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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, April 16, 1968
Other impressions
Celebrities that come to KU may not be aware of the true impression that they leave with us.
They probably feel that they have some degree of control over this because of the microphones, the large crowds, and the prepared material they speak from.
Yet you can tell a great deal about the actual man in front of us by a number of indications that he is probably not conscious of; Dick Gregory, Robert Kennedy, Al Capp, and Bill Cosby each varied in some way from the impression that each had perhaps planned to leave.
Dick Gregory used to best advantage both the sense of timing and sense of humor that he employed as entertainer in his role as a civil rights worker, and made an effective presentation.
But for those of us who happened to be around him for the few hours that he was at KU before and after he spoke at Hoch Auditorium, a different impression came through.
Dick Gregory appeared to be a man in a hurry; he has a very tight schedule, and by necessity must have his material ready. When he was an entertainer, this worked out fine but as a serious civil rights worker, he has too many quick answers and immediate analogies ready for any occasion, and his logic breaks down too often.
But the worst part is that he does not even appear to be listening to himself anymore.
Robert Kennedy came to KU right after announcing his candidacy for president right after Eugene McCarthy did very well against President Johnson. This left a jumping-on-the-bandwagon impression with many of us, and had questions about his integrity when he appeared in Allen Field House.
Yet what he seemed to represent made sense, and then he indicated something more to be respected. He answered questions from the floor. This took an extra something that in itself left a strong impression since he could have dodged that aspect of his talk, or simply stuck to the hand-picked questions submitted ahead of time as was originally planned.
Al Capp may have left the impression of an out-spoken, quick-witted satirist who can ad lib quickly with questions from the audience. But he didn't leave this impression with those of us who were invited to meet and talk with him the night before he spoke. We found out that he simply wanted some questions ahead of time planted in the KU audience to appear as spontaneous. This turned a lot of us off, and some of us didn't even go to the performance because of the impression that he left with us the night before.
Bill Cosby, a college favorite anyway, came on strong at Hoch Auditorium his first performance. Then between shows he learned of the sudden death of Martin Luther King. He attempted to give a full performance afterwards, but finally had to cut it off, explaining that he tried to go ahead but couldn't and that he just wanted to be by himself for a while. This simple sincerity, followed by a talented performance, left a very solid impression of a man who has integrity as a performer and as a human being.
An impression is just that, without logical basis nor specifies to back it up, but the impression that a celebrity leaves for better or worse is remembered long after what he said is forgotten.
John Hill
Assistant Editorial Editor
Letters to the editor
On 'Payment' and politics
To the Editor:
Half-truths, swallowed raw, are virulent.
Recent reactions to the Experimental Theatre's production $ ^{b} $ the Brazilian drama, "Payment as Promised," redemonstrate this danger.
Jerry Balch's review of the presentation (in Tuesday's UDK) was, I believe, basically an involuntary but uninformed error, amassing half-truths and rather typical insularity.
Item: the drama's inherent quality. Far from "an embarrassingly bad piece of dramatic literature," the play is historically and artistically significant. Informed critics (e.g. Oscar Fernández, the authoritative compariste who is thoroughly acquainted with American and international theatre) rank "Payment as Promised" as one of the outstanding examples of Brazil's emerging social drama.
Nor is "Payment" (as Balch
balked), "a list of hackneyed symbols with annotations. . . "
Ghosts of Tennessee Williams!
In its own terms—and the reputable critic considers these as crucial, not his personal prejudices—"Payment as Promised" is a poignant lament on the crushing of a doomed way of life. Joe Burro's simplistic but rigorous candor, his concept of work, are very clear dramatic suggestions of the impoverished Brazilian workingman's fate. Joe is exploited and killed by flabby, compromising urban authorities, what we call, in short, "the modern way of life..."
When I attended the performance last Friday night, the audience, after a rather slowly-paced first act, was quite obviously in sympathy with the drama's originality and fervor. Ken Marsolals, playing Joe Burro, gives a memorable performance. To my mind, the stage set is one of the most
Inevitably, the play and interpretation have flaws. What university endeavor hasn't?
tasteful and appropriate I have tasteful and appropriate I have in the Experimental Theatre.
Since Kansas is one of the very few universities in this country to have opportunities to see Brazilian, Romanian, and other unusual international plays, I feel the Lawrence public should not be misguided by reviews based on something less than knowledge and balanced judgment. Even in a university theatrical review, half-truth and injustice should not be swallowed raw. See "Payment as Promised" for yourselves.
Kenneth S. White Associate Professor of French and Italian
MY SEVENTH CRISIS
★ ★ ★
To the Editor:
During the past few days we have seen a transformation in the person of Eugene McCarthy. His surprising success in the New Hampshire primary has led him to believe that he is the candidate most likely to dethrone Lyndon Johnson. He has chided Sen. Robert F. Kennedy for arriving "on the playing field" after the battle of New Hampshire had been fought. By doing so McCarthy is splitting the peace factions of the country. He should realize that he lacks both the influence within the Democratic party and the popular appeal that Bobby Kennedy possesses. Perhaps Kennedy did use McCarthy as a Guinea Pig in New Hampshire, but if we are going to get rid of the cowboy in the White House, Bobby Kennedy is the only man who can do it. McCarthy and his followers should accept whatever help Kennedy might offer and realize that any bickering between the two will only be an aid to their common foe.
Luis Mata Emporia freshman
... quotes ...
"Life is just one damned thing after another."
Frank Ward O'Malley (1875-1932)
The Hill With It by john hill
When you work in an enchanted newsroom, some strange things happen. You keep expecting to see Rod Sterling to step aside and explain everything, dressed as the night jailor.
For one thing, the Daily Kansan staff has immediate access to a magic pop machine.
Our pop machine loves money. It loves to gobble it up. It does not like to dispense pop however. This is unfortunate.
A long time ago, the wicked witch of the East, on a bet, changed a raving lunatic into our pop machine.
Money is the root of all our pop machine's problems. It has an insatiable appetite, eagerly devouring every coin, happily ignorant of any gold crisis. But you never get the bottle of pop you want.
There's kind of a system to it. When you put in fifteen cents and push the button for a cola drink (notice how I deftly glide around brand names, weaving skillfully in and out of law suits and letters to the editor) you get a warm bottle of orange drink, and a small. 15-cent burp from the maniac.
When you push the button marked "Warm Bottle of Orange Drink," you get a small light show as the lights flash, the plug jumps out of the socket and viciously goes for your ankle, smoke pours out the back, and "Tilt" lights up.
That's for orange. Don't ever push the grape. Nothing happens to the machine, but a fire alarm goes off somewhere on Massachusetts St. and all the electric blankets in Eudora frost over.
Then there's the coffee pot, which wants nothing to do with coffee. The secret ambition of the coffee pot is to someday become a greenhouse. An unhappy medium is quickly reached by coffee that keeps trying to get out of the pot and must be driven back periodically with a chair, whip, and blank gun.
We have the only smart-aleke teletype machine in the country. But there's two things you must understand about teletype machines; the news comes pounding out very spastically with long pauses and then long periods of noise, and also the little dings.
The little dings are caused, its worth mentioning, by bells inside the machine which indicate when a major story is coming over the wire.
One ding might mean a crime story, two would be, for example, a major political move, three would be an international crisis, four would be world war three being declared, and five means something like the second coming has occurred in the middle of Javawk Blvd.
Those are the little dings, which the teletype machine loves. So when it's quiet in the newsroom, late at night, suddenly we get this ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-and the machine just keeps dinging. Sounds like the overture to "Doctor Zhivago."
Normally mild-mannered reporters, Kansan staff members are now madly crawling over each other, which can be, by the way, fun in itself, to get to the teletype machine to see what is so important.
"Did you know there's enough lime in the human body to whitewash a chicken coop?"
Twenty or thirty people are crowded around the machine when the part about the pauses comes in. The machine quits for a while, making whatever the mechanical equivalent of a suppressed giggle is. When the crowd starts to disperse, it dings until it gets attention then quits. Finally, while everyone anxiously is waiting, a small filler comes over the wire asking that question that man has been asking himself since the dawn of time:
The strangest of all, perhaps, is our little gnome that eats copy pencils. There are never enough of those thick, soft-leaded copy pencils around.
Excuse me. Almost had him this time. While typing this late at night in the newsroom, I just now saw a movement out of the corner of my eye.
This is because, word has it, a little tiny, gnarled old gnome, about two feet high, sneaks out late at night and eats all the copy pencils. Some laugh at this, but —
I hurled myself over the desk, grabbing an empty pop bottle as I sailed over, hit the floor rolling, firing the pop bottle as soon as I was behind the desk where I'd seen him. The pop bottle crashed above his head just as he rounded the corner and he hurried into the murky interiors of the back shop, where he safely lives among the big linotype machines.
He got away again, I thought to myself as I hurried over to check my secret hiding place for copy pencils, but maybe I stopped him in time.
But no. My hiding place for my carefully hoarded copy pencils was empty, except for a few copy pencil crumbs and a bitterly scrawled piece of graffiti that said "The hill with it isn't . . ."
There are eight million stories in the naked newsroom. This has been one of them.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY kansan
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