Pullen My Blog

Culture update: UTEP's women's history conference features film, performance piece

"The Heretics," a documentary featuring members of the New York Art Collective, and a performance piece by former UTEP art student Xochitl Rodriguez are among the highlights of the UTEP Women's History Month Conference on March 23.

The conference runs from 8 a.m.-8 p.m., with registration starting at 8 a.m. Panels and scholarly papers by activist, students and faculty will be presented in the morning and afternoon at the UTEP Union Building on topics range from the future of Juarez to teaching feminism through comics.

"The Heretics," which will be shown at noon at the UTEP Union Cinema, is described by filmmaker Joan Braderman as "an experimental documentary" about the pioneering New York feminist arts group. It features interviews and updates on 28 of its members, including artists such as Miriam Schapiro and Cecilia Vicuna and writer Lucy Lippard.

Braderman was a member of the collective, known for publishing "Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Arts and Politics" from the late '70s to early '90s.

It will be followed by a panel discussion with UTEP women's studies lecturer DeAnna Varela and Charles Horak, the Plaza Classic Film Festival artistic director.

Rodriguez, who studied metalsmithing at UTEP while pursuing her bachelor of fine arts, will give a lecture and performance at 6:30 p.m. at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, with a reception starting at 6 p.m.

Rodriguez focused on combining performing with body art while at UTEP, and worked on a series of body armor, called "The Shield," while teaching sculpture in Bhutan.

Details: sa.utep.edu/wrc/

 

A few words about Ernie Harwell

Ernie Harwell died Tuesday. He was 92.

His name may not mean much to folks around here, but to this lifelong Detroit Tigers fan, it means so much.

Harwell was the radio, and sometimes TV voice of the Tigers. He called the games when the team won the World Series in 1984, and he called the games when they were cellar-dwellers.

Ernie was old-school. He was humble. He was gentle. He was honest. He wasn't a publicity hound. He was a baseball man with a distinctive, reedy Southern lilt, not a school-trained broadcaster with a voice washed of all personality who simply schilled for the team. 

He understood the cerebral nature of the game, the peaceful way in which it can be one minute, and the thrill it can give the next.

Ernie called Tigers games for AM powerhouse WJR for more than 30 years, calling by his own count more than 8,300 games in a Hall of Fame career that included being traded by the Atlanta Crackers minior league team to the Brooklyn Dodgers for a catcher.

He'll be forever known in the Motor City, not just for those laudable traits above, but for signature phrases. When one of the Bengals hit one out, he'd say "it's long gone!" If someone fouled one off, he'd say it was caught by "a man from Cheboygan," or one of numerous cities in the Michigan, Ohio and Ontario listening areas.

My favorite: When a batter took a called third strike, Ernie'd exclaim, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road."

These were phrases that evolved over time. He didn't make them up as a young broadcaster trying to advance his career. That's the way Harwell was. Real. Natural. Traditional. That's so important in baseball.

I had two brushes with him. 

One came just a few years ago when he signed copies of one of his books at my son's middle school in Grand Blanc, MI. I bought one for my dad, who was from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak and the man who gave me my live for the team with the Old English D, and Ernie nicely obliged, even jotting a short, personal message to the distant old man of a fan in El Paso.

The other came several years earlier. Ernie always opened his first spring training broadcast with the same biblical passage. When you live in a very cold state like that, those words evoke a particularly warm feeling inside, even when you know there's going to be more snow and more cold before real baseball weather returned (my friend Andy Heller always jokes that Michigan gets two weeks of summer).

I listened to one of those broadcasts early in my run at the Flint Journal and I wrote a column about it, which, if memory serves, they ran on the front page. A few days later I got a very nice, handwritten note by Ernie, whom I'd never met before, thanking me for the kind words.

I don't know who sent him the column. God knows tons of them have been written about him. He certainly didn't have to write me a thank you note. If anything, I owed him one as a fan and as a human being.

But that's the kind of class guy Ernie Harwell was. The cancer with which he was diagnosed last year finally took him. But he'll live in my and thousands of others' memories for a very long time.

So long, Ernie. RIP.

Concert update: 'Scheduling conflict' kills Anjelah Johnson concert

Just got word that comedian Anjelah Johnson's Oct. 3 show at the Plaza Theatre was canceled due to "scheduling conflicts." Maybe. More than likely the show wasn't selling. Johnson may be a Latina comic, but she's not a big name and name recognition sells around here. I don't know how many tickets they had to sell to break even, but they obviously didn't come close enough with less than a week to go.

For those of you who did buy tickets, refunds are available at the point of purchase.

As a special added blog bonus today, I'm offering you the story that I wrote up just last night to advance the concert. This was going to run in the Friday, Oct. 2 Tiempo. And just think: it's costing you nothing!

By Doug Pullen

El Paso Times

EL PASO — YouTube, that bastion of embarrassing superstar miscues and average folks' idiosyncracies, can be a career maker. It certainly hasn't hurt comedian Anjelah Johnson.

"YouTube changed my life," she says.

How so? Just check out "Nail Salon," the San Jose native and former Oakland Raiders cheerleader's knowing, hilarious spin on a routine encounter with an Asian manicurist. The 27-year-old Johnson, who prides herself on telling true-to-life stories and creating true-to-life characters, is still getting her petite hands around just how popular the clip has been on the Web site, where it's been viewed more than 13 million times.

"That resonated with so many people not only in California and the United States," she said by phone from Los Angeles, "but all over the world. I get messages from people in Australia, Europe, the Philippines. People get it. They understand it. The accent is so familiar. The story is something every woman who's ever gone to get their nails done can relate to."

That's a quality the fast-emerging comic strives for. Johnson, the middle of five kids whose parents are of Mexican and American Indian descent, likes to take inspiration from her own experiences. "It's very observational," she says of her comedy. "I share a lot of stories that have happened to me in life, a lot of relatable issues. I definitely like to do a lot of characters in my act, stuff about family and growing up."

Her act, which was filmed recently for a forthcoming Comedy Central special, is "very much like my life story. It grows and evolves," said Johnson, who calls herself "a storyteller."

Her story is pretty unusual. Johnson's first big-time performing experience was as an Oakland Raiderette. She was good enough at it to earn Rookie of the Year honors from the Raiders' cheerleaders, who, she admits, didn't have much to cheer, though rooting for the lowly losers "gives me a lot to write about."

Johnson is surprisingly new to the stand-up comedy gig, but is headlining clubs and small theaters only five years into her new line of work. "Comedy wasn't something I pursued, comedy pursued me," says the comedian, who relies on her faith to guide her. 

"I can't explain how these doors opened for me," she says. "There are comedians who've been doing it for years and years and are just waiting for their big break. Really, I'm just being obedient (to God) and walking it every day."

Johnson's fledgling career got a couple of boosts in 2007. One was a small role opposite Gabrielle Union in "The Box," the other was a short but impactful stint on Fox's "MADtv." She only appeared in four episodes before being let go in that strike-threatened 2007-08 season, but her portrayal of the nail salon lady and Bon Qui Qui, the ghetto King Burger clerk, provided plenty of fodder for YouTube acolytes. She also got an ALMA Award nomination for her short-lived stint on the show.

"It was such a blessing being on the show for a short amount of time, a blessing in disguise because I was able to get the experience and the exposure and it was like a catapult for me," she said, though she's not sure if she got the ax as part of a budget cut or the writers strike that was looming.

While some might argue that her good looks helped open some of those doors, Johnson says being photogenic tends to make audiences skeptical, especially in the male-dominated world of stand-up comedy. "I remember when I first started there were obstacles. I had hoops to jump through. Because I'm not overweight an don't look funny, they automatically judge me, 'How can she be funny?' The first 10 minutes of my act are me trying to prove myself and they start listening to what I have to say."

People seeing her for the first time don't expect her to be funny. But Johnson tends to win them over with a sense of humor derived from her "jokester" dad and "silly" mom, not to mention her four siblings and her keen observational insights.

When it comes to career guidance, she looks up to the big comedy club owner in the sky for guidance as she maneuvers through a career that's branching into movies, including roles in this year's forthcoming Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel and next year's "The Wedding Project."

"(People) don't expect you to be funny. They expect you to be raunchy and dirty," she says. "They don't know what they're going to get when they get me. I don't believe that I have to play a man's game, play it the way he does. I'm so blessed to do things the way I want to do them, the way I feel comfortable. I haven't had to compromise who I am to get where I am. I stayed true to myself, my values, my core. It's proved beneficial to stick to who you are."

Minor Miners Musings

Saturday's 42-13 blowout of the UTEP Miners by the 10th-ranked Texas Longhorns was the first Miners game I've attended in probably more than 30 years. Things have changed a bit since then, no? The stadium's bigger, the enthusiasm for the team more pronounced (especially when UT's in town) and, at least for one night, the air was electric.

I've been in Michigan the last 25 years, nearly 20 of which was spent in Flint, just outside Detroit, where major league teams and major colleges (University of Michigan, Michigan State) are the norm. So are nationally televised games.

Not here. Bg games like this, even clearly lopsided games going in, are a big deal. We don't get enough of them, but as you can tell from a Sun Bowl record crowd of more than 54,000, if you bring 'em, they will come.

Maybe because I've covered some big events, like covering the entertainment elements of Super Bowl XL in Detroit two years go, and maybe because I have, as one editor put it, "fresh eyes," I got the assignment to write what we call in the trade a "color" piece for Sunday's A1.

The idea is to take in the sights and sounds, the smells and the tastes, talk to people inside and outside of the stadium and make it all fit into a story, which, by the way, was banged out in about 50 minutes.

I got there about 4, parked in a designated media lot overlooking the border and huffed and puffed up the hill to the stadium so I could set up my gear in the press box, where about 300 media personnel squeezed in to wax poetic about The Big Game (well, Big for UTEP; just a game for UT, which no doubt wanted to get out of there without embarrassing itself).

I was sardined in the press box between Patrick Cannon, a gentle giant of a guy who played football for UTEP from 1988-93 and is now the director of event operations for the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe. Not too shabby. The other guy, J.R., is a Miners fan originally from Indiana who works for Superior Copy and has to make sure all the copy machines in the press box are working OK. There are a lot of copies being made during a college football game.

About 4 hours before the kickoff of the game televised nationally on The Deuce (ESPN2), I lit out to the countless tailgate parties in search of some pearls of wisdom (or well, perspective) from the assembled masses, hoping to get some perspective on why this was such a big deal.

The idea was to make a complete circle around the stadium, hitting everything from the private non-tailgate for sponsors on Glory Field (I wasn't supposed to be there, but nobody was minding the open gate by the Casa Ford tent) to student celebrations near dorms to the Texas Exes, vanquished to the far SW corner of campus (and, no, I didn't make it to the huge RV city at Schuster and Sun Bowl roads), then back up the hill to a season ticketholder lot, where I found a couple enjoying beers and watching the sunset. A lovely way to oil up for The Big Game or any game.

I wrote about what I learned in Sunday's A1 story. But in the course of doing that, there were people I talked to whose names and words didn't make it into my story. There were people who did who spoke so fleetingly that I didn't get all the bio details.

Here's a few of the outtakes:

• I found my friends Rick Cross, Ray Stallings and Ray's 11-year-old son Michael sitting pretty on the 50 yard line, 77 rows up on the east side of the bowl. I help coach a little league team with Ray, younger brother of longtime friend Pam Cross (Rick's wife) and Rick, with whom I went to Eastwood. Michael's kind of the team's Mr. Clutch.

Anyway, I asked Ray how they got such choice seats. "I had one employee, a season ticketholder, who was nice enough to purchase them for me. He didn't realize he'd have to stand in line and have to buy them," Ray, a tech support manager for GECU, said. "I have to buy him lunch."

I asked Michael what he thought about it all (this was around 7 p.m.). "It's taking too long," he said. He had another 80-minute wait, this without a video game!!

• One of the hazards of being new to a city, even one where you grew up, is not knowing who's who sometimes. I talked to Pat Dalbin in the corporate sponsor area. She had just snagged a couple of $30 tix for her daughter, Margaux, and her friend, Ava Rey, both 17. What I didn't know, because Pat had to rush off to meet her husband to get the cash for the ducats, is that Pat's in charge of public art for the city's Museums and Cultural Affairs Department. Man, the conversation we could have had! I found that out when I saw her name in my colleague Maribel Villalava's column in Sunday's paper.

The girls, seniors at Coronado, told me they had just won the city's doubles team championship that day at Americas High School. "We're the No. 1 doubles team," Rey said proudly. "Now we're best friends."

When I finished my outside circuit with a stop to the season ticketholders lot near the stadium, I didn't realize the couple I met enjoying beers and the sunset were notables. He was Mark Dyer, whom I remember as a sports and outdoors writer for the Times years ago. He's president of the El Paso Home Builders Association. She was Christy Bernosky of One Realty. She wouldn't let me use the phrase she came up with to describe the excitement, but we did exchange business cards. Hey, I'm in the market for a house!

• Also lost in the shuffle of scrambling a story together on deadline was Pat Munoz, a sweet lady who was working one of four concession stands for the Miracle League, a baseball league for people with physical and mental handicaps between the ages of 10-25. It was a fundraiser for the league, said Pat, who coaches the Dodgers. She had a big smile on her face every time I walked by their booth on my way to or from the press box. She couldn't help but be impressed with the atmo. "As you can see by the colors of the crowd," she said, surveying the brightly colored throng, "Orange Fever's out there."