Paperback Yoga

Hooray for the Home Team

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By Ed Staskus

I was excited when I got an e-mail from Inner Bliss on June 3rd, the day before the start of the NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers. Inner Bliss is one of Cleveland’s premier yoga studios.

“In honor of our CAVS, celebrate the beginning of the NBA Finals at Inner Bliss all day Thursday! Tomorrow, June 4th wear your CLE Cavaliers gear to any class, all day long and get $5 off your class tomorrow!

Show up and show our team that we’re #ALLinCLE.”

Who wouldn’t want to honor the hometown team? And celebrate, too, obviously, although I wondered if that would be appropriate if the Cavaliers lost the series, which seemed likely since the Las Vegas line was all on the side of the Warriors.

After the first game was said and done the smart money line seemed to be as straight as a Stephen Curry free throw: all net.

The pictures illustrating the Inner Bliss e-mail were galvanizing: a dramatic black-and-white shot of the hometown team taken from behind as they faced a sea of fans. The second shot was of a sea of yogis on their mats on the hardwood floor of Quicken Loans Arena meditating, some with their hands in prayer at their hearts. (Inner Bliss is part of a group that sponsors large citywide yoga events at places like the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Quicken Loans Arena.) The third shot was of the team’s furry mascot in a kind of lunge, like Warrior Pose, with his biceps flexed in classic muscleman style.

The last image was the corporate logo of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The difference between Las Vegas and modern yoga is that Las Vegas is more yogic about professional sports than yoga is. The only bandwagon Las Vegas ever jumps on is the one going down the yellow brick road. It doesn’t matter whose corporate sports logo is on the side of the wagon. There are no hometown favorites in Sin City.

At the bottom of the Inner Bliss e-mail it said: LET’S GET FRIENDLY!

But, what to wear to class on June 4th to get my $5.00 discount? I didn’t own any branded athletic gear of any kind, not even Cavalier gear, despite their rumble through the Eastern Conference play-offs. I looked up Cleveland’s NBA store, which was at the Team Shop in Quicken Loans Arena, and drove downtown to buy some gear.

Parking was $15.00, but I thought, it’s the CAVS!

I almost bought the J. R. Smith Adidas Replica Road Jersey, because J. R. has been my favorite player all year, impersonating Ray Allen from behind the 3-point line game after game and a professional basketball player most of the time the rest of the time, and besides, his sleeveless replica was only $69.95.

In the end, though, I bought the King’s jersey, the man who for all intensive purposes had single-handedly both willed and freight-trained his team into the NBA Finals. The LeBron James Adidas Gold Jersey was still in stock at $109.95, so I snapped it up before anyone else could get to the loose ball.

On my way home, since it was a fine, sunny afternoon, I took the old Shoreway, which winds west along the coast of Lake Erie, rather than the interstate. I began to question whether wearing a replica jersey was enough in terms of showing up and showing my hometown team that I was #ALLinCLE.

I should go to the games, I thought.

One of Inner Bliss’s stock-in-trade posts the past few years have been yogi blurbs titled: WHY I SHOW UP.

Sitting on the sidelines, as they say in yoga class, isn’t going to make you stand up true and straight. You need to show up. It’s all about heart. That’s what basketball players do when they make the big shot: thump their chests.

The first two games of the NBA Finals were scheduled in Oakland, the next two in Cleveland, and the series alternated after that until one team or the other finally won four games and snatched the brass ring.

When I got home I started searching for tickets.

At first I was mildly shocked. The worst seats at Quicken Loans Arena, in the nosebleed section, started at more than $400.00. Seats in the lower bowl were in the vicinity of $1,500.00. When I spotted what courtside floor seats cost I was seriously shocked: $60,000.00.

It wasn’t a brass ring the two professional basketball teams were grabbing for. It was a solid gold ring, encrusted with rare gems, and fashioned by the hand of God.

I would have to sell our house to buy two courtside seats, for my wife and myself, for the first two home games. I tried not to think about what popcorn and Big Gulp sodas might cost us.

Hopefully, the Warriors would sweep the Cavaliers in four and there wouldn’t be anymore home games. If there were I would go bankrupt trying to show up.

Mysore, India, is one of the birthplaces of yoga. It is where Krishnamacharya taught in the 1930s, B. K. S. Iyengar honed his craft, and where the K. Pattabbi Jois Yoga Institute is to this day.

If my wife and I moved to Mysore a two-bedroom apartment in a better neighborhood, with a full kitchen, WIFI, and daily maid service, and including utilities, would cost about $600.00 a month. Eating out in Mysore costs between $1.00 – $2.00 for breakfast or lunch and $2.00 – $4.00 for dinner. My wife doesn’t practice yoga, but if I took a daily class at a local non-famous studio it would cost $100.00 – $150.00 a month.

In other words, for the cost of two lower bowl tickets at two NBA Finals games at Quicken Loans Arena my wife and I could live well, and I could practice yoga every day at a studio in Mysore, for about six months. For the cost of two courtside tickets for two games we could stay there for about twenty years.

Since my wife is not interested in professional sports we finally decided against showing up at #ALLinCLE and the NBA Finals, and also decided that, although Mysore sounded good, especially the daily maid service, we would stay in Lakewood, on the west side of Cleveland, for now.

I gave my King jersey away to my 18-year-old nephew, who doesn’t know about yoga, but does know the world about professional basketball.

I didn’t go to Inner Bliss’s CAVS! Gear Yoga Day the day of the start of the NBA Finals. There was something that bothered me about rooting for one or the other team. I’ve read that players on both teams practice yoga as part of their fitness regimen and thought it best to just wish both of them well.

Instead, I practiced on my mat at home, and the next evening on Friday my wife and I went to the Cleveland State University Student Ballroom and heard Jai Uttal’s kirtan band spin long jazzy sing-along chants. Quicken Loans Arena, less than a mile away, seats 20,562 fans, which are about 20,412 more people than were at the Jai Uttal show.

On Sunday night, while the Warriors and Cavaliers battled it out at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, we had dinner at Ty Fun, a small Thai food restaurant in Tremont, a grungy but gentrified Cleveland neighborhood across the industrial valley from downtown.

My home practice doesn’t cost me anything, tickets for Jai Uttal were $30.00, and the fat noodle and tofu entrees at Ty Fun are $12.50. The bottled lager beer from Thailand was $4.50. All in all our weekend cost less than a jumbo box of popcorn and a couple of Big Gulps at Quicken Loans Arena.

We ate on the small outdoor patio at Ty Fun and all dinner long we could hear the groans and whoops of Cleveland sports fans watching the second game of the Finals unfolding down the yellow brick road on the flat screens at the Flying Monkey Pub next door.

Somebody was winning and somebody was losing. We just couldn’t tell who.

EXTRA! EXTRA! EXTRA! The next morning, watching the highlights of the game on nba.com, I found out that the last roar of the night was a groan in Oakland and a whoop in Cleveland, as the Cavaliers edged the Warriors in their record-setting second straight overtime game of the series. That’s what world championships are made of: heart-breakers.

Sri Satchidananda of Integral Yoga once said, “Losses are always great eye openers.” Maybe there is something yogic about pro ball, after all.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Boomer Swarm

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By Ed Staskus

“Why don’t you all fade away, talkin’ ’bout my generation, don’t try to dig what we all say, talkin’ ’bout my generation.”  The Who

It’s been said everybody loves yoga nowadays. The love wasn’t always the case, at least not in the United States, which was a problem. It is the case today, which might be a worse problem. Yoga is good for everyone, but not everyone is good for it. Even yoga masters like John Friend and Bikram Choudhury, who created practices of great benefit, have not, because of the sex, drugs, and money scandals surrounding them, been altogether good for it.

Yoga in the western world has faced many challenges, from its philosophy being decried as a menace to society to the corporatization of the practice, but the latest threat may be the most menacing. That threat is being posed by the horde of Baby Boomers, as time catches up to them, swarming studios coast-to-coast.

Just fifty-some years before the first Baby Boomers came into existence, at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, lectures and a subsequent speaking tour by Vivekananda inspired many Americans to see the light. They also led to trouble, to yoga being decried as a cult. “Police Break In On Weird Hindu Rites,” blared a New York City newspaper. Twenty years after Vivekanda had come and gone, feature articles like “The Cult of the Yogis Lures Women to Destruction” were still commonplace.

In 1928, Yogananda, the author of Autobiography of a Yogi, was hounded out of Miami, Florida, by hundreds of anxious and angry husbands and fathers who saw him as a sex threat. “Not with my wife or daughter!” they complained and threatened with shouts and clubs.

Throughout the 1930s so-called yogi crimes were a staple of headline writers. During the Cold War some Americans worried about yogis teaching Russian cosmonauts breathing techniques. But, in the 1960s the practice gained traction. It popped up on TV and the Beatles crossed paths with it. By the 1990s new converts were discovering it daily and yoga was off and running.

Baby Boomers led the charge, especially the cadre of Boomers who became teachers, from Sharon Gannon to Ana Forrest to Richard Freeman. “The defining moment when the medical community started taking notice of yoga occurred in 1990,” said Kathryn Arnold, the editor of Yoga Journal at the time. It was also the moment when yoga began to shape shift from a practice of awareness and freedom to a get on your mat get fit get strong sweat out the toxins check out those buns exercise routine.

Postural yoga, a stand-alone practice in pursuit of health, became the vogue it still is today. In A History of Modern Yoga Elizabeth De Michelis fleshed out posture practice as a “secularized healing ritual.” Ben Houhour noted in his History of Yoga in America that the “consolidation of yoga coincided with the coming of age of the Boomer.”

Early on in their reign Boomers got loose on acid with the aim of changing themselves through drug use. The later Boomers of the 1990s flocked to yoga studios and flipped up into headstand with the same resolve. “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” said Timothy Leary, the 1960s guru of LSD. “Drop in, tune in, turn on,” said John Schumacher, a long-time American yoga teacher who spent three decades studying with B. K. S. Iyengar.

In the oughts yoga became the fashion among the better off seeking to become even better off. In the 1970s and 80s the Me Generation had invested in health and exercise fads, self-help programs like EST, and New Age spirituality. As the new decade of doom and diversions unfolded it was yoga’s turn to cater to the Baby Boomers as the practice morphed into exercise for the elite.

Since then yoga has had to go head-to-head with one thing after another, from teachers behaving badly to capitalists doing what they do best. Bikram Choudhury did both, behaving badly and beating the moneymen at their own game, while boasting about it to boot. Some teachers became hatha celebrities, racking up frequent-flier miles, preaching from the pulpit about a practice supposedly sans pulpit.

The corporate world, always looking for the next big thing, licked its lips, liking what it saw of yoga swerving into the mainstream.

Lululemon Athletica, noted for its hundred dollar separates sewn for pennies on the dollar in third world countries, built its apparel empire piggybacking on the practice. In 2012 its sales were $1 billion. Three years later, in 2015, its sales almost doubled to $1.8 billion. Meanwhile, in the birthplace of yoga, most people still wear street shorts and casual t-shirts and women even wear everyday sarees when practicing. They aren’t accessorized for the yoga runway because they don’t push themselves up into shoulder stand on a rock star runway.

In 2002 Trevor Tice founded the CorePower Yoga franchise after taking a class in Telluride, Colorado. “I was very underwhelmed by the facilities and the delivery,” he said. “It was lacking anything a good customer experience should have.” Good yogis now pay up to $170.00 a month to be overwhelmed customers at CorePower Yoga.

Forecasting for 2016 the Advertising Specialty Institute recommended to its promotional pros that the time was ripe to tap into the ever-expanding yoga market. The practice has increasingly been defined, inside and outside its ranks, as a high-end leisure activity, a perception that Rodney Yee in 2011 described as “ass-backwards.”

Backwards never had it so good.

Although commercialization is a problem for a practice that on the face of it eschews commercialization, the immediate problem yoga faces in the next several years is who’s knocking on the door. According to a recent survey conducted by Yoga Alliance and Yoga Journal, nearly 37 million people now practice yoga in the United States, up from 20-some million in 2012. More than half of that recent growth has come from older practitioners, 14 million adults over age 50, up from 4 million in 2012.

It’s the Baby Boomers banging on the door.

As time catches up to them, dragging them down into rocking chairs, they are trying to stay on their feet. “It’s improved my flexibility and balance,” said 66-year-old Len Adelman of Herndon, Virginia.

“The majority of my classes are filled with individuals over the age of sixty,” said Michele Coker, a Certified Yoga Teacher in Maryland. “Many have had injuries and are fed up with physical therapy. They come because their physician suggested it.”

“More doctors are recommending that their patients try yoga to help with healing,” said Carin Gorrell, editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal.

Yoga isn’t Muscle Beach, fortunately for those entering their golden years. No one gets sand kicked in their face. There isn’t the notion of turning anyone away, no matter what, in yoga’s DNA. But, Baby Boomers come bearing baggage. It might be best to open the door slowly and cautiously since what’s on the other side could go boom.

Baby Boomers soaked the economy for all it was worth through the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s. Greed is good, they chanted, and then left everyone else’s finances a wreck. Gen X is in worse shape than their parents and Millennials are worse off than them. The best Baby Boomer brains built fortunes for themselves on Wall Street. They then drove the country into the worst recession in 80 years. 34% of Boomers believe their own children will not enjoy as good a standard of living as they themselves have now, according to the Pew Research Center.

No one in Washington, D. C. ever says Social Security will be a problem for current retirees, in other words, the Baby Boomers. After that, all bets are off.

When the Greatest Generation had finished its run in the Nation’s Capital, it was time for the Boomer-in-Chiefs, Bill Clinton and George Bush the 2nd, to take up the reins. From his breezy approach to spending and debt to his philandering, Bill Clinton was the Boomer-in-Chief who the Baby Boomers deserved. Besides, they had transitioned from dropping LSD to dropping Viagra.

George Bush the 2nd, who was indulged as a young man, indulged himself in the Oval Office with fantasies of Weapons of Mass Destruction and money growing on trees. When the wars he started stalled he proclaimed victory. When the housing market collapsed he was on his way out of the White House, anyway.

Only Barak Obama hasn’t suffered the black eyes of Boomermania. The 800-pound gorilla with the souffle hairdo will not, hopefully, be the next Boomer-in-Chief.

The worst legacy of the Me Generation is still unfolding, which is the legacy of their burning all the cheap fossil fuels they could get their hands on, and then denying for as long as they could that climate change was happening. They will be long gone and not have to pay the piper for the heat-trapping gasses they’ve left behind. Hurricanes and floods are only now starting to rain on their parade.

It might be appropriate to bring a lump of coal to their memorial services.

Before they go to their just reward they are getting up from the stoop of old age and beating a path to yoga studios. Baby Boomers used to crow about never trusting anyone over 30. Now that more than 10,000 of them cross the threshold of 65 every day, the typical Boomer believes that old age doesn’t begin until 72. In other words, “Never trust anyone over 72.” They are putting their trust in yoga.

“It’s never too late, you’re never too old, you’re never too sick, to start again from scratch,” said the yoga master Bishnu Charan Ghosh.

Everyone who takes up yoga has their own reasons for doing it. It’s often the case that they are dissatisfied with something. If that’s the case, Baby Boomers are primed for the practice. Fully 80% of them are not satisfied with the way things are going and as a group are more downbeat about their lives than all other age groups.

They’re in a collective funk.

It was Baby Boomers who brought into life the health club era. Health is the motivation driving most of them to yoga studios, although calming their crazy minds is also a factor. They are less healthy and more stressed than other age groups, according to the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are looking for ways to stay energetic and vital in the latter part of their lives. Fortunately for them, yoga can be practiced at any age, since there are so many kinds of it, from action-style Ashtanga to no-impact chair-style.

It’s a no-brainer for the Baby Boomers. Yoga builds strength and balance, keeps excess pounds at bay, and protects joints, according to the AARP. “It’s important to start caring for your joints, to help maintain your independence and preserve your ability to perform daily activities as you get older,” said Amy Wheeler, a yoga professor at California State University at San Bernardino.

As a last resort, there’s always corpse pose, “which is a totally relaxing option everyone can do!” says the AARP.

Better late than never.

There are so many Baby Boomers taking up yoga that some teacher training facilities like the Yoga Sanctuary in Florida have classes where almost all the trainees are themselves Boomers. It takes one to know one seems to be the idea behind the curriculum.

Although Boomers represent a grave threat to the practice, because of their mercenary states of mind and narcissism, yoga’s motto is “Everyone is welcome here.”

It is literally true, to the extent that if you can’t make it to a studio the studio will come to you. The Prison Yoga Project has taught tens of thousands of jailbirds the practice, bringing mindfulness to cell blocks. “Use your body to teach your mind,” is how James Fox, the founder and director of the project, describes their mission.

Hardened criminals are one thing, but Baby Boomers are another, even harder thing. Nevertheless, yoga is a 5,000 year-old practice that has seen it all over the past 50 centuries and is probably up for the challenge. Most Boomers are taking up the practice in order to fix whatever it is they are being confronted by. They may get more, however, than they bargained for.

“I like to emphasize that we’re already completely whole,” said Niika Quistgaard, a clinical Ayurveda specialist in New Jersey. “We can enjoy ourselves even when everything isn’t physically perfect. It comes down to loving ourselves just as we are, which bring its own healing.”

It’s a way of chilling out and doing your best, rather than forever pushing and stressing out about how to become Masters of the Universe.

Baby Boomers may rediscover themselves in ways they never anticipated as they discover yoga. Although they and the practice seem like star-crossed lovers, it could be their way of staying true to themselves. In the end most people can’t be taught anything fundamental. They can only discover it within themselves. Much of life is a do-it-yourself project.

Maybe the Baby Boomers are up to the challenge of negating the self in order to discover the self, finally.

“They are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history,” wrote Paul Begala in “The Worst Generation.”

Yoga is about all the aspects of being, which are the body, breath, and inner self. The practice establishes the person in the self. It leads to self-awareness. Awareness of the self is the way to freedom, the freedom to choose and change. The Me Generation, even though burdened with all their special needs, after the long, strange trip they’ve been on, have one last chance to become the Self-Aware Generation.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Constructed Reality

Midwestern Gal (At the Borderline)

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By Ed Staskus

Backstage at the Winchester, a former bowling alley made over into a music hall, Anne DeChant reviewed the play list with her band. Then she double-checked one last time with Kelly Wright, her longtime back-up singer, and the show was a go.

Outside the hall it was wet and windy and November. Onstage the band was in fine form, by turns soulful and jamming, playing a mix-up of old and new material. Most of it was from Anne DeChant’s emotive ‘Swing’. It was a honky-tonk medley of blue-collar country songs. One of them was about losing your trailer to a twister.

If music is a river of sound streaming to the soul for the fostering of its virtue, then the Winchester Bar and Grill on the gritty east end of Lakewood, Ohio, was transformed that Friday night into a chapel of goodness.

“Now there’s a woman with a fire in her belly,” is how the Cleveland Plain Dealer has described DeChant and her band.

LA-born but Ohio-bred, Kelly Wright was both the mirror to Anne’s lead and expansive in her own right. Sometimes the best mirrors are old friends.  ‘Swing’ was her third collaboration with Anne, a collaboration stretching back more than ten years.

“I have lots of choices as far as vocalists go,” said Anne, an Avon Lake, Ohio, native transplanted to Music City and back. She is a 5-time winner of Cleveland’s Best Singer/Songwriter award. “But, my choice for support vocals is in Cleveland.”

“It was supposed to be a one-gig thing,” said Kelly.

When the Cleveland-based folk group Odd Girl Out broke up in the mid-90s, its lead singer Anne DeChant embarked on a solo career. When she needed someone to do backing vocals on her ‘Something of the Soul’ in 1999, one of the former singers in the band recommended Kelly Wright.

“I knew her in high school, so when she recommended me to Anne, it all came full circle,” said Kelly.

Kelly Wright’s father hails from Pennsylvania and her mother from Michigan. They met in California in 1967. “They both wanted to go to California to get away from their families. My dad joined the army and my mom went to nursing school.

“But, they always wanted to come back to the Midwest. My dad learned how to weld in the army so when he ended up in Cleveland he opened a welding shop.”

Lakewood-raised since fifth grade, Kelly was a freshman at Lakewood High School before breaking into song. She commuted to school with a neighbor. “This girl started picking me up to take me to school since she lived right on my block.” One morning she tagged along to her friend’s audition for Roadshow, the school’s Downbeat Magazine award-winning vocal jazz ensemble.

“I was just sitting there doing the homework I had sloughed off the night before, and the director asked, aren’t you going to audition, and I said, no, no, I only know campfire singing. But, in the end I auditioned, and I made it, and my friend did not. It was the last time I got a ride from her, but it was the start of music for me. It changed my whole life.”

She never stopped singing in high school.

“It was a great program, I got to travel with Roadshow, and we made a record every year.” She later attended Akron University on a music scholarship. “I was not very good at the scholastic, so I never finished college.” She went to a broadcasting school and became a DJ. But, she gave up spinning records and singing to open the Borderline Café in 1994 with her culinary school-trained sister Carrie.

“This is all I did for a long time,” said Kelly “Even now I still wait the tables, pour the coffee, and pretty much do all the talking. I’m exactly like my dad, hell, yeah. I tell everybody what to do. I think I’m the boss, but Carrie is really the heart and soul of Borderline.”

Kelly’s younger sister Carrie is a graduate of the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island. Two women founded the school in 1914. They had one student and one typewriter their first year.

The culinary program was created in 1973. Since then the school has graduated Emeril Lagasse, Michelle Bernstein, and Tyler Florence, among others. It has been featured on the Food Network and recently three of the school’s alumni challenged and beat celebrity chefs on the Iron Chefs television series.

The Borderline Café is a breakfast-only diner on Lakewood’s west end. Outfitted with ten, maybe twelve, tables, the walls are painted a peach yellow and “suns coming up, I got cakes on the griddle,” among other John Denver lyrics, gambol over the walls.

It’s been said breakfast is the most important meal and skipping it might be the worst thing anybody can do first thing in the morning. The good thing about having a hearty breakfast is you’re not going to be starving by lunch. The eggs Benedict and pancakes at the Borderline are famous for keeping hunger at bay.

Scene Magazine has voted the Borderline Cafe one of the ‘Best Pancake Spots in Cleveland’.

“It’s the best breakfast place in town and all immediately surrounding towns,” said one patron, washing his stack down with coffee.

“The two of them are good together,” said Colleen Wright, their mother who commutes from Marblehead more than an hour away and pitches in at the diner on busy weekends. “Kelly remembers everybody’s name. They all come to talk to her.”

“I’m always the one goofing off,” said Kelly, “but I’ve come around as I’ve gotten older.”

“She’s a brat, but she’s got a heart of gold.”

“Thanks, mama, that’s nice.”

Kelly Wright was bartending and singing on Kelly’s Island, a Lake Erie vacation destination west of Cleveland, and her sister Carrie was finishing up her degree at Johnson & Wales, when their father, Don Wright, offered to help them buy the greasy spoon that would become the Borderline.

“He wanted to get both of us closer to the family, maybe so he could keep his eye on us,” said Kelly.

“My husband thought we’d never see that money again,” said Colleen Wright, “but they paid us back every penny. They work hard at this.”

Noted for its fresh food, inventive seasonings, and Southwestern-inspired twist on traditional morning fare, the cozy and often overflowing diner is roundly considered to be more than worth the wait.

“The food is some of the best I’ve had anywhere,” said a man from Ravenna, fifty miles southeast of Lakewood. “The first time we ate here we went right in. The second time we waited in a line outside.”

“If there’s a wait you have to stand in line,” said a local man standing in line. “They don’t take names.”

“Not your ordinary breakfast,” said a woman visiting Cleveland from Pittsburgh.

“Everything Carrie makes is fresh,” said Kelly. “Nothing comes out of a zip lock bag or frozen. There are as many local products as we can find. Those eggs are cracked exactly when you order your omelets.

“The people who eat here are a lot of everybody, mostly from the neighborhood. They know it’s going to be real food made exactly the way they like it. They’re very patient, too, because sometimes you stand out there, finally get a seat, and we still have to get you your breakfast.”

Kelly lives a stone’s throw from the Borderline. “The older I get and the more gigs I play, I had to move closer to work because I was getting here later and later. I could throw a rock from our dumpster out back and hit my house.”

A single woman twice over, she lives alone. “I was in a gay relationship for nine years, but I lost that gene. I don’t know what happened. I stopped being gay.” After breaking up with her partner and selling their house, she married a man she had known in high school.

“But, I was not good at that,” she said. “It lasted for about three weeks, although we’re still friends.”

Performing with Anne DeChant has taken Kelly coast-to-coast, from New York City to clubs in California. “I’ve played everywhere with Anne,” she said. “It was a weird late-in-life kind of youth, joining the band when I was thirty-three. I thought I could be a kid again. It has led to many great things for me.”

Although she still tours, her priorities have shifted back to her family and the Borderline Café. “That was a bump in the road for this place,” she said, “because it put a lot of responsibility on my sister. I risked the wrath of my dad, too. I don’t take every gig out of town anymore. I try to be a good partner to Carrie.”

Nevertheless, Kelly continues working with Anne DeChant, recording in Nashville, as well as playing guitar and singing in an acoustic combo at summer spots. She is also the voice of a jazz duo often heard at Brothers Lounge on Cleveland’s west side.

In addition, she is involved with the Ohio City Singers, an all-star cast of Cleveland-area musicians including a choral group and sometimes featuring more than thirty vocalists, musicians, and their family and friends.

“It’s all the guys from local indie bands, like Chris Allen of Rosavelt and Doug McKean of the Stuntmen,” Kelly said. ”They write original rock-and-roll Christmas tunes and we do a big show every year.”

The Ohio City Singer carols aren’t the kind of carols Bing Crosby sang, nor are they the kind heard in the background at shopping malls. More than 300 revelers packed the Around the Corner Saloon in Lakewood on an icy afternoon when the group in Blues Brothers-style steamed up the windows. They have brought their raucous holiday jams to Cleveland’s Stone Mad Pub, Music Box Supper Club, and House of Blues.

“How I got started in music was an accident, like many of the things in my life,” said Kelly. “Music was a great part of school for me and I am forever in debt to my first teacher. I never actually knew I could sing. It really did change my life.”

At Christmastime the Ohio City Singers and Kelly Wright perform at several outdoor venues, like the Holiday Circlefest on Wade Oval in University Circle and Light Up Lakewood. Even if it’s cold and blustery, or some flakes fall, or there’s a snowstorm, as will happen in winter on the North Coast, Kelly doesn’t mind.

“I’ve bopped around a little bit, although I don’t travel very much anymore. I’ve lived here my whole life, for the most part,” she said. “I love this neighborhood. I’m not good with just two seasons. The Midwest is better for me. I’m a big gal. I like to layer, so I love it here.”

And at the end of the day, after belting out tunes outside at Light Up Lakewood, she can always slip back down the street inside to the Borderline Café, strip off the layers and wrap her hands around a steaming cup of hot joe.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Hot Room Badass

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By Ed Staskus

“I’ll have the whole grain pancakes and coffee,” said Barron Cannon.

“Cream and sugar?” asked Chris, the bartender, wearing a “Best Burgers” black sweatshirt.

“Black,” said Barron.

He was a vegan.

“And you?”

“Three eggs easy over, sausage links, whole wheat toast, cream for my coffee,” said Frank Glass.

He was not a vegan.

Barron and Frank were sitting at the bar at Herb’s Tavern in Rocky River for a late Saturday morning breakfast. “Add a lemon slice to the iced water, and no straw,” said Barron. “If you’re over three years old, or not disabled, you shouldn’t be drinking out of a straw. On top of that, whoever thought of disposable plastic straws should be horse whipped.”

“What got into you today?” Frank asked, changing the subject. Something was always getting into Barron. When it came to the environment and climate change, he wore blinders, always ready to get into it.

“I don’t know,” said Barron. “I was feeling good alert, just feeling it.”

They had come from Barron’s warm flow yoga class earlier that morning. Both of them, and probably everyone else in the class, had worked up an appetite. Barron owned and taught at a yoga studio on the east end of Lakewood, a ten-minute drive away.

“It reminded me of the way Kristen Zarzycki used to teach her Sunday afternoon five-dollar classes at Inner Bliss.”

“Is she still teaching?” asked Barron. “I thought she had gone into biotechnology sales.”

“I don’t know, but when she was teaching, she was a tiger by the tail.”

Frank Glass had gone to three yoga classes a week for three or four years, and then twice a week Bikram Yoga classes for two more years. He had a herniated disk in his lower back. Almost nothing helped. A hot water bottle helped, a daily NSAID helped, and yoga helped. He had attended a dozen-or-so workshops in his time. He practiced at home now, only going to Barron’s studio once or twice a month to stay in touch.

“That way you can stay in touch with me,” said his wife, Vera.

“There would be a eighty ninety people crammed into the class, you know how Inner Bliss is, some of them in trim, most of them trying as hard as they could to keep up, sucking air, it was a fast flow, and Kristen would be on her mat, doing all the poses, and doing the dialogue, cheerful and upbeat, while half the class was dying, just trying to make it to the end. In the summer, even with the windows open, it could get hot in there.”

“My classes are fun yet challenging, taught from a base of gratitude and commitment to taking care of your body so that students can shine in their space on the mat,” says Kristen. “On the mat, I have learned that as in life, each person has areas where they struggle and those where they shine, and that the collaboration of all of our gifts is what makes our world so amazing.”

When asked what was in the backpack she carried to and from class, she said, “Gum, lip gloss, and binkie.”

Whether she meant a baby’s pacifier, the high hop a rabbit performs when happy, or a stuffed animal, was unclear.

“Was she your toughest teacher?” asked Barron, a flapjack shard on his fork dripping maple syrup.

“No, Deanna Black was a boat load. She was freelance, thank God, so I only ran into her when she was subbing. She drove her classes at breakneck pace, and every few minutes we had to do ten push-ups, or twenty sit-ups, or some damn thing, and then it was back to the flow.”

“Push-ups are good for you,” said Barron.

“Never mind about your two cents’ worth,” said Frank. “The thing is, if you faltered, say you collapsed in a push-up, she would come over and do twenty push-ups right next to you, smiling like a wolf. She didn’t actually do the class, instead she prowled around, explaining cajoling threatening, but one look at her was all you needed to know she could it, all the physical stuff, and another class after that, with no problem. She was incredibly fit.”

“Climb every mountain, ford every stream,” Barron sang, lilting.

“She did that in the off-season.”

“The benefits are more than meet the eye,” says Deanna. “Your reactions to the challenges in your physical practice often reflect and carry over to those from the challenges of daily living.”

“OK, so she was lusty and tough as nails, good for her,” said Barron.

“But she wasn’t the toughest teacher I ever met,” said Frank. “That would be Brian Paquette.”

“Who is Brian Paquette.”

“He taught Bikram Yoga at Chagrin Yoga, although they didn’t call it that because they weren’t one of the Brainiac’s licensed studios.”

Bikram Yoga was masterminded by Bikram Choudhury, practiced in a carpeted room heated to 105 degrees with a humidity of 40%, like India even before climate change. The walls were covered in mirrors. Instructors were taught to be high-handed and to teach from a hands-off literal platform at the front of the class.

“That man was a nut,” said Barron.

“He was a nut, but if you wanted to climb the mountain of posture yoga, his 26 postures in the torture chamber was the mountain.”

Bikram Choudhury’s philosophy of yoga was making pupils work through pain. “I am a butcher and I try to kill you, but don’t worry, yoga is the best death,” he told his followers.

“You took classes in Chagrin Falls? That’s a forty-minute drive one way.”

“Twice a week for two years, until I had enough of the most unrelenting remorseless cramps I have ever had in my life. I couldn’t drink electrolytes fast enough to replenish. I got a vicious cramp driving home one night and had to pull off on the shoulder before I killed myself and everyone around me. That was the beginning of the end, although by then the economics of taking classes wasn’t making sense to me anymore.”

“Whoa, there, my friend,” said Barron. “You’re talking about my bread and butter.”

“It wasn’t just that, although bread and butter played a part. It dawned on me there wasn’t any magic, not that yoga teachers aren’t magic, most of them are, any magic in going to classes anymore. Sure, it was engaging to practice in a collective atmosphere, but I knew enough by then to stand on my own two feet. What I didn’t know, I knew I could just ask you over breakfast or lunch. Can you pass the butter?”

“What made him so tough?” asked Barron

“What made Brian tough was that he didn’t come across as tough, at all. He came across as a good-natured guy. And he was a good-natured guy, patient affable understanding. Most Bikram Yoga teachers, not if but when you had to stop, always wanted you to stay in the room.”

“Just sit down on the mat for a minute,” the apostle on the platform would say. “It’s cooler at floor level.”

“That sounds like Bugs Bunny physics,” Barron laughed.

“It was maybe one half of a degree cooler on the floor,” said Frank. “Brian let people leave the room. He told us, if you have to, you have to. Try to come back if you can. He encouraged us to drink as much water as possible. I had one teacher, she trotted out the harebrained idea that water weighed you down and we should only be taking a missionary-sized sip once in a while.”

“He sounds like a simpatico kind of guy. Is he from Ohio, from here?”

“I’m not sure, although I don’t think so. When I was taking classes in Chagrin Falls, he told me he lived nearby, maybe even within walking distance. One night, after class, we were standing around, he mentioned he had gone through some hard times. He had been a professional gambler, something like that, for a while, and had fallen into a downward spiral. He got connected to yoga, somehow scraped up enough cash for Bikram Yoga teacher training, and trained in Las Vegas, of all places.”

Bikram Yoga teacher training is learning the world-famous system and learning to teach it, according to Bikram HQ.  They are dedicated to teaching trainees the precise nature of yoga. Everyone is nurtured in a challenging, but safe environment, no kidding.

Trainees learn how to greet students professionally and jawbone intelligently about the mental and physical benefits of yoga. Everyone is encouraged to develop a dedicated hatha practice. They are taught how to speak clearly and how to teach the sequence confidently, correcting students appropriately and compassionately, no fooling.

They learn how to grow their own personal yoga practice, sans steam, since it impractical in most apartments condos homes anywhere. There’s no kidding about that.

The training takes about four weeks and costs between $12 and $15 thousand, depending on what paradise on earth the training is set. The total costs include tuition, hotel accommodation, transportation, lectures, classes, towels, and all the water you need to complete the training in one piece.

Even though Bikram Choudhury has recently fled the United States after losing a multi-million-dollar civil suit for sexual shenanigans, he continues to stage his tent show around the rest of the world.

“Brian taught hot yoga, but he was more engaged with Kriya Yoga, which was crazy at odds with the Bikram way of life, which was fancy cars and fancy girls and cash on the barrelhead. He didn’t ever say much about Bikram Choudhury, although he once said yoga had been around a long time and no one had a proprietary claim to it.”

“So, he was more a Kriya kind of guy than a fancy pants?”

“That’s right. You’d ask him what his favorite pose was, and he’d say, ‘Meditation posture, straight spine, because it brings peace.’ His favorite books were the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, Holy Science, and Autobiography of a Yogi. If you asked him what made him happy, he’d say, ‘Meditation, singing the names of God, and spending time with my family.’ His favorite quote was, ‘Read a little. Meditate more. Think of God all the time.’ I forgot to ask him who said that, but it was probably some old-school yogi.”

“My God, he sounds like a saint, not a badass,” said Barron. “I mean, one of my favorite quotes is, ‘You better take care of me Lord, because if you don’t, you’re gonna have me on your hands.’ What does that make me?”

“Who said that?”

“Hunter S. Thompson.”

“Fear and Loathing?”

“Right-o.”

“Brian wasn’t like that,” said Frank. “He wasn’t a saint, just a regular guy, really, although he did a hell of a lot of meditation. I mean, hours of it. What I mean about him being a badass is the way he went about his business in the hot room. He always came in last, wearing mid-thigh compression shorts, no shirt, and carrying a jug of water. He ran the class like a grade-school teacher. He wasn’t like a drill sergeant, which was a persona most Bikram teachers took on in some way shape or form.”

“Why did he need water?” asked Barron. “I thought Bikram Yoga teachers just shouted out the poses from their soapbox. Why did he need a jug?”

“He did just about the whole thing, which is why he needed it. That’s why he takes the gold medal of badass yoga teacher, in my eyes, at least. Every class there were plenty of people who had to take a break or leave the room. A lot of them were young and fit. Brian did it day after day, no sweat. Getting through ninety minutes of the torture chamber wasn’t any walk in the park, man, it was hard.”

“How hard can it be?”

“Believe me, beyond hard,” said Frank. “You don’t see me doing it anymore.”

“You finally accept an offer to go to a class thinking, easy, I can do this.” said Benny Johnson about his first Bikram class.

“I played real sports for a few years, so how hard can it be? You arrive at the class thinking, let’s do this! But then you walk into the class and the heat hits you. It is ninety-one thousand degrees. You set up your mat in an open space. Little do you realize the hell awaiting you. The poses are relatively easy but holding them is hard. And you actually really start needing water, but it does not help! By the final stretches, you’re just limping along. Then the torture ends, and you lay down in a haze and total defeat.”

“More iced water?” asked Chris, walking up to the bar.

“Yes, please,” Frank and Barron both said.

They drank their water, paid the bill of fare, and left Herb’s Tavern.

“How did Brian reconcile Kriya with Bikram,” Barron asked as they walked to the back of the parking lot. “The two seem mutually exclusive. Kriya is about selflessness and Bikram was only in it for himself.”

“I don’t know, we never talked about it, but his actions, how he did things, seem to say he did. He was both a badass and one of the more sincere people I ever met. He was a quiet sparkplug. If you asked him what inspired him, he would say, ‘My guru, my wife and my children.’ If you asked him who sees the real you in this sketchy world, he’d say God.”

“It sounds to me that the way he practiced in the studio was the test of his sincerity,” said Barron. “He was melding the two, but not selling out.”

“He’s a religious guy in a secular world, a spiritual guy teaching a totally incarnate practice,” said Frank. “He was always urging us to meditate, even though we were all there for the crazy boot camp workout because all of us needed it for our own almost always physical reasons. He was hard to make out.”

“The good of the body depends on the goodness of the spirit, and the other way around,” said Barron.

They got into Frank’s Hyundai Tucson and pulling up to Detroit Road, a black squirrel built like the tailback Barry Sanders, crazy quick and elusive as the all-Pro, vaulted over the brick wall surrounding the outdoor front terrace with a chuck of stale bagel in his mouth. Frank feathered the brakes, but there was no need. He wasn’t the kind of squirrel who ran in circles and got run over. He dashed to the bushy endzone at the back of Century Cycles and disappeared into the trees.

“Have you ever noticed squirrels never say things like, if I had my life to live over, I would do whatever?” asked Frank.

“I know what you mean,” said Barron, chewing on a fresh bagel he had squirreled away in his pocket before leaving. “They’re just rats in better clothes, but they’ve got it going, for sure. They’re not vegans, but what’s more free and right in the head than a squirrel?”

They might get run over by us, squashed flat like pancakes by car after car, but they never fall out of trees into a world not of their making. They are second to none at planting their own trees, too. They bury their acorns, but often forget where they put them. The forgotten acorns become oak trees.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Barron Cannon

Loose as a Goose

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By Ed Staskus

Godzilla came to yoga late in life. He was 68 years old and getting long in the tooth. His rear end hurt. He thought it might be sciatica. He had trouble twisting to see who was gaining on him. When he tried to touch his toes, it seemed like they were miles away, even though they were only a couple of hundred feet away. He was losing his vim and vigor. He was on the edge of losing his edge. He knew it better than anybody. He had to do something about it.

   The first thing he had done after being accidentally brought up from the deep in the 1950s and getting on his land legs was stomp on Tokyo. When he was done, he lapped up all the spilled milk he could find. Then he took a long nap, sleeping all day and part of the next day.

   No sooner did Tokyo rebuild itself than he destroyed it again and again. In the ensuing years he destroyed New York City three times. He destroyed Osaka and Paris twice. In between he traveled extensively and destroyed London, Moscow, Sydney, and Las Vegas, among others.

   It seemed like his pulverizing days might be over. He tried supplements and new-fangled devices. He tried long walks and strength training. He tried massage and acupuncture. He tried leafy vegetables, even though his favorite meal was eating cars and transmission towers.

   When he went to a wellness clinic, they told him there wasn’t anything they could do for him. First of all, he didn’t have medical insurance. On top of that he had never worked a day in his life and didn’t have Medicare. No cash no wellness. Don’t let the door slam on your way out. Besides, there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with him, except for his advancing years.

   He didn’t like their answers and stomped on the building, flattening it like a pancake. His best days might be behind him, but he still had his trademark stomp. However, he lumbered away with a pronounced limp.

   “Man, oh man,” he muttered. “I think I hurt my back.”

   He was ready to take advice from anybody, including his grandson Goo Goo Godzilla, who was an insufferable know-it-all. He thought he knew everything just because he could ask the Gods of Google anything. Whenever Godzilla saw a cell phone tablet laptop desktop he chewed it up and spit it out because it tasted so bad. That was what he thought about knowing everything all the time.

   “You can’t turn back the hands of time, pops, but you can slow them down,” Goo Goo said. “I’ve heard one way to do that is by doing yoga.”

   Godzilla had never heard of yoga.

   “It’s a mind spirit body discipline,” Goo Goo said. “It’s thousands of years old. Ask Oliver, the Monster Hunter in Perry, my pal in Ohio. They have a friend of the family who’s a yoga teacher. His name is Barron Cannon.”

   “There’s nothing wrong with my mind or spirit,” Godzilla said. “It’s my body that needs a tune-up. I’m ready to try anything, even if it’s mumbo jumbo.”

   Although few were aware he could fly, Godzilla could fly. When he let loose an atomic breath of fire he could blast off like a missile and rocket himself anywhere in the world. In the summer one of his favorite places for R & R was Middle Sister Island. It was one of the Lake Erie islands. It was small but big enough for him. It was uninhabited. It was quiet. Goo Goo didn’t know where it was, and Godzilla meant to keep it that way. His grandson was a busybody.

   One evening it rained hard. In the middle of the night fog rolled in. The next morning, he woke up stiff and achy. It had been happening lately, too often for comfort. He was finally determined to do something about it. He blasted off for Perry, where Oliver the Unofficial Monster Hunter of Lake County lived. Unfortunately, the shades were drawn. A neighbor told Godzilla the family had gone on vacation. 

   Godzilla took off and headed back towards Cleveland.  When he landed, he looked for a phone book to locate a yoga studio, but there were none to be had. The Yellow Pages had disappeared. Phone booths had disappeared. He put his quarter away.

   He roared off again, circling the city, and with his still keen eyesight located a studio on the west side of town. So long as he could see and stomp, he was still the boss man. He just had to limber up his old bones, get lean and mean again.

   He signed up for a complimentary class at the front desk. He didn’t have a mat, so the yoga instructor unfurled a hundred studio mats for him. The first pose, mountain pose, was just the right one for him. He was, after all, as big as a mountain. After that it was all downhill. Midway through class, frustrated and peevish, he let loose a breath of atomic fire and accidentally burnt the studio down. All the men and women fled, and the fire department raced to the scene.

   The same thing happened at the next yoga studio and the one after that. Cleveland’s yoga owners called a hasty business meeting and quickly resolved to ban the monster from all their places of business. They were, however, undecided about how to keep him out. He was as big as a forty- story building. He wasn’t hiding in any corners. He weighed in at 90,000 tons

   Godzilla was determined to learn the moves and carry the lessons away with him. He had too many mean streets to cross to adopt yoga as a lifestyle, but he had too many enemies to not do yoga. He had to be able to do to his archenemies what they wanted to do to him.

   “How about if we offer him free private lessons, somewhere outdoors, somewhere there is plenty of outdoors?” one teacher offered.

   Everybody thought it was a good idea, but nobody wanted to be the teacher doing the teaching. One false move and they might get squashed. After much hemming and hawing all eyes turned to Barron Cannon. He was a single man, didn’t have a family who would mourn him, and was an anarchist to boot. Most of Cleveland’s yoga teachers avoided him, his social and political views making them fit to be tied, no matter how much they meditated and tried to think the better of their fellow man. It struck them he was the perfect candidate. He was self-centered and hot-tempered and would give Godzilla as good as he got. 

   What Barron thought was that he had never met anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.

   “How about it, Barron?” one of the teachers asked.

    “Sure,” he said and left the meeting to find Godzilla.

   Barron was notoriously tight-lipped when it came to small talk. Another teacher once bet him two dollars that she could get him to say more than two words.

   “You lose,” he said.

   The behemoth wasn’t hard to find. It was like looking for a skyscraper. He wasn’t hard to convince, either. He thought one-on-one lessons were just the ticket. 

   “I’ve heard of you,” the monster said to Barron. “Do you know the Monster Hunter?”

   “I know the little rascal,” Barron said.

   Godzilla motioned for him to hop on his back, and when he was hanging on tight, Godzilla rocketed back to Middle Sister Island. Before he did, he landed in the parking lot of a Heinen’s grocery store so Barron could stock up on protein bars and bottled water.

   They were no sooner airborne again than they heard sirens and watched police cars and SWAT teams from Cleveland, Lakewood, Rocky River, and Fairview Park descend on the grocery store, where shoppers were scattering in every direction. It wasn’t often that the King of the Monsters visited and didn’t destroy your city. They should have counted their blessings, but they were all boomers and echo boomers and felt as blessed as they were ever going to feel.

   On the island Barron got to work early the next day, even though Godzilla was cranky, wanting to sleep in. Hour after hour, day after day, he led Godzilla through endless sun salutations, until he could do them in his sleep. When he tried to beg off, Barron tongue lashed him.

   “Do you think Ghidora is laying around gazing at his navel? Do you think Mothra is lounging around eating grapes? Do you think Destoroyah is gaping the gals at a dance hall?”

   Godzilla had to admit none of them were doing any of that. They were all probably on the prowl. They were all like him. None of them had a friend in the world, only enemies. King Kong was the only creature Godzilla was remotely close to. They had fought to a draw several times and harbored a sullen respect for each other. 

   “I’m not going to bother you with the beliefs and principles of yoga,” Barron said. “I’m not going to read to you from ‘The Light of Yoga.’ It’s not because I don’t think it’s vital to the practice, but because that’s the nature of the yoga beast these days. You’re only interested in what yoga can do for you right now. I get it. We’re going to move on to intermediate practice next, and after that to Ashtanga Yoga. You’re a quick study, big guy. Another week-or-so and I think you’ll be ready to make these exercises your own.”

   Godzilla whooped his approval. Barron dodged the monster’s inadvertent bad breath. At the end of the day Godzilla curled up and Barron curled up inside Godzilla’s curl, staying warm. At the end of the week Barron pinned a gold star on Godzilla’s chest and declared him ready to go. The monster touched his toes with ease and beamed his appreciation. He was loose as a goose.

   After dropping Barron off at his apartment in Lakewood and promising to never destroy his hometown no matter what so long as Barron lived there, Godzilla got ready to blast off back to Japan. He had some scores to settle. He had nothing left to prove, but he thought he might destroy Tokyo again, just to show he could still do it.

   He circled over downtown Cleveland before turning west for the Pacific. Below him was the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Thousands of people on thousands of mats were doing sun salutations in the sunshine on the plaza in front of the blue glass tent. It was the annual Believe in Cleveland yoga love-in. He swooped low and belched fire. Everybody looked up and saluted his mighty yogic Breath of Fire.

   His enemies were going to pay for all the slanderous things they had been saying about him, things like blobby slow and over the hill. With his newfound reptilian quickness, he was going to make mincemeat of them. He was as physically fast and aware as he had ever been, slimmed down to 80,000 tons.

   He couldn’t wait to put the moves on his glib grandson Goo Goo, either. He would show him the path to Hell was paved with good intentions, even though he knew no monsters, not even his kith and kin, had anything but bad intentions. Barron Cannon had been right to not bring up the “Light of Yoga.” The light in Godzilla’s eyes had nothing to do with yoga.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Baltic Place

Eat Sleep Scout Repeat

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By Ed Staskus

   “Scouting is a man’s job cut down to a boy’s size.”  Robert Baden-Powell

   My father was born on a family farm outside of Siauliai in 1924, six years after Lithuania’s Declaration of Independence and two years before the start of what is known as the Smetonic Era. The small city, the capital of northern Lithuania, is home to the Hill of Crosses, a protest site, folk-art collection, and spiritual statement of about one hundred thousand Christian crosses.

   Siauliai goes back to 1236 to the Battle of Saule against the Teutonic Knights. The bitter war between the Teutonic Order and Lithuania was one of the longest in the history of Europe. The first Christian church in the country was built in 1445. Until then Lithuanians were steadfast pagans. When they first encountered missionaries they came to the conclusion that Hell was a fine place to end up, if it came to that, since Lithuania was very cold and Hell was warm.

   My grandfather had been conscripted as an officer in the Czarist Army. My grandmother was Russian and a former schoolteacher. They met when he was stationed in the badlands southeast of Moscow. “In those days drunks went into the navy and dimwits into the infantry,” he said about his time as an officer in the Russian armed forces. After returning to Lithuania he served in its military and was awarded farmland outside of Siauliai.

   My father was a Boy Scout early on. Since my grandfather had been made the police chief of the province, and since Antanas Smetona, the President of the country, was the Chief Scout, and since there were privileges accorded to scout troops by the Ministry of Education, my grandfather involved my father in scouting as soon as he grew to be of school age.

   I became a Boy Scout in the early 1960s when my father became the Scoutmaster of  Troop 311. We wore official Boy Scouts of America neckerchiefs and carried unofficial knives in scabbards on our belts. We went camping summer and winter. We learned how to set up base camps and how to build temporary shelters. We hiked trails through forests, although most of us were hapless with a compass, instead relying on ingenuity, stamina, and dumb luck to find our way.

   Boy Scouts got their start in 1907 when a British Army officer gathered up twenty boys and took them camping, exploring, and pioneering on an island off England’s southern coast. The next year the army officer, Robert Baden-Powell, wrote “Scouting for Boys.” That same year more than ten thousand Boy Scouts attended a rally at the Crystal Palace in London.

   The first scout patrol of ten boys and two girls in Lithuania was organized in 1918. The next year there were two patrols, one for boys and another one for girls. During the inter-war years more than 60,000 boys and girls participated in scouting, making it one of the most popular activities among the young at that time. In 1939, just before the start of World War Two, there were 22,000 Lithuanian scouts.

   Four out of five Lithuanians were farmers or lived in the country and camping was everyone’s favorite part of scouting. It’s what probably accounts for my father’s fondness for the outdoors and all the scout camps he was later Scoutmaster of. They weren’t all sun-kissed and starlit camps, either.

   Winter Blasts were camps in thin-skinned cabins in the highlands of the Chagrin Valley at which we earned cold weather Merit Badges. We were informed that exploring outdoors in December was fun. We always built a fire first thing in the morning in the cabin’s Franklin stove, kept it well stoked, and hoped we wouldn’t freeze to death in the long night.

   In the summer a grab bag of Merit Badges was up for grabs. There were more than a hundred of them, from sports to sciences. I learned the six basic Boy Scout knots, from the sheet bend to the clove hitch. I earned my Pioneering Badge and eventually learned how to tie every knot known to man, although I never learned how to properly knot a tie, even later in life, when my wife always had to help me with it.

   My father was forever transporting, putting up and tearing down tents, finding lost stakes and poles, and persuading my mother to repair rips in canvas. He told us sleeping outdoors was manly, robust, and healthy, no matter how much rain leaked onto our sleeping bags. He had a maxim that a week of camp was worth six months of theory.

   The outdoors wasn’t just the Boy Scouts, either. For many years he was the boss at Ausra, a two-week sports-related, Lithuanian-inflected, and Franciscan-inspired summer camp at Wasaga Beach, which was on the Georgian Bay two hours north of Toronto. Although we did calisthenics every morning, went to Mass after breakfast, and spoke Lithuanian whenever we had to, what we actually did most of the time was run around in the woods like madmen, play tackle football in the shallow water of the bay, and sing off-key long into the night at the nightly bonfires. Singing around a bonfire is even better than singing in the car or the shower.

   When my father was nine years old he was one of the nearly two thousand cohorts at the 1933 Reception Camp in Palanga when Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, came to Lithuania. Palanga is a seaside resort on the Baltic Sea known for its beaches and sand dunes. Then a sleepy resort, today it is a summer party spot.

   He never forgot having been at the camp, seeing scouting’s leader and guiding light, if only on that one occasion. “He was a hero to us, someone who gave his life to something bigger than himself, even though we were all smaller than him,” he said. The scouting founder’s son, who was with him in 1933, didn’t forget, either. “I particularly remember the warm and friendly welcome we received as we came ashore on Lithuanian soil,” recalled Peter Baden-Powell in 1956.

   Five years later, in 1938, my father was at the Second National Jamboree in Panemune, the smallest city in the country, which commemorated both the 20th anniversaries of the foundation of the Lithuanian Boy Scout Association and the restoration of Lithuania’s independence.

   Things change fast, though. Two years later the Soviet Union invaded, the country’s independence was overturned, and scouting was outlawed. During the war and successive occupations, first by the Russians, then the Nazis, and then the Russians again, both of my father’s parents were arrested and transported to concentration camps. My grandfather died of starvation in a Siberian labor camp. My grandmother spent twelve years in the Gulag.

   In 1ate 1944 my father fled to Germany, making his way buying and selling black market cigarettes, and after the war worked for relief organizations dealing with the masses of displaced people. He met his wife-to-be in a hospital in Nuremberg, where she was a nurse’s aide, and he was being operated on several times for a wound that almost cost him his right hand.

   He found passage to Sunbury, Ontario in Canada in 1949, married my mother, who had emigrated there a year earlier, and by 1956 was the father of three children. While in Canada he wasn’t involved in scouting. “There weren’t any children, or they were all still babies,” my mother said. “All of us from Lithuania, and there was a large community of us in Sudbury in the early 1950s. We were all so young. We were just starting to rebuild our lives, getting married and having children, but it was taking time for them to grow up to scouting age.”

   Robert Baden-Powell said that Bot Scouts should always be prepared for the unexpected and not be taken by surprise. “A scout knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens,” he said. By that guiding light scouting stood my father in good stead through the 1940s.

   When his parents were arrested and deported, he took over the family farm. He was 17 years old. When he fled the farm in 1944 with the Red Army on the horizon it was with ten minutes notice. When he stepped off a re-purposed troop carrier in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1949, everything he had was in a rucksack and there were twenty dollars in his wallet. In the event, he eventually knocked on my mother’s door in Sudbury, almost six hundred miles away.

   He left Sudbury in 1957, where he had worked in nickel mines for almost seven years, first as a black powder blaster and then as an ore hauler, and moved to Cleveland, Ohio. We followed six months later. He worked as an elevator operator for seventy-five cents an hour, less than half of what he had been making in the mines, swept floors, stocked warehouses, and did whatever he could for a paycheck. He started taking classes in accounting at Western Reserve University.

   In Cleveland, living in a Polish double he bought in collaboration with his sister’s family, who had also fled Lithuania, he found work full-time at the Weatherhead Corporation, continued going to school at night, and after earning a degree in accounting went to work for TRW. He made his way up the ladder, finally managing his division’s financial operations in South America.

   After taking early retirement in the late-1980s he helped found the Taupa Lithuanian Credit Union and as its director built its assets into the tens of millions. In the 1990s he formed NIDA Enterprises and managed it through 2008, when he was in his 80s. He believed the workingman was the happy man. “Nothing works unless we do,” he said. He believed there was value in work. He believed work without effort was valueless.

  Because of World War Two and its dislocations, and his subsequent emigration overseas, as well as the demands of rebuilding a life and building a family, he didn’t participate in scouting for many years. But once a scout always a scout. “What you learn stays with you long after you’ve outgrown the uniform,” he said.

   When he took over from Vytautas Jokubaitis as Scoutmaster of Troop 311 they were big shoes to fill. Vytas Jokubaitis was a tireless advocate for his countrymen who became director of Cleveland’s Lithuanian American Club. He was awarded the Ohio Governor’s “Humanitarian of the Year” award in 1994. He was a true believer I scouting.

   My father worked with Cleveland’s Lithuanian scouts for nearly twenty years. While Scoutmaster he helped affiliate Troop 311 with the American Boy Scouts, opening up camping and jamboree venues, as well as linking it to the traditions and activities of scouting worldwide. In the late 1960s he established an ancillary scouting camp at Ausra, the campsite on the Georgian Bay, where Cleveland’s scouts enjoyed two weeks of camping, and by many accounts, some of the biggest nighttime bonfires they ever experienced.

   “Your dad loved bonfires,” recalled Paul Kazlauskas, a friend of mine who was also a scout. “It was a rule with him, that there be one every night. Some of our fires were as big as small cars and were still smoldering in the morning when we got up for our morning exercises and raising the flags.” When asked what bonfires meant to him, my father said, “Sometimes it takes looking through campfire smoke to see the world clearly.”

   Although we never exactly warmed to it, he introduced us to winter camping and hiking, even encouraging us to try snowshoes. I don’t remember ever falling down as much as when I tried walking on top of snow drifts wearing snowshoes. He said it didn’t matter how many times we fell down, it only mattered that we get up and try again, although getting up while stuck in snowshoes is easier said than done.

   He stressed achievement by encouraging the pursuit of Merit Badges, especially those that involved self-reliance. One summer at a Canadian camp at Blue Mountain we were taken on an overnight canoe trip. We were supervised, but only given a compass, a canteen, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies. We had to make the round-trip up the bay and back to the camp ourselves without any help. We all somehow made the round-trip without the need of a search party.

   In the 1970s he inaugurated Scautiu Kucius, a kind of Boy Scout’s Christmas celebration. Every year, the weekend before Christmas, Cleveland’s Lithuanian scouts gather and feast on twelve foods representing the twelve apostles, sing carols, and kick their shoes off over their heads to see what girl they will land near, which is old-school marriage-making..

   Another annual event he was involved in was the Kazuke Muge, a scouting craft fair, fund-raiser, and parade held every March in the community hall of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Cleveland’s Lithuanian church. He organized and promoted it for many years, making sure stalls were assembled for the craft sales, arranging indoor games and entertainment, and encouraging everyone to support the scouts.

   Although he did much for the movement, as a Scoutmaster he didn’t try to do everything for his charges. He thought it better to encourage boys to educate themselves instead of always being educated. “When you want a thing done ‘Don’t do it yourself’ is a good motto for a Scoutmaster,” said Robert Baden-Powell. Like him, my father believed that to be true.

   “There is no ideal way to do things,” he explained to Gintaras Taoras, one of his scouts. “There is no absolute wrong way to do things. Everyone has different ways to accomplish something. It will just take some faster to accomplish the task and others longer, but you both end up at the same end point. Learn through your mistakes.”

   Gintaras, who would become a Scoutmaster in his own right, when asked what person had made a difference in his scouting career, said it was my father. “Brother Vytas was never afraid to try anything new. He always gave us the chance to do things ourselves, like getting our camps organized and set up. If we got it wrong, he didn’t harp on us getting it wrong. He would ask us how we could have done things differently, what we learned, and we would then move on.”

   After World War Two the Lithuanian Boy Scouts Association began to re-organize. In 1948 a National Jamboree was held in the German Alps. More than a thousand displaced Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were there. In 1950 there was the first Lithuanian presence at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

   In 2014 Gintaras Taoras was in the front ranks when the 65th anniversary of scouting for Lithuanian immigrants on four continents was recognized at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington, D. C.  “Scouting is a powerful movement providing life-changing opportunities to today’s Lithuanian youth,” said Zygimantas Pavilionis, the Lithuanian ambassador. “I wish to personally congratulate the Lithuanian Scouts Association,” said Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama and National President of the Boy Scouts of America.

   The Centennial of Lithuanian scouting was celebrated in 2018. My father was one of many Scoutmasters who helped keep scouting alive. Although he passed away seven years before the celebration, whatever scout camp in the sky he is at today, he is sure to be smiling through the smoke of a campfire in the sky at how Lithuanian scouting has resurrected itself one hundred years later.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Constructed Reality

When Esme Got Married

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Stephanie and Joe's wedding at Casa Golondrinas in La Manzanilla, Mexico.

By Ed Staskus

Check this out. It’s just the New Year now and I lost my job.

They re-organized the place and I got let go. I am really bitter since I left there for here. The good news is a headhunter has to help me and I got three months pay to enjoy myself. I’ve gone to Hawaii. Yup, it’s January and I’m here for more than a month and Brent’s coming next week.

Later!

San Francisco is very fun, little bars and clubs, like the movies, even the ratty neighborhoods, like the Mission. I am not complaining until I run out of money. I have two months.

Hehehehe…

I have sent out some resumes and talked about a job in Milwaukee. It’s the same as I was doing, except it’s a start-up. I’ll be back home at the end of February and then I am moving out. I’ll move in with my mother for a while, at least until Brent is back.

I am finally moving! I will be leaving for Indianapolis on Sunday. This week is flying by! There is so much to do. No, I do not have a job. We will be living with Brent’s sister for a month until we are on our own. If you feel like visiting Hoosierville, I think they did well in basketball this year.

Don’t forget me.

Things are crazy here. Moving is a huge pain. Brent and I got a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment right on the highway, which is good since it looks like I might be working in Indianapolis, which is an hour away. Not having a job still blows. I am lucky I haven’t gotten fatter, or anything like that. I am definitely less high maintenance than I was before.

Things in the wedding area are about finished, only a few details to nail down. Are you guys planning on coming?

I miss you all very much. I know I have been crappy, but now that I am settled in Indianapolis I will be much better. If you get any calls, please say nice things about me. I have been interviewing, so hopefully something will break, more on that later. Please send gossip. I am dying out here. Must…have…gossip!

Brent is good, although he is missing both Hawaii and the Army, but not Afghanistan so much. He is not working either, yet, because he is in the National Guard and has to go away for two weeks next Saturday. I am sorry Bob and Jan aren’t happy. That place was too negative for me. Maggie and Cathy? Yikes! How do you stand it? I saw John at a bar and he was friendly. I always liked him the most out of that dysfunctional clan. Speaking of dysfunctional, how is Skip? Brent’s brother-in-law displays similar personality traits.

Blah!

Hey! What is going on? I haven’t seen you guys in sooo long! How has everything been? I still have no job. It totally freaks me out. There are some prospects, so hopefully not much longer for this crap. Brent might be called up for that homeland stuff. We really want him to because you get paid to guard an airport and he wouldn’t even have to do that! He would just organize the people. Then he could get state tuition for Indiana U. Wedding invitations are going out soon. Keep your eyes peeled!

Later!

Things are busy, although I am not sure how. I am sending out wedding invitations any day now. I hope you can come. I think it will be fun. If not, it is always free food.

All of our church requirements are done and we have registered for gifts. That sucks the fun out of shopping. The final fitting for my dress is next Friday. I will be in town then, but Brent’s mom will be here, too. Brent will be in Montana fishing, so I can’t really hang out. How are the mean people you work for? Bob said Cathy had another baby. Yuck. None for me, thanks!

See you soon!

What is going on? Did you get the wedding invitation? Are you planning on coming? I hope so. We’d love to see you guys there. Hopefully you can make it. I hope there aren’t any trade shows that weekend. I still have no job. I am a loser. Things are getting better, though, I think.

Is anything new going on? Keep in touch!

Hey! Didn’t you and Vera get the wedding invitation? You ARE coming, right? I am not going to be home much until the wedding, but I am definitely looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks for the massage salon gift. It works for me as long as Dick isn’t giving it!

Hehehehe…

I am evil, I know. Make sure you send back your response card soon! I am so excited to see you guys!

OK! I am finally employed!

I am going to be a marketing manager for a company called Keter Plastics. They make the same kind of things that Rubbermaid makes. They are in Costco, Walmart, and Lowes. Their latest venture is with Black and Decker and I will be working a lot with them. Yippee! I have no idea when I start and a limited idea of the money involved, but I do not think I care anymore. Yippee! It was my second choice job. My first choice was Delta Faucet, but their new department won’t begin until late October and I can’t wait that long! Now I can shop!

I am so excited!

Hey! My mom got your reply today! I am so glad you guys are coming. I am getting so excited. Make sure you come to the church. I think it will be nice. We are going to have a place for everyone to go for appetizers between the church and the reception. Medina is full of little coffee shops and pubs. It should be a fun day.

Yippee!

I am glad to see you and Vera are coming to the wedding. I think I am going to stop into your work on Thursday to say hi. I haven’t seen you in ages and I will be in the area picking up my dress from Coming Attractions in Lorain. OK, it is not exactly the area. Anyhow, do you guys want to adopt Brent? We decided his family sucks and he is looking for a new family. You don’t have any kids and he is potty-trained for the most part. He just needs a better family. OK, so all families suck, but his is really bad. His sister isn’t coming to the wedding because it might stress out her babies. She is the first woman to ever have a baby.

Sense the sarcasm!

So, think about adopting Brent.

Oh my! I am so busy. Blah! I am planning on stopping in to say hi sometime before the wedding. I need to know how everything is. Is Maggie still in the front office? Can you unlock the back door for me? I can’t believe it is July and two weeks away. I am dying! How fun!

Hey, would it be possible for me to stop in and say hello on Thursday at your work? I am coming home Wednesday night and would like to say hi to everyone before all the chaos of the wedding. Tell Bob and Jan, but don’t say anything to Cathy and Maggie.

I come in next Wednesday night, so basically Thursday morning. I have an appointment to get waxed, ouch, at 9 AM. At least I am hoping to have it then.

Later!

Whoever is in the mood to hang out at Friday’s in Strongsville on Thursday, let me know. I have a ton of wedding high maintenance girl stuff to do that day, like getting my ass waxed. Oh, wait, I mean my back. I will need a drink by the end of the night, and a smoke, and some fattening food. Let me know if you are interested so I can call ahead and get a table. If no one wants to go I will be embarrassed, but that is OK, too. You already have to see me this weekend!

Holy shit, you are busy. You are flying back from the Chicago trade show for my wedding? That is hilarious. I am sorry. You didn’t have to! That is so cool, though. I hope it is not too much of a pain for you to come back. At least it is a cheap flight. Cathy is probably so annoyed!

So, all the mean people have lots of babies. Maggie is driving a Lexus, oh, God! Where do I start the jokes? She is not the type. You can’t have a Lexus and look like you are from the 80s. I want to rip on Maggie so bad. Too easy, though… I don’t want to bring on that bad karma. When is Maggie having a brat of her own? Cathy and Dave suck. She is mean, he is oblivious, but at least he is nice. He made that place tolerable.

My life is nuts. We are going to Chicago next weekend for our “honeymoon.” We only have two days. We are staying at the Crowne Plaza, the same one we all stayed at for the trade show. Remember that place with the velvety drapes? You all got rooms with Jacuzzi’s, except me. I am so excited! I really appreciate you coming home to see us get married.

I can’t wait to see you guys. I really appreciate you ditching that fishy trade show to see me get hitched. That is so great! See you on Saturday. I am leaving work now.

My friends totally loved you. I hope you and Vera had a good time. I was so busy I didn’t get to talk to you more. It is sooo hard to do anything you actually want to do when there are a hundred people who want to be around you. Usually no one wants to be around me!

Hehehehe…

Thank you so much for coming. I hope it was worth the trip!

Did you and Vera have fun at the wedding? My friends thought you were hilarious. I wish someone would come to this cornfield. How is work? When are you leaving there? Is it any day now? Kristin told me she told you how miserable I was when I worked there. Nothing like airing dirty laundry! Sorry if you had to listen.

We went house shopping this weekend. Now I am sick. I don’t think the two are related. It’s wet and cold here. Houses are so fun to look at.

Not much is going on here. Brent is getting great grades at Indiana. He is in the top third of his class and getting recruited from companies like Proctor and Gamble, Miller Brewing, his favorite, and Kraft. He is happy.

Me, on the other hand, I am hating life. I am one of those people who let one thing get them down. I hate my job and do just about nothing all day, which gives me plenty of time to think about how much I hate my job. I have made a few friends, which makes things easier. My best friend is a lawyer and she hates her job, too, so we laugh a lot and make fun of Hoosierville. I am taking classes again, for my MBA, after a year hiatus, seeing as I had no income for most of the year.

Hopefully it will get me out of this hellish job.

Married life is fun. Brent and I do a lot of poor people things together. We have fun inventing things to do, although we are much better at it when we have money. Nikki, my old roommate and best friend, you met her a few times, is getting married right after the New Year, or maybe in the spring, That is the next thing I am looking forward to. I am excited to be the one not getting married.

I am getting pretty adjusted to my new little life.

Is there anything new with you? 

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Atlantic Canada

A Fateful Trip

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By Ed Staskus

“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.” Gilligan’s Island

“I’ve sailed my whole life,” said Michelle Boyce.

A native of London, Ontario, where she grew up, where her father worked for the Board of Education, Michelle raised her own children in Aylmer, a half hour down from London and less than a half hour from the north shore of Lake Erie. There is plenty of sailing from Port Dover to Long Point to the Port Stanley Sailing Squadron. It is Ontario’s south shore.

It isn’t Margaritaville, but it’s laid back. In Port Stanley, on the shoreline, making yourself at home with lemonade or a cold beer on GT’s Beach patio, making time is watching the town’s drawbridge go up and down. Lift bridges can get stuck up, but that’s the only thing stuck up in town.

“At one time we owned five sailboats,” she said.

“The kids and I used to sail across the lake to Cedar Point every summer. My daughter and I are roller coaster fanatics. We would spend a week in the harbor at Cedar Point and then sail back home.”

During the day cannons can be heard when pirates attack riverboats at the amusement park.

Although she still calls her neck of the woods home, where she spends half the year, the other half of the year she now spends on Prince Edward Island. The country’s smallest province, PEI is almost a thousand miles east of Canada’s seed corn hinterland.

“Sailing to PEI, it got really bad before it got really good.”

It started when Michelle, her kids, and her partner, Monika Chesnut, went to Prince Edward Island in 2008.  They went for a wedding. They liked what they saw.

“We fell in love with the island. We felt at home there, so on the way home we tossed around ideas about how we could spend more time on PEI. We’re an entrepreneurial family. We dreamt up the sailing business.”

The sailing business is Atlantic Sailing PEI, weighing anchor out of North Rustico on the north-central coast of the island. The three-hour cruises start at the dock, boarding the only sailboat in the harbor, turning out to sea, looking for dolphins and whales. The sunset sails are on the romantic side.

It’s OK to bring a bottle of champagne and get cloud nine.

Two years after first setting foot on PEI, Michelle and her daughter Jessica took the first step toward turning their dream into reality. “We knew nothing about the marine industry on PEI, but we went ahead,” said Michelle. The person with a vision is often more single-minded and able-bodied than somebody with all the facts.

The facts can be helpful, though, sooner or later.

“We went on a sailing trip, from Lake Erie, across Lake Ontario, and up to Montreal. We spent a couple of weeks there and went up the river to Ottawa. Near there we stopped at a marina and found a 38-foot boat we fell in love with.”

The name of the boat was Folie. It was going to be the boat Atlantic Sailing PEI would sail the starry-eyed to idyllic sunsets on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It wasn’t meant to be, however, maybe because folie is a French word meaning, more-or-less, delusional.

“It can also mean crazy mad person,” said Michelle. “The gentleman we bought it from was 90-years-old. He had sailed it to the Caribbean and back. He had pictures. I don’t know how he did it without dying.”

Folie is a 1960s-era strong as an ox medium-sized cruising yacht capable of offshore passage. It is a serious no-nonsense boat. The first fiberglass sailboat, the Chinook 34, was built in 1956. “Who built the Folie had no idea how thick they had to make the fiberglass,” said Michelle. “They decided they had to make it as thick as wood. The thing was built like a tank.” Since indestructible is what they ended up needing, indestructible ended up standing them in good stead.

Michelle Boyce knows her ragtops, from stem to stern. She knows what makes them go, and she knows the free enterprise end of them, too. “When Detroit was going down, I used to buy sailboats there, sell them, and sail them all over the Great Lakes to the people who bought them.”

The first thing she did to the Folie was replace its engine. “Everything on that boat was end of life.” The engine was a Universal Atomic 4, last manufactured in the early 1980s. The Atomic 4 used to be the Utility Four, used extensively during WW2 to power lifeboats.

“I found a brand new one in a barn in northern Ontario, still in its shipping crate from the factory,” said Michelle.

After the new motor was installed, she and her daughter set off for Prince Edward Island. They planned on the trip taking two weeks, sailing to and around the Gaspe Peninsula, down the New Brunswick coast, and landing on PEI at Northport. They began accepting on-line reservations for summer cruises.

They got to Northport seven weeks later.

Halfway down the channel out of their first harbor their new Atomic 4 started to overheat. “She was red-lining on the temperature gauge. There was nothing we could do. I couldn’t stop in the middle of the channel.” They raced the boat out to the St. Lawrence Seaway, shut off the engine, and threw out the anchor.

“We spent the next five days in the middle of the seaway fixing the boat.”

The engine was undamaged, but the hoses carrying the coolant to the engine had melted. “The gentleman I bought the boat from had used crappy transparent hosing that you use for fish tanks. Fortunately, I’m anal about repairs, and I had another boat on the boat.”

One rule of thumb on the high seas is, whatever it is, if you can’t repair it, it probably shouldn’t be on board in the first place. The other rule is always have spare parts.

No sooner, however, did they make it through the Iroquois Canal lock, when the boat floundered again. This time the impeller melted. “The old gentleman was also anal, and he had left spare parts scattered all around the boat, so every time we broke down, it was a scavenger hunt. We knew he had one on board, but where?”

They found it, because they had to. In the event, ‘Regulations Governing Minimum Equipment & Accomodations Standards’ state that the owner, or owner’s representative, the captain, “must ensure that all equipment is properly maintained and stowed and that the crew know where it is kept and how it is to be used.”

After replacing the water pump, they sailed down the seaway, staying on the cruising side of the buoys, cruising the wide river. They kept the engine quiet, not dousing their sails, keeping them set to the way they were going.

It was a windy day, the waves like rippled potato chips, leaving the last lock outside of Montreal, when their steering went. “The boat would only turn right. It wouldn’t turn left. We were heading for a sandbar. One of the locals in his boat beside me was screaming, ‘Turn, turn, turn, you’re going to hit ground.’ We hit ground and came to a stop.”

“Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground,” observes Dan Bamford, a veteran sailor. “One never left port and the other one was an atrocious liar.”

“A cable fastener broke,” said Michelle, “which was a minor happening of all the happenings. We plugged a hand tiller on, but we were still stuck on the sandbar.”

She took a low-tech approach to the problem. Michelle had lowered the sails, but now got them back up, and when the wind blew into them it threw the boat over. “The wind in the sails took the boat off the shallow water,” she said.

“The goal is not to sail the boat, but rather to help the boat sail herself,” John Rousmaniere, one time editor at Yachting magazine, has pointed out.

They pulled into a marina, filled their tank, and got started, except they couldn’t get going. “They filled our tank with dirty gas. I got it running off a jerry can, running a hose directly from the carburetor to the can, bypassing the tank on the boat. But then, we weren’t twenty minutes out of the harbor when we picked up a rope on our prop.”

She was done with problems for the day. “The wind was going in the right direction, so I just threw up the sails and we sailed from Montreal to Quebec City.”

They ended up floating in one spot off Quebec City for five days. “The wind died and we had no propulsion,” she said. “Our cooler went warm and we were eating dry reserves. We didn’t have any idea the tides were going to be 24 feet. There was either a 10-knot current going this way or a 10-knot current going that way. The current was so crazy there was no rowing our dinghy to shore. We couldn’t dive under the boat to get the rope off our prop, either, too much current.”

When the wind finally picked up slightly they slowly hove into a marina on sail power.

“My daughter chickened out, and so even though my holding my breath under water days are long past, I dove in and got the rope off the prop.”

At the next marina they followed a friendly local in. He had a sailboat similar to theirs. He waved to them. “We’re fine following you,” she shouted across to him. “You’ll be safe,” he shouted back.

He got stuck.

Then they got stuck.

“Fortunately we were stuck in mud and stayed afloat,” said Michelle. “He ended up on dry land. “

The next day, having gotten unstuck, back on the St. Lawrence, they fought a following sea all day. “The waves behind you throw your boat this way and that. It’s hard to steer. At the end of the day I was exhausted.”

It might be why she misread her charts.

“I thought I was in 25 feet of water at low tide. Actually, I was in 25 feet of water at high tide. The water all disappeared in the middle of the night. My daughter and I were sound asleep when, all of a sudden, BANG! We were sideways.”

Waking up with a start, she saw their cats, Cali and Pablo, jump from the bed to the wall, which was now the floor. “They were totally confused.”

Keeping her wits about her, she remembered a story the man they bought the boat from had told them, about the same thing happening to him in the Caribbean. “He just went to sleep when it happened, the water came back, and it was fine. So, that’s what we did. We made a bed on the wall and went to sleep.”

In the morning the tide came in and the Folie floated up and away. “It is a tough, tough boat,” said Michelle. ”It was fine. We had pretty much worked out the bugs by then.”

At least, she thought so. “A tale of a fateful trip, aboard this tiny ship, the mate was a mighty sailin’ lad, the skipper brave and sure.” Assumptions, on the other hand, are like termites.

They picked up Monika, her partner, at Riviere-du-Loup, a city near where boats turn towards Atlantic Canada. One of the best places for whale watching in the world is at the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park offshore from Riviere-du-Loup. Beyond the small town are scattered even smaller towns hugging the coastline, and lots of forest.

“Every so often you’ll see a town and a church steeple. There were almost no other boats around, just the three of us on the Folie, when a superfast black Zodiac came on our horizon. He circled me until he got behind me, and started coming up my wash.”

There were no markings on the Zodiac. There were four men, clad in black, on the boat. Michelle got on her radio.

“Vessel approaching, please identify yourself.”

There was no response.

She tried again. There was no response. She tried the Coast Guard. “I have a vessel of unknown origin approaching me, unknown intent, mayday, mayday.” There was no response. She grabbed her flare gun.

“He was coming up my tail. Pirates are a real thing,” she said. “Since we’re a floater, our decks were lined with water and gasoline cans. I had a pirate plan, which was open a gas can, throw it at them, and shoot the flare gun, lighting them on fire.”

It was when they came within range, the flare gun cocked, that the blue lights on the boat blinked on. It was the police.

“Slow down,” one of the policemen shouted.

“Whatever,” Michelle muttered.

“Where are you going?”

“Prince Edward Island.”

“Where are you putting into next?”

“There,” she said.

“Where’s the man on board?”

“Pardon me?” The man on board was news to her.

“You guys are by yourselves?”

Michelle. Monika, and Jessica looked from one end of the boat to the other. “The cops finally left us alone.” The Zodiac sped away and the Folie got back on track. Time was their enemy.

“The whole time we had all these bookings in North Rustico. We were booked solid. Every single day I wasn’t on the island I was hitting the refund button.”

They hadn’t got much farther when their alternator blew, stuff started to seize, belts got red hot, and smoke filled the boat, which ended up sideways to the waves. “We instantly got into our deal with it mode.” Jessica ran the jib up, Michelle stabilized the boat, the smoke cleared, and they found a spare alternator, although they were starting to run out of the other boat on the boat.

By the time the Folie flooded a few days later she was already starting to wonder what the difference is between an ordeal and an adventure.

They had dropped Monika off near Dalhousie, New Brunswick, so she could pick up her car and rendezvous later on PEI, when they noticed with a jolt that the boat was half full of water.

“It still wasn’t over!” said Michelle. “One of the grease fittings, a cap at the prop shaft, had popped, and water was shooting into the boat. The bilge pump was pumping like crazy, but it couldn’t keep up.”

It was sink or swim.

She grabbed a length of rubber hose, some clamps, and a broom handle. She stuffed the handle into the rubber and stuffed the works into the hole. “I clamped it tight so water would stop coming into the boat.” They pumped the seawater out, but by then it had gotten into the engine oil. “It turned it into chocolate mllk. It was like a chocolate milkshake.” They sailed to open water, threw the anchor out, and the next day replaced the oil.

They could see the oxidized red of Prince Edward Island in the far distance.

Taking it easy in a bay one morning, having coffee, they watched baby belugas approach the boat. They are sometimes called sea canaries because of their high-pitched twitter. Big whales were blowing in deeper water. A herd of seals slipped in close to the sailboat.

“The cats were running around the boat,” said Michelle. “The seals were lined up beside the boat, their noses stuck up, and the cats were on top of the boat with their noses stuck down, trying to figure each other out. It was like first contact.”

When they once and for all pulled into Northport on the west end of Prince Edward Island, they were beyond a shadow of a doubt on the island.

“I’m not a quitter,” said Michelle.

That is when they found out the harbors they were going to sail in and out of were too shallow for the Folie’s keel. They also found out there wasn’t a crane-lift big enough to lift their sailboat out of the water. It couldn’t stay where it was. Boats on PEI get winterized in the fall and summerized in the spring. Setting and forgetting your pride and joy from January to April in the water is leaving your boat on the frozen hot seat.

The first thing Michelle did was to channel the Professor, one of those marooned on Gilligan’s Island. A science teacher, he could build anything, hammocks and houses, so the castaways could live comfortably. He rigged up washing machines, supplied water, and generated electric power, using nothing but indigenous coconuts and bamboo, although he was never able to repair the Minnow.

“The hole on that boat defies all of my advanced knowledge,” said the Professor.

Michelle built her own 10-ton hydraulic trailer with which to back up, get under the Folie, pick it up, and carry it away.

“There must have been thirty guys standing around there watching being brutal.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“That’s not going to work.”

“You’re going to kill yourself.”

“Are you sure that’s going to work?” asked Monika, who had joined them.

When she had the boat on the trailer and the trailer hooked up to her pick-up, and was driving the boat away, to be stored away safe and sound and out of sight in Summerside for the unforeseeable future, none of the bystanders were there anymore.

“They scattered like flies,” she said. “Not one of them was there for I told you so.”

The second thing she did was drive home to Ontario, pick up her 29-foot sailboat, the Calypso, and haul it back to land’s end, across the Confederation Bridge, and to North Rustico.  To this day the Calypso is Atlantic Sail PEI’s bread and butter, three cruises a day, private charters, and special events.

“Awesome experience,” said Donna Burgoyne.

“Monika and Michelle were fabulous hosts, very knowledgeable,” said Andre Pelletier.

“Elle nous fait decouvrir la faune marine et les magnifiques paysages de PEI,” said Sabrina Bottega. “Avec Michelle, c’est super capitaine.”

“The Folie drained us, in more ways than one,” said Michelle. “It almost bankrupted us. We had to refund tens of thousands of dollars, although we ended up doing some tours at the end of the season.”

Before landing at Northport, they spent the day anchored off West Point. “It’s where all the windmills are,” said Michelle. It’s where ship yards built sailboats long ago. It’s where sightings of a sea serpent still happen. It is where buried treasure is reportedly buried, still a secret.

Michelle made herself at home on her back in the sun on the deck while Jessica lolled at the stern.

“There is nothing like lying flat on your back on the deck, alone except for the helmsman aft at the wheel, silence except for the lapping of the sea against the side of the ship,” Errol Flynn once said.

The three-bladed wind turbines on West Point go around and around. There are 55 of them, rock steady as long as the epoxy sails stay full, at the West Cape Wind Farm. Tilting at windmills is quixotic, like running in circles. But if you can stay the course, and square the circle, making your energy making it a go, you might end up where you wanted to be all along.

When Michelle Boyce stepped off the plank she landed on the sure-footed red sandstone of Prince Edward Island.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Rhythm of the Saints

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By Ed Staskus

The word yoga is first mentioned in the Rig Veda. Assuming the practice to be five millennia in the making, it got rolling in northern India during Harappan times. By then the folks in the valley were the largest civilization in the ancient world, stretching across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges. Its estimated population of five million made it bigger than Egypt.

   They didn’t waste their time building pyramids for the top dog, either. Even though their burial sites reflect social structure and hierarchy, the burials are all in brick or stone lined rectangular or oval pits. Bones are bones in the long run, no matter how big the pine box.

   Brahmans developed and refined the practice and wrote up what they were doing in volumes, more than two hundred scriptures. They taught sacrifice of the ego through action wisdom and self-knowledge. One of the most famous scriptures still read far and wide today is the Bhagavad Gita, an unfortunate recruiting poster for Uncle Krishna. If it wasn’t so plausible and beautifully written, it would be laughable. As it is, it’s more quicksand than bedrock.

   Everybody knows yoga started in India, and that anybody who wants to be somebody has to dive into the ocean of the practice across the ocean. India is where it’s at. It’s like baseball, there’s first place and no place. Especially if you are training to be a teacher. The overseas rates for spring training are very good. Courses usually include the instructor and all the yoga you can do, accommodation, meals, props, and outdoor activities. 

   One caveat is that in India they tell you don’t eat too much food. The other caveat is they say don’t take group classes and make yoga your life. In the West everybody eats as much as they please, they take all the group classes they want, and they aren’t making yoga their life. Westerners are crazy in many ways, but they aren’t that crazy.

   A non-caveat is that a month-long 200-hour yoga teacher training program averages between $1200.00 and $1500.00, which is a bargain in any language.

   Amish Tripathi, who writes best-selling novels set thousands of years ago, said his heroes all practice yoga. “In ancient India it was part of daily life, both the physical and the mental aspects. Every culture has gifted something to the world, and this is our gift,” he said.

   At least it used to be.

   It has been estimated that 300 million people practice yoga worldwide, at least sometimes. More than 55 million are in the United States, 16% of the population, and 100 million-some are in India, 8% of the population. Far more people statistic-wise do it in the Land of Mammon than in the Homeland.

   It’s like the Spanish Steps got shipped from Rome to San Diego, and the natives are clanking up and down the steps, lighting up legal weed, laughing up a storm, splashing soft drinks littering crunchy chips and leaving wads of old chewing gum behind.

   It would seem to make sense that the Birthplace of Yoga would be the Land of Yoga. It would seem to make sense that the natives are all in. It would seem so, but is not the case, by all accounts. 

   “Most Indians I know don’t do yoga,” said Sandip Roy, a writer based in California. “My friend Rajasvini Bhansali is an exception. And she’s often the only Indian in class. She recalled one class in particular.”

   “The instructor pointed to me, saying Indians are better oriented towards squats,” she said. “And I realized he was holding me up as an example of how we primitive people are better squatters and have looser hips.”

   He had the same experience. “I show up at my first yoga class in San Francisco. It’s steamy hot. There are more than one hundred people, and sure enough, my friends and I are the only four Indians.”

   “It’s easy to count the number of Indians in a yoga class in America,” says Nikita Taniparti. “Often, I’m the only one. I’ve taken to counting the number of Sanskrit tattoos. In a class of around 25, I typically spot around ten. Only one of them is my own. Combing the magazine covers of Yoga Journal, the most recent evidence of an Indian on the front cover seems to be 2009.”

   It’s not just Indians living in the West. “There are hordes of them who are ignorant about the history of yoga,” she added.  Even though it is their own backyard, they don’t necessarily have ownership of the practice.

   Kate Churchill, director of the 2008 documentary “Enlighten Up,” interviewed yoga pioneer Pattabhi Jois at his school in southern India. “We might as well have been in the Puck building in New York,” she said. “There were over one hundred Westerners and not a single Indian. I was looking around and saying, ‘Well, where are the Indians?’”

   “With the exception of Rishikesh in Uttarahkand, there won’t be yoga classes everywhere. Regular, everyday Indians do not practice yoga at a studio,” said Sandy Kingsley of Inspired Exploration.

   Maybe they are finding inspiration at home. Maybe not. Maybe they’ve got something else at home that needs doing.

   “India is the birthplace of yoga,” said New Delhi native Raju Kumar. “I think lots of people do yoga in India, but most people cannot give time for it due to the survival of their family. They sleep late and arise early to catch the bus or train for their job. They have no more time to spend on yoga so cannot take the advantage of natural fitness. But all the people should do yoga for internal and external benefit.”

   When this came to the attention of Narendra Modi, the newish Hindu nationalist strongman savior of the sub-continent, his head almost exploded, and he was ready to order riots. He knew from past experience with his archenemies, who are the Muslims, that they always work. His circle of advisors finally got his head turned around, the riots were called off, and he went soapbox, instead.

   Even though yoga helps most people fall asleep more quickly and wake up rested, Narendra Modi is not most people. He practices it to be able to stay up most of the night, and after a pre-dawn nap, wake up raring to go ready to solve his country’s problems. Nobody gets in front of him. 

   The first thing he did was establish International Yoga Day, set to be June 21st every year. The second thing he did was lay out plans for yoga to be taught in schools. The third thing he did was emphatically suggest compulsory yoga for India’s notoriously out-of-shape police. Maybe they could finally start chasing down some of the serial rapists in the country. 

   He also said yoga lessons would be offered free to civil servants and their families. He didn’t say, if you were a householder, your taxes were going to foot the bill for the lessons. There is never any need to upset the voting public.

   “Yoga is an invaluable gift of India’s ancient tradition. It embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action, restraint and fulfilment, harmony between man and nature, a holistic approach to health and wellbeing. It is not about exercise but discovering the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature,” he said.

   Suneel Singh, a guru in south Delhi, agreed, saying, “It is a complete package for everybody’s body and a cheap way for keeping you hale and hearty.”

   The Muslims didn’t necessarily agree that making yoga a national priority was the way to go. Many of them felt like they were stuck in a closet full of wire hangers. One false move could be their last move. They could end up being hung out to dry.

   “Many Muslim scholars say that yoga is against the fundamental tenets of Islam, to pray to the sun, for example,” said Asaduddin Owaisi, a Muslim member of Parliament. “Why make this a nationalist issue? Just because I do not want to do yoga does not mean I am not a patriot.”

   Mark Twain once said that a patriot is “a person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.” Nobody talks to Narendra like that in India, not if they know what’s good for them. They hunker down in cow pose and keep their thoughts to themselves. The two-time current Prime Minister has centralized power and takes no guff.

   “As a seasoned yoga practitioner, our great leader Modi is able to embody unity of his mind and body, take thought action, restrain himself and achieve fulfilment, create harmony between man and nature and provide a holistic approach to health and wellbeing,” explained Kaballi. 

   Many Indians don’t have a surname and are known by only one name.

   “If he wasn’t practicing yoga and being trained to restrain himself from all forms of passion, we would have seen a real blood bath in Gujarath in 2002,” he added. The top dog is a saint, although saintly on his own terms, at his own rhythm. It was just a minor bloodbath in Gujarath. Most of the blood was the blood of Muslims. It was their own fault, though. If they had practiced more yoga maybe they would have bled less.

   “The important point is that India is proving it’s a country of undiluted democracy with an ancient old civilization. The minorities are a pain on the spine, all crybabies. It is high time the West stops its underhand dealings with them hoping to make India kneel. I too am now organizing yoga for everyone!”

   Is yoga an important part of life for everyone in India? It is and it isn’t. Everybody thinks they know all about it, the same as everybody in the United States thinks they know everything about the 2nd Amendment. Since so much of India is poorer than not, and since much of it is outside the mainstream of growth and development, development is the front of the line issue. Finding a good job is important. Putting food on the table is important. Tossing and turning at night with no air conditioning in one hundred-degree temperatures is an issue. The air and water are foul. Sanitation is atrocious. Governance and corruption are big problems. 

   Narendra Modi ran for the throne in 2014 on slogans of better sanitation and better governance. Everybody already knew what he thought about Muslims, so he didn’t have to say much on that thorny issue. Yoga was an after-thought after the election was signed sealed and delivered.

   When he sponsored a proposal to make the first day of summer International Yoga Day the resolution was supported by 177 nations at the United Nations General Assembly. It was an easy yes vote. There is a halo of virtue that surrounds the practice, no matter how many people like Modi Bikram Osho and all the other self-serving saints wrap themselves up in it.

   “Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over,” Elvis Presley said.

   Yoga is like that too. When you have it you have it all over. The way to get it is to go find it for yourself and make it your own. If your mom and dad and the president and prime minister have to tell you to go to your room and do yoga, it is possible it will get ingrained in you, but it goes against the grain of the practice.

   When Narendra Modi and his right-wing BJP state politicos try to impose it from the top down, they will hopefully be as successful as the commies were when they tried to impose all the rules from headquarters. Unless you’ve turned your gaze to turning a profit on yoga, the top-down approach is not any good.

   In business it is about the hierarchy of high versus low employees. The high-ranking people make decisions relating to goals and plans while the low-ranking people perform tasks and achieve the goals set for them. It creates clear lines of authority, standardizes products and services, and facilitates quality control.

   There aren’t many things in this manmade bossman world that are personal anymore. From state control to corporate control to message control it’s gone under my thumb, from overt to invisible. Yoga is one of the personal things, since its premise is, it’s all in your head. Get your head right and all will be right as rain.

   “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights,” sang Peter Tosh, one of the original Wailers.

   Yoga is a bottom-up personal business undertaking. Somebody telling you to get on your mat has got the business end of it all wrong. Listening to those kinds of top-down orders is wasting your time and the time of the last five thousand years.

   Better to put the earbuds on, tune out the Narendra Modi’s of the world, and listen to the vintage rhythm of the saints.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Constructed Reality

Slap Happy

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By Ed Staskus

By all accounts Ryan Woidke seems to be a normal 19-year-old born and bred in Lakewood, Ohio, where he still lives on weekends while in his second year at Kent State University. A graduate of Lakewood High School now majoring in Criminal Justice, trim and athletic, a full-time academic with two part-time jobs, he blends in with most other backpacking students.

Except on Friday nights, when he changes his t-shirt and blue jeans for deer-hide leather shorts, wide embroidered suspenders, a white cotton shirt, a green wool hat with a grouse feather ornament, knee socks, and black shoes with thick two-inch heels and cleats as big as horseshoes.

Once transformed he goes shoe slapping at the Donauschwaben German-American Cultural Center in Olmsted Township on Cleveland’s southwest side. The shoe slap dance is schuhplattler.

The Donauschwaben are the Danube Swabians of Eastern Europe, a German people who colonized parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire along the Danube River in the 18th century. After WWI their lands were parceled out to Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. After WWII most fled their farms and towns when faced with the advance of the Iron Curtain. Many relocated to Ohio, to Cincinnati, Akron, and Cleveland.

The Donauschwaben have a Coat of Arms. It is made of a German Eagle on top and a fortress below. The eagle is black and the fortress towers are between a sun, symbolizing the rise of Christianity, and a crescent moon, symbolizing the setting of Islam.

“What happened was that in my freshman year at Lakewood High one of my best friends asked me to help serve dinner at their winter dance event,” said Mr. Woidke. “Later on he invited me to a practice, and, of course, when you show up they start making you dance. I was hooked on it right away.”

Schuhplattler, or hitting the shoe, as it is called, is native to the mountainous regions of Bavaria and Tyrolean areas of Germany, in which women spin around their partners or simply spin in place and men execute a syncopated series of loud slaps on lederhosen-clad legs and soles of their shoes.

Between slaps men and women both waltz to the accompaniment of accordions, sometimes three or four or more of them, a wall of wheezy but smooth sound ranging from very soft to very loud.

Accordions are assembled with wax and the best ones are always fully handmade.

“I had never danced before,” said Mr. Woidke. “I don’t know if I have plattle or not, but at least for this I do.”

Rhythm is known as plattle in schuhplattler circles.

Schuhplattling requires flexibility, stamina, and unity of the group, so that the slapping isn’t just loud only, but is one loud slap in concert. Men slap themselves on the knees, thighs, and feet. Traditionally a courtship dance, a means to attract the opposite sex, it became a way to showcase the agility and strength of men and a spectacle to dazzle women.

Watschenplattle is a variation of schuhplattle. During the slap dancing men smack each other firmly on the butt in addition to everywhere else.

Schuhplattler is almost a millennium old, first described in 1050. In modern times washing one’s hands afterwards, especially if watschenplattling, has become a rite before starting up any other courtship-like activities.

“Some of us are younger and have the endurance for it,” said Mr. Woidke. “Others are in their 50s, but they’ve been doing it since they were little kids, so they’re used to it.”

Schuhplattling originally came to Cleveland in the early 1920s when four couples toured the city demonstrating the European folk dance at civic functions. The dance group Schuhplattler und Trachtenverien, better known as STV Bavaria, was formed in the mid-60s and today thrives with more than a hundred members, ranging in age from 7 to 70.

“Many of our young adults grew up within the club, but Ryan came to us as a teenager,” said Paul Beargie, vice-president of STV Bavaria and a long-time Lakewood resident.

“He has taken to the dance and fully immersed himself in the culture. It is encouraging to see his enthusiasm to learn and pass on what he has learned.”

Five years of weekly practices, competitions, and cultural events have immersed Ryan Woidke in the history and customs of his adopted Bavarian Alps and the dancing that dates back 40 generations.

“Ryan is more than a dancer,” said Kenny Ott, president of STV Bavaria. “He’s second-in-command of the men’s teaching. He’s a young man who has stepped up and assumed a role of responsibility, perpetuating the culture for at least another generation.”

One of four dance directors for the group, Ryan Woidke brings a young man’s energy to the thousand-year-old tradition.

“I’m at the point where they can show me five dances a night and I’ll know all of them,” he said

Every year STV Bavaria participates at the Cleveland Labor Day Oktoberfest, drawing large crowds. It is the club’s major fund-raising event, as well as an opportunity to perform their native dances, and sometimes even strut their stuff before an audience often unfamiliar with schuhplattler.

‘We do all kinds of funny skits,” said Mr. Woidke. “In one of them we come out dressed as old men with canes. A lady comes out with a sign saying she’s got a special brew, and we drink it, go around the glockenspiel, and when we come back, we’ve lost our beards and scraggly wigs, and we’re dancing upright. It’s like the beer that makes you younger.”

A recent poll on the Oktoberfest Facebook page rated the colorful STV Bavaria pavilion and their folk dances in full costume tops for the holiday weekend, for more reasons than one.

“We have sponsors who donate bead necklaces and sunglasses, and we toss stuff out to the crowds right after the shows, “said Mr. Woidke. “One year they gave us Jagermeister apparel to throw out.

“Another time it was thongs. That was nuts, everybody was grabbing for those.”

Affiliated with Gauverband Nordamerika, a non-profit foundation formed in 1966 to preserve and carry on the cultural heritage of Bavaria and Tyrol, including their ethnic costumes and dances, Cleveland’s STV Bavaria group regularly competes in the biennial Gaufest national competition. Since 1973 they have won 7 gold medals.

In Orlando, Florida, in July 2011, STV Bavaria brought home first place in the Gaufest group dance, and well as placing two couples in the top three of the singles competitions. They qualified for the 2012 Bayrischer Loewe in Germany, at which event they will go shoe-to-shoe against teams from both the fountainhead and from around the world.

Mr. Woidke can’t wait.

“We’re going to go and compete against all of their best,” he said. “I’ve only been here five years, so there are many things I don’t know, but I’m still going.”

By his own reckoning part German, largely on his father’s side, Mr. Woidke dances schuhplattler for the heritage, for the competition, but mostly for the camaraderie.

“The people are great,” he said. “It’s like one big family. They’re fun to hang out with.” What he meant was the energy and community of putting on a show, the village atmosphere of people who care about what they’re doing and about each other.

Mr. Woidke’s future plans include getting his undergraduate degree, attending the police academy at Kent State University, possibly enlisting in the Marine Corps, and definitely schuhplattler.

“No matter what, even if I go into the military, I’ll keep it up,” he said. “I can jump right in when I’m on leave. You can’t beat it.”

At the Bayerischer Lowe in Gauting, Bavaria, in May 2012 Mr. Woidke and the Cleveland group, STV Bavaria, took 5th place in the Gruppenpreisplattein, or group dance.

In 2013 STV Bavaria defended their first place North American Gaufest medal, again taking the gold.

After transferring to and graduating from Cleveland State University, Mr. Woidke, a life-long gun enthusiast, enlisted in the United States Army. He is currently stationed in South Korea, where he works as a Military Weapons Specialist.

Slap dancing is unknown in South Korea, although the actor Tom Hiddleston improvised a schuhplattle one night for his fantasy fans in Seoul, South Korea, during the premiere of the movie Thor: The Dark World.

Ryan Woidke, meanwhile, continues to work on his plattle, with the thought in mind that it’s never smart to give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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