Tofu Dog in the Sausage Race?

One of our great neighbors across the hall, who moved to Wisconsin a year ahead of us, is a vegetarian. Being one myself, I was naturally relieved that another of my unusual persuasion could survive in the land of bratwurst. After all, we've posted before about The Bratzooka at our local minor league park, and about the famous sausage race at the Brewers' Miller Park. I naturally assumed that my arrival would simply double the state vegetarian population, approximately.

Of course I've since discovered that we herbivores are not quite that rare up here; Woodman's has a great selection of vegetarian products (actually most local supermarkets do a decent job), and most restaurants have at least a couple of things on the menu, which is about what I used to find in Boston. In fact the most "local" restaurant in town, the Delta diner, has a whole vegetarian section with about 20 choices for us strange folk.

But if someone had told me that there was a vegetarian player in Major League Baseball, the last place I would have looked would be the Milwaukee Brewers. Nonetheless, Prince Fielder, the Brewers' star first baseman, has apparently joined me in the great cult of the carrot.

Everyone must read this article from today's New York Times.

For one thing, it's just good writing. Hilarious, at least to someone who is a vegetarian (me) and someone who is familiar with our strange kind (Jodi). But it's also a great look at the difficulties even a celebrity vegetarian occasionally has finding something he wants to eat when dining out, and the different reactions of his fans and co-workers.

General Manager Doug Melvin said he had no concerns, then or now, about perhaps his team’s strongest player drastically changing the fuel he put in his tank. Melvin is so unmoved by the situation that he said: “Is he still a vegetarian? I don’t even know.”

...

Several spaces down, [tailgaiting fan] Dan Ricksetter of Milwaukee added: “It was a bit disheartening when he decided to become a vegetarian. Brats are intrinsic to our culture. They’re the breakfast of champions. I’m not sure which sport.”

I will say, in defense of our subspecies, that Fielder may be an unusually picky eater. Personally I'm always up for trying new things; today I ate cactus for (possibly) the first time ever at our favorite local tex-mex place. But sometimes you just want a PB&J sandwich, and there's nothing wrong with that. I hope Fielder has better luck in the future.

One minor quibble with the article: it claims that "a tofu dog has yet to be invited" to the Sausage Race. Had the reporter done his homework, he might have added that PETA actually suggested the idea to the Brewers in 2002. At the time, they said they had no plans to add to the four existing sausage contestants (Hot Dog, Brat, Italian and Polish). In 2006, however, they added Chorizo. Maybe with this latest news about Fielder, it's time to break down another barrier in our nation's long history of sausage discrimination. Only time will tell.

P.S. Apparantly OnMilwaukee.com joked about this on April Fools.

Little Seder on the Prairie (for real this time)

Happy Passover to those of the persuasion! Our first set of little seders out here in Wisconsin was successful, tasty, and of course a bit tiring. It's been a busy week since, but here is a picture from last weekend.

Matzah always tastes so good for the first day or two and then starts to get a bit old.

The Public Enemies filming is all done and the town is finally returning to normal. Over the weekend while they started to strike the set you could walk around it again and take more pictures of the fabulous props. I'll post those on flickr eventually. It was also amusing to see the spatters of fake blood remaining on the bank building.

I did not meet Mr. Depp (or, sadly, David Wenham), but a friend did and reported that he was very nice and had "small, delicate hands."

So Oshkosh had its day in the sun, and now we have (literally) pouring rain and thunderstorms. I fear our minor-league baseball plans for this evening are now in danger.

Hag Sameach! Off to work.

The Celebrity Wave

So today after work I wandered over to watch some of the filming, which has begun downtown. (A crowd was already gathering when I went out this morning). They're not using the totally awesome, really dolled up part of downtown yet, but were shooting a nifty little escape-and-car-shot near our very own library (the escape building was the Masonic Lodge next door). Despite the fact that I felt kind of silly, I stuck around for three takes, until my feet got cold.

After each take, as the car rolled back down the street, Johnny Depp would wave hello to the very, very large crowd (for Oshkosh) that had gathered to watch, which must get old after six or seven takes. On the middle take, he walked back down the street and spent a fair amount of time waving and such, which led to generalized pandemonium. By the third take, a lot of teenagers had arrived and there was really major, Beatlemania-esque screaming and a lot of "I love you Johnnnnnnnnnnnnyyyyyyy!!!!!" (You will note that at this point all of Oshkosh is apparently on a first name basis with Johnny Depp; people kept referring to him in that fond possessive way one sometimes refers to their hometown first baseman-- "has Johnny come out yet?"

All of this leads me to ask: What do we see when we see celebrity? Why the hysteria over a wave from someone 100 feet away? (And why was I the only person among the folks I chatted with who cared about seeing the other members of the cast, or knew who most of them were?) I think celebrity is a reaching out for the transcendent (while everyone simultaneously wants to see papparazzi pictures of celebrities with their kids, pumping gas and being "just like us"). What are we expecting will happen, really, though? Do we expect to be transformed, or healed, or what?

Or are we just really curious?

In New York I had comparatively few celebrity sitings. One year we saw the opening night red carpet for the "42nd St" revival, which included the late Jerry Orbach and the now-fired Star Jones. My most notable nyc celebrity occasion involved seeing Simon Cowell in the Plaza Hotel lobby while friends and I were waiting in line to try to get into afternoon tea. I hadn't watched American Idol at the time so I was vaguely aware of who he was and would have walked right by if there weren't a huge crowd of women mobbing him (and to his credit he appeared to put up with it with a good deal of patience, even posing for pictures).

And, yes, he was wearing a black tee-shirt.

(We also went to a taping of the Daily Show, which I will admit was an all-out fangirl worship experience for me).

Really, though, being a New Yorker is supposed to be about leaving the celebrities the hell alone and letting them go about their business. If I had ever really seen someone I doubt I would have wanted to bother them.

But in Oshkosh--Oshkosh!!--well, there will probably never ever be another Big Movie Star here, so I guess I can really understand everyone going bananas.

Just go bananas for David Wenham too please if you see him (for all I know I DID see him, I didn't have binoculaurs and they're all wearing hats)

It's also funny having a lot of "out of towners" descend. Oshkosh has tourists now. I say to them what I always thought about tourists in New York: come, enjoy our town. SPEND MONEY.

Also: when you've had a bad day at work, watching filming with a lot of gunfire is strangely cathartic.







There he is! Itty bitty in the center of the photo above.

Passover at Woodman's

Somehow it seems that we have not yet posted in this space about the glory that is Woodman's Food Market in Appleton. Granted, NYC dwellers are used to small supermarkets and narrow aisles, but there are plenty of decently-sized, big box supermarkets up here. Festival Foods majors in fresh produce and Packerphilia, Pick 'n' Save has a huge selection of junk food, and the Piggly Wiggly has Broccoli Wokly. But Woodman's has everything. For example, everything includes this:


But for the moment, I just want to point out what a freaking huge Passover section there is for a state with a grand total of 28,330 Jews, most of whom seem to live 90 minutes south in Mequon. On the other hand, the two biggest celebrities featured at Appleton's nearby history museum were both Jewish.

Anyway, here is the usual "Jewish" section of the first (of two) "international" aisle:



here's some more holiday stuff including some giant boxes of matzo



and here's a whole section on the side of the aisle for holiday junk food! 4 kinds of macaroons!



More on the wonder of Woodman's (employee-owned!) at some future date.

Rob this bank, Johnny Depp!

Well, he's he-ere. The Deppster has landed, to much generalized excitement and, it sounds like, some stalking. I think it's great that they're using so much of Oshkosh, with the initial filming taking place down at the airfield and making use of some of the cool old planes. Makes you realize we're really a strangely logical place to film a period piece. So things are still relatively "quiet" here in the downtown, although I saw a plane flying low out near the lake with a helicopter right above it, so that may have been film-related.

The downtown construction looks quite amazing--people were out wandering around (despite the fact that it's freakin' 30 degrees out!) and taking pictures of the buildings-- and of themselves WITH the buildings, like Disneyworld. It's kind of like we have a small and very temporary theme park with no dudes in dog suits. (And hey, Mouseketeers, this is no coincidence-- the whole Disney-thing "works" because they use lots of movie tricks and touches. Same attention to detail). Even though I know Oshkosh wasn't constructed with forced perspective, sometimes it really does seem that way.

Below are a bunch of pictures of our wee little 1930s town, and there are more in the full and on-going set on flickr. The pictures start with shots of construction and conclude with some local "welcomes." :-) Enjoy!

[In other news earlier this week-stomach flu! so! not! good!]

The Dream Factory

Talk about the two worlds of this blog colliding. After seven years in New York, I got used to tripping over film crews. I never lost all curiosity, but it did become quite commonplace, particularly at Union Seminary, where the assorted Law and Order shows set up shop constantly and lots of other productions troop through.

So I get an academic job and move to a small, quiet town in the Midwest, and what happens? Oh, just a giant Michael Mann 1930s gangster movie starring-- wait for it--JOHNNY DEPP--comes to town.

Privately, I've always thought that Oshkosh looked like a movie set (though I usually pick the 1950s); I'm glad to have my opinions vindicated by some of Hollywood's finest (We really liked Collateral in this house). And, of course, as all of Northeast Wisconsin knows by now, Mann's film Public Enemies will be shooting here sometime in the next few weeks. Crews are already busy turning back the proverbial clock on Main Street. You can see the coolness they've worked elsewhere in Wisconsin (specifically, Columbus). The general mania surrounding the filming so far in Wisconsin is being documented on Dane 101 and many other blogs, including in this funny piece.

I'm not even going to pretend that I'm not excited. In addition to Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, the film stars David Wenham. Yes, that's right, geeks. Faramir is in Wisconsin. Dude. I'm darn excited, and so are my students (they're not as geeky as I am about LOTR though).

In reality, I know that I'm probably not going to be seeing any movie stars (they won't all film scenes here). It's not like I have the kind of job that I can skip out on and go watch them film all day, and if I learned one thing from living in New York, it's that making movies (from the bystanders' perspective) is mainly about people setting up lights and sound equipment and I'm not too likely to trip over them filming scenes. Still, I'm giddy about the production being here because I'm excited by the craft of movies-- knowing that someone had to decide what color green to paint on the exterior of what is usually a local coffee place so that it will show up in a few seconds of film, watching all of these little details come into place, is pretty darn neat.

One funny side effect is that the town's dissafected youths (or "yout'" if we are in West Side Story), who usually congregate around the sundial on the green and smoke cigarettes, now have nowhere to go because the sun dial is being surrounded by a false front they're building for the movie (I can see how the modern sculpture would be a tad out of place). Today we saw them wandering on Algoma Blvd., looking a bit confused about where to stand.

Our town's quaint little Main St.-which has such a Disneyworld, simulated, set-like quality already-- is now literally being painted over into a movie set.


More to come in the days ahead, methinks.