I’ll tell you about the group show I’m part of on theWest Coast on another day, since its opening isn’t happening until March 18.

But here on my home turf, the place to be this Thursday, March 2, is at Gallery 51 on Main Street in North Adams, MA. So, like, if you plan to fly in from Albuquerque or Grand Rapids for the festivities, you’d better get those tickets reserved!

It’s a three-artist group show called North Adams Illustrators, and during the seven weeks between March 2 and April 23 my drawings will be sharing the gallery walls at 51 Main Street with two other illustrators who live and work nearby: Emily Daunis and John Shamburger.

I’d say you folks deserve a double-dose of squirrel humor for your patience!

Yeah, the rap number was an even earlier surprise, come to think of it, but that was just Arlen wowing the crowd with a dramatic device I was unlikely to emulate, given my personality. The cross-fades, though, were something else.

I knew going in that Arlen was going to use PowerPoint, and everyone knows that PowerPoint is awash in transition options — and there’s not a slide projector-ish ker-chunk to be heard in any of them. In glorious silence you can wipe this way and that as you glide from image to image, up, down, left or right, or diagonally from an unexpected corner. One frame can burst from the middle of frame before it bounded by a circle, square, or diamond, and for all I know the most recent upgrades will let you amaze your audience with galloping pinwheels of sequential pie charts. Mere dissolves are the tamest arrows in the application’s quiver.

The picture didn’t change, or seemed not to, but a new element was added to the scene at the exact moment when Arlen was ready for it. More than could ever be true with old fashioned slides that announce every change with a brief blackout and a great clanking of apertures, Arlen had become the master of his audience’s attention.

I imediately saw this as a great step forward for fluid storytelling in slideshows. But despite the fuss I’m making about it here, that was not what made the biggest difference for me personally.The old-style slides were costly to photograph and process, so (without Dave Hutchison’s skills and generosity to fall back on) I had to be so economical, even stingy, in introducing new ones that my presentation’s ability to evolve and grow was hobbled.

But I can make new PowerPoint images for free, sitting at home in front of my Mac, and this has made it possible for me to expand beyond the single, self-promotional divertissement I had started with when I first performed my Kodak slideshow twenty-three years ago.

In the last two years I have presented a digital adaption of my original slideshow to students at the Ringling Schjool of Art & Design and gave an illustrated lecture about the evolution of my drawing style at a conference at the University of Florida. At Brown University in Providence I showed students in Paul Buhle’s class on "The Sixties" how Stuck Rubber Baby grew out of my memories of the Civil Rights strife in Birmingham when I was young; at the School for International Studies in Brattleboro my slideshow called "Racism & Brain Debris" related SRB to a broader examination of the way prejudices get imbedded in our minds. And in mid-March I’m going to give my new slideshow adaptation of The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth a trial run at the Topia Arts Center in nearby Adams.

It takes work to create all of these varied programs, but not money. For a cartoonist who still has to hustle to get by, that’s important. And it’s PowerPoint that has made it possible for me to venture into this new territory, and I’m having a ball.

But long before helping me get a grip on digital graphics, Hutch had been my chief slideshow enabler.

Hutch’s availability as a photographer made my first slideshows possible. No way could I have borne the cost of putting together the ambitious series of unendingly-evolving presentations I offered to audiences between 1983 and 2003 had I been forced to pay commercial rates for the photography involved. And God knows I didn’t have the equipment or skills to shoot the damn slides myself!

In the beginning Hutch insisted on shooting my slides for free. Eventually, as the number of images I put together for his camera expanded into the hundreds, he finally yielded to my guilt-induced insistence that he accept small payments of cash or pages of my original artwork in return for his camerawork. With his encouragement I continued to periodically revamp my show with dozens of photocopied panels from my comics that I pasted onto construction paper with lung-rotting spray adhesive. Whenever I had stockpiled enough slide adaptations of my stories to merit a new photo session, Hutch was ready to go.

The reality of how fortunate I had been to have Hutch’s help hit me fully after his death, when I was forced to engage a professional photography service to provide the half-dozen or so new transparencies it took bring my slideshow up to date for an appearance at the Alternative Press Expo. Those few slides set me back a small fortune by comparison to the modest tokens of appreciation Hutch had been willing to accept from me! Minus my friend’s assistance, my slideshow was forced lay fallow for a while: the lack of anything but the most fleeting references to projects that I had concocted subsequent to Stuck Rubber Baby’s completion made it increasingly, embarrassingly out of date.

Then Arlen Schumer’s illustrated lecture at the New School showed me how to liberate myself from transparencies, slide carousels, and noisy machinery along with the creative limitations they had been imposing on me without my realizing it.

The slide sequences flowed smoothly, and the only thing that went "Ker-Chunk" were our first fumbling efforts to coax my Apple PowerBook and the classroom’s PC-acclimated audio-visual set-up to make friends with each other.

We thought we had taken every possible precaution to avoid technical glitches. Carl Villanovia of MCLA’s Media Center had invited me to the campus a week earlier so we could assure ourselves in advance that the projector would play well with my Mac. It had taken a little fiddling with connectors and clickers, not to mention the desktop PC sitting nearby that is customarily charged with telling the projector what to do with its light beams. But from all appearances, by the time I had left for home Carl and a few other individuals who chipped in with advice and suggestions had demonstrated beyond doubt that the set-up could proceed smoothly. All I would have to do when I returned to address the class would be to plug in a plug and turn things on.

Nevertheless, our best-laid plans did today what best-laid plans are famous for doing. It was balking time in machine-land. Images on my laptop screen just sat there looking back at me instead of slithering along through cables and lenses onto the big screen on the wall behind me.

A call went out to Carl to please return and reprise his magic from the week before. A few minutes later all was well, with my presentation’s beginning being only slightly delayed.

Dr. Raskin’s students remained totally patient throughout and never once resorted to banging silverware again tin plates to express displeasure. I appreciated that. All went well once the curtain rose, the the only regrettable consequence of my late start was that no time was left at show’s end for me to field questions and exchange views with the students. I regretted that.

Dr. Raskin says there may be an opportunity, however, for me to return to the class another day so that some real discussion can take place in response to my words and images — and, of course, the book itself.

But I promised in my last blog entry to share what I learned from Arlen Schumer several years ago about how to leave my beloved but klunky Kodak slide projector in the dust and take my slideshow into a new and more satisfying realm.

I will keep my promise — but tomorrow, not today. Blog entries shouldn’t go on and on and on any more than slideshows should.

I call them my "Ker-chunk Days" because back then (and for twenty years thereafter until my eyes were opened by Arlen Schumer of Dynamic Duo Studio in 2003) I was at the mercy of the moods and mechanical crudities of my Kodak Carousel Slide Projector.

I shouldn’t be unfair. Those little projection devices from the pre-digital era of film transparencies in cardboard casings served me well during many an evening of book-promotion in assorted cities and venues, from Los Angeles to London. With experimentation and practice I put together a nice little "dog-and-pony-show" (to use a term picked up from my early days as a paste-up artist in Birmingham’s advertising agency world) that always got a warm response.

Then I attended an illustrated lecture by Arlen promoting his book about comics in the ’sixties in New York that showed me how a slideshow should be done.

And I knew it was time for me to move on beyond Kodak.

I would tell you more right now but I’m racing out the door to teach my QuarkXPress class in Pittsfield. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll be able to explaim why Arlen and his presentation changed my way of doing things.This topic is on my mind right now because I’ll be giving an illustrated lecture tomorrow morning to students in a Graphic Novels as Literature class (how times have changed) at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

And I’ll be doing it the non-Ker-chunk way.

My drawing skills had a way to go back then and so did my coy-title-detector. These guys lived in a hollow tree, y’see, one above the other. An arborial duplex of sorts. The squirrel at the top of the tree was the one named Tops. The squirrel at the bottom of the tree was named — what, Bottom? No, that would be too obvious. How about Button?

The thing is, there were plenty of duds during the run of that series, but I have no apologies. It was a learning time for me and I got better as I went along. And the thing I liked best about the feature was the way it played with words. Their sounds. Their vibes. Their small, intersyllabic surprises.

People who visited my web site during its earliest incarnations (1998 or so, I think) will remember that I resurrected some Tops & Button panels for whatever amusement they might provide, and examples from the series have occasionally surfaced in published interviews as examples, fortunate or otherwise, of my earliest efforts to break into cartooning. But for the most part the series has lingered only in the fading memories of Birminghamians unaware that a budding underground cartoonist was hiding behind some funny animals who had appeared out of nowhere in the columns of their morning paper.

The new versions exist, so why not share them? So brace yourself for the occasional Squirly & Earl episode in these blog entries of mine.

The humor is soft — definitely not guffaw material. But in this hectic, overheated world we live in today, it pays to slow down occasionally and smell the yard rodents.

This time the questions are coming from Ed Mathews, who was invited to talk to me while hanging out at Comicon.com’s throbbing Pulse news division. (Normally Popimage, where "My Hypnotist" has been unfolding all week, is Ed’s turf, but Jennifer Contino offered him some of her Pulse space so he could spead the word about my comic strip to the Pulse constituency. Thanks, Jenn. You’re da bomb!

While I’m citing comics journalists who’ve given me Internet "air time" lately, let me also remind you about Katherine Keller’s interview that was posted back in December at Sequential Tart. I don’t get this much press attention often, folks (must be that subliminal post-hypnotic suggestion I enbedded in all of my advance plugs for "Hypnotist"), so lap it up while it’s available!

Meanwhile, back in the land of the mundane, Eddie and I spent hours this weekend trying to get a head start on tax preparation. We’ll be getting professional help this year because of the state we live in (speaking both geographically and matrimonially).

It’s like this: Eddie and I have to check the "single" box on our federal forms even as we check the "married" box on our Massachusetts forms. Such is the sad, conflicted state of America’s current marriage laws.

Eddie and I had contemplated using TurboTax to do our taxes as I’ve sometimes done individually in the past. But the software designers at Intuit, TurboTax’s parent company, seem not to have figured out that there’s a whole set of couples who will never again fit Uncle Sam’s template unless times change radically.

The reality is simple: in Massachusetts Eddie and I are neither domestic partners nor civilly united nor the recipient of blessings under some unofficial "ceremony of commitment." We are legally married. Period. We’d be as married as George and Laura Bush if George and the Federal Government (and lovable Laura, for all the help she’s offering) weren’t quivering in fear behind the built-in bigotry of 1996’s so-called Defense of Marriage Act, hoping desperately thatall of the gay marriages will just go away before their precious institution is ruined—but not before they can be exploited to win a few more elections for Republicans.

But that’s for them to sort out. Here in Tax Season 2006, Eddie and I find ourselves both legally married and involuntarily unmarried at the same time.

Before spending money on TurboTax I called Intuit’s techie-help line to ask whether they’ve programmed their software to deal with couples like us. Those of you who have used TurboTax know that if the data you enter in your federal form doesn’t match the data you enter in your state form, the software will insist on flinging alert messages at you until you agree to pick one version of reality or the other.

When I explained my concern, the phone techie on the other end of the line (who happened to be a lesbian herself) exclaimed. "Yeah, come to think of it, that sucks!" (Or words to that effect; maybe she wasn’t quite that blunt while on the job.)

I suggested that she relay word through her supervisor to Intuit’s programmers that they should get on the stick about this problem if they don’t want TurboTax to keep losing customers year after year. There are a lot of us married gay folks here in Massachusetts, after all, and this problem is going to keep coming up again and again.