A preview of next week’s all-Madonna episode of “Glee” — with Sue Sylvester starring in “Vogue!”
One thing I especially love about this show is is agnosticism about music — it makes no distinction between classic rock (“Somebody to Love”), Broadway show tunes (“Defying Gravity”), 60’s pop (“Don’t Make Me Over”), or current hits (“My Life Would Suck Without You”). I love the mash-up episodes, combining songs like “Smile” (Lily Allen) with “Smile” (composed some 80 years earlier by Charlie Chaplin). It is a hallmark of adolescence to be exclusionary and to define people by what they like, with absolute and rigid categories for indie, metal, emo, and especially NOW vs. THEN. So I am very happy to see this show not just introduce its audience to music they may have thought of as outside their sphere but to the very idea of openness to great songs, wherever they come from.
I Remember Better When I Paint: Treating Alzheimer’s through the Creative Arts is a documentary about the way that the arts can reach people struggling with severe dementia and other memory impairments. It is a touching and inspiring film that should remind us all of the power of art — and love — and of the humanity that persists even when the more superficial manifestations of daily communication fail. The film will be shown on some PBS stations (check local listings) and is available on DVD.
Interview: Dr. Rick Hodes of ‘Making the Crooked Straight’
Posted on April 13, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Dr. Rick Hodes is an Orthodox Jew who has devoted his life to “tikkun olam,” “healing the world. His motto is the Talmud’s statement that “He who saves one life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” Dr. Hodes has spent most of his professional life working with the poor and sick in Ethiopia, treating hundreds of patients and taking seventeen children into his own home to raise them as his family. His salary is paid by the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee, and he raises the money for his patients. A new 30-minute documentary about the doctor, his work, and the children will be shown on HBO. The director is Susan Cohen Rockefeller.
I spoke to Dr. Hodes by phone as he was preparing to fly back to the US from Ethiopia.
How did you come to Ethiopia?
I came first in 1984 because of the famine. I came as a relief worker. I was a resident at Johns Hopkins and I took five or six weeks off and worked in the famine camps. For a while I was the only doctor for several thousand starving people.
What surprised you about Ethiopia?
The depth of the culture, the depth of the ancient Christianity, how people in Ethiopia really know who they are. They don’t think of themselves as black. They don’t think of themselves as African. They really think of themselves as Ethiopian. Even their Christianity is very much involved with their Ethiopian identity. If you go to a Christian ceremony, it will be very Ethiopian as well, with the colors and flags. Ethiopians know who they are. They really like their culture. They have their own religion, their own food, their own system. If they’re not in Ethiopia and find someone else from Ethiopia, they feel very close to them, especially if they are from the same region.
I have heard that in Ethiopia everyone carries the children around, that everyone takes care of the children as though they belong to the whole community.
They carry the children on their backs, there’s a lot of physical contact, child abuse is much less here. The rate of psychological problems from lack of care seems to be lower.
As an outsider, was it difficult for you to gain their trust?
Once you start doing good things, they start coming to you. They will ask if I can help them, teach them, do something with them. And learning the language.
What led you to take over responsibility for the children?
Bewoket had run away from home because he was dying. And he ended up in the university hospital. They discharged him to a Catholic mission. I was volunteering there. He was very attached to me. And he was in such difficult shape it was actually easier to have him in my house, where I could care for him. Once I took in one, I met another one, and so on. I try to say that this is finished, but it’s not finished.
Do the kids get along with each other?
Any two people under the same roof will not always agree, but they do well.
What do you do for fun?
They play board games. The healthier ones play soccer. The less healthy ones play Monopoly and card games. It’s funny, three years ago they had not seen a car or a white person and now what gets them most excited is buying a hotel on Boardwalk.
Do they want to become doctors?
A lot of them do. One boy was dying in Gojam and his dad sold two goats to get him $30 to come to the big city. They came to Addis Abeba,, and they spent 20 cents a night to sleep on the floor of the hotel with 20 people. They had no money for the bus so they had to walk six or seven miles to get to me. I reached into my pocket and gave him $10 and I said, “Here, every time you come I will give you more, so spend this. Eat two or three meals a day, sleep in a bed, take the bus, take care of yourself.” And that is when he started getting better.
And now this boy, who had been in a remote school studying to be an Orthodox priest is in eighth grade, speaks fluent English, and wants to be a doctor. When he came to America he told his life story at a fund-raiser and we raised $1 million. There’s another girl who was an orphan, living in a medical college because she had nowhere else to go. I ended up bringing her to Addis Abeba, treating her TB, sending her for surgery, and now she is in 6th grade and wants to be a doctor. When I first met her she said she wanted to be a housemaid because then she would have a place to live and cook. Now she’s living in my house, she speaks English. For $10-12 thousand we’ve completely transformed her life.
What do Americans need to know about Ethiopia?
The depth of the culture and the niceness of the people. It is a poor country, but it is a proud country with a deep culture, a history, definitely not uncivilized.
How does your Jewish faith inspire and sustain you?
I really enjoy being Jewish. I pray three times a day and keep the Sabbath to the extent that a doctor with patients can do that. We just had a big Passover seder. It is an important part of my life, the daily schedule, the weekly schedule, the monthly schedule. It becomes all-encompassing. But one of the nice things about being in Ethiopia is that I feel very welcome here. I respect other religions. Most of the kids are Orthodox Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim.
What I’m personally trying to do is making the world a better place for a few people, helping as many people as I can in that sense. I’m sending 16 kids in May to Ghana for surgery. That’s the greatest thing in the world for me.
Storytime Live! — Interview with Director Sam Scalimoni
Posted on April 12, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Sam Scalimoni is the director of Nickeoldeon’s new traveling “Storytime Live” show, starring its most popular characters, including Dora and Diego, the Backyardigans, the Wonder Pets, Kai-Lan, and more. What is it like to create a show for the most enthusiastic audience in the world, pre-schoolers and their families?
We thought we knew what we were in store for, but we really didn’t know until we saw it in front of an audience. Last week we were at Radio City Music Hall and to see 6000 families come in and just cheer for all the characters — the young performers that we have definitely felt like rock stars. How do you hold their attention? They’re a very squirmy bunch and very excited!
The great thing about our show as opposed to those in the past is that we have four different stories. So it’s like four mini-musicals of about 15 minutes long. And between them we have Moose and Zee from Nick, Jr. coming out and play puzzles with the audience and help them guess what’s coming up next. So they’re constantly being engaged and entertained with something new happening all the time, and being led through it, entertained and educated at the same time.
They’ve taken four of the most popular character groups from the Nickelodeon stories. And they’re very fun and clever and fast-moving and they never talk down to them. We like to think of our show as the first theatrical experience for young people. We have some very clever writing and parents have as good a time as the young people.
I approach this like any other project. It is about story-telling and it’s about clarity. We kept the focus on making it clear to anyone, not just young people. We use our paint-brushes, the costumes, the scenery, even the lighting to show you what’s happening next and where your focus should be. And I find young people have a better sense of reality than adults. They know the theater is a pretend kind of place. We have some fantasy — a dragon, a witch who flies, a monkey king who flies, a dragon that turns into a prince — we have those kind of thing but they are done in a theatrical way and the young people are right there with you. You mentioned the costume design — what were some of the challenges?
The costume design is challenging because the characters are so well known and the kids want them to look familiar. But the actors are human and we did not want them to have big cartoon-y heads. And we wanted them to be comfortable and be able to do all of the movement they needed to do. So we were working with five different creative teams from Nickelodeon to get the essence of the character — real people and monkeys and puppetry — and make sure it was practical for what we wanted to do on stage.
We had very specific requirements. It very much reflects our audience, a lot of ethnic diversity, people who were tumblers, who could do the flying and all of that. But most important was we needed people who could be themselves, very honest performers, none of that phony kind of acting as opposed to really being a person so the young kids could connect to them. Is there a moment that really gets a big reaction from the crowd at every performance?
When the monkey king flies from nowhere, he just appears, and it is very exciting. And Dora makes a magical transition into a princess and it always gets a big “Oooo.” And our finale is so exciting because it’s the first time Nickelodoen has let us mix the characters from all the shows, to see them all together in a really exciting dance number, the kids are all dancing in the aisles.
The Touring Schedule — Dates and Locations:
In an especially touching episode of the series, Matt goes to Iraq to visit a family whose children need surgery for dwarfism-related health problems. I began by asking him about that trip.
How did you come to meet with the family in Iraq?
I made three trips all in all. It was mid-2008 and a friend of mine who had a little person daughter was stationed in Iraq as a helicopter pilot and called me from Iraq to say one of their street patrols had stumbled across a family with several children with dwarfism or what we call skeletal dysplasia, that’s the most technical term to describe it. And they are in dire need of medical help. I said, “What can I do over here?” We needed permission from the officials in Washington to bring them to the US and that was going to be a tough road because they are trying to build the medical community over there and not bring people over here.
I got permission to go over there and the military escorted me. We brought the families to a facility to get x-rayed and brought them back over to the states. We were actually able to convince a doctor and an anesthesiologist to go back there with us and perform operations on a couple of the different children. But they needed more serious operations that cannot be done in a tent in a war zone. They needed really sophisticated spinal monitoring equipment. So on the third trip over I was able to bring the kids back. I use the term loosely — there was really an army of people involved, the military, the State Department, I was just an observer of a lot of this, a facilitator, but there was a lot of people really intensely dedicate to these children and this family.
The oldest gal who had the most dire need went first and there was complications and unfortunately we lost her. We knew that was a strong possibility, but it was very sad and disappointing to have made all that headway getting them over here. The reality was heartbreaking.
Is there much of a little people community in Iraq?
There is an active community. They don’t have the kind of organizational structure we have here, with by-laws and everything. The second trip, when I went over with the doctors to do the operation and it turned into a clinic. They announced it and they came out of the woodwork, little people did, parents holding their children, adults, the same variety and a larger percentage than you would get here in the states!
How has the show affected the way Americans see little people?
It has affected us and it has been positive. People see us as real people. Even people that hate our show and dis on us about keeping a messy house and not raising our children right, and that’s fine, that’s what makes our show popular, to have not polarizing but different opinions about us — I think our show has positively affected society’s view of little people. And now, with the other shows, Jen and Bill, The Little Couple, The Little Chocolatiers, we had known all of these people for years and we’re all high-fiving because it gives a more rounded view, other little people who have interesting lives, too. The only thing that’s the same about us is our size.
How did you meet your wife, Amy?
I met her at a little people’s conference in Michigan, that’s where she’s from, in 1986. It was not exactly love at first sight but we stayed in touch by mail. We were both interested in each other. And then about six months later she said she was coming to visit a friend in California. I don’t think she ever actually saw her friend! We ended up spending all of our time together and hit it off pretty heavy that week. I visited her a month later, and she came back to see me. Our total courtship time was three visits in six months. I popped the question, and of course I wanted to elope. But she was a nice conservative Christian girl and she wanted a big wedding. So we compromised and she cooked up a wedding in short order and a couple of months later we were married, in September of 1987.
How has raising your children so publicly made it harder or easier to be a parent?
It has made it harder, absolutely. There’s a lot more influences in their lives, producers and people dragging them around. But one advantage is that I didn’t realize Jacob was hanging out on the roof as much as he was, but I saw it on film and was able to tell him not to. There’s a lot of filming that does not make it to television, and I see things I might not have seen. Or the producers will tell me what they’re up to. But it is harder in a sense because I don’t want to scold them on camera. No one wants that. Some people think what they see is all there is. The bloggers don’t have a clue that it’s quite a bit more balanced that what they’re shown. That is frustrating for us. It seems like a big window on our lives but it’s not everything.
What’s unique about our show compared to other reality shows is that we spend a lot of time hanging out and waiting for something to happen. A lot of shows are much more produced. They’re focused on the activity. There’s hours and hours of just sitting around watching us do nothing in the hopes of a five-minute interaction and then they zone in on how that comes to a conclusion over the next few months, whether a conflict or a triumph. But that means that they will catch one part of an interaction, like maybe some angry words, and not necessarily have or show the other part, kissing and making up. That’s the nature of television.
What is coming up on the show that we should look forward to?
We have a trip to Europe where the boys go off and do their own thing. They backpack through Germany and Amsterdam. Despite what you may think, the producers do not interfere and if they get lost, they get lost. Then I meet up with them in Paris and we have all of the logistics of travel and who wants to go where and the evolution of the family, what everyone wants to do, Molly’s birthday, and our everyday on the farm stuff happening!
is a documentary about the way that the arts can reach people struggling with severe dementia and other memory impairments. It is a touching and inspiring film that should remind us all of the power of art — and love — and of the humanity that persists even when the more superficial manifestations of daily communication fail. The film will be shown on some PBS stations (check local listings) and is available on DVD. 
and 
. 