Perhaps because I am not Caucasian. some friends and colleagues have been asking for my opinion on the broiling brouhaha over the whitewashed Oscar nominations for 2016. To one such query, I replied cryptically, “People should stop whining, and just get on with it.” Not surprisingly, my politically incorrect response was met with uncomfortable…
Nearly two years after his death, Grant K. Goodman’s scholarly research on the subject of “comfort women,” a euphemism for the sex slaves working in the official brothels established throughout Southeast Asia by the Japanese Imperial Army for the pleasure of its soldiers during World War II, continues to provide key evidence that such atrocities…
Every year, on my birthday, Grant Goodman, who was an early riser, would call me at 6 in the morning and sing “Happy Birthday” most endearingly because it was also mostly off-key. Later in the day, we would get together for a special celebratory lunch or dinner, just the two of us, after which he…
Although I had seen the Metropolitan Opera’s energetic new production of Franz Lehar’s THE MERRY WIDOW in its Live-in-HD series in movie theaters last year, I could not bypass the chance to see the same production live onstage this past weekend at the Lyric in Chicago. Instead of Renee Fleming and Nathan Gunn, this time…
On the afternoon of 9 May 2011, the English Department of the University of Kansas gave a festive “milestones celebration” in the North Gallery of the Spencer Research Library for three of its new retirees, presided by Chair Marta Caminero-Santangelo, and organized by Administrative Assistant Robert Elliott. The retirees (Mike Johnson, Jim Hartman and I)…
When 9/11 struck, a collective sigh of relief was heard from among the Filipinos I knew in the United States. “Thank God the perpetrators were not brown,” they cried, although I’m not sure what skin pigmentation they would assign to Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorists in the Middle East. If not also brown, then what? Tan?…
I was riding high in 1977, coming off, as it were, from the “success” of my first play, Conpersonas. Marshall Fine, the Arts Editor of the Lawrence Journal-World, had somehow convinced the editor that the local paper should cover the invitational performance of the K.U. production of the play at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. …