20 Dog-Eared Recollections about "Wishbone"

    This is a BuzzFeed-style listicle because I ran out of time to edit an essay for Dr. Mackie's Creative Nonfiction before the portfolio was due. It was about the PBS show Wishbone, and all the previous drafts were sprawling avalanches of information that scared off most readers. I guess I got a little carried away in my enthusiasm for the subject. Listicles make absorption of information easier to digest.

     1, The 1990s were a great time to be a canine TV star. There was Beethoven the St. Bernard, Moose the Jack Russell Terrier (Eddie from the TV show Fraiser, Skip from the film My Dog Skip), Buddy (from the movie Air Bud, Comet from Full House), and Soccer, narrator/protagonist of the children’s show Wishbone.

      2, Soccer beat out over a hundred dogs during the audition for the lead role. The occasional backflip seen on the show was real; and likely was what won him the part.

     3, Like all stars, Soccer had stunt doubles. Their names were Phoebe, Slugger and Shiner. A dog named Bear was used for the publicity photoshoots.

     4,  Producer Rick Duffield owned a Jack Russell Terrier himself, and he’d been playing with the idea of a children’s show starring a talking dog for a while, but hadn’t ever quite figured out how to make that work. Then his gaze fell upon an anthology of world literature sitting on the bookshelf, and all the puzzle pieces fit together – the dog would narrate classic novels and plays, bookended by the real-world adventures of his people.

     5, Those people were mainly his owner, Joe Talbot, Joe’s mother Ellen, his best friends Samantha Kepler and David Barnes, and Ellen’s best friend/next door neighbor Wanda Gilmore.

     6, There were fifty episodes run on PBS stations between 1995-98, divided into two seasons. Reruns aired until 2001.

     7, Because one parent seemingly had to die in every story starring kids or dogs, Joe’s father Steve died years before the show began due to a rare blood disease.

     8, In real life, the actress who played Ellen (Mary Chris Wall) was actually the mother of Jordan Wall, who played Joe.

     9, None of the main cast ever really had any noteworthy credits after this show ended.

     10, The voice of Wishbone, Larry Brantley, won the part during a callback after an improvised five-minute monologue while watching Soccer be mesmerized by a tennis ball in the corner of the room.  

     11, Almost all the episode titles were puns. (Examples: “A Tale in Twain” was a two-part Tom Sawyer, “Furst Impressions” was Pride and Prejudice, “Bark to the Future” was H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, and Henry IV, Part One became “The Prince of Wags.”)

     12, The literary imaginings inside Wishbone’s head were put together as theater productions, and used a core group of Dallas/Fort Worth-area theater professionals as these players.

     13, The show went well out of its way to break down the barrier required for suspension of disbelief, frequently showing clips explaining how certain visual effects were made during the credits. And the setting of a video game based on the show was the set’s backlot.

     14, These behind-the-scenes clips can be found on YouTube, and there is an entire channel dedicated to showing full episodes.

     15, Eight different spinoff book series were created between 1995-2001, totaling 77 titles in all, continuing the adventures of every viewer’s favorite Oakdale residents.

     16, The sports teams of Sequoyah Middle/High School, where the kids attend, are known as the Bulldogs, and their colors are blue and yellow-gold. Wishbone filled in as the team mascot at one point.

     17, Guest stars included pre-fame versions of Jensen Ackles (best known for Supernatural) and Amy Acker (of Angel and Dollhouse).

     18, Other guest stars were Shelley Duvall from The Shining and, playing himself, Dallas Cowboys fullback Daryl “Moose” Johnston.

     19, Wishbone was replaced by another dog-and-book-related series, an animated TV adaptation of Norman Bridwell’s Clifford the Big Red Dog series.

     20, The Clifford show got a short-lived spinoff titled Clifford’s Puppy Days, whose head writer was Suzanne Collins (of Hunger Games fame). 

Some Writer

     I really enjoyed writing this essay for Dr. Dial-Driver's Children's Lit class.

     In her foreword for the 60^th Anniversary edition of E.B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, multiple Newbery Medal-winner Kate DiCamillo (Because of Winn-Dixie; The Tale of Despereaux) writes that White “loved barns and pastures, dumps and fairgrounds, ponds and kitchens. He loved pigs and sheep and geese and spiders” (vi). He also loved subjects as diverse as “rain, harnesses, pitchforks, springtime, fall, spiderwebs, monkey wrenches and Ferris wheels” (vi). Because of this love for the common bits of everyday life, “every word of this book shows us how we can bear the triumphs and despairs, the wonders and the heartbreaks, the small and large glories and tragedies of being here” (vi). In case the reader didn’t catch this aspect on the first reading, DiCamillo is humorously pointing out that another thing White loved was creating atmosphere-enhancing lists, which can be seen everywhere from the description of farm implements and junk cluttering Zuckerman’s barn (13-14) to Fern and Avery’s summer activities (42-44) to the ingredients of the meals Wilbur and Templeton consume (too many examples to mention all of them).

     Charlotte’s Web is a novel about friendship, which also says a lot about good writing, while also being about growing up and facing death, of which there is plenty on a farm. In 1947 White wrote an essay outlining the “Death of a Pig,” published in the January 1948 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. White begins this essay by stating that the traditional farming practice of butchering a hog for wintertime is natural and accepted without question: “It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned” (Essays of E.B. White 17). On this specific occasion, one ad-lib interrupted that ancient script’s flow – the pig never showed up for his last supper: “I found myself suddenly cast into the role of pig’s [sic] friend and physician – I had a presentiment that the play would never regain its balance and that my sympathies were now wholly with the pig” (17). This particular pig died of a sickness a short time later, despite White’s best efforts of swine-nursing, and thus depriving him of tasty ham and sausage. But soon afterward he began work on his second children’s novel, which starred a pig protagonist.

     Of course, like his earlier children’s novel Stuart Little and his later children’s novel The Trumpet of the Swan, the animals in Charlotte’s Web can speak English. Can animals really talk? It’s a popular idea in the minds of many, and the wise Dr. Dorian doesn’t completely rule out the possibility when talking with Mrs. Arable: “I have never heard an animal say anything. But that proves nothing. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and hat I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention” (110). Perhaps White was consciously echoing the words of G.K. Chesterton from Chesterton’s famous defense of fairy tales in “The Ethics of Elfland,” part of his book Orthodoxy:

I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hardworking people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. I would always trust the old wives’ tales against the old maids’ facts. (Orthodoxy 53-54)

     Still, facts must be dealt with and arranged appropriately. And as Melissa R. Cordell explains in an article on the backstory of Charlotte for the October 2008 issue of children’s magazine Highlights, White “filled a folder with sketches of spiders and notes about spiders at work” (32), and a lot of these notes wove themselves into the tale, including “Charlotte’s description of the seven parts of her leg, what happened when Charlotte’s children hatched, and how her foundation lines differed from her snare lines” (33). College professor Sue Misheff summarizes the work in her 1998 essay “Beneath the Web and Over the Stream,” for the academic journal Children’s Literature in Education, by saying, “Within this fantasy lives a very down-to-earth spider who weaves a bit of magic into her otherwise realistic web which essentially saves her friend from certain extinction” (133).

     Chesterton would agree that a spider’s web is magical; when queried with such unanswerable questions children wonder, such as why birds lay eggs or gravity makes apples fall in autumn, “we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is magic” (quoted in Elfland 57). So would Dr. Dorian, though he uses different language: “A young spider knows how to spin a web without any instruction from anybody. Don’t you regard that as a miracle?” (White, Charlotte 110)

     Another everyday miracle for any writer is having a good editor, and most people in general would considered blessed with a spouse they could both work well and get along with. For White, his wife Katharine filled both of these roles admirably, though she did not officially edit his work. As he wrote in a March 1954 letter to a little girl named Shirley Wiley, “My wife is an editor. An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do, but who has escaped the terrible desire to write” (Letters 358). And writers need editors for the simple reason that White cited when replying to a student’s query: “I can’t explain myself. Everything about me is mysterious to me and I do make any strong effort to solve the puzzle” (Letters 372).

     Still another everyday miracle is the concept of stories themselves, and the immense power they hold. Western author Louis L’Amour said of them in “In the Beginning, There Was the Story…”, a short essay from his reference work The Sackett Companion: “The story was man’s first and best means of transmitting knowledge or information, of preparing the child as well as the adult for what might come” (261). White uses the power of story, in part, to model what desirable behavior looks like and educate readers through new vocabulary, while keeping his adult viewpoint that sees humor in the commonplace. As Charlotte says to Templeton on page 140, “’Humble’ has two meanings. It means ‘not proud’ and it means ‘near the ground.’ That’s Wilbur all over.” In this approach, White creates what Misheff calls “a safe space created by a reasoned approach to a problem” (Misheff 138).

     Even though Charlotte dies, because death is inevitable for all creatures, life goes on for Wilbur, and he must learn to deal with the pain in order to grow and mature (Misheff 137). DiCamillo says this is part of Charlotte’s promise to Wilbur, in addition to being White’s promise to his readers: “Things will continue, life will go on. It will be beautiful, astonishing, heartbreaking. And as long as you keep your eyes and heart open to the wonder of it, as long as you love, it will be okay” (Foreword vii). This is a very important lesson to learn, which can be taught somewhat by sitting at the typewriter and bleeding, so sayeth the Hemingway quote familiar to nearly all English majors. Life’s experiences will teach this lesson to the readers in one way or another at some point in their lives, but books like this one can play an early role in understanding this lesson, which is part of why children’s literature possibly occupies the highest place in storytelling, which in my opinion is the highest form of teaching tools in existence. 

      White also has quite a bit to say about the importance of good writing in general, not to mention common sense, throughout this work. But in terms of finding out what this advice is, we must study his actual words. “If you are engaged in writing a theme about my works, I think your best bet is to read them and say what you think about them,” was the advice he gave a high school student named Arthur Hudson (White, Letters 372). So that is what I tried to do.

     There is the main plot device of the words “SOME PIG,” “TERRIFIC,” “RADIANT” and “HUMBLE” appearing in the threads of Charlotte A. Cavatica’s webs in Zuckerman’s barn and the fairgrounds, of course. No one understands how words could appear in a spider’s web, because it seems utterly fantastic. But again, Dr. Dorian serves as a voice of reason: “I don’t understand it…None of us do. I’m a doctor. Doctors are supposed to understand everything. But I don’t understand everything, and I don’t intend to let it worry me” (108-10). Since “doctor” comes from the Latin “to teach,” this bit of wordplay in that statement about “having to understand everything” is doubly worthwhile. After all, isn’t part of the reason that professors and teachers continue to seek out new perspectives and knowledge of their subjects because they wish to learn more?  And if we tried to understand everything, we would quickly go crazy, an observation which Chesterton expands upon in his earlier Orthodoxy essays “The Maniac” and “The Suicide of Thought.”

     Another bit of humorous observation about writing occurs during the initial barn-wide planning meeting, where Wilbur protests that he’s not terrific, only to be quickly overruled by Charlotte’s snarky-yet-sensible reply: “That doesn’t make a particle of difference. Not a particle. People believe almost anything they see in print” (89). This is sadly true, and can be seen by reading the political coverage in newspapers or on Facebook. People are quite easy to fool.

     In an essay remembering his Cornell professor William Strunk, White describes his own process of writing this way: “I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any notion of what is taking place under the hood” (White, Essays 256). Is that comment a little strange, coming from the editor/co-author (with Strunk) of The Elements of Style, one of the most influential books on writing in history? Kind of. But at the end of the day, the words that White hammered out just worked. They connected with people, and explained clearly the simple, often-forgotten parts of life’s daily existence in a rural setting. And that’s what counts. Perhaps with the closing lines, he was hoping they could be his epitaph: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both” (184). I know that I would be honored to have people say about me.

Works Cited

Chesterton, G.K. “The Ethics of Elfland.” 1908. Orthodoxy. Ignatius Press, pp. 51-70, 1995.

DiCamillo, Kate. Foreword by Kate DiCamillo. Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White. 60^th Anniversary edition. Illus. Garth Williams. 1952, HarperCollins, 2012, pp. v-vii. 

Cordell, Melinda R. “E.B. White and His Spiders.” Illus. Meredith Johnson. Highlights for Children, Vol. 63, No. 10, October 2008, pp. 32-33. EBSCO. Accessed on 28 September 2016. Web.

L’Amour, Louis. “In the Beginning, There Was the Story…” The Sackett Companion. Bantam Books, pp. 261-262, 1988.

Misheff, Sue. “Beneath the Web and Under the Stream: The Search for Safe Places in Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terbithia.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 29, No. 3, 1998, pp. 131-141. EBSCO.  Accessed on 29 September 2016. Web.

White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. 60^th Anniversary edition. Illus. Garth Williams. 1952, HarperCollins, 2012.

--------------. “Death of a Pig.” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1948. The Essays of E.B. White, 1977. Harper Colophon Books, pp. 17-25, 1979.

--------------. “Will Strunk.” 1957. The Essays of E.B. White, 1977. Harper Colophon Books, pp. 256-262, 1979.

--------------. “To Arthur Hudson.” 1 April 1955. Letters of E.B. White, Revised Edition, 2006. Edited by Dorothy Lorrano Guth and Martha White.  Harper Perennial, p. 372, 2007.

--------------. “To Shirley Wiley.” 30 March 1954. Letters of E.B. White, Revised Edition, 2006. Edited by Dorothy Lorrano Guth and Martha White.  Harper Perennial, p. 358, 2007.

BIbliography of Suggested Reading for Teens

     For Dr. Dial-Driver's Children's Lit class. This bibliography, too, was extremely difficult to narrow down to ten examples. I tried to be diverse when it comes to genres.

Rawls, Wilson. Where the Red Fern Grows. Doubleday, 1961.
     Billy Coleman lives near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and he diligently saves up for two years in order to buy a pair of coonhound puppies, which he names Old Dan and Little Ann. His grandpa helps him teach the dogs to hunt raccoons, becoming one of the Ozarks’ most accomplished hunters. After Dan dies following a mountain lion attack, loyal Ann dies from a broken heart, and the Colemans move out of the mountains at Mama’s request, settling in Tulsa.
     The chief heartbreaker of all dog-story-tearjerkers, this ought to be required reading for Oklahoma children due to the local setting. Loyalty is the chief virtue expressed in these pages, though there are many virtues scattered throughout. I was five when I first heard this story, which was plenty old enough to understand it. Wilson Rawls wrote his books for “people,” and hated the idea that publishers marketed them as children’s literature. Therefore everyone ought to read it, as an example of true love and the power of patient hard work. Especially teenagers.

Kaye, M.M. The Ordinary Princess. 1980. Doubleday, 1984.
     In the far-off kingdom of Phantasmorania, there is a seventh princess born to the king and queen, her royal highness Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne – and the seventh princess is always the prettiest, the most graceful, the most blessed of all the fairies. Everyone knows that. But everyone also knows how contrary fairies can be – and this is what caused this princess to be ordinary, of all things. An ordinary princess would be an embarrassment to the kingdom, so Amy becomes a scullery maid in the royal castle of the next country over, where she eventually falls in love with a man-of-all-work.
      This was mystery author M.M. Kaye’s only fairy tale, but it works supremely well, mainly because it has such an emphasis on the ordinariness of life, while at the same time clearly being a fairy tale and containing all the classic ingredients. These elements are treated with respect, unlike so many things which claim to be modern fairy tales (glaring at you, Shrek).

Schaefer, Jack. Shane. 1949. Bantam, 1975.
     In 1880’s Wyoming, the Old West was dying quickly. This novel is narrated by a man named Bob Starrett, who was eleven when a dangerous stranger rode onto their farm one day, signed on as a hired hand and then found himself defending the group of local homesteaders in the middle of a range war with a devious cattle rancher.
     It’s a straightforward and formulaic Western plot, but the writing quality alone makes it worth reading for the strength of Schaefer’s descriptions. Bob Starrett is one of my top ten narrators across all books ever.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. 1960. Grand Central, 2010.
     This tale set in a Depression-era southern Alabama town chronicles Scout and Jem Finch’s childhoods dealing with their father Atticus’s occasionally absent-minded parenting, in addition to the trials of public education and racism. Character and setting are much more important than plot.
     Scout Finch is probably my favorite narrator of all time, and Atticus is one of my favorite characters. This is a classic of southern American literature, and therefore almost has to be read at some point. Lee deals with a lot of big questions in this novel, and doesn’t provide all that many answers, which appeals to teenagers everywhere. If the reader has writerly ambitions, then studying Lee’s Go Set a Watchman shows how important the revision process is.

Goldman, William. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure. 1973. Del Rey, 1987.
      In the country of Florin, long before Europe and just before glamour, but after America and blue jeans, lived the most beautiful woman in the world. She was a farm girl named Buttercup. Forced to marry Prince Humperdinck against her will, she is kidnapped and then reunited with her first love, Westley. Once Buttercup is recaptured, Humperdinck brutally murders Westley. He is resurrected (this is a fairy tale, after all) and teams up with Buttercup’s original kidnappers to break her out of the castle. The novel ends on a wonderfully ambiguous note, as they’re running away as fugitives with their end unknown.
     There’s the first sentence, to start with: “This is my favorite book in all the world, although I have never read it.” So many quotable quotes. So much more character depth than in the movie. This is a fairy tale for grownups, which claims neither to be more nor less. It is presented as an abridgement of a longer satirical Florinese history by fictional author S. Morgenstern. To paraphrase an A.A. Milne quote (from Once On a Time), the reader will either love this style of narration, or he/she will not. It’s that sort of book.

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. 1598. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. Penguin, 2002, pp.365-400.
      After the conclusion of a civil war, many people gather at the house of a rich man named Leonato. His daughter Hero is engaged to Claudio, whose best friend is Benedick, former lover of Hero’s cousin Beatrice. Everyone schemes to get Benedick and Beatrice back together. Complications ensue.
     William Shakespeare is one of the greatest storytellers in the history of English. His comedies are the easiest for modern readers to understand, and Much Ado follows most closely the formula of a modern comedy. And Benedick and Beatrice are amazingly snarky, slinging insults at each other with gleeful abandon. There is also the brilliant Joss Whedon film adaptation.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1953. Simon & Schuster, 2013.
     In a bleak dystopian future, humanity is enslaved by addiction to technology, books are banned, and firemen create fires. After making the acquaintance of his quirky neighbor Clarisse, fireman Guy Montag comes to question everything he knows about his life and his society, to the point of becoming a wanted fugitive.
     The idea of dystopian literature is to serve as a warning of what society could become. Thus, while it may be uncomfortable to read, it is an important genre to be aware of, in order to avoid the futures described in the books. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 together make up the triumvirate of essential dystopian literature.

King, Stephen. On Writing. Scribner, 2000.
     Almost everyone has read at least some of Stephen King’s works while a teenager, so why not read about the man behind the stories? The first half is a memoir, detailing his life from childhood up until the struggling early years of his marriage. The back half is a “how to write well” book. Both of those genres are necessary sometimes.

Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. 1990. Ballantine Books, 2015.
     A billionaire with no common sense creates a theme park featuring live cloned dinosaurs. During a cold opening of the park as a final measure of readiness before allowing the general public, a traitorous employee sets a catastrophe in motion which severs all power and communications, letting all the dinosaurs loose from their enclosures. Lots of people are eaten over the weekend.
     While mostly a bit of thriller fluff, there are some profound questions raised by this novel, mainly dealing with the role of science and technology in our world. And a quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm is interesting: “In the information society, we expected to banish paper. What we actually abolished was thought.” Loads of academic jargon make this somewhat difficult to wade through, so I would estimate high-school-age as a target audience.

Montgomery, L.M. The Golden Road. 1913. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2012.
     This novel meanders here and there, so there isn’t much a plot. It follows a group of friends and the adventures they had together just before going their separate ways as they grew up, narrated by the adult version of one of the characters. That makes it a perfect read for panicking high school graduates going to college to destress with as they reflect on memories made. This is another book with the target audience of “people.” I love most of Montgomery’s works, but this is my favorite of hers. 

About "Space Jam"

     For Dr. Mackie's Creative Nonfiction, this prompt was to write about one of our favorite movies.

     There are a lot of movies I love, that I’ve learned a lot of storytelling technique from by repeatedly studying them. Unfortunately, they usually tend to get blow aside as either “low production quality” or “kids movies” or something like that. And sure, they aren’t all masterpieces. In fact, they usually tangle themselves into pretzels that defy any one genre, skipping easily through several, and meaning every one. Movies like The Princess Bride; is it an adventure? A fantasy? A romance? A satire? A fairy tale? It’s all of those, and it’s honest about being all of those things. The Big Green is a 90’s sports movie, certainly. But it’s also about hope, the job of teaching, the power of small-town community and an interesting conundrum of illegal immigration. Space Jam is the one I’m going to talk about for this assignment, though.

     A diabolical theme-park owner named Swackhammer sends a group of tiny aliens called Nerdlucks to capture the Looney Tunes in order to enslave them and increase attendance. The Looney Tunes come up with an escape plan by challenging the diminutive Nerdlucks to a basketball game. However, the Nerdlucks steal the talent of NBA superstars, transforming themselves into the terrifying Monstars. Meanwhile, Michael Jordan has retired from basketball to try playing professional baseball in order to make good on a promise he made as a child to his father. So Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and the rest kidnap Michael to get him to help win the game. The Looney Tunes defeat the evil aliens, the NBA players get their talent back, and Michael Jordan decides he’s terrible at baseball and goes back to the Chicago Bulls to win another couple championships. That’s pretty much the entire plot.

     On some level, it could be called historical fiction, given that it explains Michael Jordan’s first retirement to try (and fail at) playing professional baseball. Of course the reasoning was changed, as this decision remains somewhat in mystery, though it likely had something to do with his father’s murder and outrageous gambling debts. On another level, it’s an extended screwball comedy, since it features most of the classic Looney Tunes characters going through their daily lives. And then there is the science-fiction part of the story, since aliens blast onto Earth in order to enslave the inhabitants. And oh, yeah, it’s a sports movie on top of everything else, with cameos from most of the top players of the time, and featuring Bill Murray and Danny DeVito for good measure. If a cynical viewpoint was to be taken, it could be said that this movie was made solely for advertising merchandise. And it was, of course; even the characters mention this. But it doesn’t take itself seriously, while fully admitting that none of these rules it’s following make any sense. Because of this, it works. This could be because a more three-year-old Wesley-approved movie could not have been made if it were manufactured for me alone in mind, but this report doesn’t have to be subjective. The greatest basketball player in the world is teaming up with Bugs Bunny to save the world from a bunch of aliens. Yes, please!

     It came to theaters when I was three, and while I don’t think I remember watching it in theaters, Mom said I hid in her lap when the Monstars first appeared. I also know that I saw it for the first time in the theater because she says we were grocery shopping one day not long after and I recognized a song the PA system was playing(R. Kelly’s “Fly Like an Eagle” or Seal’s “Fly Like an Eagle” cover) as being from the movie, which she then recognized after I urgently explained the connection. I can also clearly remember dancing maniacally to the soundtrack in one of the apartments we lived in. The soundtrack has Bugs Bunny doing a rap song, of all the insane experiences worth listening to at least once. There are the detractors who gleefully point out all the paper-thin plotting, the lack of acting ability from Jordan, or complain that the Tunes themselves act nothing like themselves. Have they watched some of those shorts in a while? The Tunes can be mean, and there can be sex jokes hidden in many of them.

     Lola Bunny is an original character expressly designed to give Bugs a love interest, less-than-expressly to sell merchandise, and possibly to give girls a role model of Bugs’ standing to admire. I think all of those goals were met. The appeal of Lola was obvious: she was fantastic at basketball, and independent and determined. Besides that, she became the girlfriend of Bugs Bunny, so that automatically got about a thousand bonus points. (I hung out with teenagers all the time, so some of their attitudes I must have picked up by osmosis.) “She’s hot!” Tweety says. Feminists can complain that she never really does anything – and they kind of have a point – but that’s missing the point, really. In the first place, the story is balanced the way it is already, and to shift anything would have thrown everything out the window. Secondly – and this is by far the most important – was the purpose of the story wasn’t to create a masterpiece, it was to fire the imagination, one of the highest callings I can think of for story in any medium. So Lola isn’t exactly much else than a bit of cheerleading damsel in distress in the movie. In kids’ imaginations, she played a bigger role; maybe she single-handedly saved everyone. Maybe she and Bugs went on dates and antagonized Elmer Fudd together. Anything was possible. And the thing is, that same principle applies to every single character. All those gaps in the movie can be filled in by each viewer, bringing them into the story like few others can match.

     Obviously people can’t be squashed flat into a pancake and reinflated, lassoed through golf holes, dynamite can’t be used to blow up the backboard, and arms don’t stretch like rubber bands for thirty feet. But this is Looney Tune Land, and so that’s all fine and dandy. After all, if trains can pummel Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote can fall prey to goodness-knows-what perils from ACME, then all these Space Jam quirks are fine. They’re animated, and they know it. Depth perception doesn’t exist, so all kinds of adventures can happen. (This doesn’t work quite as well in 3-D Land, unfortunately.) A story usually covers the same welcoming (because it is well-trodden) plot, and so we learn to recognize these details and find comfort in their sameness.

     The familiar threads of story material are easily recognizable; the average townspeople need the stranger to come in and save the day from a force of marauding evil. This stranger has to face his past and overcome it in order to vanquish the threat. The stakes are dire. The average townsperson has friends and a lovely lady to back up his efforts to fight the threat courageously; indeed, all the townspeople exhibit immense courage and fortitude. In the end, through seemingly impossible odds, the threat is defeated. Everything goes well from there (that we know of). There. Now what movie (or book) did I just describe? It could have been nearly any Clint Eastwood movie, it could’ve been It’s a Wonderful Life, it could’ve been Pixar, it could’ve been Much Ado About Nothing. In the same way, a sport of almost any kind is a comforting thing, because there is a fixed set of expectations and outcomes, with a bewildering amount of variation possible within those set guidelines. One team will always win, the other will lose. The basketball will not be kicked, and it will go through the basket. Even though it’s a movie, and therefore prone to break the rules a little in order to create more dramatic tension, all that excitement of the movie is enhanced by knowing the framework the scene of the climatic showdown is staying within.

     This could go on for a while, but I should really wrap this up now so it doesn’t stretch on for thirty-plus pages (because it totally could). I love Space Jam because it fires the imagination and acknowledges that anything could happen. Are their imperfections? Yeah, all those critics have some good points. But they are forgetting that at the core, the movie has “it. Whatever ‘it’ is, you’ve got a lot of it,” Michael tells the Tunes on leaving. I would call this “heart.” 

Time Compression Experiment

     For Dr. Mackie's Creative Nonfiction course, this assignment was from a less-than-helpful textbook titled Tell It Slant. We were supposed to take a mundane experience and compress multiple instances of that incident into one bizarre stew. So I chose a typical Sunday morning at church.

     “How are you doing?” Sam asks after we show up to church half an hour late for Sunday school – again. It’s been another rough week, and I guess she can see that, even if she wasn’t one of the few people my armor will let inside to see the real me.

Mrs. Ferguson is standing nearby, leaning against the Grace and Truth bookshelf to relieve back pain from her ninth pregnancy. Her oldest daughter Kerra’s married now, and Josh soon will be, it looks like from the grapevine.

     “Um…I’m all right, I’m fine,” I say.

     “And by that, he means it’s hell,” Mrs. Ferguson grins, and she lumbers down toward the kitchen. Sam crushes me in a gigantic hug, pulling away after our youth pastor Steven coughs.

     “Your eyes said more than your words.” Her voice has a quiet undertone. 

     “Thanks.”

     “Sorry to hear about Sunny,” Steven says. “Losing a dog is tough.” 

     “It’s all right. She was old, and arthritic, and nearly blind, and –“ I bolt for the kitchen. I need coffee if I’m going to stay awake during Marie’s dad’s sermon from the Gospel of John.

     There are a lot of empty spaces in the pews; what with the mass exodus and all. It wasn’t even orchestrated, really, not that anyone could tell. Just one family leaves for some legitimate reason, then another, and then another, and it’s like Welll…who’s left? Not the DeSpains, or the Buckmasters, or the Lawsons (and Cassie’s at OU now, anyway, so it’s not like we can chat about writing). Mr. Gundersen’s been thinking of taking a long-term trip to his vacation house in the Arkansas Ozarks, and he can’t really be blamed for needing the rest, though it is kind of worrisome. It will take a while to stop thinking of him as the pastor, since he stepped down from that role last month.

     In the prayer requests it looks like Justin Selby just blew up his hand with some fireworks, I bet Melody was worried sick. Marie is mentioned again as needing prayer…that’s not a surprise to any of us who were in the youth group. She was just lacking – It, whatever that was. We all knew that she would be eaten alive once she was out on her own. And there were a lot of problems each of us were dealing with, just trying to keep ourselves together and reasonably in one piece to get through high school and slowly progress through college. Lots of people’s parents dying from cancer, which is horrible. Dad’s out of a job again, which is somehow normal. Dylan’s working on a ranch in Wyoming over the summer, so pray for safety for him, and peace of mind for his parents. He’s doing all right, though it can get lonely up there, from what I’ve heard. But he’ll be okay.

     Hymns we’ll be singing today, hmm… “In Christ Alone,” that’s a great one, of course, wasn’t it ages ago that I learned that? Feels like it. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” that’s one we forget to ponder too often. “How Firm a Foundation” is another great choice. Bennett and Laura are doing a fantastic job on guitar and piano – it was always fun when Laura filled in for Josh when we were leading the youth group’s worship music, she played at a fast enough pace that my strumming didn’t sound like I was rushing things.

Rags will be sad that I have to immediately head back to school, but cats can’t rule the world like they think they can. Finish revising/updating that story where they try to, if there’s time. Then SWAT has a special rehearsal for the show Wednesday night, and there’s volleyball practice after the Monday night worship service, with the state BCM tournament coming up next weekend. Note to self, check to make sure everyone brings their scripts just in case they need them. Okay, then – not ready for this next week up ahead, but here goes.

     This was a weird experiment, kind of like I was consciously constructing a dream, given the wild mishmash of events and the blurry first-person stream-of-consciousness narration. Maybe I should have chosen “a typical Sunday morning at church” for the event to condense. But there was plenty of material to choose from – that’s one of the good things about going to the same church for fourteen years. The bad thing can be that the ghosts of those gone, or of events past, can sometimes pop up and dominate the scene in real life. So they don’t need any encouragement, swirling the history all together into a McFlurry (do those still exist?) like this assignment asked for.

     The prompt asked what we gained and lost by this experiment. I’d say that I recognized again what a rough couple of years our church has been through, with nearly every family going through at least one or two chronic-stress events. There was a lot of trials and characters that were left out of this sketch, of course – it asked for a compliation of a typical event. Not everything fits. And though the facts have been chewed though a blender, as far as chronology and everything, I think the tone was kept, more or less. I don’t really like this piece, but some writing one likes and some is just to beat the deadline. The honesty was stripped away, by mangling the timeline, and that kills the spirit, even if the style can produce interesting and sometimes pretty effects like CDs when microwaved. 

Styrofoam and Other Instruments of Blood-Pressure Skyrocketation

     The prompt for this assignment, from Dr. Mackie's Creative Nonfiction course, was to write about something that irritated us.

      There’s no telling why we find certain things intolerable. They just are.  For me, one of these irritating things is the sound that Styrofoam makes when it squeaks against something – worse than nails on a chalkboard, because it happens so much more often. And another thing about Styrofoam – what the heck is it? A bunch of chemicals with unpronounceable names, likely. It takes up a huge amount of space in trash cans, doesn’t ever really decompose by itself, and the only way to safely get rid of it is by burning. And then there are the little snowflakes of residue left behind.

            Styrofoam is convenient, though. And that’s probably why gas stations, fast-food places and restaurants use containers made out of the stuff for drink cups and hauling leftovers. And while there’s nothing that can be done about it(therefore no point to complaining), all those fast-food places look the same. And taste the same. There’s no character to most of them. And so it’s the same thing over and over across America, everyone shops at Dollar General, Wal-Mart or Target because they’re familiar, and eats at the same Burger Kings and Pizza Huts. The little out-of-the-way independent stores that Steinbeck stopped at in his journey are mostly gone. Maybe they were already gone by that time, I don’t know.  But now, for most things, if the franchise has only three or four locations, that’s about as separate from corporate red tape and bureaucracy as it’s going to get. There are exceptions – some weekly newspapers are still hanging on, for example. And more eastern Oklahoma examples can be found in the bank in Westville, a grocery store in Beggs, or the movie theater in Okmulgee, besides other places in other towns. And there will always be a small spot left for individual restaurants – especially drive-ins and barbeque joints. But in general, there’s an overwhelming sameness to the American landscape, which is frustrating.

            The extreme dependence on cars being the primary mode of transportation could be linked to this, perhaps. And yes, they are about the most efficient way to get from Point A to Point B. It’s the lack of any other options that becomes the problem. If an elderly person or someone with visual problems, for example, cannot drive, then they are kind of left to the mercy of others, which can be an uncomfortable place to be, human pride being what it is and not knowing who the neighbors are and all. They feel like a burden, and so keep to themselves, not fulfilling a role in their community.

            Switching back to a more personal irritation, my stress level launches through the roof whenever anything involving money has to be done, outside of bargain-hunting. Financial-aid details, for example. I’m very grateful that it’s been there to take care of most of the costs, but at the same time, there is almost nothing that wrecks my composure quite like a day of working out what documents need to go where, and things like that. Part of this could be because I don’t enjoy working with numbers, or because immediate deadlines don’t allow time to process the steps necessary to complete the task. And I just don’t really understand how money works, taxes and things. Since we didn’t have much growing up, I couldn’t learn by observation about how to think about and interact with money when there is some. That’s not the type of learning that can be picked up from reading, either. I’ll learn it all at some point.

            There are more things which raise my hackles, of course. That’s part of the flaws that make us human. But I’ll wrap this up, because I’m running out of page space here. Besides, it takes a lot of energy to contain the flood of Things That Irritate Wesley, if that subject has to come up, and even more to figure out which topics are safe enough to use in an essay like this. Then there’s exactly how to word each sentence, etc. But that’s why I’m an English major, words and language are what I can work with best. 

The Dark Side of Football

     The second essay for Topics of Advanced Comp was on a critical issue. The Super Bowl was that weekend, so I figured, "Concussions and safety in general in football is certainly a critical issue!" So that's what I wrote about. It scored an 85, which I thought was acceptable, though disappointing.

     The fiftieth edition of the Super Bowl was won by the Denver Broncos on Sunday night, and an estimated 94 million Americans watched the contest, according to CinemaBlend’s Conner Schwerdtfeger. For this reason, an appropriate and timely topic seemed to be focusing on the health risks which can come from football. We draw comparisons between the players on the field and the gladiators of Roman times, forgetting one very important detail: Those gladiators usually died. And even though it is a much slower process for football players, they are getting killed, too.

     Much of the storyline from the early seasons of the high school TV drama Friday Night Lights deals with the aftermath of quarterback Jason Street’s paralysis in the middle of a game closing the first episode.  As head coach Eric Taylor prays in a closing voiceover, “Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile….It is these times, and this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves” (“Pilot”). Over the last several years, the mainstream sports media have turned a much more critical eye on this issue of safety, which has caused many fans to carefully reconsider their positions on the game in general, as well as how to discuss game action. An example of this can be seen in the differences between the introductory videos of the Electronic Arts video games Madden NFL 2000 and Madden NFL 12, both of which are easily found multiple places on YouTube. Almost in its entirety, the opening highlight reel in Madden 2000 was composed of vicious, violent and frightening tackles – thirty-five shots out of the montage’s forty-five total images were of near-decapitations. By Madden ’12, though, many of the shots were of the pageantry surrounding the kickoff(airplane flyover, cheerleaders, etc), and then the editing of the onfield action was extremely stylized, only vaguely resembling a depiction of a game.

     In Brian M. Ingrassia’s history The Rise of Gridiron University, he writes that social scientists of the early twentieth century such as Edward A. Ross and Francis A. Walker helped popularize football by claiming it developed “moral as well as physical tone” as it created young men with “courage, coolness, steadiness of nerve, quickness of apprehension, resourcefulness, self-knowledge and self-reliance” as players subverted their individual wills to achieve a common goal (93, 95). John Sayle Watterson’s book College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy relates in detail how the game we know as football came to be what we recognize today. Originally it was a corrupted version of rugby played by eastern colleges, mainly those that we now call part of the Ivy League. Games were more or less organized mob scenes, and occasionally massacres. Due to so many players dying either on the field itself or in relation to injuries suffered while playing, the rules of the game were drastically rewritten, thanks to the considerable influence of President Theodore Roosevelt. Some of these rule changes created for safety purposes were the forward pass, a system of penalties, and the notion of having to earn ten yards for a first down. It took a while for all of these changes to have their intended effect, but eventually serious injury or death became the rare and horrible exception (64-69, 118-119).

     One of the modern issues our society worries about concerning football is concussions, or more specifically, chronic traumatic encephalopathy(CTE), which is a degenerative brain disease likely caused by excessive repeated trauma to the neural regions; it was found in a Boson University study that 87 of 91 subjects showed symptoms of CTE, according to Ian O’Connor’s ESPN.com editorial lamenting the death of flamboyant former Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler.  O’Connor also states that Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pioneer of CTE research, estimates that 90% of all NFL players have CTE, while a Fox Sports article quotes him as suspecting that O.J. Simpson also suffers from the condition. Omalu was recently in the spotlight thanks to the film Concussion, starring Will Smith as Omalu. But what exactly is a concussion? According to the Sports Injuries Sourcebook, “any change in mental status or function qualifies as a concussion” (218). This is typically caused by a sudden sharp blow to the head, as it comes from the Latin word concutere, meaning “to shake violently.” The result is that the sufferer gets confused about his/her environment (WebMD). Since children’s brains are still developing, they jostle around more, which puts them at great risk for receiving concussions. Some, though not all, symptoms of this could be dizziness, nausea, vomiting, blurred vision or altered emotional behavior (Sports Injuries 218). They may be classified as either Grade 1(mildest; patient remains conscious at all times and is merely dazed), Grade 2(worse; patient still remains conscious, but remains out of it and has difficulty answering simple questions correctly), or Grade 3(by far the worst; patient is knocked out) (Sports Injuries Sourcebook 219-20).

     In an editorial for the American Heart Association’s publication Circulation, Gary J. Balady and Jonathan A. Drezner report that 83% percent of linemen are susceptible to developing either hypertension or prehypertension, which could result in a premature death due to cardiovascular disease.

     While the highest-profile levels of anxiety about the health risks that come with playing football will naturally be towards the professionals, they represent only a miniscule fraction of those playing football in America. There are thousands of college teams, high school squads and youth football teams. This gambling away of present health for the slender chance at cashing in on a fortune can be devastating if the player loses. Kathleen E. Bachynski and Daniel S. Goldberg report in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics that two-thirds of Washington State high school players stayed in games after an occurrence of a mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion (“Youth Sports” 329). This Russian roulette with one’s health is well-chronicled in H.G. Bissinger’s book Friday Night Lights(which was the inspiration for the TV show) in the case of Boobie Miles, who was primed to be the star running back of the 1988 Odessa Permian Panthers. Instead, he shredded his knee in a preseason scrimmage, which dashed his dreams of attending a Division I school (53-57, 66-69). He is now an overweight diabetic with a prison record living in a trailer with his girlfriend and a lot of child-support payments to his ex-wife, according to Bissinger’s follow-up article for the ESPN-affiliated Atlantic-esque pop-culture-oriented Grantland website, entitled “Where Is Boobie Miles?”, which was actually an excerpt of his sequel After Friday Night Lights.  

     Which takes us back to wondering, is it ethical to allow young men to throw away their health in order to satisfy the public’s need for a spectacle in order to avoid doing household chores? There are many other reasons for fans to follow football, of course, perhaps keeping track of their alma mater, or sportwriters and broadcasters following their assigned beats. The Romans were skilled warriors; which is why they left such a mark on Western civilization. There is a football stadium in California known as the Coliseum; which is an obvious tribute to the earlier Roman Colosseum. We stage our fights in this arena, replacing the sand with painted grass, and we may call players “gladiators”; which comes from the Latin word gladius, meaning “sword.” There’s something we forget often, though: most of the time, those gladiators in the Colosseum were killed. And so are football players; it’s just a slower process. CTE is just one of many swords ending their run. Bachynski and Goldberg write that “the most affected population when it comes to brain injuries is also the most vulnerable,” as developing adolescents have weaker neck muscles and still-developing brains, together with the possibility of not being able to fully recognize and understand the responsibilities which come from playing sports like football (“Youth Sports” 324). Think of Boobie Miles or Jason Street. Can we condone this slow slaughter of future generations by tolerating it now? These are tough, introspective questions, which must be answered on a personal case-by-case basis.

     In our state, the shorthand way the rest of the country remembers where we are is because of the crimson and cream of the University of Oklahoma Sooners. Football is taken extremely seriously at a local level; just look at rivalries such as Jenks-Tulsa Union, Checotah-Eufaula or Henryetta-Morris. But as much energy is invested in the Sooner State, down south in Texas it’s even bigger, with the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Longhorns, TCU Horned Frogs, Baylor Bears, Texas A&M Aggies, and many other high-profile squads. On a high school level, the competition is even fiercer; due to the sheer size of Texas, there are 704 public schools that currently make the playoffs, according to Tuesday Morning Quarterback columnist Gregg Easterbrook (“Friday Night Bloat”). That represents a lot of the competitive tension which kept the TV version of FNL humming, as audiences followed the Dillon Panthers’ quests for that gold ball trophy. But as Easterbrook points out, that also results in that many more chances for injury. To win a title, a Texas high school squad must play through 16 games – the equivalent of a full NFL season. Again, these are high school students. They are still developing physically, mentally and emotionally, and must do ordinary things like schoolwork as well. They are not professionals; it isn’t their sole job to win football games. This seems troubling. But at the end of the day, as FNL’s Coach Taylor said to close the pilot, “We all are vulnerable, and we will all, at some point in our lives, fall. We will all fall. But we must carry this in our hearts: That what we have is special, that it can be taken from us, and that when it is taken from us, we will be tested.” Is it hard to imagine the landscape of the Midwest, Texas and the South without football? Yes. But that might perhaps serve a greater good, if it prevents injuries such as these from occurring. However this story of football’s place in modern society turns out, it should be interesting to watch from the bleachers.  

Works Cited

Bachynski, Kathleen E. and Daniel S. Goldberg. “Youth Sports & Public Health: Framing Risks of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in American Football and Ice Hockey.” Journal of Law, Medicie & Ethics 42.3 (2014) 323-33. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 8 February 2016.

Balady, Gary J. and Jonathan A. Drezner. Circulation. 128.5 (July 2013) American College of Cardiology Foundation and American Heart Association. 477-80. MEDLINE. Web. 8 February 2016.

Bissinger, H.G. Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990. Print.

------------------. “Where is Boobie Miles Now?” Grantland. ESPN. 30 April 2012. Web. 4 February 2016.

“Concussion (Traumatic Brain Injury).” WebMD. WebMD. N.d. Web. 4 February 2016.

DR_C. “Madden 2000 Intro.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 12 August 2009. Web. 4 February 2016.

Easterbrook, Gregg. “High School Football’s Friday Night Bloat.” Tuesday Morning Quarterback. New York Times. 24 November 2015. Web. 4 February 2016.

Ingrassia, Brian M. The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2012. Print.

O’Connor, Ian. “Another CTE case, another reason football needs dramatic change.” ESPN.com. ESPN. 4 February 2016. Web. 4 February 2016.

“Pilot.” Friday Night Lights. (1.01) Writ. Peter Berg. Dir. Peter Berg. Netflix.

Saraf, Sid. “OJ Simpson likely suffers from CTE, says Concussion doctor.” FoxSports.com. Fox Sports. 29 January 2016. Web. 4 February 2016.

Schwerdtfeger, Conner. “The Super Bowl Ratings Were Apparently Huge, Of Course.” CinemaBlend. Gateway Media. 8 February 2016. Web. 9 February 2016.

Sports Injuries Sourcebook: Basic Consumer Health Information about Sprains and Strains, Fractures, Growth Plate Injuries, Overtraining Injuries, and Injuries to the Head, Face, Shoulders, Elbows, Hands, Spinal Column, Knees, Ankles, and Feet, and with Facts about Heat-related Illness, Steroids and Sport Supplements, Protective Equipment, Diagnostic Procedures, Treatment Options and Rehabilitation, Along with a Glossary of Related Terms and a Directory of Resources for Additional Help and Information. Third edition. Ed. Sandra J. Judd. Detroit, Mich.: Omnigraphics, 2007. Print.

Watterson, John Sayle. College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Print.

Ya boy MiMz. “Madden NFL 12 – Opening Introduction.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 29 August 2011. Web. 4 February 2016.

Modeling Christlikeness in a Sitcom-like Stage Family

    This personal essay was for Topics of Advanced Composition. It scored a 93, and Dr. Dial-Driver just gave me one of those "Really?" looks when I turned in a revised version. That got 100 points.

            Talking about the citizens of Pawnee, Indiana, Parks and Recreation’s Ben Wyatt says at one point, “You know, it’s weird. I’ve been to a lot of towns…usually people don’t care about anything. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re weirdos, but….they’re weirdos that care” (“Time Capsule”). For a while around the Northeastern State University campus, and to a lesser extent the city of Tahlequah or Cherokee County generally, if “the SWAT team” were mentioned, the speaker likely didn’t mean a squad of heavily-armed law enforcement officers. Instead they were talking about the drama ministry of the Baptist Collegiate Ministries, which was considered as somewhat of a loose cannon amongst the tight-knit community of BCM outreaches. But we cared about each other. And that was important.

            I was a loner growing up, for the most part. Not that I didn’t like people – it’s more just that I like a small group of specific people, and if someone is able to gain my trust in order to be called a friend, then that trust is nearly indestructible. I had acted in middle school musicals with our homeschool co-op and really enjoyed that, but in general, Oklahoma is rather lacking in acting opportunities. So there was just the occasional murder-mystery, and quoting good TV lines with my siblings. But in general, nothing, which didn’t do much to take my mind off a disastrous freshman year of college or the violent implosion of the sarcastic, witty and creative support group that served as our personal Buffy-type “Scooby Gang” for me and my friends in surviving high school.

            The project known as “Students with a Testimony” began when Samantha Hill transferred to NSU around the spring of 2012 from Carl Albert; their branch of the BCM had a drama ministry primarily used as a tool for evangelization, and Sam wanted to continue that work in and around Tahlequah. She obtained the blessing of NSU BCM directors Bob and Debbie Lipscomb, and then the project was off and running. So she set out to round up some team members through word-of-mouth.

“I pretty much just had to go out on a limb, finding strangers who wanted to be a part of the BCM and say, ‘Hey, are you a Christian? Would you like to share your testimony?’” she said during an interview for an unpublished newspaper article in September 2013. “I was the crazy girl that everyone saw coming and, believe me, they’d run the other way, because they knew exactly what I was wanting to recruit them for.”

Sam tried to recruit me to immediately join the team when I came to Tahlequah in fall 2012, but I declined, since I thought I had better focus solely on schoolwork until I was more adapted to campus culture. Besides, I was more involved at the time with Campus Christian Fellowship, another ministry which has (though no one on either side wants to actually admit it) a fierce rivalry with the BCM. She got about a dozen people to sign up, though; and they performed a handful of shows in churches of various sizes, interspersing testimonies and Scripture with music and comedy sketches.

      Through a mix of gentle pestering by Sam throughout the year and knowing several other people who attended the BCM regularly, together with realizing that CCF wasn’t at all a place where I could grow spiritually, I started going to the Monday-night worship service, and gradually discovered that this was a good organization to be a part of. When fall 2013 started up and the SWAT sign-ups were passed around, I figured that I ought to dive deeper into helping out. It had been forever since I’d acted in anything, and besides, it was a ministry opportunity. The team was made up of mostly new faces this time around, with Haley Ritter co-leading the group with Sam for a semester.

     “I actually heard about SWAT when I first met Sam and Haley, they were telling me about it, and it seemed like a really, really cool way to do ministry,” said Elizabeth Hodge in an interview from September 2013. “I’ve been involved in theater most of my life, but never have done any kind of ministry like this before. It’s a really cool way to spread the Gospel, because you don’t have to go five thousand miles away and spend five thousand dollars.”

     Once we’d gotten the sketches memorized, life quickly turned into something of a sitcom: Friends was blended into Full House and the sketch comedy group Studio C, and then that combination was added to the YouTube series Messy Mondays, as I put it in a blog post simply titled “SWAT.” But we really did become like family. Sam was the mom of the group, Haley the drill-sergeant aunt. And together, they kept things running with a mix of strictness and sweetness. Jacob was the cool older cousin, while Elizabeth, Susan and I were like siblings. Neighbors included the spacey janitor James, four-wheeling Becca, obnoxious Scott (everyone hated him), couple Skylar and Ja Li Si (we gave them a hard time, of course), while Caleb and Holly were always sort of hanging out in the corner. New additions to the cast several weeks in were TJ, serving as the fiery deadpan snarker in addition to doing voiceovers, while Justin turned out to be a jack-of-all-trades, doing everything from locating churches to running sound equipment and acting.

     There were a lot of coffee runs to McDonald’s when someone had a lot on their mind –

“Random coffee runs late at night make for a gem of a night,” Elizabeth tweeted once – and there was entertaining improvisation out of necessity, and malapropisms galore (well-chronicled in my video “SWAT Blooper Reel”). Road trips to and from shows were also very…interesting, to say the least. As Elizabeth said, “The basic theme of all our road trips is, like once we get there, you ask: ‘…But did we die?’ And that sums up everything perfectly.” For example, there was that night we went looking for the invisible church in Sallisaw.

     Having put together a silent project to go with the Lifehouse song “Everything” for a charity fundraiser/talent show, we were invited to perform it at a revival at Deliverance Baptist the next week. We didn’t usually do shows on Wednesday nights unless it was a special occasion, and this definitely counted. Thing was, though, we’d lost several key props between performances, since it was supposed to be a one-time thing. And several people were late, adding to the tension. So we nervously played ping pong to pass the time, then split up, one group racing to Wal-Mart for glass-bottled root beer, the other group flying to Dollar Tree for play-food money. We got to Sallisaw with a half hour to spare, more than enough time to find the church…..except that none of us can find it on our phones’ maps. We did find three other churches, which all turned out to be the wrong ones. So we finally talk Jacob into calling the pastor, where he’s given directions which sound straightforward enough: “At Wal-Mart, turn right onto Maple and then drive a ways, and then another right.” Maple is located, but it leads to a really sketchy-looking neighborhood….and none of us (ten people in three vehicles) had ever been to this city before, so we were completely lost. And by now it was pouring down rain. Susan and I ask for directions from some terrified construction workers at the Assembly of God, which turns out to be another dead end. (Also, we realized once we got back in the car that she was already in costume as Death.) We get a lead on another place it might be, which takes us several miles out of town and past three burned-out buildings which were at one point churches. The search has now taken an hour and fifteen minutes, all five occupants of our car vote for giving up and finding dinner. We relay this information back to the other two cars, and then eat and drive back home to Tahlequah, crying in frustration yet knowing the situation was hilarious. . This experience was recapped in far more detail in my blog post “Getting Lost.”

     Weather slowed the beginning of our spring semester’s schedule, but the execution of the performances was greatly improved, due in part to the addition of Drew and Ashleigh as tech crew and about a quarter of the cast dropping out. We banded together often to cover roles whenever necessary, and strengthened connections with the other BCM ministries, as the more musical of us joined the worship band. Organization-wide lunch hangouts were a staple of Friday afternoons, and watch parties during Thunder games caused much screaming and strangling of pillows. The overall atmosphere was much like working in Pawnee’s Parks Department, and when you enjoy your coworkers, coming in every day is awesome. Most of us spent nearly every nonclass moment in either the BCM’s basement, living room or office. Special SWAT events included Christmas caroling at a senior citizens’ center - three days before Thanksgiving - a birthday party picnic, and a game night featuring intense rounds of Catchphrase and Apples to Apples. An elderly pastor in Muskogee even gave a handful of us marriage advice after the show one night. (”If you live long enough to say ‘Yes, dear,’ you’ll live to learn everything else.”) Pretty good advice.

      After Sam and her husband moved once she graduated, the way everyone planned the leadership transition to take place was for Susan to take over the reins the next year, with me taking the second-in-command role which Haley had filled. But there were a lot of family problems at home, which meant that I had to leave for a semester in order to help out. Susan’s theater duties kept her too stressed to run SWAT properly, so it was absorbed into the worship band, where it limped along for the rest of the year before apparently being shut down sometime in spring 2015. And by then transfers happened – Skylar and I came to RSU, Elizabeth went to NSUBA, Caleb to Southwest Baptist, etc. And life happened, too – Justin and Ashleigh fell in love almost immediately, and their wedding will be held in a couple months. Jacob is engaged now, and Haley got married. Ja Li Si became Miss Cherokee last year, and began dating Sam’s brother. Graduations will begin proceeding in a couple months.

     We weren’t that successful at evangelizing, but we did do well at encouraging those who needed it – whether that was audience members, relatives, friends or castmates – through the spiritual valleys, discouragements, breakups, general insecurity and school panic of this life. We were a team, which doesn’t come up very often. You don’t really get that Parks and Rec vibe in real life very often. And when you do….that ought to be treasured. “A team isn’t a bunch of kids out to win; a team is something you belong to. Something you feel. Something you have to earn,” Gordon Bombay said in The Mighty Ducks. We earned that, and you don’t let those ties fall slack. So we still keep in touch, and have mini-reunions whenever possible. I may be allergic to college, but SWAT has definitely been one of the highlights.

Works Cited

Coburn, Wesley. “Getting Lost”. Blog post. Another Lover of the Blade. Blogger. 21 November 2013. Web. 17 January 2016.

--------------------. “SWAT”. Blog post. Another Lover of the Blade. Blogger. 9 November 2013. Web. 17 January 2016. 

-------------------. “SWAT Blooper Reel”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 29 December 2014. Web. 17 January 2015.

Hill, Samantha. Personal interview. 9 September 2013.

Hodge, Elizabeth. Personal interview. 9 September 2013.

------------------ (HodgepodgeEH). “Random coffee outings late at night make for a gem of a night.” 7 March 2014. Tweet.

The Mighty Ducks. 1992. Dir. Stephen Herek. Buena Vista Pictures, 1992. DVD.

“Time Capsule”. Parks and Recreation: Season Three. Writ. Michael Schur. Dir. Michael Schur. NBCUniversal Television Distribution. 2011. DVD.

ABC's of College

     For a Poetry Writing assignment; I was bored and I've been reading a history of Sesame Street. So here's the ABC's of College. Hope y'all enjoy.

     A is for Academic Jargon, which can be difficult to understand. And Assignments, and also All-Nighters, where you attempt to understand that Academic Jargon. “A” is also used in Avoiding Other People, or Acting.

     B is for Broke, which all students are. And also for BuzzFeed, huge time-waster/refuge from pressing work to do.

     C stands for COFFEE!!!!!!!! (Everyone knows that.) Because of the Chaos of Classes. And Cussing. (Which helps in dealing with Classmates.)

     D means Deadlines, AKA “Get something turned in or else.”

     E is for Education. Duh. And Essays. And Escape, which is what a lot of Essays are about. Not to mention Exhaustion or Energy Drinks.

     F means Financial Aid. It also might mean Football at a lot of schools, or Friends.

    G is for Graduation….eventually.

    H is for Homework, for obvious reasons. Hope, too; which can be in very small supply. Homecoming is usually celebrated by many folks.

    I is for the Internet, for equally obvious reasons.

    J is for Jail, which is what school can feel like sometimes. And it could also be Journalism, which isn’t taught much anymore.

   K stands for Knowledge, the main goal behind education; in theory.

   L is for Loans. (These are evil. Avoid them at all costs.) And Laundry. This is just a pain, but kind of necessary to daily life. Libraries are useful, though.

   M is for Money. Pretty much what everything revolves around. And MLA, which is how most Essays ought to be written. Microwaves are pretty useful, too.  

   N is for Netflix, to procrastinate appropriately.

   O is for Oreos. Because of…

   P, which is simple: PANIC. And Pancakes, Prayer, Poetry, Pixar, Pandora and Pizza.  

   Q means Questions; namely “What am I doing here?” and “How is this concept relevant to real life?”

   R is for Roommates, which might lead to our next letter…

   S is for STRESS. So much Stress. And Sickness, Spotify and Superheroes. (Time is measured in Semesters.)

   T means Tears. Because of Tiredness, among a lot of other things. So you watch TV to cope with Deadlines.

   U stands for University.

   V is for Volleyball; the best way to relax for an hour or so from distressing Homework. It can occasionally be a good way to meet people.

   W is for Weekends, where you either avoid studying or catch up on all the stuff you’re behind in.

   X is for eXistential Crisis, which (it’s debatable) might be a requirement for being an English major, or being a college student at all.

   Y is for Yawning. There is a lot of that after being forced to do an All-Nighter. College also takes YEARS.

    Z is for Zonked. It’s hard to find words beginning with “Z”, though Ziplock Bags are highly important, to keep Leftovers in.

The Avengers

     With Netflix taking down The Avengers on Monday, I figured it was high time to get a review written. So, quick recap: After being introduced to the characters Tony Stark(Iron Man), Dr. Bruce Banner(Hulk), Natasha Romanoff(Black Widow), Thor, Clint Barton(Hawkeye) and Steve Rogers(Captain America), in that order, we come to the end of Phase One* in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There's a lot of important minor or recurring characters that we come to know as well at the same time we learn these superheroes' origin stories. We've also learned that there's a secretive agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., Bruce Banner is being hunted by the U.S. Army, and Thor's brother Loki is a master of manipulation, among many other important and/or interesting facts.
     So, to quickly recap the lead-in to this movie: During World War II, the Nazis' top-secret science division was known as HYDRA, run by a man named Johann Schmidt(aka the Red Skull). HYDRA found a cube of unimaginable energy and power known as the Tesseract, which came from Thor's homeworld of Asgard. A behemoth-sized bomber that was piloted by Rogers crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, taking the Tesseract down with it. Brilliant wealthy, eccentric and arrogant inventor Howard Stark finds the Tesseract and organizes a search for Rogers, who, due to genetic changes from a failed government project to create super-soldiers, doesn't actually die when the plane hits an iceberg. Instead he's frozen in suspended animation for almost seventy years, suddenly finding himself in modern-day Times Square. Meanwhile, the Tesseract has reappeared and is under S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, and Thor's friend Dr. Erik Selvig, who has been unwittingly hypnotized by Loki) takes on the task of studying the cube.

     Somewhere in space, someone known only as The Other is speaking to the occupant of a large throne. The Other explains that Loki(Tom Hiddleston) was given an army of Chitauri in exchange for retrieving the Tesseract. Thus, Loki controls the world of Midgard(or Earth, as we call it) and the one being spoken to will control the universe.
     At a combined S.H.I.E.L.D./NASA base in New Mexico, while the personnel on base are evacuating under orders from Agent Phil Coulson(Clark Gregg), the Tesseract is unstable; opening a portal that allows Loki to enter our world. He quickly hypnotizes Agent Clint Barton(Jeremy Renner), turning the Hawkeye into a zombie like Selvig. Director Nick Fury(Samuel L. Jackson) instructs his second-in-command Maria Hill(Cobie Smoulders) to retrieve the Phase 2 Prototypes and get them out safely. She asks if that's really a priority at the moment, considering everyone within an unknown distance may die. "Until such time as the world ends, we shall act as though it intends to spin on," he answers. Being the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., he'd know.  Loki, Selvig and Barton escape with the Tesseract, Hill giving chase, while Coulson and Fury jump aboard a helicopter just before the compound implodes. Hill is trapped in a rockslide on the compound's edge but is otherwise unharmed, while Loki blasts the helicopter out of the sky and the commandeered truck slips away. In response to this Level 7 threat, Fury has no choice but to activate the emergency-situation-only Avengers Initiative.
     So, Coulson starts that plan by calling Agent Natasha Romanoff(Scarlett Johansson), who at the moment is interrogating shady Russians military personnel. On hearing Barton had been compromised, she signs up for the mission quickly. She's sent to enlist Dr. Bruce Banner(Mark Ruffalo, but we'll get to that). Okay, so when you have a bunch of movies interconnected so tightly like these, sometimes cast changes are inevitable and you pretend the character hasn't changed a bit. But Edward Norton was a much better Banner than Mark Ruffalo. Anyway, she goes to South America(One of Banner's favorite hiding places) and traps him in a decently-well-off shack outside Calcutta. She explains that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been tracking him for some time, even running interference to keep the Army away. "Doctor, we've on the verge of facing a global catastrophe." "Oh. Those I actively try to avoid." Fury wants Banner to find the Tesseract, tracing it by the minute traces of gamma radiation it leaves.  And everyone knows that Dr. Banner is the world's foremost expert in gamma radiation(which, incidentally turns him into the Hulk at times. After the accident, Selvig and his fellow colleagues never heard from him again.)
     Fury is in a meeting with his bosses, the World Security Council. Actually, he's defending his stance that a response team is needed. They're skeptical at best. "You're going to leave the survival of the human race to a handful of freaks." "They can be isolated, unbalanced even - But I believe with the right push, they can be exactly what we need." "You believe," one member says. "War is not won by sentiment, Director," another proclaims. "No. It's won by soldiers." Fury agrees respectfully.
   
     At this point, we have a brilliant sequence of Steve Rogers(Chris Evans) trying to adapt to ordinary life. It was cut out because of time constraints, but in my opinion should have been left in. As seen here, Rogers watches newsreel footage from the war often, and considers trying to see if his love interest Peggy Carter is still alive. Howard Stark is dead, but his son Tony(Robert Downey Jr.) is an adviser to S.H.I.E.L.D., so, maybe... He wanders around by himself, stopping by a sidewalk cafe where he meets a pretty waitress named Beth. After she walks away, an old man(Stan Lee) at the next table says he should've asked for her number. Steve shakes his head; he's just not ready yet. It's hard, so hard, to die and then wake up seventy years later. Everyone you knew is either dead or extremely elderly... To try to cope with this frustration, Rogers finds an old-school boxing gym and annihilates a mountain of punching bags.

     This is where Fury finds him, fighting the flashbacks and trying to come to grips with this horrible new reality. "You here with a mission, sir?" "I am." "Tryin' to get me back into the world?" "Trying to save it." In another part of New York City, the newest high-tech building of Stark Industries is almost finished, and Tony and his in-all-senses-of-the-word partner Pepper Potts(Gwyeth Paltrow) are having one of their endless arguments when Coulson interrupts. "Mr. Stark, we need to talk." "You have reached the Life Model Decoy of Tony Stark. Please leave a message." "This is urgent." "Then leave it urgently." Coulson then walks into the room. "Security breach!" "Phil! How are you doing?" Pepper welcomes him in. "'Phil'? His first name is 'Agent'." Tony mutters. Coulson hands Tony a package to review and then leaves, Pepper tactfully moves on to the next piece of business. "You have homework. A lot of homework." Basically all of the events of the Phase One movies that he wasn't directly involved in. Tony begins tackling the pile of material.
     The next day, Coulson and Steve are flying in a Quinjet to an aircraft carrier. Steve is reading over Banner's file, and a starstruck Coulson attempts to explain what an honor it is to fly with his childhood hero. "I hope I'm the right man for the job," Steve says. "Oh, you are. Absolutely." Coulson then goes on to say that the suit has been slightly modified. "Aren't the Stars and Stripes a little....old-fashioned?" "Everything that's happened, everything that's going to come to light...people might just need a little old-fashioned." They, and everyone else, arrive at the aircraft carrier. The engines begin doing something strange, prompting Steve to ask if this was a submarine. Banner: "Really? They want me in a submerged pressurized metal container?" Just then the "ship"(in reality a Helicarrier, an aircraft carrier/ship/helicopter/airplane) begins to lift off the water. Banner continues groaning. "Oh, no. This is much worse." The frayed nerves of everyone involved are beginning to show.

     In Stuttgart, Germany, Loki creates a distraction for Hawkeye by causing a disturbance at a high-class societal event. (Hawkeye's mission is to obtain iridium for Selvig.) Cap suits up and heads to Germany. Loki is delivering a propogandic monologue about subjugation when an elderly Jewish man stands up and refuses to comply. "I said, 'Kneel before me.'" "Not to men like you. There are always men like you." At this point Captain America rescues the guy and walks towards the Asgardian. "You know, the last time I was in Germany, and saw somebody standing above everybody else like this, we ended up disagreeing." Black Widow and Iron Man come in as backup, and after a brief skirmish Loki allows himself to be captured. On the return trip to the Helicarrier, a huge storm comes up. Loki shivers. "Whatsamatter, scared of a little lightning?" Rogers asks the prisoner. "I'm not overly fond of what follows." Thor(Chris Hemsworth) lands and enters the plane, grabs Loki and flies off. Iron Man chases them, not understanding what's going on. Besides, his prisoner had just been kidnapped. "Stark, we need a plan of attack!" "I have a plan. Attack." "Cap, I'd sit this one out if I were you," Widow warns. "These guys are basically gods." "There's only one God, ma'am, and I'm pretty sure He doesn't dress like that." Loki and Thor have some....issues to work out. "The Earth is under my protection, Loki!" "And you're doing a marvelous job with that. The humans slaughter each other in droves while you idly fret. I mean to rule them!" "And so think yourself above them?" "Why, yes." Loki's surprised by the question. Isn't the answer obvious? "Then you miss the truth of ruling, brother. The throne would suit you ill," Thor's almost in tears now in anger and pity. "Listen well, brother -" Thor disappears, tackled by a flying Iron Man. "I'm listening," Loki replies. Thor and Iron Man begin brawling through the Black Forest while Loki observes, amused. "HEY!" Cap shouts. They both stop, surprised. "Look, I don't know what you're doing here-" "I'm here to stop Loki's schemes!" "Then prove it. Put the hammer down." "Uh, yeah, no....Bad call! He's really loves his hammer!" Stark doesn't agree with this at all, getting sideswiped by Mjolnir, Thor is only too happy to comply. But apparently vibranium is even stronger than Asgardian metal. Everyone warily gets to their feet
     Loki is trapped inside a glass cage meant for the Hulk, agitating Fury by pointing out an element of his motives that perhaps strikes a little too close to home. Fury manages a flippant reply before stalking away. Watching the exchange is everyone else, Thor tells them that there's an army of Chitauri coming to help him take the Earth, and Banner mentions that must be why he needed Selvig; to build a portal so that they can enter. "Have care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason; but he is of Asgard. And he is my brother." "He killed eighty people in two days," Romanoff drops in. "...And he's adopted." Banner wonders what the iridium is for. Stark then waltzes in and delivers a lecture about the stabilizing properties this element allows; the portal shouldn't collapse in on itself, and can therefore stay open as long as Loki wants. Barton could get his hands on the rest of the portal-building materials fairly easily, only thing left is a power source. "When did you become an expert on thermonuclear astrophysics?" Hill asks sarcastically. "Last night. The packet. Selvig's notes. The extraction theory papers? Am I the only one who did the reading?" Banner and Stark begin a rapid-fire unintelligible scientific plotting session, Cap and Fury tell them they ought to start their counterattack by studying Loki's sceptre. "It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a HYDRA weapon." "What I want to know is how it turned two of our smartest men into his personal flying monkeys." Thor looks mystified. "I understood that reference!" Steve says, thrilled.
     The new friends bond over science, and with some help from Cap, discover that the power source in question is Stark Tower, and then get diverted in what Fury's not telling them. "He's a spy. He's THE spy. Even his secrets have secrets." Steve, curious now, prowls around the ship. Tony continues pestering Banner about the Hulk. Thor and Coulson chat on the bridge, Thor trying to explain Loki's need for power and vengeance. Fury, speaking in riddles and half-truths as ever, asks them why, if he's a prisoner, it seems that Loki's the only one on the ship that wants to be there.
     Inside his cage, Loki greets Romanoff, who's snuck up on him looking for intel regarding Barton. The trickster talks her into revealing her debt to Hawkeye, who didn't kill her on a mission to do so. She joined S.H.I.E.L.D. to get away from her KGB past, now putting her "very specific skill set" to better uses. Loki then mocks her desires in another monologue. "You lie and kill, in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors, but they are part of you,  and they will never go away." (Perhaps he's also speaking to himself here....) As this speech is eloquently delivered, Stark and Banner's hack of the system is discovered, and Rogers finds weapons with HYDRA markings. (They were confiscated by the Allies at the war's end.) In the midst of Loki's mad emotional torturing, Romanoff discovers his plan: To release the Hulk and split the team up, thereby allowing the portal to be opened and the Chitauri unleashed.
     "What are you doing, Mr. Stark." Fury sweeps into the lab. "Uh...I've kind of been wondering the same thing about you. What is Phase 2, anyway?" Cap plunks one of the ray guns on a table. "Phase 2 is S.H.I.E.L.D. uses the cube to make weapons."  Fury tries to explain. "We gathered everything related to the Tesseract. This does not mean -" Tony spins his computer monitor around, blueprints clearly visible. "I'm sorry, Nick. What were you lying?" Romanoff stalks in. "Loki's been manipulating you, Banner." "And you've been doing what, exactly? I'd like to know why S.H.I.E.L.D. is using the Tesseract to build weapons of mass destruction." Fury points at Thor, who's as surprised as anyone. "Last year we had an encounter with visitors whose grudge match leveled a small town. We learned that not only are we not alone, but we hopelessly, hilariously, outgunned." "My people want nothing but peace with your planet." "But you're not the only people out there, are you?" A sea of argumentation, everyone yelling over the top of everyone else, gets underway. "We're not a team, we're a chemical mixture that creates chaos." Banner says.
     Barton is leading an invasion during this argument, drawing closer and closer as the tempers rise ever higher. "Without the suit, what are you?" Rogers asks Stark. "Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. You're a lab rat, Rogers; everything special about you came from a bottle." "You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on the wire and let the other guy crawl over you." "I think I'd just cut the wire."
     At this point, the Helicarrier is breached; one engine goes down, and Stark and Rogers are sent to repair it. Banner transmogrifies into the Hulk, which chases Black Widow. On hearing the Hulk's roar, Loki smiles. Cap is sent to flip a switch that will let Stark get inside the turbine. "What's it look like in there?" "It appears to run on some form of electricity." "Well...you're not wrong." Tony then talks Steve through his end of the repair, and they (eventually) get the engine running again. The Widow/Hulk chase breaks apart more of the ship's insides until Thor crashes into the rage monster, saving Romanoff. Thor attempts to reason with Banner, but he and the Hulk end up destroying most of a hangar, sometime later the Hulk crashlands in a warehouse. Barton shuts down another engine, dropping the craft like a rock. Thor tries to tackle an escaping Loki, but winds up sailing through the hologram and landing in the cage, trapped. His brother stands outside the cage, unimpressed. "Are you ever not going to fall for that?" (Lucy and the football...) Coulson appears in the doorway, armed with a prototype gun so out-there and advanced that even he doesn't know what it does. Loki stabs Coulson's heart with the sceptre as Thor watches his friend expire. He then opens the bomb bay door, dropping Thor twenty thousand feet below. Before he dies, Coulson shoots Loki with the big unknown gun. Loki's blasted through a wall from the impact. "So that's what it does." Black Widow and Hawkeye have a fight scene in a hallway, she knocks him out. Stark narrowly avoids being shredded by the flawed engine's turbines, taking out a mercenary shooting at Steve. So that first engine is fixed now. Loki escapes on a plane.
     Fury runs to Coulson's side. "I'm clocking out, boss." "Not an option." "It's okay. If this was ever going to work, they needed...someone...to...." Fury stares at his most loyal agent for a minute, then tells Hill, Steve and Tony the news in person. He explains that yes, they were trying to build an arsenal out of the Tesseract, but he had an even riskier idea in mind: "There was an idea, Stark knows about this, but there was something called the Avengers Initiative, that would take a group of remarkable individuals and see if they could become something more, to see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died believing that idea, in heroes." Tony can't handle all this heavy stuff, walking away to think it over and understand it. "Well, it's an old-fashioned notion." Fury says to himself, loud enough for Steve and Hill to hear.
     Barton snaps out of it, fully himself again, though reeling from the trauma of "having your brain taken out...and something else being stuffed in." Natasha's watching him, waiting for to wake up. She says they have to stop Loki. "Who's 'we'?" Hawkeye asks. "I dunno. Whoever's left."
     "Was he married?" Steve asks Tony. "No. There was a cellist....I think." "I'm sorry." Steve pauses. "He seemed like a good man." "He was an idiot." "For believing?" "For taking on Loki alone." "Sometimes there isn't a way out, Tony." They discuss Loki's strategy, wondering why he wanted to divide their forces and then conquer them. "He wants to be seen doing it, he wants an audience..." "Like in Stuttgart." "Right. That was just previews, this is Opening Night. Loki, he's a full-tilt diva, he wants flowers, he wants parades, he wants a..monument built to the skies with his name plastered-" Tony realizes that Loki WILL probably use Stark Tower as a power source like they were saying earlier. And, also, that he could be talking about himself here, too. Neither is a very good thought. Cap jumps on a Quinjet for New York with Hawkeye and Widow piloting. Iron Man and Thor each fly solo. It's time for the Avengers to assemble.

     Hill points out to Fury that Coulson's prized near-mint Captain America trading cards, now blood-stained, were in his locker when he died, not his jacket. "I know. They needed the push."
     Tony lands at Stark Tower and politely orders Selvig to shut the machine down. Delusional, he refuses, and so Tony tries blasting the machine. That doesn't work, either; but does knock Selvig out. So Tony sets his sights on Loki, they both walk inside. "Please tell me you're going to appeal to my humanity." "Uh, no. Actually I'm planning to threaten you." Loki chuckles. "You should have left your armor on for that." "Yeah...it's seen a bit of mileage. And you've got the Glowstick of Destiny." Tony pours himself a drink, offers Loki one. Loki declines and chuckles again over the stall attempt. "No, I'm threatening you." "The Chitauri are coming. What have I to fear?" "The Avengers. That's what we call ourselves. Sort of a team. 'Earth's Mightiest Heroes'-type thing." "Yes, I've met them." "Takes us a while to get any traction, that's for sure. But...let's do a headcount here. Your brother, the demigod; a super soldier; a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend; a man with breathtaking anger management issues; and a couple of master assassins. And you; you've managed to piss off every single one of them." "That was the plan." "Not a great plan." Tony's slipped some sort of metal bracelets on his wrists while talking. He remains completely calm during this whole exchange, it's part of what makes it so awesome. "I have an army," Loki says. "We have a Hulk." "Oh? I thought the beast had wandered off." "You're missing the point. There is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes and maybe they're too much for us, but it's all on you. Cause if we can't protect the Earth we'll damn sure avenge it." Loki tries then to hypnotize Tony by tapping his chest with the sceptre, but there's just a clinking noise. He pauses, puzzled, then tries again. Another clink. "This usually works." (The sceptre is being stopped by Tony's artificial heart.) He throws Tony out the window instead, and we find out what the metal bracelets are for: They're locking devices for his newest suit, the Mark 7. This suit attaches itself to Stark, stopping his fall and carrying him back up to the top of the building. "Oh yeah, there's one other guy you pissed off: His name was Phil." Just then, the portal opens.
     The alien army rushes in, blasting everything in sight. Taxis are blasted to bits, cars are flying, fires break out, streets are uprooted. Citizens scramble for cover, including Beth the pretty waitress Cap met. Thor lands and engages his brother in combat; the two have an elaborate battle at the top of the building. On the ground, police cars are screaming into the area, so are military police vehicles. The jet somehow crashlands without seeming to harm civilians; apparently Clint Barton is the best pilot this side of Anakin Skywalker. Another wave of Chitauri enter; these riding jet-ski-like machines and techno-whale creatures. It's bad. "Stark...you seeing this?" "Seeing....still working on believing." Loki slips away from Thor's clutches, hitching a ride on one of the jet-skis. Cap runs to save a bunch of trapped civilians, while Black Widow holds off an attack as Hawkeye evacuates a city bus. "It's just like Budapest all over again," she says as they fire away. "You and I remember Budapest very differently." Cap directs policemen to move citizens away from the main battle area, Iron Man is keeping the whale-creatures distracted up top, more bits of buildings are crashing down, lots of slicing and stabbing and shooting and imminent danger everywhere. Thor flies down to where the rest of the team is after trying unsuccessfully to power down the Tesseract. Right then Banner shows up, driving an old moped. "So...this all seems...horrible." he greets them. "I've seen worse," Romanoff says matter-of-factly. "I'm sorry." "No...we could use a little worse." she nods. Cap tells Stark that Banner's here, he replies that the party's moving their way. Sure enough, immediately afterward comes a whale. "I...I don't see how that's a party," Natasha looks puzzled. "Doctor, this might be a really good time to get angry," Cap instructs. Banner Hulks out and punches the whale in the jaw; stopping it cold. From there, it's an easy shot for Iron Man to launch a missile into the thing, and it explodes in a fiery death. Selvig has regained consciousness by now. Loki tells The Other to send the rest.
     So....along come at least three more whale-creatures and an innumerable amount more of the Chitauri, Cap barks out a gameplan and everyone gets to work. Hulk smashes all the paper men he sees. Thor slows the flood entering the sky. Iron Man sails around as bait, Hawkeye's perched on a building picking them off one at a time(does the dude never runs out of arrows?), and Cap and Widow are manning the streets. More shooting and punching and daring feats of bravery/stupidity/necessity(your choice). Romanoff hijacks a jet-ski(they're much larger than they seem). Hulk slows down a whale enough that Thor can give it a good whack with Mjolnir, and together they drive the whale into an old cathedral.
     On the Helicarrier, Fury is being called into a videoconference meeting with the World Security Council. "The Council has made a decision." "I recognize that the Council has made a decision. But given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it," Fury defies them. "Until my team has proved that they cannot defend that island(Manhattan), I will not authorize a nuclear strike against a civilian population!" "If we don't send it out, we lose everything." a Councilmember counters. "If I send that bird out, we already have." Fury hangs up.
     Natasha's jet-ski is now being chased by the one Loki is driving. "Nat, what're you doing?" Hawkeye wonders. "Uh....little help?!" "I'm on it." He launches an arrow straight towards Loki's ear....which he catches effortlessly. The arrow then blows up, sending Loki back to Stark Tower along with Romanoff. The Hulk then beats Loki senseless, and Selvig reveals the existence of a self-destruct button, a safety for the machine. It's the sceptre. Tony's taking on a whale. "JARVIS, you ever hear the story of Jonah?" "I wouldn't consider him a role model," the elaborate computer system answers. Nevertheless, Tony rams his way through the entire creature, killing it and however many Chitauri were using it as a taxi. Hulk's facing at least fifteen jet-skis, Hawkeye almost as many.
     The Council overrides Fury's decision, claiming he is no longer in authority and thus the pilots' bombing run is a go. Fury brings one fighter jet down on the runway with a bazooka, but another right behind it gets loose. Time for an urgent message, left urgently. "Stark, there's a missile heading straight for the city." "How long?" "You've got three minutes." Thirty seconds later, according to the radio, the package is sent. Not knowing any of this, Thor and Cap work together on the ground, while Selvig and Natasha try to shut the portal down. She tells the others of the this development, Cap gives it a green light. Stark immediately negates that message, telling them about the nuke, now incoming less than a minute away. He plans to take the bomb up the portal. "Shall I call Miss Potts?" JARVIS asks. "May as well." On her plane, Pepper's too engrossed in the tragedy to notice her phone is ringing. As Iron Man disappears into space, the S.H.I.E.L.D. staff cheers, while Fury and Hill know the truth; it's a suicide mission. The missile hits a vague ship-looking object, destroying it, shutting down all functions of the Chitauri and their whales. Tony begins his slow, terrifying descent, the superheated energy coming steadily closer. Knowing he probably won't make it back. The rest of the team stares at the sky, anxious. On Cap's order, Natasha closes the portal, sealing off the wave of annihilation. Stark slips through at the last second, never slowing down for an instant. Thor winds up to come to the rescue, but Hulk leaps out and scoops up the man, deflecting and absorbing the otherwise-fatal forces of gravity. Thor and Cap run to the prone man on the cratered pavement. They look at each other. Is he -? The Hulk bellows in a grieving manner. This bellow wakes Tony up. "What just happened? Please tell me nobody tried to kiss me." Steve's gaze is far-off, in Europe, likely, and seventy years away, but he answers slowly. "We won. It's over." Maybe World War II finally ended. Stark looks relieved. Everyone is exhausted beyond belief. "Have you guys ever had shawarma? I don't know what it is, but I want to try it." "We're not finished yet," Thor tells him.
     Loki awakens to find two master assassins(one with a drawn bow), a super soldier, a green rage monster, his brother the warrior and a wrathful Tony Stark all staring down at him. None of them look too happy. "If it's all the same to you, I think I'll have that drink now."
     Folks begin picking up the debris, writing letters in thanks, lighting candles at a Mass, getting Stark shaves or Captain America tattoos, graffiti-ing their appreciation for the Avengers. Some don't know what to believe, "...it just seems like there's a lot they're not telling us." Some think it was a hoax. "Superheroes? In New York? Give me a break." Stan Lee comments to a TV newscrew. Politicians and talk-show analysts give their opinions and thoughts. "These so-called heroes have to be held responsible for the destruction of the city. This was their fight. Where are they now?... "What, that this is all somehow their fault?" Beth the waitress asks, incredulous, during an interview. "Captain America saved my life. Wherever he is, and wherever any of them are, I would just....I would want to say thank you."
     The Council wants answers. Fury coolly replies that the Avengers have earned a leave of absence from the index of gifted individuals, so he isn't tracking their current whereabouts. And the Tesseract? It's out of this world. "That's not your call." "I didn't make it. Just didn't argue with the god that did." Thor and Loki, bound for punishment, return to Asgard with the Tesseract. "I don't think you understand what you started, letting the Avengers loose on this world," a Councilmember frowns from on high. "They're dangerous." "They surely are," Fury agrees. "and the whole world knows it. Every. World. Knows it." "Was that the point of all this? A statement?" "A promise." Fury exits the conversation, and Hill wants to know how things work now. "They've gone their separate ways, so...some pretty extremely far. If we get into a situation like this again, what happens then?" "They'll come back." "You really sure about that?" "I am." "Why?" Fury stares out the window. "Because we need them to." Hill evidently doesn't agree, but wisely doesn't say anything.
     Inside Stark Tower, now with just the large "A" remaining outside, remodeling is taking place, and Tony and Pepper are working on blueprints and designs for the next building.
     PS - In space, The Other is speaking before the being on the throne. "Humanssss....they were not the cowering wretches we were promised. They are unruly, and therefore can not be ruled. To challenge them is to court death." The being on the throne grins. He is Thanos. (That's going to be terribly important in the future, as he's one of the galaxy's most awful and despicable tyrants. See Guardians for more information there, but we'll have to wait and see what happens here.)
     PPS - They really did go to the restaurant after confronting Loki. The employees are closing up for the night, and the team is wearily chewing their food. (Shawarma is apparently kind of like Arabic barbecue, something like a Greek gyro.)

     So, yeah, this is different than most of the other superhero movies. Bigger in scope, in aliens, in battle scenes while still allowing character development and memorable one-liners. It took most of two days to write this review because of that. The main point, I guess, is that you don't have to like each other in order to work together(though that definitely helps). What matters, ultimately, is that the job gets done. So if you've only seen it because everyone is talking about it(like you would The Breakfast Club, Jurassic Park, Days of Thunder or Napoleon Dynamite), you'll probably enjoy it. And if you love all things Marvel(for example, great storytelling, compelling characters, interwoven storylines, snark....) then it's a must-see.

* - Phase One of the MCU consists of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers, and also the One-Shot short films The Consultant and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor's Hammer. 
     Phase Two is made up of Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy; the first two seasons of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; the One-Shots Item 47, Agent Carter, and All Hail The King; and the as-yet-unreleased Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man.