Michael Perry's Blog, page 417

With Respect

This was a tough woman.

Ms. Wagner was the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire school of nursing during  my college years.  She was a woman of strength and dignity.  Look at her photo, and then imagine her in 1986, having summoned a certain well-mulleted, pickup-truck-driving, roadie-dressing, night-shift-working male nursing student into her office simply to ask how things were going.  She had concerns, you see (more implied than stated, but sometimes stated), that perhaps I wasn't wh

Localpalooza

It's so fun to be just plain proud of someone.

From a Wall Street Journal review of Chicago's recent Lollapalooza shows:

Local music, really.  Even when he's in Belgium.

Art in the Open Air

Two years ago we took our then-seven-year old daughter to see Merchant of Venice at the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  She drank it in, loved it, and marveled that she could look up from the stage to the sky and see all the stars above.

During our Mineral Point visit this past week we had a chance to attend the theatre again (this time for George Bernard Shaw's The Philanderer).  It was, in short, a dreamlike evening, my wife and I in the company of our now-nine-year old, t

Back Home?

By the time you read this we should be back home.  Spent the week in the Mineral Point area courtesy of the folks at Shake Rag Alley, who asked me in to help with a writing workshop.  A special thank you to "my" writing crew.  We came to discuss writing in general and their work in specific, but I left feeling I'd been given new perspectives on my own typing, and why I'm so grateful I am allowed to spend so much time with words.  Thanks to everyone who gathered in the little room…may your pens f

Pigs Eat Anything

Back on chicken butchering day we boiled up a big old tub of gizzards and livers.  Dumped'em in the hog trough.  Y'really haven't lived until you 've watched a pig dance while hot-mouthing a steaming gizzard.*

*Yes, I know we can eat them, pickle them, grill'em on a stick…but we had pails of the things.  Plus if you put the chicken in the pig you get…pig.  So we'll eat them eventually.

Office Mascot

Was sitting in the green chair editing a draft at dawn when this fellow emerged ever so slowly from beneath the desk, headed for a patch of sun.  He was dehydrated and covered in carpet lint.

Put him outside in the dew-covered grass.  An hour later he was bright green.  Another hour later he was gone.