The Bad Grade That Changed The U.S. Constitution by Matt Largey    In 1982, a 19-year-old college sophomore named Gregory Watson was taking a government class at UT Austin.  For the class, he had to write a paper about a governmental process.  So he went to the library and started poring over books about the U.S. Constitution—one of his favorite topics.  "I'll never forget this as long as I live," Watson says.  "I pull out a book that has within it a chapter of amendments that Congress has sent to the state legislatures, but which not enough state legislatures approved in order to become part of the Constitution.  And this one just jumped right out at me."  The unratified amendment read as follows:  "No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened."  The amendment had been proposed almost 200 years earlier, in 1789.  It was written by James Madison and was intended to be one of the very first constitutional amendments, right along with the Bill of Rights.  But it didn't get passed by enough states at the time.  To ratify an amendment, three-quarters of state legislatures need to approve it.  And it turned out that the 200-year-old proposed amendment didn't have a deadline.  Watson was intrigued.  He decided to write his paper about the amendment and argue that it was still alive and could be ratified.  He turned it in to the teaching assistant for his class—and got it back with a C.  He needed 38 state legislatures to approve the amendment.  Nine states had already approved it, mostly back in the 1790s, so that meant Watson needed 29 more states to ratify it.  He wrote letters to members of Congress to see whether they knew of anyone in their home states who might be willing to push the amendment in the state legislature.  When he did get a response, it was generally negative.  Some said the amendment was too old; some said they just didn't know anyone who'd be willing to help.  Mostly, he got no response at all.  But then, a senator from Maine named William Cohen did get back to him.  Cohen, who later served as secretary of defense under President Clinton, passed the amendment on to someone back home, who passed it on to someone else, who introduced it in the Maine Legislature.  In 1983, state lawmakers passed it.  "So I'm thinking, 'my first success story; this can actually be done'," Watson says.  Feeling emboldened, he started writing to every state lawmaker he thought might be willing to help.  After a while, it started to work.  Colorado passed the amendment in 1984.  And then it picked up momentum.  Five states in 1985.  Three each in 1986, 1987 and 1988.  Seven states in 1989 alone.  By 1992, 35 states had passed the amendment.  Only three more to go.  After 10 years of letter-writing, sweet-talking and shaming, Watson was within reach of his goal.  On May 5, 1992, both Alabama and Missouri passed the amendment.  And on May 7, as Watson listened on the phone, the Michigan House of Representatives put it over the top.

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/05/526900818/the-bad-grade-that-changed-the-u-s-constitution  The Muser heard about this story watching a comedy skit on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah in May 2018.

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

meme  (meem)  noun   1.  An element of culture, idea, behavior, etc., that’s transmitted from person to person.  2.  An image, video clip, etc. often with amusing caption, that’s transmitted virally on the Internet.  From Greek mimeisthai (to imitate, copy); coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976.

NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED  You can't get anywhere unless you're willing to take a risk.  The saying dates back to Chaucer (c. 1374) and is similar to the late fourteenth century French proverb:  Qui onques rien n'enprist riens n'achieva (He who never undertook anything never achieved anything)  The proverb was included in John Heyword's collection of proverbs in 1546.  First cited in the United States in 'Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden.  It takes varying forms:  Nothing ventured, nothing lost, nothing ventured, nothing won, etc. ."  Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996).  https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/5/messages/951.html

           

Celebrating the Audience:  Approaches to Participatory Performance  posted by Josh Sobel  July 27, 2014   I spoke with Halena Kays, Artistic Director of The Hypocrites in Chicago.  From promenade stagings of Pirates of Penzance to audience members reading lines during David Cromer’s record-breaking Our Town, The Hypocrites are constantly trying out different ways to engage with their audiences.  In our conversation, she brought up a few of the pitfalls that can trip up this kind of work.  Many artists have the philosophy in creating their work that “the audience has all the power.”  And this isn’t true.  As the performer and artist you always have the power.  It’s your show, it’s your theatre, your rules.  So it’s your job to create a scenario where you are always the one looking foolish, where the audience is always at a higher status, and where they can never make a “mistake”—only you can.  In 2013 Halena helmed Jay Torrence’s Ivywild:  The True Tall Tales of Bathhouse John, a brilliantly oddball telling based on the true story of early 1900s Chicago Alderman John Coughlin and his siphoning of money from Chicago’s vice district in an attempt to build an amusement park in Colorado.  The audience participation that was featured in this piece was not an initially planned element:  It began with “what is the story?” and “what are the goals of the production?”  What experience do you want the audience to have, and why for this story?  For Ivywild, we wanted the audience to feel like they were on a ride, that they were getting an amusement park experience; the experience of being amazed and surprised.  From there, the creative team spent at least ten hours just discussing the goals, the story, the desired effect of the play itself before any choices were tried, before participation was fully considered.  Creating this kind of work is a joy.  I recently dipped my toe in these waters with an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.  When creating this piece, Sarah Rose Graber, a collaborator on the show and current Fulbright Scholar studying devised and participatory theatre in the United Kingdom, stressed one thing above all:  “When interacting with the audience, it must always be an act of celebration, never one of obligation or imposition.”  Read more at  http://howlround.com/celebrating-the-audience-approaches-to-participatory-performance

Have you attended  “immersive” or “participatory” or “interactive” theatre?  The answer is yes if you have attended plays where audience members can guess the guilty party.  The answer is yes if you've attended Tony and Tina's wedding, Class Reunion (you'll get to sing the school song honoring the cicada), Sleep No More (based primarily on Macbeth), and Finnegan's Wake (you're in the middle of a raucous Irish wake).   Thank you, Muse reader!

In a survey conducted by the American Heart Association in 2011, 61 percent of respondents incorrectly said sea salt is a low-sodium an alternative to table salt.  Here’s the truth:  most salts--including sea salt, table salt, kosher salt, and Himalayan pink salt--contain about 40 percent sodium.  The label might claim to have less sodium than table salt, and here’s why:  it’s about the volume of salt that can fit into your measuring spoon.  If the salt crystals are small, more of them will fit into your measuring spoon than if they are large.  So, while table salt may have about 2300 mg of sodium in a teaspoon, there are about 2000 mg of sodium per teaspoon if you are using sea salt , and pink Himalayan salt has about 1700 mg of sodium per teaspoon . . . all because the volume of the salt crystals in a teaspoon are different!  To get a clearer picture, you can check the food package, Nutrition Facts label to compare how each type of salt compares to table salt.  Check out how much sodium you should eat for more information.  Some companies claim that sea salts and mountain salts like pink Himalayan salt contain special minerals.  The levels of minerals reported are very low (so low, they may not be reported, depending on the brand).  You can eat minerals that are touted in these salts (like iron and magnesium) by eating healthy.  This includes eating vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fat-free or low-fat dairy, lean meats, poultry, and fish (preferably oily), legumes, unsalted nuts and seeds and non-tropical vegetable oils.  Enjoying a variety of healthful foods should give you the nutrients, minerals, and energy you need to live a healthy life.  https://sodiumbreakup.heart.org/pink_himalayan_salt_is_it_lower_in_sodium

May 21, 2018  VINALHAVEN, Me.   For years before Robert Indiana died, his deepening isolation on this remote island, more than an hour’s ferry ride off the Maine coast, had mystified some longtime friends and business associates.  Mr. Indiana, whose career was made, and nearly consumed, by his creation of the sculpture “LOVE,” had sought refuge here four decades ago, an exile from a New York art world he had come to resent, and settled into a rambling Victorian lodge hall overlooking Penobscot Bay, where he was, more or less, left alone to create his art.  [Read the New York Times obituary of Robert Indiana.]  In a federal lawsuit filed May 18, 2018, a day before Mr. Indiana’s death at 89, a company that says it has long held the rights to several of Mr. Indiana’s best-known works proposed an answer, arguing in court papers that the caretaker and a New York art publisher had tucked the artist away while they churned out unauthorized or adulterated versions of his work.  “They have isolated Indiana from his friends and supporters, forged some of Indiana’s most recognizable works, exhibited the fraudulent works in museums, and sold the fraudulent works to unsuspecting collectors,” said the lawsuit filed last week by Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. in Federal District Court in Manhattan.  Murray Carpenter and Graham Bowley   Read more and see pictures at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/arts/design/robert-indiana-vanished-artist.html  Read NYT obituary at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/obituaries/robert-indiana-love-pop-art-dies.html

May 22, 2018  Philip Roth, the American literary icon whose novel “American Pastoral” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1998, has died, at the age of eighty-five, according to friends close to him.  His great subjects, as Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote in this magazine, in 2006, included “the Jewish family, sex, American ideals, the betrayal of American ideals, political zealotry, personal identity,” and “the human body (usually male) in its strength, its frailty, and its often ridiculous need.”  Roth published his first story in The New Yorker, “The Kind of Person I Am,” in 1958; the following year, another story in the magazine, “Defender of the Faith,” prompted condemnations from rabbis and the Anti-Defamation League.  “His sin was simple:  he’d had the audacity to write about a Jewish kid as being flawed,” David Remnick wrote in a Profile of Roth, in 2000.  “He had violated the tribal code on Jewish self-exposure.”  In 1979, in its June 25th and July 2nd issues, The New Yorker published—in its entirety—“The Ghost Writer,” the first of Roth’s novels to be narrated by his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.  Zuckerman would make subsequent appearances in the magazine, in “Smart Money” (from “Zuckerman Unbound,” 1981) and “Communist” (from “I Married a Communist,” 1998).  Over two issues, in 1995, The New Yorker also published excerpts from “Sabbath’s Theater” (“The Ultimatum” and “Drenka’s Men”), for which Roth won his second National Book Award.  (The first was for “Goodbye, Columbus,” published in 1959.)  Roth also leaves behind a corpus of essays, criticism, and other artifacts, some of which Adam Gopnik explored in his essay “Philip Roth, Patriot,” last year.  https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/philip-roth-in-the-new-yorker

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1891  May 23, 2018