Humankind-Amazing Local Music

Eden Brent wowed the crowd!

 

As a kid I used to love to fool around on the piano for countless hours. I did not have a clue about what I was doing, but I had a great time. Then I took about 7 years of keyboard lessons trying to learn how to play the Organ. At the “pinnacle” of my ability I was able to eek out a passable version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (The Phantom of the Opera theme).Even though I learned how to play, I really don’t know my A chord from a G these days but I still love music. I can’t seem to get enough records, cds, mp3s, (just ask my wife), of great music from just about any musical genre.

I love live music, especially when it is done well. Here in Put-in-Bay we have some great music choices. The perennial favorites like Pat Daily, JD Owen, Mad Dog Adams, Bob Gatewood, Ray Fogg, and West Side Steve keep their fans coming back to the island year after year. Popular regional bands like Mustang Sally, The Menus, The Maxx Band, The Paradise Band, Wally and the Beaves “pack the house” which is great for business. I live in the village, but not right downtown, and I know you can hear a live band just about every day of the summer somewhere. The list of bands coming to the island every summer is long, but I long for more, more bands, more choices, and more styles of music too (especially when it is free!)

This summer there are some great bands coming to Put-in-Bay that are, to use a cliché, outside the box of what we normally get. On July 6th a group from Detroit called Terrie Lea and the Mustangs came and opened the Twilight Music Series at the monument to rave reviews. A little country, a little rockabilly, with a nice tribute to Johnny Cash, Terrie provided a great sound for the Put-in-Bay Arts Council’s “American Originals” concert series. They have won the Detroit Music awards for best country a dozen times.

I search for good music, and last summer I went with friends to Cleveland Metroparks to a blue grass festival and heard Missy Raines and the New Hip from Tennessee. Her band tours the country doing festivals and concerts all year long. Missy is an amazing award winning bass player and the band plays Blue Grass jazz. I hope you didn’t miss Missy Raines and the New Hip on July 21st.

I got a phone call one day; a person from Columbus had heard that we have Eden Brent coming to the island. They wanted to get tickets. I told them the concert was free! On August 4th we are pleased and amazed to get Eden Brent, a blues piano player, from Mississippi. Eden has a sultry voice and is the real deal when it comes to authentic Mississippi blues music. Last winter she came through Cleveland, playing at the Winchester in Lakewood. You could not get a seat.
The final concert of our Twilight Music Series on August 18th is Mo’ Mojo. They are smokin’ hot and play Cajun Zydeco. I don’t remember a real Zydeco band ever coming to the island. If you are a music lover and want to dance too, bring your sweetheart. I promise you that you can’t escape the infectious sounds of Zydeco and that toe tapping feeling will certainly come over you.

One last note on local music, there is a band of real Put-in-Bay Island guys that have been seen playing at Walleyes, Tippers and the Fish Bowl. They go by the low-key name of “The Island Band” to blend in. I guarantee you will enjoy their show and may even be asked to come on stage and play tambourine.

Hollywood and Wine

Last summer we made the trek to Hollywood California in search of Put-in-Bay’s most famous movie star Ann Harding (who has not one but two stars on the boulevard). We saw Grumman’s Chinese Theater, the Hollywood “walk of fame” and took the prerequisite “tour of the stars”. It was horrible, the tour I mean, the guide was a really bad comedian and we did not see one star. That’s because smart stars (though perhaps not Charlie Sheen) would not be seen in the daylight at most of those “so last year” hot spots on the tour. But America continues to flock to Hollywood because we are truly star struck. We are always optimistic that the stars will come out and we will be the lucky ones to spot a famous emerging star like Robert Pattinson (Water for Elephants, Twilight).
I have to believe that every summer when folks come to Put-in-Bay they probably think they might see a star or two as well. Why not, we are a popular summer destination and it’s a fun place to visit. Back in the 40’s and 50’s sport and movies stars would go on bus tours across the country. The route was often along Route 6, from Cleveland to Chicago. In fact the Island House Hotel and Restaurant in Port Clinton was a very popular lunch spot along the way. But few ever made it to the island then and fewer still do today.
Last summer while giving tours I did not see one famous person, though there are always rumors. The “soup Nazi” Larry Thomas made famous in Seinfeld is the most often mentioned. I know of one actress, Mary McCann, who grew up on the island and has a very successful career in New York Theater and television, but we have not had any big stars reside in Put-in-Bay lately. The last “star” of that magnitude would have been writer and playwright Shel Silverstein in the nineties.
I understand that Paul Lynde (center square on Hollywood Squares), who grow up in Mt. Vernon Ohio, was employed at the Boat House one summer, but that was before he was a “star”. I have been told that character actor Jack Murdock spent some summers on the island. A sci-fi regular he was in many films including “Rain Man” and “Big Top Pee Wee”. Most of our brushes with fame are really fleeting these days. Unless you count Mike Rowe from “Dirty Jobs” filming the two segments about our Snake Lady Kristin Stanford or MTV “Cribs” that came to the islands this spring, we are not on the Hollywood tour any more.
Truth is that the island has not been a hot spot for Hollywood ever, but perhaps back in the 20’s and 30’s especially during prohibition Put-in-Bay was a destination of choice for vaudevillian actors. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the location, but In 1918 America’s sweetheart Mary Pickford (who?) the most popular silent screen actress ever may have spent a summer on the island. Then in the 20’s Ann Harding (who stared in over 60 Hollywood films) and her husband Harry Banister were on the island for about 9 summers. They came here because of that vaudeville connection, (or was it the wine, hmm). And in 1940 Ann came back to Put-in-Bay for a day with “Philadelphia Story” star Katharine Hepburn. But anyone younger than 40 probably does not even have a clue who these stars were.
Sadly, we are not on the Hollywood “a” list anymore, so lets do something about it. I think we should start a Film festival. Invite filmmakers and their stars to the island. We’ll call it the Bass Island Film Festival. We can be like Martha’s Vineyard, Sundance or Telluride Film Festivals and capitalize on our great location and venues. We can start with an Ann Harding retrospective. I think our crisscrossed history with the glory days of Hollywood should be the springboard to fame and the new Hollywood place to be. Imagine Katie Holmes (from Toledo), who is now separated from Tom Cruise hanging out at one of our island bistros with Oscar winning actress Halle Berry from Cleveland. It could happen but I need your help. Send me an email with your brush with fame on the island, a connection to someone famous, or be a movie mogul so that we can get this going and make the island home to the hippest new festival. I know we can do it. Drop me a line at director@leifilmsociety.org. The stars are out there.

Humankind- Shopping Roulette (or it’s Good to Give)

One of the most asked questions, (perhaps the most asked question) I get during the summer while giving tours is “What is it like here in the winter?’ It is often hard to hold my tongue and answer seriously, but usually my first response is “quiet really quiet”. Of course it must be difficult for visitors to envision that all the stores, restaurants and bars ever close. And even more difficult to imagine us out ice fishing, playing cards on Wednesday nights, or catching up on all the chores on the “honey do” list. But the weeks between Halloween and New Years are my favorite. You know just about everyone on the ferry, and if you don’t it doesn’t take long to find out why they’re on the island.

Usually a nosey question or two is all that is needed, (always a reporters best friend). Construction workers, sales people, and service providers from furnace repairmen to satellite TV make their last house call of the season before the boat stops running. There is such purpose to this time of year. Everyone is headed to a doctors’ appointment or buying supplies for a winter project or just getting all the final food shopping needed for the winter. I see parents and grandparents getting holiday presents and going shopping just because they can. It is a small pleasure for many to just spend leisurely hours in a mall or in a large “do-it yourself’ store. We get some time to indulge ourselves, or at least in the fantasy of personal gratification. For me it is test-driving new cars.

After all the rush back and forth is complete we get a minute to reflect on what is important. Perhaps it is time to catch up on letter writing or contacting friends and family. Maybe it is a time to spend sharing our time or talents with others like Joe Foutts does teaching and advising the new high school drama club (come join us for the play “Scrooge” December 9,10,11). I like to spend a little of this time thinking about how I may be able to give back to others (before tax time of course).

Perhaps before the years end you may contemplate giving to your favorite charity, making a contribution to your church or looking at ways to make a difference in our community. Last month I got to write a story about Community Foundations, like the Ottawa County and Toledo Community Foundations and the important role they play for our local non-profits. TCF is actually a collection of funds. Some provide scholarships for our children, or help local non-profits complete their specific missions, others that provide unrestricted funds for achieving good for the community. You may not realize that one of those funds does great things behind the scenes right here on the Bass Islands.

The “William E. Market Family Community Fund”, established in 2008 by Mary Ann Market as a tribute to her late husband “boss” Bill Market, is one of these special funds. The Markets have long been supporters of the arts, church and civic organizations. Mary Ann hoped that the Market Family Fund would be able to contribute a modest amount of money each year to a worthy project, non-profit, or community organization on Put-in-Bay, Middle Bass Island, or North Bass Island. In 2008 a contribution was given to the Put-in-Bay EMS and in 2010 a donation was given to the Put-in-Bay Volunteer Fire Department (there was no contribution made in 2009 due to those wonderful folks from Wall Street).

Anyone is welcome to contribute to this fund that is coordinated through the Toledo Community Foundation. There are so many great ways to give back to our community, supporting a fund like this or any of the Toledo Community funds that provide hope for our community and county are great choices for giving a lasting gift for years to come. So don’t worry, if you find yourself fearing the shopping roulette wheel of fortune, getting the right gift for that hard to shop for family member is only a stamp and envelope away. Send a gift that will keep on giving this season. And please don’t tell the mainlanders how much fun we really have here in the winter you’ll only encourage them to come and stay. (For more information about the William E. Market Family Community Fund, please contact Julene Market.)

Beyond Belief-About Facebook

Beyond Belief- About face-book

The news today (3/18), Facebook has officially eclipsed Google. According to the Silicon Valley’s Mercury News “If you logged on to Facebook last week to share a photo, brag about your child or disclose what city you were born in — you may have helped push the Palo Alto-based company past a new milestone: Facebook for the first time had more traffic than Google on a weekly basis in the United States.”

Whoa, and I only joined Facebook to bug my kids. Really, I had no idea I was going to be a part of a wave of change in our new age of instant gratification. Social Networking, as it is called, has exploded into a national pastime. It is here on the island and growing daily. We have hundreds perhaps thousands of Put-in-bay Facebookers and fans.

Friends, neighbors, distant relatives, the circle just keeps growing. Here’s a list of just a few local fan sites I know of related to Put-in-Bay. The Lake Erie Chapter of the Black Swamp Conservancy, The Roundhouse, Perry’s Cave, First Island Son B&B, The Beer Barrel, Bob Gatewood, The Boathouse, Bone Lady, Ray Fogg, The Ohio State University, Middle Bass Town Hall, The Put-in-Bay Brewery, The Miller Boat Line, Ohio State Parks, and on and on it goes and we’re just getting started.

If you are already on Facebook, you may notice the some people spend a lot, I mean hours every day sending messages, looking at pictures, giving their thumbs up approvals and two cents worth. I know this may just be the tip of the iceberg for creating a larger online consciousness across America, or at least the islands. Middle Bass has set up a “town hall” on Facebook that has encouraged discourse and idea sharing that might not have been possible without the connectivity power of the Facebook network.

One Internet sage told me that websites and email, as we know it might well be a thing of the past in a just a few years. These interconnected networks allow instant communication, idea sharing within groups or among individuals and you don’t have to deal with commercial spam. Forget about MySpace, Linked In, AOL Instant Messenger, Flicker and Twitter, you got be “here” to be in touch.

And the best part is when you see a person walking (or driving which is even scarier) somewhat haphazardly down the road; you can guess they are texting, tweeting or Facebooking. I can guess that it won’t be long before we will be paying a surcharge on our car insurance to pay for tangling with the “lost” wanderers of the new realm.

The Internet has grown like a weed. When Michael Jackson died unexpectedly last year, people “tweeting” and “googling” nationwide nearly crashed the Internet. Now, an interesting “tagged” photo shared between friends (read the Facebook privacy statement) could very easily be seen by thousands in seconds, really!

How did this happen? Mark Zuckerman created Thefacebook in 2004 while living in the dorm at Harvard University. Within a year Facebook was on the Internet and a huge hit among college students. The idea of having a social network, a way for college students to mix, mingle and learn about each other in a safe setting, their dorm room, was instantly popular. Parents were initially happy to know that this new way of socializing would mean a safer school environment. Then they wanted to get involved to see how it worked. True innovators and what we call first early adopters realized it could be much much more. Today families and baby boomers alike are fueling the amazing exponential growth of Facebook.

Facebook is a wide-open experiment in communication. Honda Cars learned this the hard way last year by using social networking to promote their “brand”. They had no idea that public opinion could backfire so quickly on their “great idea”. They called it their “Honda Love” experiment. They set up fan sites for all their cars, existing and new. The experiment wheeled out of control as negative comments started to appear especially on their new “crosstour” site. This snowball effect of emotional messaging created a PR debacle of immense proportions and one that Honda is still reeling from today. What can we learn from this? We may not always like what we see and hear in a world of electronic media.

If you have a business with a fan site on Facebook you may get comments that are out of line from time to time. Sometimes people can be mean spirited. So the question is, are you ready to ride the new wave of Internet connectivity and see where it takes you? I am. And I am really hopeful that with the use of some good social skills and manners we will go a long way to making this a positive and meaningful dialog for years to come.

Human Kind-Who Dat?

Humankind- Who Dat

I ‘m a closet sports junkie. I can hide my need for sports action pretty well most of the time. But the Olympics are like a two-week endless buffet for sports fans like me. From opening ceremony to the last medal it doesn’t’ get much better than that. I know I have things to do, but at this time of the year I really do need my daily fix of ESPN. I have been known to watch games or even just the box score updates on my laptop. Some people even get updates on their cell phone. I know I am not alone. Hang out at Tippers or the Skyway and you will notice other folks with a similar affliction.

The large TV’s with sports, even just highlights are like eye candy. You’ll notice our eyes darting from the person we are talking to back over to the TV. Go to any bar or restaurant and we are looking for the best angle from a booth or table so that the TV is just off the view line of the person we are with. Seriously. My wife has caught me staring at a score update because the game I wanted to see was not on locally. Thank goodness for those score updates at the bottom of the screen!

If you love sports, this past month has been one of the most satisfying in years. On top of the amazing stories that came from the Olympics, the Colts beat the Jets, and then the Saints fulfilled every Cleveland Browns’ fan fantasy of being worst to first when the Saints defeated the favored Colts and won the Super Bowl. But none of that topped our local Put-In Bay School basketball season.

No question this year, the best sports story was right here in Put-in-Bay. Lets start with the important news; the boys went from 1 and something last year to 8 and 5 this year. And the girls basketball team went undefeated their first 9 games. Our players and coaches were featured on the local TV news and regional newspapers; they even had their Mackinaw Island game broadcast on Internet radio. The fans went from dutiful parents showing up every week to a loud and boisterous cheering section of Panther Fans. In fact in one game the ref remarked to me (with a smile) that he was going to have to respond to the fans “opinions” if they kept sharing their views so vocally!

For me this basketball season provided the most satisfaction I can remember as a sports fan ever. Being the scorekeeper for the PIB school basketball teams was pure joy. The fun of score keeping is that you get to actively be involved in the flow of the game and contribute to the overall fan appreciation. I have to admit that in some of the more anxious moments it is really a struggle to remember to mind the scoreboard, watch the clock, and flip the possession arrow. You just find yourself getting really involved in the game.

In one of the girls home “barn burner” games I may have forgot to run the clock after a critical free throw for a few seconds. Luckily the ref was “helpful” in correcting the situation. And I need to tell you this sports fan thing is not limited to just guys. I shared duties with two Moms that did statistics (Jane Market and Kelly Mohn). I can tell you that they were twice as excited and just as involved if not more than me in the flow of every game. We would often need to have short conferences to discuss points, was that a two or a three and should we switch the possession arrow. Everyone was watching the game and that is not just fun that is pure adrenalin flowing. If you were there I know you felt it too.

Competitive sports, in such a small population, are really rare. A coach from one of the visiting teams remarked that his school had twice the number of students in their high school than we have in the entire school and he felt lucky to have 8 players on his team. (Both our varsities had 12 plus kids.) We have families of players, from kindergarten to seniors, generations of parents and kids that share in the joy of sports. But none of this would be possible without the sincere love and interest of our coaches. From Susan Harrington’s All Star program to the varsity teams of Craig Schuffenecker and Steve Poe there is joy in Pantherville again. And now I have to go, The PIB Archery Team is heading out to Columbus and it’s March Madness time too, Go Bucks.

Beyond Belief-Bubble Boy

Beyond Belief “Bubble Boy rides again”

Last winter we took a chance and left both our cars on the mainland before the last ferry stopped running in December. We made a commitment to use our electric golf cart as our sole means of transportation for the duration of the winter. We had gotten a zippered weather enclosure and some knobby tires to make our cart “winter friendly”. As it turned out it really worked great. The enclosure kept us “relatively” warm and by keeping the battery charged every night we never needed to beg for a ride home.

But what about those really cold nights and the snow and the ice you’re wondering? As a car guy, I was often asked about the battery’s performance and the winter handling of our cart in the snow. There was this one morning in particular when we had just had a big snowfall that required digging out the driveway to get the cart to the road. The golf cart, unlike its ATV cousins, cannot double as a snowplow. So after a bit of shoveling I finally was able to “blast” my way out of the drive, and through the drift by the road. I was worried I would get stuck but amazingly no problem!

Luckily, the road crew had already plowed the road smooth long before I got the shoveling completed so we were able to drive around the island with impunity. The knobby tires gave us ample traction and some common sense kept us from following the ATVS off road, though it was a tempting option. Since we can never really go faster than 12-14 mph even “panic” breaking on snow was not a problem. At 14mph if you simply take your foot off the accelerator in an electric golf cart you come to a stop in less 20 feet. Try getting a car to do that on snow!

One afternoon as we rode around in our enclosed golf cart towards the end of last winter, we drove past one of the island golf cart vendors walking along Catawba. He yelled out to us “Bubble Boy rides again”. For those of you who are Seinfeld fans you will probably remember the seriously funny “Bubble Boy” episode. According to Wikipedia “The Bubble Boy” is the 47th episode of the American sitcom Seinfeld, as well as the nickname of Donald Sanger, one of the characters in that episode. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bubble_Boy_(Seinfeld_episode).

For those who don’t remember, “Bubble Boy” was an angry rude man confined to a controlled environment “bubble” because of his suppressed immune system. So while the “bubble boy” comment was not exactly a direct compliment, I realized that the larger reference in his statement about traveling in our protected slow moving “bubble” enclosure was right on. Heck we liked it so much we left the “bubble” on all summer as well.

It is so easy to get attached to our comfortable cars, especially in winter. Heat, comfy seats, windows…it sounds so luxurious. However, we found that there was no place we were headed on the island that ever took more than five minutes to get to by cart. We could get home in about the same time it takes to get the average car warm anyway. And I see a lot of folks here that willingly drive their ATVS in the winter with no wind protection, which has to be much, much, much colder than our “bubble” cart.

After reviewing our bills, we used very little electricity, less than 5 dollars a month. The annual cost savings were really worth a few shivers when compared to the cost of gas we had used the winters before. In fact we still have gas credits at the gas station from 2008.

Perhaps you saw the article in the last gazette about how the new electric golf carts for sale actually qualify for a huge US energy tax credit. This could be a very motivating consideration if you have been on the fence about this subject. There is no doubt that electric golf carts are a great transportation option year round here on the island. I am not sure if this is “green”, or carbon neutral, or if we are saving the planet, but I can tell you for certain golf carting works year round and its doesn’t cost much. See you on the road.