Toejam at Paddy O’Shay’s Sept 2nd, SMEast ’78, Harold Epstein.

Aug 17 2011

Toejam at Paddy O’Shay’s Sept 2nd, SMEast ’78, Harold Epstein.

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Harold Epstein, Musician. SMEast Class '78

I have a way of not getting to the main point, so here it is. Harold Epstein’s Band Toejam (or whatever etiquette is to indicate collective ownership of a group of musicians but Harold is who I know. When you google it he has all the important businessman titles: General Manager and Booking agent) is playing at Paddy O’Shay’s Labor Day Weekend.

So, what would anyone have to do that could possibly be better than seeing a committed creative of (40 years? …when did you start playing Harold?) in our class at East to celebrate that we’re 50ish and shouldn’t be laboring so hard?
Or, as I see it, play is indeed work and takes some effort.
So, get in the car (Julayne Ramsey is driving 600 miles from Minnesota…I’m not giving up on Eugene Bridges as he needs some fresh Kansas air being down there is smoky moutains all summer), hop on the plane, ride your bike on the bike path on I-435, whatever you have to do. It should be fun.
I’ve heard there will be a former recluse or two from my neighborhood putting in an appearance.
Dave Wood (and Denise Gatzoulis) called me a month or so ago and at that time we committed to seeing Harold play next KC visit, so he motivated me. So, I’m hoping they’re both in town. All the outdoorsman can sit together at one table and talk hunting and fishing and Cabela’s. I’ll pass on this for the fashion and art and photography with Julayne and Lisa Revare Hickok. I’m name dropping on my homies being there, have no idea of their social commitments that Friday as we’re all too busy to talk.
no one comes to these things if they are true dyed-in-the-wool pills or assholes.

so here’s the data:

Paddy O’Shays

Sept 2, 2011

9 pm to 1 am

135th and Nieman

As I haven’t seen Harold and didn’t hear him play in high school, I have no idea of music genre. In my mind, this could be anything from Led Zeppelin to the Monkees, but I’m sure we can find a way to dance to whatever it is. I intend to dance a lot, mostly with the girls.

So, that’s about it. Toejam, is of course, front and center. But, I do love these opportunities for high school friends to get together. I realize that it may make me a bit of a loser to think back about high school. Whatever…But two things…

stop here for 99.9% of readers. The rest is just Paula’s attempts to get some of the thoughts about high school and friends role in later life that are constantly spinning around her head, onto paper and into her blog therapy. This is done for numerous reasons, one being her goal to talk and burden/bore others less about such randomness in casual conversation. I’m going to rehearse before I go Friday evening, can’t promise anything.

I know I always have mixed feelings of good and bad about this time in my life. And almost 30 more years of real life, different people, different experiences, different jobs and places certainly makes this just a little sliver and maybe not the most interesting facet. But, it was the slice when we were transitioning from being girls and boys to women and men (hormonal). And that is a common bond. And, I’m thinking and hoping that amidst all the $h!t of probably not the greatest sex and fumbling, parents and family life, competition, drugs and alcohol and trouble and and self- discovery and Carolyn Howard, that there was a lot of joy and fun for everyone. This is what I like to remember with friends.
On a personal note about friends and I’ll get to the point after a bit of background…. I married 6 months after graduating from KU to an incredible man who went to a private high school in KC and was in a frat at KU. But, he grew up on a ranch in the Flint Hills. I should have realized that the Brooks Brothers and penny loafers were just a small part of this guy. But, the gritty cowboy thing was and of course, will always be extremely alluring, as you can imagine it was for a Johnson County Girl. This John Adams was really is the main show. I was confident that since I was creative, love and I would figure out the rest. I threw myself in and have never regretted it.

So, right after we were married, we moved to the XIT ranch in his family’s cattle business down on the Cimarron River in very rural Meade County, Kansas, 30 miles from the closest city. He’d go there to brand cattle for two weeks in the summer. But, he had never lived there full-time, so we shared the adventure. It is about as diagonally opposite from Johnson County as you can get in Kansas and about as diametrically opposite from Johnson County as it comes.
So, I’m getting closer to my point about old friends, places, and memories of key things to build upon that were my foundation and are my mother’s milk. These are for me: my family, my school friends, creative expression we all have and do in different ways, and France.
The isolation of living on the High Plains was often very challenging for someone like me who a) likes to work for days on end and needs the solitude to do this, b) is efficient and isn’t going to drive 30 miles to town in a lonely moment just have coffee with a female and pick up the milk and c) is at heart a social person. But, I did it, I lived it, and the wandering in the Great American Desert to find self (as the High Plains was labeled when Europeans started to explore America) is me. And maybe we all have had or still have this in some form, whether in our truck or at our computer or in suburbia or at a cocktail party, or out on the beautiful ocean of the hi plains in Kansas…those moments when the blissful Alone can at times be lonely and we go inside our minds to find a companion with a common past that knows us and we don’t have to say a thing.
The point: you were always on my mind and will be there for me, both at happy times and dark moments when there is no one else around and I am weary of being alone.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7f189Z0v0Y&ob=av2n[/youtube]

I look forward to seeing anyone who can make it on Friday, 2nd. Go Harold with the artful life! Paula.

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Apr 1 2011

SME Cheerleading and Carolyn Howard: the Sue Sylvester archetype

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Howie Returning with the Spirit Stick, Summer Camp 2006

Coach Carolyn "Howie" Returning with the Spirit Stick, Summer Camp in Marshall, MO,2007

“Cheerleaders’ Travel Pays off; New Cheers learned at camp” by Britt Alexander, photo credits assumed.

WWCD? Another great woman, What Would Carolyn Do?
Jane Lynch had to have shadowed Carolyn Howard, the virgin Queen of the female worker bees of Shawnee Mission East for decades. Carolyn was our gym teacher, and ruled over the women and the women’s country club sports, swim team, tennis team, cheerleading, heralders and pep club. She counted the homecoming votes, she counted the balls, she tallied the grades, and gave us 5 minutes to peel off that wet lancer blue spandex swimwear before the bell rang for our next class. More about her old school fashion in the JV Cheerleaders, but you get her idea, very Betty Grable. Or was that ruching actually just the indentations in our flesh to girdle in our most socially prized teenage assets?

All my sister Gina’s friends turned out to vote for me as a sophomore, so I was one of the two sophs that made JV with Kathy Kindred and that commenced the relationship with Carolyn (see Kathy: The Sophs on JV with Sr. Bad attitudes). She gave me a B that semester in gym but not knowing who I was up against, I questioned the numbers that got passed on via my sister.

“Sophomores who make JV don’t get straight As.”

She ended up changing the grade which I lived to regret.

The Sophomore Cheerleaders, 1975, Carolyn below.

Carolyn was very pretty and had a great sense of humor. And most of all, she was brutal….5:30 am summer practices before work at the Village Pool at 7…the herkies and hamstrings and but always with a heart of warm iron.

Herkies at sunset...on our Kansas beach...

She always stuck with us no matter how spastic we were, the last girl on the tennis ladder (me) still got to play even if she hadn’t mastered her loser’s mindset as she went into the match. She kept me on, when I petered out after one week of swim practice and intense chlorine, giving Marthe, a great swimmer, and me, the quitter, the coveted jobs as swim team managers who passed out the Vitamin C. My hair has not yet recovered from the humidity.

Paula Graves and Sandy Clingan, Scott's sister. Junior McCall's, in McCall's Magazine. 1968.

Carolyn Howard saved her old tennis balls to give to my mother, Ginny Graves, for puppets in her art classes. Here is a published picture of one of these puppets in McCall’s by Sandy Clingan, Scott’s sister, with cropped partial Paula Graves burlap drawing and mention to prove I was once a famous artist. So back to Sandy’s, it had a green cone-shaped dress and was on a stick. Here’s my dad’s drawing to give you the idea of the function of the tennis ball.

A Ginny Graves-Carolyon Howard joint creation.

I just wanted to highlight Carolyn’s contributions to the Children’s Art World of Kansas City. from Ginny Graves Discover Stuff.

Carolyn Howard had two pets, Pam Hanslip and Julie Hise. Julie was miss all pro sports and this woman worked her @s$ off as she still does in her own career that’s something like boot camp I think. Julie Stram cornered me and Kathy (the two who had traditionally been in head cheerleader slot) and Julie about our stated credentials for the coveted position of Head Cheerleader. Julie won hands down, the first to the thrones demoted to the choir. Kathy and I compared our answers, but we’ve never actually cornered Julie at a reunion to see what she said to get the job, maybe we’ll have to do that next time.

Paula in her letter jacket pre-letters at a particular SME Cheer Party with Kathy, rosy glow from that tasty '78 Marsala, compliments of Graves cooking wine cellar frigidaire.

Julie did pick up on part of the problem right away our sr. year when she jumped us for having a bad attitude at summer camp, and by the way she was more grueling than Carolyn. It didn’t stop from first bottle of cold duck, port, or whatever was available from the Graves or Kindred cellars for toddies in the SMSouth parking lot ’til we brought down the girls of ’78 in a sr-squad pre-wrestling drinking violation when she was out-of-town. For that, Howie benched us for the Shawnee Mission South Game our Sr. Year, just the Seniors, so the Juniors on JV got to cheer.

This is what mostly what Kathy and I contributed to the guys as cheermaidens, good gossip.

a Shawnee Mission East Cheerleader Jumping Jill puppet

Drawings for Carolyn in her lancer blue tracksuit with her warrior women, Jumping Jack Puppeteer Design, by Dean Graves.

And a final heirloom photo of the Carolyn Howard in Sweatsuit jumping Jack doll puppet, construction artist Paula Graves. But of course, Howie was really the puppetmaster until we toughened up and learned our own strings to guide through us through the she-life. And by the way, I earned letters in three sports at Shawnee Mission East; cheerleading, swim team manager, and debate. And I’m proud of it.

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