union rallies.

Day 1
~1,000 people

It has been over a month now, and as I watch the rallies around the Capitol wax and wane, I am just beginning to wrap my mind around what I-- and all of us in Madison, Wisconsin, the US, and the world-- have been part of for the past four weeks.

Day 2
~ 25,000 people

Day 6

The community of Madison has been transformed by this movement, and the impact won't go away quickly with the protesters. Every one of us has been affected by it, whether because we slept in the Capitol building for two weeks straight, or because we were late for work 3 out of 5 days every week because of swamped city buses, or because we suddenly have something other than Wisconsin winter weather to talk about with every single person we encounter throughout the day.

Day 7
~70,000 people

Tom Morello kicks off Week 2
with Rock for Your Rights

Our local pizza place, Ian's Pizza was absolutely swamped with business for two weeks because of hundreds of calls from around the US and the world with donations of pizza to be delivered to the protesters around the Square. Inside their store, Ian's has a board that lists all of the countries calls had come from, and a note that says "All 50 states!". They received more donations than their employees could keep up with, so many so that they started to donate their donations to other local businesses and to refer callers to other businesses to make donations.

Sit-in Feb 27

I attended the sit-in at the Capitol on February 27, fully prepared to be dragged out of the building and arrested. I was there as much for the experience as for the statement. I was moved and impressed by what the people had transformed our state Capitol into, perfectly organized chaos; a huge open communal living space that was both a statement of solidarity against the bullying of this government and a testament to the ability of people to coexist and care for each other when they are driven by common goals and not restricted by the pursuit of money.

I climbed to the second floor of the building with the number for my lawyer in magic marker on one hand and the number of a friend prepared to bail me out of jail on the other. I milled about with around 500 people as the announcement was made overhead that the building was closing at four p.m., then waited with them for the small number of police officers from counties around the state to ask us to leave. When we weren't asked to leave, or dragged out of the building, I was disappointed at first. I had come for the experience, and it was, frankly, a little boring after awhile to just mill about the Capitol listening to a drum circle and protest chants. But, then I was reminded of our reason for being there and realized that we had won this one. It was suddenly interesting to be a part of that, and I slept that night with a sense of pride for my city and my state.

"WE ARE WI"

That sense of pride was completely deflated the next morning when authorities started to restrict access to the building. That was the first moment, after attending more than two weeks of protests, that I realized that we were just going to lose.

The greatest blow, of course, came last Wednesday, when the Senate sneakily pushed through the anti-Union legislation. Although the move re-lit the fire that was threatening to burn out under the protesters, it was still completely disheartening. What are we fighting for anymore? The fight continues, but with each victory for the other side, this inspiring community is looking more and more like an angry mob to me. It seems that no matter how right we are or how loud we shout, the powers that be are not listening.  I don't know what to do to make them listen, and I know we can't possibly stop shouting.  I'm just trying to exist in my city now, witnessing this historic event without being swept up in false hope or heavy disappointment at every turn.

SOLIDARITY
Friday, Feb 18

Rock for Your Rights, Monona Terrace
Monday, Feb 21

Monday, Feb 14
Headed to the Governor's office

Tuesday, Feb 15
Teamsters arrive

Serving Ian's Pizza outside the Capitol

Rock for Your Rights
Tom Morello invites us all to join him on stage

Rules of etiquette inside the Capitol

Sneaking a moment away from work to
check out the action
Saturday, Feb 19

the first thursday.

scenes from campus life

The semester had begun, and I was easing into my new schedule, which now began at eight each morning. For the first time in months, I was waking to an alarm. I had started to work nights over the summer vacation, and I was used to waking only when the superfluous honking of horns on the street, chatter of yuppie pedestrians outside of my window, and sunshine through my broken vertical blinds became too much to sleep through. I was happy for the added hours in my day forced upon me by this early rising, but it was taking a lot more coffee and a lot more weed to put me in shape to leave the house so early each day.

It was Thursday, which meant my journalism class at nine-thirty. We analyzed the novelty and relevance of an article in the campus paper about a twenty-year-long study by the University that proved that “boozing” before exams will lower test scores. We all agreed that it was entertaining to read officially what we all knew from years of experience, but that not a single student on campus was going to change his behavior after reading this article. It was yet another quaint warning from the University that we ought to watch our drinking if we were to be at all successful in our college careers. Much appreciated.

After class I headed to the library, where I passed the computer lab and the cafe to reach the library stacks in a dimly-lit corner on the third floor, exchanged my copy of Anais Nin's Diary for the next volume, then settled into the cafe for more coffee, free internet, and lunch. After six hours of homework, correspondence, and Editing in the cafe, I caught a bus back home, made supper, stole a quick nap, and headed to work.

I stopped to buy a bottle of vodka, as I wouldn't be out until long after the liquor stores were closed. Next to me, pondering over 6-packs in the adjacent cooler, were two girls, maybe nineteen, barely passing for twenty-one tonight.

“Lindsay, you can't just have a liquid dinner again tonight! We should order pizza when we get home,” one said to the other.

“No! No more drunk food,” the one called Lindsay replied. “I am totally addicted! I'll get fat while I'm in Wisconsin.”

As I waited in the long line at the counter, I noticed an unusual number of Vikings jerseys and Brett Favre t-shirts all around me. Ah, football season had begun. Good; the store was not going to be busy tonight.

So, instead of waiting on lines of customers, I spent the night swapping coming-of-age stories with my coworker.

“I got my first tattoo when I was fifteen,” he told me. “A friend of mine needed practice, so he took a bunch of underage kids to some sketchy hotel room downtown and gave us all free tattoos. I got my nose pierced when I was sixteen by some chick in the back of a cafe. I don't think that was legal...”

Throughout the night, drunk couples and groups from the bar next door wandered in to buy munchies and condoms and coffee to top off their nights. Even our regulars were more drunk than expected, everyone friendly as hell and smelling like stale booze even early in the night.

As the night wore on, we could feel the madness of downtown Madison growing around us. Students whose money hadn't run out yet, who had no class on Fridays and no homework assigned yet, who had just recently left their parents' house for the year, and who had stayed sober for four days straight, were ready to fucking party that night. We could hear shouting, techno music, and the general din of debauchery floating into the store each time the door opened for a second.

“I never knew it before moving to Madison,” my boss noted, “but the weekend actually starts on Thursday. And the first Thursday of the semester is like a fucking national holiday in this town.”

And the kids were celebrating, getting this weekend started in bro bars with football and cheap beer and fake IDs. Unfortunately, many of these kids were from out of state or underage, early in their college careers, so most didn't yet know how to handle their alcohol. When I left the store at 1am, the streets were swarming with kids stumbling, puking, wandering, screaming; lost, confused, and wasted .

A couple passed me in the crosswalk, the girl stumbling with as much indignation as she could muster in her wobbly high heels, and the guy behind her shouting, “Yeah, here we go again: I'm not as sensitive as you. I don't care as much as you. You love me so much more than I love you. Whatever, babe. I'll just fucking drop you. Fuck that; I don't have to put up with this shit.”

Two blocks down State Street, I ducked into the bus shelter and settled onto the wooden bench to wait the twenty minutes for the next bus. The shelter was directly across the street from the most Badger-red, bro-filled sports bar downtown, and I watched from behind the glass as groups of young drunks wandered out of its doors.

“Hey bra, hey bra,” drunken taunting across the street. Two of a group of three guys in front me were starting a fake fight with each other, one shouting these words in his Jersey accent and tapping the chest of his friend, puffing out his own. They crouched and raised loose fists to each other, slapped at the air a couple of times, then collapsed into a drunken hug with their third companion. “Nah, man, I'm just messing around. We're cool.”

Taxis were running slowly down the street, stopping in front of the bars as the drivers searched the masses for whatever incoherent group had called them and forgotten by now that they were waiting for a cab. Kids knocked on their windows and tried to climb in random cabs, but the doors were all locked, and the drivers just kept moving. Good Samaritans guided their friends into the taxis with empty pitchers or buckets to puke in, gave the driver directions on where to take their friends, handed them a few dollars to cover the fare, and returned to the bars with the weight of that guy off of their shoulders. Assholes left their friends behind to pass out in the bathroom stalls.

I pulled a joint from my bag and lit it, calming my mind as I took in the madness swirling around me from the other side of the glass shelter. I watched one guy walking down the middle of the street stop and stand in place, staring straight ahead of him with huge pupils for about five minutes without moving. I watched another trip over his own toes and fall face first onto his cheek on the sidewalk. I grimaced with pity as his friends helped him stand up.

Behind me, a girl shouted, “Oh my god! I love that jacket!”

She had stopped while she and her friends walked down the sidewalk, and now she was leaning against a storefront window and tapping the glass to point out the jacket to her friends.

“I'll come buy it tomorrow,” she said as they walked away. “Mañana. El sábado. Per favore,” she chattered to her oblivious friends. “Oh wait! Por favor, I mean!” She laughed. “I shouldn't have taken Spanish and Italian in the same semester.” She waved a hand in the air and shook her head. Even drunk, this town is so goddamn academic.

Across the street, a pair of Madison police officers, one man and one woman, strolled around the corner to patrol down State Street. I hastily put out the joint on the bench and tucked it back into my bag, but they didn't even glance my way. They were chatting with each other, counting on their mere presence to maintain order in the streets. They rounded the corner and walked away from the bro bar just as two people walked out, first a guy in a black-and-white-checkered Abercrombie hoodie sweatshirt, followed by a bitching girl in a short dress and high-heeled sandals.

“You wanna do this?” the bitch screamed at him. They wandered a few feet into an open space on the sidewalk and silently taunted each other for a few seconds. She clumsily slipped out of her sandals and threw her cardigan on the ground next to her. She squared herself and patted him on the cheek to egg him on.

“Aw, come on, baby,” he slurred to her, then reached for her waist. She slapped him again lightly on the other cheek, and he stepped back. They were both so drunk and weak and completely unable to engage in this battle that it unfolded practically in slow motion before me. The guy shook his head at her and unzipped his hoodie and tossed it to the ground a few feet behind him.

They continued to bat at each other a couple of times before a group of five girls poured out of the bar and surrounded them. They tried to coax the two to cut it out while their friend was screaming, “This fucker was trying to start shit with me!” and swatting at the air in front of the guy.

Behind these girls, a group of three guys came out of the bar and watched the fight from a few feet back without interfering. One of the guys noticed the sweatshirt lying on the ground and picked it up, eying the fighting couple carefully as he did. He chuckled to his companions as they dug into the shirt's pockets and pulled out a cell phone and a wallet, stuffed them in their own pockets, and dropped the sweatshirt back to the ground. None of the group just a few feet away noticed this, and finally the girls were able to pull their friend away and sit her down to help her strap her sandals back on. The guy turned away with a snarl, picked up his sweatshirt, and joined the three guys, apparently his own companions. They greeted him and patted his back, calling the girl a bitch and laughing drunkenly as they all walked away down the street.

When I finally exited the bus in my neighborhood, I found myself behind a couple of girls leaving the Gyro shop on the corner. As they weaved a path down the sidewalk, they threw arms around each others' shoulders and held their phones at arms' length to snap a picture to remember the moment. I was walking a lot faster and steadier than they were, unintentionally gaining on them. As I approached quietly within a few feet, about to pass them, the brunette turned around suddenly and gasped.

“Holy shit!” she shouted, but rested a hand kindly on my shoulder after a moment. “I'm sorry-- you scared the crap out me!” She giggled and caught her breath.

I apologized for nothing in particular and laughed too, shrugging my shoulders and rolling my eyes.

“Here.” She passed me a bottle of Coke mixed with cheap rum from inside her purse, and we walked another block together. I introduced myself, and she took a picture of me with her phone before they turned the corner and left me alone but thankful for the warmth of the rum in my belly on this cool night. I finished my joint on the way home, set my alarm for eight a.m., and settled into bed content. I am not much of a fan of football, or bros, or gaggles of drunk young girls; but they do put on a pretty good show to kick off a Madison weekend.

observations from der rathskeller

I am in the Rathskeller at the Memorial Union, and it is filled with Coastie frat kids in costumes that make this place feel like a rave. This is going to be a strange crowd to listen to a solo acoustic hipster musician from Milwaukee.

The Union is the center of campus for anyone visiting or coming back to reminisce over college memories. Because it's raining, the music tonight is inside the Rathskeller, a beautiful olde German-style bar and music venue. The Rathskeller has a domed brick-tiled ceiling and a dozen thick wooden-framed archways. The rod-iron chandeliers are ancient (or ancient-looking), and the walls are painted with odd characters and German phrases; scenes that at one time may have had a deeper meaning, but now simply give drunk college kids something to wonder at. The beautiful mismatched wooden tables have been in here for decades and are layered with years of pencil carvings... “Donny” and “MoLo” have graced my table over the years, small steps in the history of a Union tradition.

Outside of the Union, along the shore of Lake Mendota, is the Memorial Union Terrace. In better weather, we'd see the show on that outdoor stage, a much larger space, more beautiful, and the perfect summer contrast to this German beer hall. The Rathskeller is heavy and dark, filled with thick humid air that seems to hold the weight of the memories of everything that passes through. The Terrace outside its windows is light and sunny, filled with the ever-coveted metal Terrace furniture in an array of bright colors; the open sky and the Lake and the woods take the music and the memories of this place away as fast as they are made, to be lost like so many Summer nights.

Shaggy comes on the playlist before the live act, and the Coastie kids have gone crazy. The dance floor is suddenly filled with bouncing tutus and guys in make-up and suspenders. This is followed by “Take Me Home Tonight”, and the room breaks out in unison for this one line. A table of blonde high-school girls in matching black-and-white stripes are bouncing and shaking their ponytails at each other in a corner.

The solo acoustic guy gets on the stage, and the Coastie kids quickly realize that they can't bounce this way anymore. They slowly bob and weave to a calm stop, place their hands at their sides, and turn calmly toward the stage to enjoy the music. The musician has a 19-inch waist and scraggy arms and fingers, a huge acoustic guitar, shaggy brown hair, and an orange knit cap (which he keeps on despite this room's ungodly temperature.  How hipster-ly ironic.).

The time comes, apparently, for the costumed Coastie kids to move on to whatever party they are preparing for, and there is a sudden mass exodus from the room of hundreds of tutus, clown wigs, suspenders, mascara, and tiaras.

Later in the night, I go on a short excursion through the Union, starting outside up on the brick semicircular balcony covered in vines; into the gallery where I sit down to play the grand piano in the middle of the room, without knowing at all how to. I browse the room, touching the texture of the paintings on the wall, because I always want to do this and finally I am in a gallery with no one else around. I walk through the foyer of a formal ballroom dancers' ball. I am tempted to crash it, to step in and try to follow along; but a little afraid, concerned about ruining their magical evening to complete my own. I complete the circle and make my way past empty meeting rooms and locked student org offices, back through the gallery, and out onto the balcony.

From here, in the dark and through the rain on the early May evening, I can feel the buzz of change at this campus hub. I can hear the music inside the Rathskeller, and I can see the Terrace, open for business and coming alive, ready for Summer. The Coastie kids will be leaving the city soon, and the Spring rains will give way to sunny Summer nights. The Rathskeller will sit dark and empty, while the Terrace is filled with nostalgic Wisconsinites, reggae, blues, brats, and oh-so-many pitchers of beer.

squares and rockstars.

"We're not EXACTLY rockstars," the Taxman said as we headed to the hot tub early Sunday morning.  Someone had said "It's great to be rockstars," partying all night, and the neighbor's hot tub open to us at all hours.  This assertion by the Taxman sums up my evening with the Squares.

Well, there was sex, drugs, and rock and roll that night, for sure.  There was dirty dancing and hookups in dark corners; wine, beer, jello shots, and weed; two live bands playing great music we could dance to.  Partying followed by great food with friends followed by naked hot tub.

In a way, I guess, one could call it a good night:  no one went home mad, no one cried, no one had any sex they don't remember, there was no mess left anywhere, and nothing was broken or lost.  I imagine this is how the Squares see it.  "We partied an appropriate amount."  The Taxman's calculation.

We had one bottle of wine between four women.  One refrigerator of bottled beer for seventy-five people that ran out after we each had three.  Maybe four people smoking weed and only one guy with a pipe.  Not a single person smoking cigarettes.  No one drinking jello shots but the groupies because they tasted too much like vodka.  The lights were on in the house all night.  The house was ninety degrees, and the only two people I knew there (and the only ones not busy grinding with someone they wanted to hook up with) kept stepping outside for relief from the heat.  Even during the best songs!

The room was full of private-school music majors who had nothing in mind but who they would fuck that night, where, and when.  They weren't used to "outsiders" playing at their house parties, and they gave little energy to the band.  The music they talked about amongst themselves was their upcoming end-of-year recitals.  This crowd reminded me of a pianist chick who, when asked to step in for the keyboard part during my friends' band practice one time, responded, "I'm classically trained, and I don't want to damage my form." Musicians; but students, not rockstars.

Mistakes were made.  I didn't order any drinks at dinner before the show.  No one warned us, the "outsiders", that when these kids party they pre-game to shit-faced ahead of time, so the house doesn't supply a keg.  Just a few beers to keep everyone going until the hook-up hour.  The girls and I went with the practical choice of buying only one bottle of wine, assuming only we would drink it and beer would be abundant; we didn't prepare for the possibility of sharing or having no beer.  We stopped drinking early on so we could all drive home, but didn't resume the drinking once we were home, and we ate a bunch of food.  We spent a lot of time eating and chatting as the sun started to come up, and by the time we made it to the hot tub it was practically daylight, and we were all practically sober.

We were only in the hot tub for forty-five minutes, not enough time for it to warm up completely, so it was lukewarm the whole time.  The band members brought their girlfriends along, so no sexiness in the hot tub at all.  Though, when the Taxman had uncharacteristically called for naked hot tub and a late night, sexiness is certainly what he had been hoping for.

"I've never been to the hot tub with the Editor and not the Doctor before.  This should be interesting."

Well, Taxman, you have nothing but fantasies.  Any hope for achieving those you dashed yourself in your own mind before we could even get started:  "We're not EXACTLY rockstars."  You need to expect your dreams to come true and make something happen.  It was not interesting, not like you imagined.  It was far too real; lukewarm water and pale white bodies we could see with sober eyes in the morning sun.

Rockstars are meant to be seen in dim light through a smoky haze.  Never after dawn, and never sober.  They have groupies on their laps at 3am, not girlfriends-- unless their girlfriends have groupies, too.  Rockstars don't take a break for fresh air during the good songs.  Rockstars have the ability to see their dreams as possibilities and make them reality.  Squares can drink all night, dance to rock and roll, make great music, stay up until 5am, and get naked in their neighbor's hot tub.  Without the anger and the crying and the hazy sex and the mess and the broken shit and the extra booze-- without the passion-- they're just... Not exactly rockstars.