18feb25016 -- Colorado Legislature, Hunger Free Colorado, NACo’s County News and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem “Beside the Sunflowers”

Bird-dogging the legislature in Denver

The Colorado Capitol in Denver

NEW BILLS NEW LAWS … I’d given up going to state meetings for Colorado Counties, Inc. (CCI). It’s a useful lobbying group that helps counties prevent really bad bills from making it through the Legislature. And helps even pass a few good ones … But, of late, CCI has been infected with the “partisan paralysis” that Sen. Ted Cruz champions. Last month Republicans knocked almost all Democrats out of CCI leadership positions on its steering committees. Instead of having a chair with the majority party and vice-chair with the minority party, so as to offer a bi-partisan front to legislators on CCI issues, conservatives led by Weld County Commissioner Barbara Kirkmeyer cleaned house … That kind of disastrous internal one-up-woman’s-ship led Boulder County to leave CCI last week. Denver City and County had already pulled out … San Miguel County’s paid its dues for 2016, or we might have considered pulling out as well. But, next year, unless there are changes, it would be hard to recommend staying on board a group that supports fracking, tax breaks for the rich, return of public lands to the states, and opposes universal health care, more money for education, higher minimum wages, etc … But this year, I’ve been directed to attend and offer what liberal input I can to the process … The bills CCI reviews run the gamut from the inane to the seriously wrong, from good ideas to senseless tweaks. There was unanimous support for a SJM16-001, urging Congress to pass Good Samaritan legislation to protect those involved in voluntary reclamation of abandoned hard rock mines from potential liability – a big stumbling block for cleaning up situations like the one over in San Juan County that led to a mine adit blowout and heavy iron release in the Animas River last year … ASIDE: When I was in San Francisco last month, I visited an art installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts entitled, “Golden Prospects” by Kevin Cooley. It was all about the Animas River spill, with boxes of on-floor videos of murky water flowing over iron-coated rocks. It wasn’t very impressive. But maybe living so close to the actual river was insulation from the meant-to-shock simulations of tainted agua … CCI steering committees voted to support HB16-1150 to give counties authority to prohibit underage nicotine possession, SB16-080 to require cannabis grow operations in a home to be enclosed, locked and restricted from anyone under 21-years-of-age, HB16-1030 to allow local governments to require insurance and driver’s licenses for OHV riders on local roads (something local counties have been trying to achieve for years), and SB16-060 that shifts fiscal responsibility for providing courtroom space from the counties to the sate … CCI opposed SB16-067 to grant a personal property tax exemption for broadband providers, HB16-1088 giving Fire Protection Districts the authority to impose impact fees on new development, SB16-81 to create a rural economic emergency assistance grant program, HB16-1071 which would have granted county citizens initiative power for county decisions (killed in committee), HB16-1078 granting whistle-blower protections to local government employees, SB16-37 changing the public’s access to digitally-stored data under the Colorado Opens Record Act, and SB16-54 allowing local governments to set minimum wages in its jurisdiction … Those are only a handful of the hundreds of bills considered in the Colorado Legislature each session. Which is why it’s important for local governments to pay attention to what’s happening in Denver. And, with perhaps a new bipartisan county support group, help shape the action.

RAT-A-TAT STATS … Hunger Free Colorado released a report last month for 2015 that ranked Colorado 46^th in the nation for getting food stamps to the needy. Pitkin County had the worst record, enrolling only 10% of those eligible, while El Paso County had the best record, enrolling 71%. San Miguel County enrolled 27% of those eligible, according to the report … The National Association of Counties (NACo) puts out a newsletter, CountyNews, and in the Jan. 11^th edition, it published a graph of the Top 10 Counties with the Highest Growth Rate of 65 Years and Older Population (2004-2014). Colorado had 7 of the 10 spots, with San Miguel County ranked third in the nation with a 203% growth rate. That’s telling me that the Telluride Region is becoming a retirement haven and that doing more for seniors is something the County is going to have to wrestle with in coming years … In the same issue, NACo’s County Explorer program offered a map that showed San Miguel County to be the only county in the state in 2015 to have full economic recovery with all four recovery indicators used from Moody’s Analytics data – one of only 215 counties in the nation to do that, out of over 3000 counties total … Finally, the heaviest one-day snowfall ever recorded in the nation wasn’t in Alaska, Montana, Maine or New Hampshire, but right here in Colorado. On Dec. 4, 1913, 63 inches of snow fell on Georgetown in Clear Creek County

THE TALKING GOURD

beside the sunflowers

naked, except

this strand of what ifs

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Western Slope Poet Laureate

11feb25016 -- Homeless, Super Bowl, Broncos, Joe Hutchison, Looking South to Lone Cone, Wendy Videlock, Science News and a poem, “Listserve”

The dark underside of the City

Colorado Poet Laureate Joe Hutchison

HOMELESS … That was the biggest downside of returning to San Francisco in January. There were whole tent cities under freeway overpasses and along other busy thoroughfares. Bums, we used to call them, sleeping in the street. Or in parks. Cardboard for covers. But these days both sexes. And sometimes whole families … Of course, I had no defense when someone asked me for money. I’m from Norwood where we help each other out, even if we don’t particularly like one another. I had a roll of ones in my pocket, just for that occasion -- of being asked … Still, I wasn’t naïve. I grew up in the City. I kept my eyes averted walking in the Tenderloin. The Mission. Letting anyone engage your eyes as you passed was tantamount to inviting trouble. Better to pretend you were deep in one’s own thoughts than to register anything even faintly hinting of recognition. That’s the urban way … But if someone asks me, I have a hard time saying no. As long as I have enough to share, and someone asks, it kind of feels like it’s my duty to oblige … My daughter got mildly annoyed with me, as we walked the night streets returning from shows or scooter rides. If asked, I shared. It made for slow walking on some jaunts … Maybe the worst example (although it felt like compassion to me) was entertaining a homeless sort while Iris went to a class nearby. An older woman, but not elderly. Asking strangers odd things, questioning stuff, ranting about her last hotel, and her aunt, and others who had wronged her. I was in a trendy hipster yogurt and pudding shop off Polk Street. I was typing out a column (like this one) while enjoying a bowl of rice pudding (like my mother used to make). Lady GoneGone (or whatever her name was) sat at an adjacent table. Soon she was plying me with queries and telling long stories that made little sense. Or repeating stories over and again … I guess she reminded me of my mother, who had lived in the City. And had only been saved from homelessness because I moved her into an apartment in Noe Valley I’d rented for a half-dozen years. The landlord was a good-hearted sort. The rent was affordable for someone on Social Security and food stamps. The second-floor railroad flat of the three-story building wasn’t pretty. But it was clean. And livable … She stayed her last years there until the cancer took her. Lady GG reminded me of what might have become of Blanche, if I hadn’t been around to watch out for her. So, before long, I was buying GG a pudding. Telling the waitron it was okay. That GG wasn’t bothering me … For about an hour I half-listened, half-typed. Not only was she a talker, but she scratched her arms and legs ceaselessly. Finally explained she had lice, about the time she got moved out of her table by other customers and sidled in next to me. Not touching. But close … Finally, the time came to meet up with my daughter at a jewelry workshop a couple doors done the street. I politely, if firmly, detached myself from GG, said goodbye, wished her well, and scurried off. My compassion tested. My heart also a bit sore, thinking of where GG would spent the night. And the next day. And the rest of her life.

SUPER BOWL … Sadly, Mayor Ed Lee and the not-so-progressive San Francisco pols used the Super Bowl down the Peninsula at the new Levi Stadium in Santa Clara as an excuse to roust the homeless from their tent city at the foot of Potrero Hill. Which, in turn, sparked public protests from the decidedly liberal element still infiltrating the hipster capital of California … Not that having hundreds of people (they actually estimate about 1,500) living in the streets is a good situation. It’s not. And so something has to be done … But moving people for a football game is maybe not the best thing to be done.

BRONCOS … You didn’t have to be a Broncos fan to root for the Manning underdogs against the Newton upstarts. But the Angler Inn was a good setting to watch the upset. Not a spectacular game. Lots of turnovers – mostly benefiting Colorado. But a hard-fought slog that went our way … Life doesn’t always happen like that. Nice to be part of the good times when it does.

JOE HUTCHISON … Colorado Poet Laureate Joseph Hutchison has a blog [www.jhwriter.com]. He recently sent out an email with a list of his best books in 2015. And two Western Slope poets made his list … “Best Poetic Discovery: Wendy Videlock (how did I survive without her marvelous wit?) … Best Floating World Poetry: Art Goodtimes’ Looking South to Lone Cone, where the local and the spiritual intersect and release astonishing flashes of, well, I can only call it wisdom.”

SCIENCE NOTES … What were the science breakthroughs this past year that you won’t find in textbooks, but are important changes in how we as a culture see things? To find out I turned to Science News, published by the non-profit Society for Science & the Public … Pluto, that demoted sub-par planet, turned into the year’s hall-of-fame superstar -- thanks to a robotic spaceship the size of a grand piano named New Horizons, which revealed its ice volcanoes, mountain ranges and regions devoid of craters, in transmissions still being received … “Seeing a new world for the first time,” opined Cathy Olkin, a planetary scientist at Boulder’s Southwest Research Institute, “I mean that’s huge.”

THE TALKING GOURD

Listserves

where theorists

bat intellectual systemologies

back & forth like bric-a-brac

you can almost

smell where they’re headed

& beat them to the seat

though, careful,

they like to piss on new poles

& bark up each other’s trees

still

I like the leads

they give us

Iris Willow, Jersey Boys, Scoot, Paul Fericano, Dennis Dybeck, Kit Muldoon’s passing and an elegy poem for Kit Muldoon

Spending time with my daughter

(photo by Bert Fan)

SAN FRANCISCO … The nicest part of taking off for California to honor my old parish priest on his 90^th birthday was spending time with my daughter Iris Willow and my son-in-law Bertrand Fan. As I explained last week, we decided to take advantage of city life and did three major theatrical productions – both the nationally renowned American Conservatory Theater’s Satchmo at the Waldorf in the ornate Geary Theater and the working-class Marsh Studio Theater’s production of Echo Brown’s Black Virgins Are Not For Hipsters in the Mission District. Both were extraordinary … But we tried our luck, decided to go for broke and paid $100 each to see a traveling version of a Broadway musical as well.

JERSEY BOYS … I’ve never made it to Broadway, although I’ve seen my share of musicals. But never as professional or polished a production as this. Watching it in the landmark Orpheum Theatre helped … I had a vague memory of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. But soon as I heard Sherry baby, it all came flooding back to me. That classic early Sixties sound. Part of my adolescent yearning. And that later hit, Big Girls Don’t Cry … These weren’t world-changing songs. But they were pop hits. It’s about that great American dream of success. And Valli does succeed. But the story is kind of a sad one. Yes, he and his buddies made it from street kids to pop sensations, but at quite a cost. Betrayals. Suicides. Huge disappointments. So, in the end, in spite of all the fame and fortune, it’s a bittersweet story … But nothing bitter about the production. It was fantastic music, dancing, costumes, staging, everything. What you’d expect from an amazing show like this … And it taught so many lessons as only theater can do. Making other people’s lives come alive in such pointed scenes that you can’t help talking away things in your own life from the dazzle of the acting and emotional avalanche of experience recreated … I’m hoping to go see more theater, locally, in Denver and back in SF, when I get back there. I can’t think of any artistic medium that moves me more than live theater.

(Photo by Iris Willow)

SCOOT … Maybe the most surprising and fun activity Iris and I had were renting electric motor scooters and tooling around the San Francisco hills, visiting friends, going to museums, taking in some of the great restaurants that seem to be as prolific as San Juan boletes in a good year. Scoot, the name of the service, uses smart phone technology to actually run the scooters. You get one at one site, drive it around, take it to a battery-replenishing site or park it and use another one. The smart phone keeps track of everything and takes the money from your on-file card. You don’t deal with people. Just machines. They have a range of 20+ miles, which works in SF, but maybe not in many sprawling cities … But we drove all around Golden Gate Park. Visited the new De Young Museum thanks to poet buddy Dennis Dybeck. Met up with poet Paul Fericano and sem buddy Kerry Yates and had a great lunch at Pacific Catch. Toured a couple museums, including the Contemporary Jewish Museum and a great show, Chasing Justice – artwork depicting the union organizing of some great Russian-Jewish activists in the automobile industry in the 1930s … Easy to park. Gasoline-free. We even found Vermont St. – the twisting roadway in Bernal Heights that’s as crooked as Lombard Street but without the tourists … If you’re adventuresome, let me recommend Scoot as the best way to tour San Francisco on one’s own.

Art, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Kit Muldoon, SETH at a performance in Denver

KIT MULDOON … Many in Colorado’s poetry community mourned the loss of this dear heart, who succumbed to cancer last week after a long illness. There was a memorial reading at the legendary Mercury Café in Denver, where she often read, including at the annual end-of-the-year Erotic Festival of Poetry. I got to read the poem below I’d written in her honor, as did Ted Vaca (who offered the near-homeless Muldoon a hospice room in his house with his family for the last six months of her life – bless him!), Jimi Bernath, Roseanna Frechette and many other of her poet friends. She will be missed.

Kit on Valentine's at the Merc (Photo by Andy O'Leary)

THE TALKING GOURD

Picking Red

-for Kit Kalriess Muldoon

There it was. A red kerchief left

in the Denver Museum parking

lot. Unclaimed. Run over

Do I stoop to pick it up

& wave its dust aloft

into my floating world?

A gesture, maybe. Like Kit's

all in red, sharing

center stage with the Erotic

Or conjuring stone soup

for sodden poets in the San

Juan shelter of her worn van

Making more than just

do, with meager pickings

Making a feast. That's it!

That’s Kit, McRedeye sez

Making a feast of adversities

And for us, in our sadnesses

it’s picking up on the red

brilliance she’s left us

Not dead cloth left behind

Fr. John Coleman, St. Joseph's Catholic School, Satchmo at the Waldorf, John Douglas Thompson, Black Virgins Are Not For Hipsters, Echo Brown and a poem by Lito Tejada-Flores about Doug Tompkins

Honoring a holy man of the cloth

Fr. John and Bill Murphy at 90th Birthday Lunch
(Photo by Patricia Murphy Hardy)

FATHER JOHN … It’s almost a given with modern American life. We change our situation. Move away from home. Lose touch with old friends. Rarely do we get a chance to reconnect with our past lives from 50 some years ago. But thanks to cyber connections with members of my grade school class from St. Joseph’s Catholic School in California, I got to do just that this past week … Our local parish priest – one of those selfless Catholic holy men for whom Christ’s gospel was about serving the poor not beefing up the collection plate – was celebrating his 90^th birthday. So classmates Ray DiFazio of San Francisco and Gary Shara of San Jose assembled a dozen or so former altar boys and a sprinkling of Catholic school girls from the our old Mountain View days (circa 1952-59) to take the good padre out to lunch at the Bay Café beside the Palo Alto Municipal Airport … It was a beautiful meal, with a lot of reminiscences and catching up and memories relived. Father John Coleman was alert and as kindly and admirable as ever, ministering still to a mostly Hispanic flock in his East Palo Alto parish … “Arthur McArthur” he used to call me, and he did again. Talking of the days when my Dad was altar boy director and all of us were idealistic young people, with our lives ahead of us -- before we’d gone off in different directions. Had become lawyers, teachers, politicians. One a falconer, another a college provost, another a jazz musician. Most retired, or soon to be. But Father John’s loving example had brought us all together for a moment once again, where it wasn’t so important what we were, or what we’d done, but how we all still honored where we came from and how we’d helped shape each other’s lives.

Young Fr John in the sacristy at St. Joseph's Mountain View (Photo by Ray DiFazio)

SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF … It was a homecoming of another kind with my oldest daughter Iris Willow and my son-in-law Bertrand Fan. My dad was in theater and I’ve always loved attending theatrical productions. So this visit to San Francisco the three of us took the time to attend some plays … The Tony Award-winning American Conservatory Theater is one of the nation’s premier theater companies. And we were extremely lucky to catch the amazing John Douglas Thompson in Terry Teachout’s one-man show, Satchmo at the Waldorf … Thompson took us backstage of Louis Armstrong’s public persona to reveal the racial struggles, personal betrayals and musical brilliance of Armstrong and his rise from New Orleans poverty and obscurity to world class fame. It’s a bittersweet story that makes you cry as much as laugh and cheer … And Thompson won a standing ovation at the end of the show -- for good reason. It was a tour-de-force performance. Highly recommended.

Echo Brown in performance (Courtesy Photo)

BLACK VIRGINS ARE NOT FOR HIPSTERS … As luck would have it, Iris, Bertrand and I caught another one-person show. But the situation couldn’t have been more different and yet, for all that, eerily similar. Instead of the gold leaf opulence of ACT’s Geary Theater, we squeezed into the drab, working-class Marsh studio theater in San Francisco’s Mission District to catch the phenomenal Echo Brown unveiling her life story as a coming-of-age young woman. It was sassy, sad, sexy, and at the same time a supremely moving performance. Where Thompson told the tale of black male experience in America, with all its racism and injustice, Brown did nearly the same thing for black female experience – only with a more contemporary spin. Down to earth and in your face … Again, you were made to run the gamut of emotions and feel deeply what it was like to be oppressed and to rise above that oppression through sheer will, humor and life’s dawning revelations. It was another standing ovation evening … I’m hoping Brown brings her marvelous show to Colorado. Highly recommended.

TRANSIT AUTHORITY … Great to see all three major local governments working together so well in Telluride, finally, and making some headway on getting a Regional Transit Authority on the ballot for this coming November. It’s an exciting time for regional cooperation.

WEEKLY QUOTA … “Going from big to little regions, going from capitalist to socialist, going from patriarchy to matriarchy – as long as the discourse remains merely secular and merely scientific, I think it’s doomed. I mean, if it doesn’t kindle us up to singing, if it doesn’t quicken us to dance, to gratitude and praise, what kind of knowledge is it?” –Ronald Goodman, Planet Drum Pulse, Fall 2015

THE TALKING GOURD

Remembering

Doug Tompkins

Not enough time

Not enough time to

save the planet

Not enough time to

reseed all those grasses

But the hills are greener now

Not enough time to

restore those jaguars

to their rightful place

But the world is

a little wilder now

Not enough time for all

his ideas, plans and projects

schemes and dreams

But enough

for the most important ones

Never enough time

But enough time to love Kris

Always enough time for friends

And enough time to

change the world

Thanks Doug

-Lito Tejada-Flores

Mountainfilm Co-founder

Chile