The fact that the curriculum was simply conveying demonstrable facts about the demonstrably diverse makeup of New York’s community life carried no weight with this determined lady, who ultimately succeeded in have the curriculum in question quashed.

Last week I came across my sketched version of "The Educator,"my comic strip response to this controversy. It never found a home and hence was never re-drawn in finished form, but I still kind of like it.

First graders used to learn to read by reading books starring two bland suburban kids named Dick and Jane.

There were presumably no homosexuals living on Dick and Jane’s block, although Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat could occasionally be spotted lurking near their playground, awaiting his moment.

Sure, those of us with Mac computers could feel smug in the knowledge that the bug in question would only begin making Microsoft’s PCs go haywire at the stroke of midnight, not our superiorly crafted Apple devices.

Unfortunately, the real world runs mostly on PCs, not Macs, and if the entire set of electric grids that powered Planet Earth were going to go successively ka-flooey time zone by time zone, the refrigerator spoilage of Mac-owners would be just as distasteful as it would for PC-owners.

Lots of computer-patches were being downloaded and installed furiously as the doomsday date approached, but even though the professional geeks who were programming such patches theoretically knew what they were doing, who could be sure that they would get every single thing corrected that needed correcting? After all, if they were so smart, howcum they let the damned bug get into all those computer hard drives in the first place?

So most of us watched television warily on the 31st as midnight began creeping across the world’s land masses. Of course, all eyes (or rather, hungry banks of television cameras) are on the International Dateline every New Year’s Eve, but as the Year 2000 approached the coverage had a different vibe. Normally the planet’s media watch eagerly to the skies over New Zealand brighten dramatically from the first of many displays of crowd-pleasing fireworks that would soon be exploding over the world’s celebrating cities. But in 2000 ther media waiting to see if New Zealand’s lights would all go out and airplanes would begin falling willy-nilly out of those aforementioned skies.

Had such nightmarish developments actually begun unfolding in New Zealand as some had predicted, then those of us located west of there would have various numbers of hours available to contemplate the similar nightmares likely to befall our own time zones as the Sun advanced our way.

It turned out that as clocks struck midnight in one zone after another, catastrophes proved pallid. Some ATMs malfunctioned here and there and other modest inconveniences arose during the next few days, but all in all the Y2K bug proved to be as non-formidable as had the Comet Kahoutek, which also caused widespread edginess as it approached our planet in 1974 and which also failed to live up to its advance billing as a disaster delivery system.

Why is the Y2K Bug on my mind today? Because I happened to come across two rough sketches this week (see above and below) while looking for an unrelated item in my files. These two variations on a theme were commissioned in 1999 by a friend of mine who thought that — what with the end of civilization being imminent — there might be money to be gleaned from making comical Y2K tee-shirts available to consumers.

My friend was naive about the amount of lead-time required for such a merchandizing venture to be profitable, unfortunately. Besides the normal need to lay careful marketing groundwork well in advance of introducing a topical product, it goes without saying that tee-shirts linked to the end of civlization are best sold before civilization actually begins ending, since people senses of humor tend to do downhill fast once their future prospects have been obliterated.

Anyway, neither my friend’s tee-shirts nor finished versions of my two sketches ever materialized. But since the sketches have spent several years in a file drawer waiting to be re-discovered already, why shouldn’t I share them with you today?

I managed to put together Cruse Art Newsletter on time this week. Here’s me patting myself on the back for that.

Meanwhile Eddie and I are bracing ourselves for chaos as architectural plans are finalized for a home renovation project that’s going to turn our home life upside-down very soon.

See the room in the two photos below? That somewhat disorderly and yet homey living room containing a pleasant little old lady (that would be Evelyn, Eddie’s mom) and a serenely distracted dog (that would be Lulu the dalmatian) in full relaxation mode? Memorize what you see, because very soon this room in its present configuration will be history. Gone! Replaced!

Walls throughout our house will be ripped down; our entire configuration of rooms will be rearranged. Life in the Cruse-Sedarbaum dwelling will never be the same.

Last week I wrote about my recording session for an adaptation that may or may not ever happen of The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth. Now I want to belatedly take note of the passing last April of the woman from whose imagination the book’s title character sprang.

I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that I didn’t post anything about Jeanne Shaffer’s death at the time I learned about it. I’m terrible at composing quickie obits when friends depart, and in the case of Doc Shaffer, her achievements merit better-rounded tributes that I can provide by folks who knew her better than I ever did.

Jeanne and I may have produced a book together, but our actual face-to-face visits were limited to maybe half-a-dozen. The visits we did have were sprinkled across a span of decades, the first of them occurring while I was an undergraduate drama-speech major at Birmingham-Southern College forty years ago.

1967, specifically. Jeanne, a composer and educator whose professional home base was at Huntington College in nearby Montgomery, envisioned an opera based on an allegory she had dreamed up about a swimmer who undertakes the rescue of an entire population of miserable people. Itching to start coming up with music for it, Jeanne was scouting for a librettist she could team up with.

Someone who knew that I was an aspiring playwright told her I might be interested in having a go at it. Ignoring the fact that I was a 23-year-old greenhorn, she chased me down and pitched the project.

I loved Jeanne’s story and spent a few months trying to nail down a proper approach. But although she was unfailingly encouraging throughout that period, I soon realized that I was in over my head. Just because I had written a few student plays and had listened to every musical comedy cast album in the Birmingham Public Library record collection didn’t automatically confer mastery of the opera libretto form. Chastened by my clear inadequacy, I begged off, and Jeanne graciously freed me from my commitment.

That could have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Fifteen years later I popped back into Jeanne Shaffer’s life full of excitement about an entirely different way to tell her story. Our heroic swimmer, I told her, could be the protagonist not of an opera but of a comic book story. A story told with silhouettes.

(Why silhouettes? Maybe I’ll get into that another time; this blog entry is about Jeanne Shaffer.)

Now some practitioners of the "fine arts" (and Jeanne’s many musical compositions certainly placed her within those circles) might have looked down their noses at the comics form had they been approached with such an impertinent suggestion. But Jeanne had an adventurous streak and was unburdened by artistic snobbery. She was instantly intrigued by the radical recasting of her idea that I was proposing. Soon she was a certified enthusiast, and her enthusiasm persisted through the more than twenty additional years it took me to complete my adaptation, which mutated early on from a comic book story into a stand-alone book.

If Jeanne had been a more controlling storyteller she might have kept me on a tighter leash as I added my own touches to her fable and revved up its level of satire. But she rolled with the punches, paying me the compliment of trusting me to pretty much have my way with her tale.

Our only creative disagreement during Swimmer’s germination was resolved almost as soon as it appeared. Between the time of her story’s first telling in 1967 and my re-entry into her life in the mid-’80s, Jeanne’s natural generosity of spirit had led her to attach a slightly more hopeful conclusion to her story. I urged her to reconsider. I wanted to confront readers uncompromisingly with her tale’s darker implications and make them deal with it. Our title character may have been propelled by merciful impulses, I acknowledged, but the book itself needed to be merciless.

Mercilessness doesn’t come easily to gracious southern women, but Jeanne saw my point and let me restore her fable’s original ending.

You’d think that our decades-long marathon of creative cooperation and mutual appreciation would have left me more familiar with all aspects of Jeanne Shaffer’s life and personality than it did. Fact is: the ins and outs of Swimmer dominated most of our conversations, whether in person or on the phone. Anything else I’ve learned about her very interesting life history has been absorbed in chance fragments and on the fly.

I did learn that she was a former child actress in the movies. How cool is that? (As "Jeanne Ellis" she played Jeanette MacDonald’s childhood self in Girl of the Golden West.) She toured for five years with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra beginning when she was eleven — an unusual entry to find in the résumé of a cultured Montgomery Episcopalian, I would say — and I learned just now from her entry in the online listing Classical Composers that she sang with Grace Moore on the Lux Radio Theater. (Hey, my brother and I used to lie awake at night listening to the Lux Radio Theater in Springville during the ’50s. I gather we were twenty years too late to catch one of Jeanne’s performances, unfortunately.)

Jeanne enjoyed a 35-year career as an educator and for thirteen years headed the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Huntington. And long after her Lux days she became a radio personality again via the Southeastern Public Radio Network, hosting a weekly program on women’s music called Eine Kleine Frauenmusik.

Years ago I asked Jeanne if recordings of her music existed and she directed me to a CD of organ performances by Frances Norbert called Music She Wrote: Organ compositions by Women , which includes selections composed by Jeanne along with the work of others (most of it downloadable from the link above). I’m listening to her contributions to that CD as I write this.

I gather that late in her career Jeanne must have played an important cheerleading role for female composers through her web site WomensMusic.com — a site that Google apparently thinks is still alive but that I’ve had no luck accessing this week, which makes me think it did not survive its founder. (If you have better luck than I did, let me know.)

It doesn’t surprise me that teaching, mentoring, and helping other creative people was a strain that ran through the long, productive life that Jeanne led, since even though I personally experienced only a small sampling of her many facets, being giving was the tack she reflexively took with me. Who was I, anyway? An openly gay cartoonist who had gained his chops in underground comix whom she had previously experienced only as a green college-age playwriting wannabe who couldn’t get his act together, materializing out of nowhere after a decade-and-a-half of non-contact to announce that Hey, you oughta be in comics!

"OK," she said. "Put me in comics."

She continued her pattern of givingness by allowing me a huge degree of creative latitude as I expanded and reshaped her story into something very different in its details from the one she first imagined, but one that still had the same concerns about human folly that she had originally invested it with. At least I hope it did. Jeanne never hinted that it didn’t.

The Swimmer lady is gone now, and I’ll never get a chance to ask her what Jeanette MacDonald was really like. But we came away from our three decades of glancing interactions with a book to show for it that has both of our names on the cover.

How cool is that?!

Wow! Wotta month! Only three blog entries have gotten posted since issue #3 of my Cruse Art Newsletter came out, and now here I am this morning telling my subscribers about #4.

There’s been all of the Lit Graphic activity I’ve described recently plus drawing my long-delayed contribution to the next Boy Trouble anthology plus three very welcome commercial illustration assignments plus planning for my classes at MCLA. And to cap it off, having dug out from one snowstorm two days ago and thereby having the final exam process for my cartooning course at the college thrown into disarray by abruptly cancelled classes, I’m looking forward to an even bigger snowfall that’s predicted for tomorrow. Whee!

And you know what happens to professors who give exams? They’ve gotta grade those exams! Even if they’re trying to maintain their secret identities as professional cartoonists whose teaching is a sideline and who have personal work they’d really really like to get down to. Or blogs they’d like to post entries to more than three times a month.

Grading takes time, and it has to happen fast, too, or the college Registrar’s Office will get nervous — as will the professor’s students, who after all are understandably eager to learn how their overall grade point average (and hence their ENTIRE FUTURE) is gonna be impacted by a professor’s arguably capricious application of rigid alphabetics to what is inherently a non-hierarchical process: one individual’s expression of creativity.

I fret over this because I’ve both been a student and I’ve spent many years struggling through the aftermath of studenthood. In other words, I’ve got at least a little perspective on these matters. Based on my own experience as well as any number of artists’ biographies, I’m painfully aware that whatever letter grade I give to a student will affect that student’s relationship with his or her parents (or whoever elser is footing the bill for the student’s college tuition) without much affecting the course of that student’s post-collegiate life, should that student actually see the creation or art as his or her long-term calling. A letter grade certainly won’t be predictive of anyone’s future "success" as an artist, since the word "success" has no true meaning in the context of a culture that largely thinks of creating art as a frivolous activity unless somebody is making bunches of money as a result.

But grade I must. It’s in my contract.

Still, I fret. It’s no big deal; I’m a born fretter. And I do enjoy being around young people who think there’s value in engaging in temporary collaboration with me. I like to see hope happening. I enjoy watching people discover that work can be fulfilling rather than a mere imposition on their time.

But there’s something inherently fraudulent going on when you tell art students that they’re doing "A work" or "C work." Sometimes the insights you may derive from an art class don’t hit you until long after you’ve tossed your commencement cap into the air and letter grades have become silly artifacts of youth.

Serious artists seek mastery of processes whose values are entirely subjective. They probe for insights about their personal strengths and weaknesses in a realm where the line between bad execution and interesting idiosyncrasy will in the end lie in the eye of the beholder. Wondering how they compare to some others who by chance happened once to be competing with them for grades in a classroom will have long been supplanted by concern over whether that one detail in a work of art that’s been plaguing them for an hour can somehow be re-shaped so as to strengthen the whole.

Myself, I loved being in college. It expanded my horizons and changed the course of my life. From being around some great artists who were also teahers and mentors, I learned how bracing making art can be if we put the quest for fame aside and set about wrestling with the dark angels that stand between the human race and enlightenment.

I did reasonably well as an undergrad, I think, but I remember very few letter grades that I was given. Memories of breakthroughs during play rehearsals, though, are indelible.

To be alive, I guess, is to make peace with fraudulent activity to some degree — or at least with the possibility of it. Here we are, after all, stuck in the middle of a human race that’s ridiculously imperfect. Can we look with cold eyes at our own failings, or do we struggle to believe that we’re a little better than we really are so we don’t lose hope?

Can we ever be sure that whatever grade we subconsciously give to ourselves about our own "success" at trudging through adulthood has any basis in reality?

Let’s face it: most of us fudge our marks here and there so we can sleep with ourselves at night.

Not from our actual Thanksgiving meal, of course. That would suggest an uncharacteristic presence of mind on my part. No, the best I can provide from the Big Day itself is this shot of our new roommate and household matriarch Evelyn Sedarbaum presiding over some culinary preparations before the excitement had really begun.

Shall I prodide a play-by-play account of their arrival on our metaphorical red carpet? OK, here goes. From the west (meaning Schenectady, Albany, and Minneapolis) came Jen the Niece, Cousin Betty, and Second-cousin Faith…

I also dutifully took my camera along with me to the recent opening of the Lit Graphic exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, determined ro break my pattern and come away with some snapshots of the event. Sadly, my pattern remained intact. Only as I was driving home did I realize that I had forgotten to take a single picture.

Fortunately, a couple of my cartooning colleague have come to the rescue by allowing me to show you snapshots that they took.

At left: Cartoonist and educator Marek Bennett sent me this shot, taken with his camera, of the two of us, (Notice the strap across my shoulder from which my own camera dangles forgotten and unused. Am I a hopeless case or what?!!)

Below: Marek also snapped me standing longside Dave Sim, the legendary and indefatigable creator of Cerebus.

While admiration for a job well done is appropriate, the cartoonists among us will inevitably be tempted to do our own inelegant riff on the painting should an opportunity present itself — as exemplified by Laura Weinstein’s promotional graphic (at right above) for Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel, the exhibition of comics art that opened on November 10 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

To be fair, snobbery hasn’t always been the culprit. Sometimes it’s just been habits of thought. Various of my perfectly open-minded art-loving friends acknowledge that they’ve never felt called upon to give much thought to Rockwell, thus allowing the widespread condescension toward the man’s accomplishments to go unexamined in their minds. One can’t keep up with everything, after all, and the need to worry about George W. Bush’s presidency has more urgency, perhaps, than any need to reevaluate the artistic legacy of a popular illustrator who, it must be said, never suffered from disdain among everyday folks.

Maybe I’ve got a personal agenda at play here. As the target of much (to my mind undeserved) condescension during my Barefootz years, I’ve always felt an affinity for the underrated Norman Rockwell. We schoolyard outcasts have to stick together.

Fortunately, time seems to be rendering a fairer verdict about Rockwell than have some art critics in the past. Decide for yourself. For sheer pleasure in looking at richly imagined pictures that have interesting stories to tell, the Rockwell Museum is the place to beat. And the Museum is assembling a big Rockwell exhibition that’ll soon be touring around the country as well, so original Rockwell paintings may not be as out of reach as you think, even for people who can’t make the drive to western Massachusetts.

I view the man as a master visual storyteller who knew how to portray characters that made ordinariness fascinating. Cynics may bristle at the unabashed "neighborliness" of those images and personalities made famous in the course of the artist’s long partnership with the SatEvePost, but those of us who like telling stories with pictures and aspire to do it well know when we’re seeing a fellow cartoonist in action.

Even if Rockwell’s stories were told on canvases instead of comic book pages, the man was clearly playing in our ballpark.

As was true when JM#1 hit bookstore shelves a couple of years ago and CNW brought together a panel to celebrate the occasion, WGBH Forum Network was on hand to videotape the proceedings. The newest recording will ultimately be posted on the WGBH web site (keep your eye on this spot for that); meanwhile, if you’d like to see the video of Jen, me, and Joan Hilty doing similar panel duty back in 2005, here’s where to find that little archival gem.

Typically, thanks to the usual crush of professional tasks that persist in preventing me from making blogging the core of my existence, it’s taken me a full ten days to post photos taken during this most recent Cambridge gabfest. But better later than never; here are a couple of the many images snapped by Jen’s beloved lovergirl and occasional photographic documentarian Emmalee Aliquo. (Not being a media whore like the rest of us, Emmalee has no web presence that Google or I could find; hence her name bears no hyperlink. But take my word for it, Emmalee is one cool chick and you should get to know her sometime.)

Tucked in among our audience, by the way, were two distinguished theatrical personages from the Boston area, Ed and Charlotte Peed, who just happen to be old college-era friends of mine on whom I hadn’t laid eyes in many a long year. Much fun was had as we lunched and caught up on our lives for a couple of hours before the panel began.

I got to observe Ed’s skills at close range in a play or two, though. Especially memorable was listening to him and occasionally viewing him in action from the vantage point of the garbage can I occupied throughout BSC’s 1967 production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Since I only popped into view a time or two during the play, otherwise snuggling in darkness amid mentholated cough syrup fumes (I got sick during the show’s run), I mostly experienced the auditory rather than visual aspects of Ed’s performance as Hamm. But I could tell, even from the odoriferous blackness of my trash container, that his performance was holding the audience rapt throughout the evening.

My dramatic high point in the show was getting to fearlessly eat a Milkbone dog biscuit as onlookers gasped. It comes with the territory if you’re going to play poor, legless, garbage-can-dwelling Nagg in Beckett’s black comedy of desolation, hiring a stunt eater being frowned upon in the world of serious theatre. Ed, who was cast in a more prominent role than mine, ruled the stage as a magnificently throne-bound Hamm. And in case you’ve never tried them yourself, I’ll spare you the trouble: Milkbones, while not actually tasting "good," aren’t quite as unpleasant to the taste buds of a non-dog as one might expect.

I don’t seem to have a photo of Ed in his Hamm role, unfortunately, but I do harbor a yellowing photo (see below) of him portraying one of the four somewhat spooky young men who spent two hours giving a fellow named Manchester Wintergrey the jitters in my 1967 Playwright’s Lab play The Sixth Story.