Tuesday, May 21^st, 7:15 pm

This event is free and open to the public. Kurt’s Karass: Dan Wakefield, a 35 minute short documentary about Kurt Vonnegut Jr, will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the star of the film segment, Indiana’s own Dan Wakefield.

In the film, Wakefield reminisces about Kurt, a 1940 graduate of Shortridge and editor of the school’s daily paper, The Echo. Wakefield, also an Echo writer, graduated a decade later. Wakefield traces his friendship with Kurt from his first meeting with Vonnegut in 1963 to the year before Vonnegut died, when Wakefield gave a talk in New York that Vonnegut attended and then warmly took his old friend out to dinner so they could catch up.

Vonnegut reviewed Wakefield’s first novel Going All The Way, in Life magazine, and wrote “Having written this novel, Dan Wakefield will never be able to go back to Indianapolis. He will have to watch the 500-mile race on television.” It took about forty years for Wakefield to move back to Indy. Going All The Way was later made as a movie starring Ben Affleck, Rachel Weiss and Rose McGowan. Wakefield’s memoir New York in the Fifties was produced as a documentary film by his friend Betsy Blankenbaker, another Indianapolis native, and is available on Netflix.

Commissioned by the Vonnegut Estate, Wakefield has edited compilations and written introductions to the books Kurt Vonnegut Letters, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: The Graduation Speeches, and Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories, with Jerome Klinkowitz.

Former WFYI radio personality and longtime Indianapolis resident, Travis DiNicola, returns to Indy to emcee the event. DiNicola, founder of Indy Reads Books, is thrilled to return to the stage with Dan Wakefield and host the evening’s panel discussion, “Sitting down and talking with Uncle Dan about writing, and his memories of authors he has known, is one of my favorite things, and perhaps what I miss most about living in Indy. I’m so excited to be given this opportunity to come back to Indy and share a conversation with Dan and the audience.”

After the screening the panel discussion, including Wakefield and emcee Travis DiNicola, will feature Shortridge student Shaun’Tae Swanson, Shortridge cheap xanax buy online teacher Michael Gawdzik, and Max Goller, who conducts courses for teachers who want to use Vonnegut’s work in their classrooms.

The Charles Bruce Foundation, a Pennsylvania based non-profit that supports Writers, Artists and Musicians (WAM!), in conjunction with the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library has devoted the past three years to interviewing some of the Vonnegut’s dearest friends. The film team – headed by Tim Hashko of Steaming Kettle Films – has produced a series of short documentaries in hopes of preserving fond memories of this American Icon as shared first hand by his closest companions. Earlier productions featured artists Joe Petro III and the infamous Ralph Steadman.

Special thanks to the folks at Shortridge High. None of this would be possible without Shortridge educators, Mike Gadzick – who will be participating in the panel discussion – and Charles Langley who coordinated the event for the high school.

Panelist information:

Michael Gawdzik is a language and literature teacher at Shortridge High School. For the last two years, he has strengthened the connection between Shortridge High School and the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library by incorporating Kurt Vonnegut focused curriculum at every grade level. His hope for every student at Shortridge is to read at least one book by the beloved Hoosier author.

Max Goller is the Director of Education at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis, Indiana. Goller works with educators across the U.S. promoting classroom teaching of ideas related to Kurt Vonnegut. He retired with 20 years of service from the United States Navy in 2001 having served as an electronics technician, instructor, and recruiter. Max currently teaches 8^th grade English at Hamilton Southeastern Intermediate Junior High School in Fishers, Indiana.

Shaun’tae Swanson is an African American girl that has seen the scary side of this world: the side we think is normally hidden from children. She is an artist that seeks to put her trauma to use, painting vivid imagery with her words. She is a poet, writer, but most importantly a reader. Reading is a part of who she is, and has taught her how to become the writer she dreams to be.

“The Uncle Dan and Sophie Jam”

Tuesday night, April 30, 6-8 pm at The Jazz Kitchen

PURCHASE TICKETS

I could do my autobiography with music. Songs of an era bring pictures to mind.

“Don’t Fence Me In” – I’m on a streetcar going from Broad Ripple to Tabernacle Church to play basketball in the Eighth Grade, and my School #80 pal Dickie Richardson is with me. Itchy Richardson goes to Broad Ripple and becomes a basketball star; I go to Shortridge and write about basketball for The Daily Echo.

“How High The Moon:” Les Paul and Mary Ford are doing their version of the song that stands for all high school romance, we’re “parking” at Crown Hill Cemetery, or buzzing the D-Vu, or playing the jukebox inside at Spencer’s drive-in.

“Here Comes the Sun” – I’m lying on the grass in the Boston Public Garden with my hippie friends, looking up through a green panorama of leaves of the tallest tree we could find to lie under, and this weekend Janis Joplin is coming to give a concert and the following Saturday Joni Mitchell is coming this is as close as you get to heaven.

The Gypsy Kings are playing “Volare” and I’m driving my ten-year-old God Daughter to Oleta River State Park in Miami for a weekend family retreat of The Coral Gables Congregational Church; whatever The Gypsy Kings play it seems like Miami.

I have always played songs to inspire stories that become novels or memoirs, and I’ve learned that music is now being used in therapy with people who have Alzheimers, and with autistic patients. That’s what we’ll explore at the next “Uncle Dan and Sophie Jam” at The Jazz Kitchen on April 30 with music by the fabulous saxophone player Sophie Faught and her band – Kenny Phelps on drums and Jesse Wittman on bass. We’ll also have Dr. Meganne Masko with her guitar, which she uses in therapy sessions. Dr. Masko teaches at IUPUI and is one of more than 200 music therapists in Indiana, working in hospice, nursing homes, psychiatric facilities, rehab centers and clinics.

My writer friend Susan Neville, Butler professor and prize-winning author of books that evoke readers’ memories, will also be with us for the new “Jam.”  I want to ask her what music she might have used to inspire her moving Indiana Winter, whose lyrical prose seems like it might very well be set to music. I will pass this idea on to my musician friend Tim Brickley, who composed a song for the movie of my novel Going All The Way. Who knows what creative projects and powers will be launched that night? The music of Sophie and her crew is bound to inspire you. It’s “The Uncle Dan and Sophie Jam” at The Jazz Kitchen, Tuesday night, April 30, 6-8 pm. $20 admission, $10 for students (all must be over 21.) As we used to say in the days when I lay on the grass of the Boston Public Garden and

looked up at sun while The Beatles played in my head: Be there or be square!

The lively and impressive Fonseca Theater Company will present as its finale for their stellar season the play “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” opening March 13^th at the Linebacker Lounge on W Michigan Street. This revival of the great Billie Holiday, who Frank Sinatra said was “the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing. . .”

Late one Saturday afternoon night in July of 1959 I got a call from Billie Holiday’s good friend Maely Dufty, husband of New York Post writer William Dufty, who ghost-wrote Billie’s autobiography “Lady Sings the Blues.” Maely explained that that Billie was in Metropolitan Hospital in New York, sick from heroin withdrawal. To add to her misery, the New York City police had come in to her hospital room and arrested her for drug possession, handcuffing her as she lay dying and maintaining a policeman in her hospital room. Maely was calling friends to ask if they would take around a petition for people to sign requesting the police to let her die in peace, without keeping watch in her hospital room.

Without hesitation, I took the subway up to the Dufty’s 93^rd Street apartment and took copies of the petition, sure that it would be a popular cause, hardly controversial. I had forgot, however, that this was the 1950s, and we were still in the era of McCarthyism, when people who had signed what they thought were innocuous petitions for causes like aid  to mission houses in the Bowery, o support for the teachers union, and later were hauled before the McCarty committee accused of being Communist sympathizers. McCarthy and his minions had Americans fearful of signing anything, for fear it might later be held against them.

I happened to know there was a meeting that night of The Young Peoples Socialist League, headed by my writer friend Michael Harrington (he later gained game by writing the book purchase viagra with prescription “The Other America” that inspired the LBJ poverty program.) Mike introduced me and recommended people sign this simple request for humane treatment of a dying woman – yet many refused, backing away in fear that somehow, someway, this might years later be interpreted as some kind of “subversive” act! The popular statement of refusal to sign any document was “I’m not a signer.” Less than half the people in this most liberal-minded gathering imaginable were afraid to sign. The response was even more fearful and less supportive in other gatherings I went to in hopes of support – parties, bars, even meetings at churches. McCarthy had taught Americans to fear – not their enemies, but their own government.

I took my petitions with the signatures I’d managed to accumulate, and turned the in to the Duftys. Other friends had also brought in what signatures they were able to find. The Duftys and their lawyers, supported by newspaper articles about this travesty, were able to get a court order for the New York City police to finally leave Holiday’s hospital room a few hours before her death. She died on July 17. Her songs and her recordings are still classics played today – most notably “God Bless The Child,” and “Strange Fruit,” the haunting song that portrays the lynchings of black people in the South.

In 1961 Holiday was voted to the Down Beat Hall of Fame and Columbia reissued almost a hundred of her early records. In 1971 Diana Ross portrayed her in the movie “Lady Sings the Blues” and was nominated for an Oscar.

If you would like to catch Fonseca Theatre’s production of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” performances are Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7pm and Saturdays at 4pm and 8pm at the Linebacker Lounge. There will be a special matinee at 2pm on Sunday April 7^th in honor of Billie Holiday’s birthday.

Visit fonsecatheatre.org for tickets and more information.