The Duke (Read-Response 2)

I've always been a big fan of John Wayne. I grew up not only watching his westerns and World War II pictures, but listening to how much both my grandma and great-aunt loved him. They even got to meet him once when he was filming Rio Bravo at the Old Tucson studio in Arizona. I remember my grandma telling me how my great-aunt, her sister, got angry while they were filming a fight scene and the Duke had blood coming out of his mouth. She actually walked up to and slapped the man who she thought had struck Wayne, only to find out that it was just a blood pill that the actor had bitten down on in his mouth to simulate taking the blow.

He'd never really been hit.

Reading Joan Didion's "John Wayne: A Love Song" brought this back fresh to my mind. She writes from a reporter's perspective, covering the last two weeks of shooting of Wayne's 165^th film, The Sons of Katie Elder. We receive an enlightening account of The Duke, with the other primary cast members and crew relegated appropriately to their position on the undercard. Dean Martin was a star in his own right, but when sharing the screen with John Wayne, he might as well be you or me.

Didion admits to being fascinated with the Duke from an early age, first seeing him on screen when she was eight years old in 1943. It would be 22 years later that she would finally meet him and write "Love Song", but her appreciation for the man is readily evident in her article. The way he walks, the way he talks, even the way he stands up from his chair…all of those idiosyncrasies that anyone who has ever seen Wayne in a film know all too well…they are part and parcel part of John Wayne. They are not portrayed in his characters on screen. What we are seeing in a John Wayne picture is the star himself, playing a part, but not adopting an accent or movements that are anyone's but his very own.

But Didion does more than focus on how manly the Duke is, or how soft spoken and nice he can be to the people around him. Though she does both of those things to some degree, she takes us somewhere that we, as fans, may not necessarily want to go. Especially in 1965, when the article was published. She takes us down a dark road, albeit briefly, to a time when the Duke really did get hit. But her telling us about Wayne's battle with cancer doesn't make her story morose. It doesn't detract from the overall message that John Wayne is a man. That John Wayne is the man. Instead, she turns the tide on the "Big C" much as Wayne himself had done by beating the disease itself.

She manages to paint an image of a true American Icon, all in a few brief pages, by sharing her personal experiences and relating them to her time spent on the set with the one and only John Wayne.

My grandma and great-aunt would be so jealous.

How to Write Funny (Read-Response 1)

David Sedaris has been introduced to me as a humorist, so when I picked up his book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, I fully anticipated a work rife with witticisms and the occasional turn of phrase that might, at best, elicit a grin from me. I don't normally read non-fiction at all, and reading essays about someone else's life just never seemed all that interesting to me. Then I cracked open the cover on this book, and had my opinion altered almost immediately.

Sedaris covers a wide range of topics in this collection of essays. Most of the essays focus on his family life with his parents and sisters. A few of them find their focus outside the familial unit, like "The Girl Next Door" and "Chicken in the Henhouse." It was in one of these essays that I found what I think I was looking for in his writing.

The essay is titled "Full House" and is about his first sleep over at another boy's house. He was in the sixth grade and has discovered that he's gay. This came as a surprise to me, though I couldn't begin to explain why that is. My brother is gay, and it surprised me just as much to find that out. Maybe it's the religious upbringing I suffered through coming out.

In this piece, Sedaris describes both the events of that night and his budding attraction to members of the same sex. I have to admit, when I read "A naked boy was what I desired more than anything on earth," I nearly threw the book in the trash. It felt dirty and more than a little creepy to me for a grown man to be saying this. I have two kids myself, and nothing scares a parent more than the thought of a pedophile.

I had to step back for a moment and think about what I was reading. This was a recounting of how the author felt when he himself was in the sixth grade, not how he's feeling at 25 or 30 years old. I tried to remember what I was thinking about in the sixth grade and was able to forgive Sedaris his young lustful thoughts as I remembered all the girls I liked in when I was 11. It was a long list.

After my brief moment of panic, I continued reading the essay and like I said, found what I was looking for. What was it about Sedaris that makes his writing so funny? There's nothing funnier than real life, and much like Jerry Seinfeld or George Carlin, Sedaris tells his stories with a truth that belies disbelief and shows him for the faulted person that he is; that we all are. He does this using language that is both genuine and fantastic at the same time, eliciting fits of laughter in place of the grins I'd anticipated.

It is here, in the turn of phrase or even the use of a single word, in an otherwise serious or uncomfortable situation. That is where the comedic genius of Sedaris lies.

D&D 101 (Journal Entry #4)

The stage is set:

It's Sunday afternoon. My laptop sits at my end of the dining room table, my spreadsheets open and ready to go. My dice bag, designed to act more like a bowl when it is opened, is near at hand, several of the colorful polyhedron dice sitting out on the table already. I've got the small battle-mat laid out, with dry erase markers and two cases of miniatures in case there's a fight today. A glass of Mountain Dew rests at my elbow.

I'm ready.

In small groups my players arrive. They are Shannon, Mark, Pam, Ed, Diane, Will and Sean…but only for a few minutes as we greet each other upon their arrival, and again when we say good-bye at the end of the night. For the next nine hours, however, they will be Ithein, Rix, Verena, Tuon, Elmas, Reillithan, and Basil…the names of the characters that they are playing in the world of Riniel.

"Well, I need a recap. Does anyone want to volunteer?" I get no volunteers, so after a silent count of 10, I roll a d8. That's a die with eight sides. Imagine two four-sided pyramids that are attached at their bottoms. I roll a 6 and count around the table to "Diane, thank you for volunteering."

"I don't have a lot of notes," she begins, looking hesitantly around the table. "We were in mountains with a lot of dead trees and we'd just rescued Shannon's character…"

"Ithein," Shannon replies to the unasked question.

"Right, we'd just rescued Ithein and Ed's new character from the drow (evil dark elves), but we hadn't gotten her name yet." She finishes with a sheepish look to the others, who all jump in and help her remember what happened the previous week. She becomes more animated as, with the others' help, she remembers more.

"That's right! We were walking in rocky terrain with very heavy fog and got ambushed by some skeletons…"

"Six," Pam chimes in.

"…and a zombie. Some of the horses ran away during the fight. Basil went after three of them and…Will went after one."

Will grumbles something about no one being able to pronounce Reillithan and everyone has a chuckle, since he has trouble with it himself.

"My horse fell in a crevice that it missed in the fog and broke its neck," she continues. "Then Verena's horse fell in another and was injured, but didn't die." She glares at me for rolling 2d6 and getting two sixes when her horse fell, and rolling two ones for Verena's horse. That's twelve points of falling damage to one horse and 2 points to the other, though they both fell 20 feet. "Basil finally caught up to Luc's horse with Luc strapped to its back since he was unconscious from the kobolds."

Luc, Ed's previous character, had been a little too free with his magic and almost burned an extremely young dragon under the protection of a small group of kobolds. Kobolds are small reptilian humanoids about the size of a typical four-year-old child. One of the kobolds had beaten him into unconsciousness for his carelessness.

Diane begins laughing as she recalls what came next. "So Basil is walking his horse and leading Luc's to avoid losing anymore horses when he hears wolves howling close by. He hears a horse running somewhere in the fog below him and realizes he's back at the last crevice he'd had to cross in the fog. Then he hears more howls, even closer than before, and has to let go of Luc's horse to keep his own under control. Luc's horse panics and races away from the howls and loses its footing, sliding and then falling into the crevice with Verena's horse. Unfortunately, it lands on its back and crushes Luc underneath. Basil can't see through the fog, but he hears the horses running, then the growls of the pursuing wolves, then the screams of the horses as the wolves growls turn to snarls…then silence."

"Basil gets back, empty-handed, and we set off to complete our rescue."

"Thank you, Diane," I say as the players turn to me expectantly. "Ithein, you were sitting on the ground exhausted. Elmas had just finished getting you cleaned up and had braided your hair for you. Reillithan was on the ridge keeping watch. Verena, Rix, and Basil were roguing the bodies while Kur-dan watched over the naked sea elf woman."

"Ed, you're completely naked except for Kur-dan's cloak. What are you doing?"