, rolling cigarettes, apparently oblivious to it all. You’d almost think he was rolling up good reefer instead of tobacco, but that was way off the radar back then and there. After he died, when I’d go visit Grandma, she’d get all teary talking about him, telling me how well they got along and how they never had a fight in the 60 years they were married. I’d just shake my head at her because she never gave the man a minute’s peace as near as anyone could tell.

Every Thursday, my aunts would come over to Grandma’s house to do laundry. They’d heat water over an open fire in a big galvanized tub, and transfer the hot water by the bucket to a washing machine tub with a wringer. There were clotheslines all over the place and the cousins would all play together while the women worked, generally keeping our distance lest the switches come out. We spent a lot of that time playing in the creek (pronounced “crick”).

Almost exactly between the two houses was a path that led down the hill to the creek. It was just a trickle, not deep enough to drown a toddler, but there was one place wide enough to skip a small rock a couple of times. One of my cousins skipped a rock across my head once and drew blood. We’d pick up rocks to look for crawdaddies, build dams and play war, chucking reedy plants like spears.

So if it’s true what they say, that the first five years are the most formative of a person’s life, this was the stuff I am made of. Juvenile parents and outdoor johns. Crawdaddies and Granddaddy Longlegs. Forts on the newspaper and invisible gnomes in the well.

We lived on Auburn Lane until sometime in 1965 when we moved to Richmond, Ind., where I went to first grade (no kindergarten) at Starr Elementary School, and turned 7 years old that fall.

Photos by Greg Lynch

It’s lunchtime in Somerville, Ohio, and Megan’s Grocery and Pizza, both the only grocery store in town and the only place to buy hot food, is bustling.

With a well-worn wooden floor, two tall racks of greeting cards by the front door and a massive display of Slim Jims on the counter, Megan’s looks as though it hasn’t changed much in the 25 years Randy McGaha has owned it, and except for the lottery paraphernalia, maybe even from the 25 years before that.

On front of the meat cooler, its top covered with individual servings of dry cereal and a pizza warmer with piles of foil-wrapped cheeseburgers, a hand-made starburst sign advertises $5.50 pizzas, cheese or pepperoni, every day. Somewhere behind it all, Randy McGaha hands out sandwiches and good-natured grief to the half-dozen men loitering in the cramped space between the cashier counter and the two aisles of groceries and soft drinks.

McGaha is a multi-tasker in the old-fashioned way, running the slicer, making and wrapping sandwiches, answering the phone, running the cash register, giving instructions to the kids helping him out, telling stories about Somerville and greeting every person who comes through the door by name. His wife Brigitte operates like a third hand, taking money and ducking into the back room occasionally to make a pizza, but mostly it seems like she’s just trying to stay on the fringe of the whirlwind her husband creates.

When he was a child, he said his grandfather had a small grocery in Dayton, Ky., but McGaha (pronounced muh-GAY-HAY) claims he didn’t know anything about the business when he gave up his job making false teeth to buy Sylvia’s Corner Market 25 years ago, changing the name to honor his new-born daughter.

“Now I have three daughters and two step-daughters,” he says.

“I just wanted something different,” he says, “and boy, did I get it. A lot of time; a lot of hours.

“It was doing pretty good when I got it, but there wasn’t any pizza or hot food or lottery in town, so I built it up.”

He grew up in Somerville, just a few doors away from Megan’s.

“It used to be one of the wildest towns there every was,” he says, “but it’s as safe as can be now. The town has slowed down, but not me. I guess it’s because there’s no competition.

“My mom still lives in the same house I grew up in,” he says. “I enjoyed it. I had a good childhood in this burg. We used to have a baseball team, played in Camden and Oxford leagues, out in Reily and Darrtown.”

Standing by the front door eating a lunch meat sandwhich, Alan Dunkelberger, third-generation owner of Dave Dunkelberger & Sons, another of the few remaining Somerville businesses, comments that McGaha is two days older then he is.

“You know how thick bicycle tires are?” he asks. “We rode around this town so much we kept wearing them out.”

A tall man in sunglasses tells McGaha, “Two packs,” and McGaha hands him Marlboros.

“They don’t even have to tell me what kind,” he says. “I know what everybody smokes.”

As he goes back to his slicer, McGaha says, “Everybody who comes in here knows me. I could be in a bad mood or a good mood and nobody cares.”

"I write songs because I need to," said Yellow Springs singer/songwriter Dawn Cooksey. "I would write them even if I didn't play them for anyone."

It's therapy, she said, and she knows a little bit about that because she is a therapist and a licensed social worker. For a time, she worked for an agency in Hamilton, and through her contacts began performing for the Farmer's Market, which in turn led to her upcoming appearance at the Music Cafe on Tuesday, Dec. 23.

Born in Dayton, Cooksey lived several years in Austin, Texas, where she performed in the folk/alternative rock band Dik Dam Dyk. It was in the Austin open mic nights that she overcame her fear of performing her own songs.

"I didn't think anyone would care about my problems," she said. "I'd be a wreck for days before a gig, but I told myself I'd go every week until I'm not scared anymore.

"It took a long time."

Her songs tend to be sad, mad and everywhere in between, she said. "There have been a few exceptions, but I generally don't write when I'm happy and enjoying my life — which is most of the time.

"There are a few exceptions that blow me away, but happy songs tend to be kind of dorky anyway," she said.

She has a band, 68 South.

 Dawn Cooksey on MySpace

Having played Bob Cratchit for two years prior to taking over the helm as the director for the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park's production of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Michael Evan Haney has been involved in what is now a Cincinnati tradition from the very beginning.

"It's really become a part of my life," he said. "I never thought I'd be involved in a play that would become a city-wide institution. When we started, we didn't even know there would be a second year, but even though it was not critically accepted, it was good in audience numbers."

Every year before rehearsals start, Haney goes back to the original novel and reads it — even though the adaptation uses nearly the same dialog word-for-word.

But he still looks forward to it every year with the goal of putting on a "crackerjack" performance.

"Other groups that do this often allow the quality to slide as the years go by," he said, "but that's just a sacrilege. Dickens is just a sacred as Shakespeare.

The key, he said, to keeping it real is to remember one thing.

"I wrote it at the top of my script: 'It's about Scrooge, stupid,'" Haney said. "The ones that are not successful are those that lose that focus."

For instance, some productions have made that into a lavish, show-stopping production number.

"But you have to remember Scrooge's involvement in the party," he said. "If he's not at the heart of it all, you're in trouble."

Local favorite Bruce Cromer will be humbugging as Ebenezer Scrooge for the fourth year.

"Bruce is a wonderful actor and his Scrooge is special because he never stops working on it," he said. "Each year, he finds something new and closer to the human soul of what Scrooge is.

"I call Scrooge 'the middle-age man's Hamlet' because he goes through just about every human emotion possible."

Also returning are Dale Hodges as the Ghost of Christmas Past/Mrs. Peake, Keith Jochim as Mr. Fezziwig/Ghost of Christmas Present, Todd Lawson as Young and Mature Scrooge, Gregory Procaccino as Jacob Marley/Old Joe, Andy Prosky as Bob Cratchit, Regina Pugh as Mrs. Cratchit, Wayne Pyle as Mr. Cupp/Percy, Tony Roach as Fred, Ron Simons as Mr. Sosser/Topper and Amy Warner as Mrs. Fezziwig/Patience.

"Almost everybody, from Scrooge on down, is a little richer this year and I see some nuances that I haven't seen before," Haney said. "It's like Shakespeare in that the text is so dense with so many levels that you can find all sorts of different ways to use them."

A lot of the production, however, remains exactly the same.

"It's a major decision to change anything," he said, "and you have to have meetings. We changed Marley's entrance a few years ago, and so had to change all the sound and technical cues."

how to go
WHAT: Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"
WHERE: Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park
WHEN: Through Dec. 30
COST: $31-$59
MORE INFO: www.cincyplay.com

Bruce Cromer as Ebenezer Scrooge/Sandy Underwood

The Great Gatsby meets the Bard of Avon as the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company updates the comedy "Twelfth Night" to the Roaring Twenties.

Directory Jeremy Dubin said he hit on the idea over the summer while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel of a man who re-invents himself so that he can work his way into the upper reaches of society.

"I was struck by the similarities between the characters," he said, "and of what comes out of trying to change your fundamental nature.

"And I felt that the scenes with the clowns Toby Belch and Feste have a vaudeville flavor that would work nicely in this kind of format."

The official synopsis:

After a shipwreck, Viola (Sara Clark) finds herself separated from her twin brother Sebastian and alone in the city of Illyria. Bereft at the loss of her brother and forced to make her own way in the world, she disguises herself as a man, "Cesario," and takes a job in the court of Duke Orsino (Rob Jansen). Orsino is hopelessly in love with the Lady Olivia (Kelly Mengelkoch), who has refused all of his previous advances. When Orsino sends "Cesario" to Olivia to plead his case one more time, Olivia falls instantly in love with "Cesario". Meanwhile, Viola has fallen in love with Orsino, but cannot express her desires without revealing her true identity. The classic love triangle becomes further complicated when Viola's twin brother, Sebastian (Kristopher Stoker), arrives in Illyria and is mistaken for "Cesario." As the romance unfolds, Olivia's drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Matt Johnson), conspires with Olivia's servants Maria (Sherman Fracher), Feste (Christopher Guthrie) and Fabian (Billy Chace) to play a practical joke on Olivia's stuffy butler, Malvolio (Jim Hopkins).

"'Twelfth Night' has so many story elements that resonate with the Roaring Twenties," Dubin said. "Women were becoming more independent, dressing in a more masculine fashion, and taking work outside the home, just as Viola is forced to do.

"Prohibition created a black market in bootleg alcohol that led to a lot of outrageous behavior, a perfect opportunity for Shakespeare's drunken rascal Sir Toby Belch to make mischief. And the birth of jazz created a free-wheeling atmosphere where the desire for true love was often at odds with the social mandate to be the life of the party."

While it's become common practice to put Shakespeare's stories in more contemporary environments, Dubin points out that it seems Shakespeare did the same thing in his day, with plays like "Julius Caesar" making topical references to things that Caesar would not have known about — a striking clock, for instance.

"He worked within a certain visual vocabulary, using his contemporary references to place a character's social status to make it relatable to his audience," he said. "We have our visual vocabulary, too, and these plays are not museum pieces, but relevant, living theater."

The danger, then, comes when the production distracts from the script, to become cute or irrelevant to the action.

"It's a trial and error process," Dubin said. "We're careful not to force things into the text that aren't there. You want to make sure that you don't make it something it's not."

how to go
WHAT: "Twelfth Night" by William Shakespeare
WHERE: Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, 719 Race St., Cincinnati
WHEN: Through Jan. 4
COST: $26 adults; $22 seniors; $20 students
MORE INFO: (513) 381-2273; www.cincyshakes.com

photo: Rob Jansen and Sara Clark

The title is not only long, but hilarious in its own right: “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant,” Know Theatre of Cincinnati’s off-the-hook holiday offering.

If only the production lived up to the promise.

The Pageant won an Obie Award for its off-Broadway premiere, with predictions of a cult phenomenon as a dead-pan musical rendering of the life of L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who was fond of saying that his craft was a waste of time when a guy could get rich by starting his own religion. Then he started a religion and got rich (and I am confident that I will get a stern letter from a Scientologist for writing this — it’s happened before).

The premise, and the hoped-for charm, of the Pageant is that it uses the trappings of a church or school Christmas pageant, calling to mind ubiquitous “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” in telling this story, substituting Hubbard’s life and doctrine for that of Jesus.

But this show is not about making a pageant, but a parody of one, and as such falls victim to the imitative fallacy by being self-consciously, but not skillfully, exactly what it should only be pretending to be.

This is the second show of its kind in the Know season. But with “Reefer Madness,” with the premise of being a school production warning of the evils of marijuana, there was constant winking and nudging at the out-dated propaganda. When the character did something cheesy and over-the-top, we knew that it was a comedic choice (whether it was funny or not).

But the humor doesn’t work when the production doesn’t have something in it to let us know that they’re trying to sing off-key, rush their lines or hesitate on a cue. These things could happen with comedic intent and result, but there’s nothing here to clue us in that this isn’t just a poorly-cast and under-rehearsed show, but a parody of one. There’s no wow factor, no moment when we are awed by either the talent of the cast or the brilliance of the material. We may have had both, but the production seems so poorly-conceived and tossed-together that nothing stands out. Since we never see the man behind the curtain, never get a sense of his presence, we presume he’s not there. Consequently, the show doesn’t seem campy and silly, but pathetic.

how to go
WHAT: “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant” by Kyle Jarrow
WHERE: Know Theatre of Cincinnati, 1120 Jackson, Cincinnati
WHEN: Through Dec. 28
COST: $12
MORE INFO: (513) 300-5669; www.knowtheatre.com

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