Mom told to take down ribbons

Published in the Current and the American Journal

A South Portland mother who has been putting up yellow ribbons around the
city to support her soldier son has been told by the city to take them down.

When the war in Iraq first started, Valerie Swiger’s son Jason, 21, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, was serving there. Back home, his mother hung yellow ribbons around the city as a sign of support for all of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

City officials say there is an ordinance on the books that prevents displaying any personal message on public property – including notices about garage sales and missing pets – and while her ribbons have been up for some time, they now have to come down.

Swiger said she never knew about the law, which has been on the books since the 1960s, and told several city officials of her intentions, but none of them ever told her she couldn’t hang the ribbons.

In April, she said, she went to the City Council to tell them about her ribbon campaign. Nobody said a word to her then. She even got a call from
someone at City Hall – she won’t say who – asking if they could have a couple of ribbons to hang there.

Swiger didn’t hear anything but support until City Clerk Susan Mooney called recently to say someone had complained that the ribbons were
getting dirty and tattered. Swiger offered to replace them.

“I feel they should remain up. It’s not over,” Swiger said. She was especially sensitive about the issue because Jason had called the day before to say he was headed back to Iraq.

Swiger said Mooney told her the ribbons couldn’t be placed on utility poles, to which Swiger agreed. Swiger said it wasn’t until the next day Mooney called with the bad news: The ribbons were against the law.

Now Swiger is being told she had violated the law from the first day she put the ribbons up. City Manager Jeff Jordan said police and code enforcement officers do enforce the ordinance, though he said it’s not a “high priority.”

The ribbons violate the ordinance, Jordan said, because they make a personal statement. “We probably should have” told Swiger when she first put the ribbons up, Jordan said. “We might have gotten a bit caught up” in emotion as war began, he said.

He encouraged Swiger to continue her ribbon displays, as long as they’re not on town property.

“They can be put in lots of different places. Just put them on private property,” Jordan said. “Don’t put the city in the position to regulate
content on public property.”

Swiger doesn’t think the ribbons are offensive. “That yellow ribbon doesn’t say Republican. It doesn’t say Democrat. It doesn’t say war. It doesn’t say Bush.” What it does say is, “we respect what you’re doing. Hurry home. We’re waiting.”

District 1 Councilor David Jacobs, who represents the area including Swiger’s home, said he is sympathetic to Swiger, but must stick to
the law. “Even though the ribbons are intended to send a positive message, they are still a symbol of personal expression that’s prohibited by city ordinance.”

He said allowing the yellow ribbons puts the city in a bad position if anyone else wants to put up a sign. “Clearly the city has been looking the other way,” Jacobs said. But that will end now, he said.

Swiger stands firm. “I am not going to take those ribbons down,” she said. Further, she wants a change to the city ordinance that will allow the ribbons. She also wants yellow ribbons to be displayed at public buildings and on the “Welcome to South Portland” signs along roads at the city’s boundaries.

District 4 Councilor Chris Bowring has asked the council to discuss the matter at a September workshop. He wants to see if the language could be modified or interpreted to allow the ribbons.

Swiger said the message is important, and helps keep the soldiers motivated and alive. “I think they deserve a little respect.”

Keep dancing, Sally: Struthers shakes it at Ogunquit

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Starting with a rousing "Yee-haw" from the audience, Always . . . Patsy Cline is a romping love affair of a musical, telling the story of one of the country music star’s most obsessed fans, and the unusual friendship that develops between them.

Louise Seger (Sally Struthers) is a Texas-sized woman with Texas-sized hair and a "Texas-sized imagination" who loves to listen to the music of her favorite singer, Patsy Cline (Christa Jackson). She first heard Cline on the "Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts Show" in 1957 and immediately fell in love with the singer’s voice.

Indeed, Jackson has mastered the twang, squeaks, and near-glottal-stops that made Cline’s singing so unique. But her performance is limited to an impersonation in a staged retelling of a story. Her singing is indeed excellent. And she hits all Cline’s big songs — there are 19 in the show and three as a sort of built-in encore. Yet her character is never truly developed. The only glimpse we really get of Cline’s inner life is in one short letter, the first she ever wrote to Louise, which appears late in the show.

Perhaps this is because the play is "licensed by the family and estate of Patsy Cline," as the program helpfully informs. There is no mention of — not even a cryptic allusion to — Cline’s rocky love life, including two husbands and at least two affairs. The best we get are stand-alone songs about broken hearts and promises, with no explanation that the reason Cline sang them with such feeling was that she identified all too well with the subject matter.

Fortunately, Struthers saves the play from being a flat set of unconnected songs. It is her narration and show-stealing performance that keeps the audience entertained throughout.

This is very different from how many of us know Struthers today, on television raising money for Save the Children. It is a reminder that Struthers won two Emmy Awards — admittedly, the most recent in 1979 — for her role as Archie Bunker’s daughter, Gloria, on TV’s All in the Family.

Here she plays a Southern woman, complete with a garish fringe-shirt like those an editor of mine in Missouri used to wear. Despite her middle-aged girth, Struthers remains remarkably flexible, and uses her entire body to convey her character’s deep emotions, from a celebration of divorce that nearly lifts off the stage to a "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" seated dance performance that must be seen to be believed.

Her stage presence is what makes this play. And though the Oregon native sometimes makes her Texas accent sound like a Dana Carvey impression of President George Bush I, she carries the stereotype of a fawning fan to a new height.

Chancing to meet Cline before a Houston show, Louise steps in and appoints herself Cline’s manager, then chauffeur, hotelier, and chef. She takes personally every aspect of the show, even conducting the band with a spare drumstick to make sure they don’t rush Cline’s soulful singing.

This is not a band that needs conducting. They play a number of characters as well, from a perhaps-they-do-need-a-conductor local backup band, to musicians in the spotlight themselves. All of them, including the steel player whose name is inexplicably omitted from the program, are excellent, neither overpowering nor undersupporting Cline and maintaining a current of energy throughout the show.

Some of that energy should have gone to the lighting crew. The spotlight operator was regularly late illuminating the stars. There was a strange "moonrise" during "Walking After Midnight," apparently because the light wasn’t lined up properly to begin with. And during some of the slow songs, the lights over the band flickered, not only distracting the audience but no doubt making the musicians’ jobs harder.

Struthers, however, needed no extra energy. Her outrageous antics sent both her and Jackson laughing regularly, and interactions with the audience brought everyone into the show.

The popular appeal of Cline’s music is made clear as she sings in Louise’s kitchen late at night: Louise identifies with every word. The audience left feeling like Louise’s reaction had been made manifest 40 years later: "It made me feel so alive."

Always...Patsy Cline
Written by Ted Swindley. Roy M. Rogosin, producing artistic director. With Sally Struthers and Christa Jackson. At the Ogunquit Playhouse, through Aug. 16. Call (207) 646-5511.

BACKSTAGE

• Thanks to the efforts of a lot of people from across the world, and most notably the teens themselves, the Story Quilt performance by the students in the Theater Project’s International Teen Festival went off superbly, melding tales and traditions to honor many cultures. Complete with an Arabic-speaking fox in a Palestinian fable, an overflowing pasta pot in the Italian tale of Strega Nona, and a practical solution for a too-noisy house, the teen actors amused audience members of all ages, including a little boy who added, from the seats, a second chicken sound-effect to the delightful cacophony.

• At Sanford Maine Stage, Rumors, by Neil Simon, opens August 15, detailing the calamitous evening a group of houseguests have, including gunshots, a car crash, and a visit from the police. Call (207) 324-9691 for tickets to the show, which runs through August 30.

British humor: Like the food, a bit dry

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Alan Ayckbourn is one of the funniest living playwrights in Britain. It is, therefore, no surprise that in a theater named after a region the British plundered, his humor doesn’t exactly hit the mark.

Ayckbourn’s play Relatively Speaking, now at the Acadia Repertory Theatre, no doubt has sent thousands of English audiences grasping at their sides and gasping for air.

And yet at nearly every laugh-line, the Acadia Rep audiences were silent. This is not the fault of the playwright, the director, nor even the actors, who, with a stiff English upper lip, kept on and made at least bearable what, elsewhere, would have been an entertaining show.

The problem was in the audience, and in particular the choice of this play for this audience. New Englanders are a genial lot, to be sure, but when faced with a play whose sole stock-in-trade is a cultural reference to somewhere else, we’re not a barrel of laughs.

Acadia Rep has built a strong reputation over the years as a place to see good, solid, fun summer theater. Ayckbourn’s plays have been well received by audiences before, the theater reports. If this year’s customers are like the overly considerate characters in the play, no doubt Relatively Speaking will be, too.

The plot hinges on people who are too polite to say what they mean, and overreach themselves to assume the best, imagining good things where they in fact have no clue what is happening.

A young man (Greg, played by David Blais), in love with a woman he has known less than a month (Ginny, Kimberly J. Forbes), proposes marriage just before she heads off for a weekend out of town. She says she’s going to visit her parents. Despite unmistakable signs that she is having an affair, he decides to surprise her — and them — by arriving unannounced to ask her father for her hand.

But he’s in for a surprise about his hosts’ identities. And they (Philip, played by Fred Robbins, and his wife Sheila played by Fred’s wife Liz) each suspect the other is cheating but are again, too polite to devise a confrontation about it.

Rather than the old-fashioned Yankee directness, the entire play is saturated with British deference. It requires, therefore, an implausibly large suspension of disbelief.

Nobody asks a pair of unknown arrivals who they are; when Ginny tries to tell Greg what’s going on, she doesn’t say, "they’re not my parents," but, rather, "she’s not my mother."

And what must be one of the funniest lines to all Britons is completely dead here: Fully uncertain who he is or why he has appeared in her back garden, Sheila invites Greg to stay for lunch. This invitation is one most British people could identify with, either as reflective of themselves or someone they know who is so proper they might just invite the bus conductor in for tea after a cheery request for a ticket. And it is also a line next to nobody in the US would ever utter to a stranger.

Nonetheless, the cast does well without much help from audience energy. Fred Robbins is an excellent blustering English country squire, his wife Liz is a dutiful Sheila, Forbes is a strong professional young woman with a streak of noblesse oblige, and Blais’s Greg is lovably missing something. Their awkward interactions are clever, and the actors seem to genuinely believe only what the characters "know" at the time.

Perhaps the crowning moment in this play, however, is the slapstick scene change partway through Act 1. Accompanied by the William Tell Overture, three stagehands, dressed as British removal men (that’s "movers") convert a London bedsit into a Home Counties estate garden. It was the first scene change I have ever seen that drew its own applause.

This is not Ayckbourn’s doing, however, but director Ken Stack’s. The playwright himself appears to falter from time to time in the play, resorting to weather as a conversation topic, as if even he couldn’t figure out where to go next.

He offers hints of hilarity, and of failure, including in this funny-but-not-here comedy a moment when Philip starts to laugh at a newspaper item, but then hems and haws his way to a halt. When Sheila asks what it was, he says, "I thought it was amusing, but it wasn’t."

Relatively Speaking
Written by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Ken Stack. With David Blais, Kimberly J. Forbes, Fred Robbins, and Liz Robbins. At Acadia Repertory Theatre, Mount Desert Island, through Aug. 10. Call (207) 244-7260.

BACKSTAGE

• This weekend in Brunswick: Frank Wicks’s Soldier, Come Home on Friday ($10; (207) 729-6606 for reservations); teens’ international Story Quilt at the Theater Project, once Friday, twice on Saturday, and, just-added, once on Sunday (pay-what-you-want; (207) 729-8584).

• What’s J-C got this time? Revenge. John-Charles Kelly, a Maine State Music Theatre regular with a Vegas past, brings the Strip to Brunswick August 11. Lynne McGhee, Ed Romanoff, Joyce A. Presutti, and Ray Dumont will share the stage with three theater critics — but not the Phoenix’s. Call (207) 725-8769.

• The Deertrees Theatre Festival in Harrison hits August 14 and 15 with Vanities by Jack Heifner, a female coming-of-age story for the 1960s and ’70s. You may yawn (another coming-of-age tale?), but the off-Broadway hit made loads of folks laugh. Call (207) 583-6747.

Candidates line up for county charter commission

Published in the Current and the American Journal

Nine local residents have put their names in for candidacy for the Cumberland County Charter Commission, which will be elected in November to find ways to improve county government.

Some issues that seem certain to come up in the discussions, no matter whom is elected, are increasing the size of the county’s governing commission, appointing rather than electing certain county officials and consolidating emergency services dispatching.

Seven are running in District 2, representing Baldwin, Cape Elizabeth, Frye Island, Gorham, Scarborough, South Portland, Standish and Westbrook. Voters will choose two.

Shawn Babine is a town councilor in Scarborough who believes “it’s the perfect time and opportunity” to look at “how we can improve all levels of government.” He wants to look at whether the county should have its own taxing authority, rather than sending bills to the towns, which then impose taxes. He wants the town to have a voice. “As Scarborough is growing, we need to become more involved in regional issues,” he said.

James Damicis of Scarborough also is running. He worked on a project 12 years ago at USM’s Muskie School of Public Service that predicted regionalization would have taken place around the year 2000. Formerly with the Planning Decisions company as a consultant for Scarborough’s Growth and Services Committee, Damicis wants to “make county government more efficient.” He also wants to make it “more visible.”

In Aroostook County, people who are asked where they’re from will say “The County,” while here, “they might not even know the county that they’re in,” Damicis said.

David Bourke of South Portland spent 30 years in private industry and plans to advocate for what members of the public say they want from the county during a series of workshops with the charter commission. He said his experience living in other areas of the U.S. could give him valuable ideas on how to do things differently here. “New England is really behind the times when it comes to” regionalization, Bourke said.

Nancy Larsen of South Portland said she has not had a lot of time to look at the charter. A former city councilor and mayor in South Portland, she said she knows that city’s charter very well but did not know the county doesn’t have one.

John McGinty is a Cape Elizabeth town councilor and a member of the county’s budget advisory committee who has expressed reservations in the past about the county’s budget process. “One of the first things on my mind is to make the county more accountable,” McGinty said. He wants there to be more commissioners. Now, “essentially you have two people controlling a $25 million budget.”

Harold Parks of Gorham spent his career working in public administration, including as administrative assistant to the mayor in Westbrook. He wants to regionalize services, including emergency dispatching. “We have these needs and at the same time we have limited resources,” Parks said. A regional view could help meet those needs with less money.

Robert Reynolds of Gorham, a Portland firefighter, said he believes it is time to consider “regionalization or consolidation of services.” He said 495 municipal entities for a million people is too many. At the same time, “I also want to make sure that there’s no degradation of services.” Now, there is too much fragmentation. “Every community acts as if the world stops at the town line,” Reynolds said.

For District 3, representing Bridgton, Brunswick, Casco, Freeport, Gray, Harpswell, Harrison, Naples, New Gloucester, Pownal, Raymond, Sebago, Windham and Yarmouth, there are three candidates, including Thomas Bartell and Lani Swartzentruber, both from Windham.

Bartell, a town councilor, said he wants to continue his involvement in county government, where he has served on the budget advisory committee and is now a trustee for the Civic Center. He wants to look at what other counties do, both in the state and around the nation. “I’m for effective government,” he said.

Lani Swartzentruber is a Portland attorney specializing in corporate charters and bylaws. She wants to do thorough research on the issues involved in a county charter. She supports smaller, more efficient government with fewer regulations but is reluctant to cut government positions in a state that “needs more good jobs.” And though if elected, she herself would be representing people in Brunswick, she disputed the ability of a Brunswick resident to accurately represent the needs of people in Windham, where she lives. “You can’t tell me that someone who lives in Brunswick” knows what’s best for Windham, she said.

Couple sues over bedbugs at hotel

Published in the Current and the American Journal

Richard and Lyn Alleborn of Wayne, Maine, have sued the owners of the South Portland AmeriSuites hotel, claiming that bedbugs ruined their Christmas shopping trip.

It is an incident state health inspectors say has never happened before in Maine.

The Alleborns checked into the hotel on Dec. 21, 2002. And just hours later, they fled the hotel, covered in bites from bedbugs.

Lyn Alleborn had won a stay at the hotel as a prize for doing good work with her employer, State Farm, according to their lawyer, Tracie Adamson.

The suit, filed in Kennebec County Superior Court, names Ocean Properties of Portsmouth, N.H. AmeriSuites immediately addressed and corrected the problem, according to the state.

According to the lawsuit, Richard Alleborn began to itch over much of his body shortly after he got into bed in his room at the AmeriSuites. His wife then saw a bug on her and pinched it on the bedding, causing the blood-engorged pest to burst in a spray of blood on the sheets, the lawsuit says.

“He was bitten all up his legs,” Adamson said. “She had many bites over her hands and wrists,” as well as elsewhere on her body. “Mrs. Alleborn was literally vomiting, she was so horrified,” Adamson said. Some of her bites started to scar as they healed.

The suit seeks payment for medical expenses as well as compensatory damages. “The medical payments are minimal,” Adamson said.

Even Adamson didn’t know that bedbugs actually existed until she heard the Alleborns’ story. Bedbugs normally hide in mattresses and in the walls, but are drawn out by body heat, Adamson said. “They actually suck your blood,” she said.

After the Alleborns left, the hotel staff disposed of the bedding, mattress and box spring and fumigated the entire room, according to a state Bureau of Health report obtained by the American Journal.

The company that conducted the fumigation agreed with hotel staff that “bed bugs were present,” in what a state inspector called an “infestation.”

No adjacent rooms were affected, and the room had been vacant for 20 days before the Alleborns checked in, the report says. By the time the state received a complaint from Lyn Alleborn, on Jan. 7, the problem had been rectified, and an exterminator had verified that multiple insecticide treatments had killed all of the insects, according to the report.

The report says “the hotel has taken both immediate and appropriate actions to remedy the situation.”

After reviewing state health inspection records, “we cannot recall another incident like this,” said Newell Augur, a spokesman for the Department of Human Services.

A duty manager at AmeriSuites said the hotel had done “more than the state asked” to fix the problem, and referred calls to the hotel’s general manager, Michael Siemion, who did not return several phone calls before the American Journal’s deadline.

Adamson plans to ask for a jury trial in the case. She doesn’t expect it to go before a court for at least a year.