Baggy Paragraphs

Cleaning out a file folder labeled “News Clips Pre-1995” yields the following throwaways:

August 5, 1987: “Whiteheads Tell of a Separation: Call Marriage an ‘Inevitable Casualty’ of Baby M Case”

Runaway surrogate moms were a better story 20 years ago. Today we have Britney Spears! And Madonna versus Tanganyika! Why did I save this clipping so long? My only thoughts on babies are that, without them, there wouldn’t be dead baby jokes. In the best line from this New York Times story, the Whitehead’s attorney blamed “the extra stress placed upon [the] marriage by the public discussion of private matters.” He went on to insist, “Mr. and Mrs. Whitehead love each other very much.”

August 6, 1987: “Man Storming Pentagon Offices Is Shot to Death by Security Guard”

A clipping like this happens when you subscribe to the Times and feel solely responsible for documenting American history. My motto should have been, “Remember the Times Index and put away your scissors!” Dwain Wallace, crazy guy—”had been under psychiatric care in Ohio earlier this year”—tried to get past guards with a pistol, maybe to shoot up the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the guards plugged him right through the heart.

July 26, 1989: Brief item announces Ed McMahon had filed for divorce from his wife, Victoria

I used to save anything related to Johnny Carson and “The Tonight Show.” Victoria was 22 years younger than McMahon. About four years after the divorce, he married Pam Hurn, who was about 30 years younger. Considering recent developments, it’s likely she didn’t get either the wealth or status she’d bargained on when she married the Second Banana.

February 20, 1990: “‘Fantasies’ fueled success, Monaghan says”

Because I covered the vintage car auction scene for Automobile and Monaghan was a player on that scene, I must have thought this Ann Arbor News story would come in handy if I ever was called upon to write a cover story or a full-length profile feature. I could mine the News’s piece for such nuggets as this: “I had a very unsophisticated beginning, [but] sometimes the less you know, the better off you are. Just find a plan quick-and-dirty and do it. Those people that plan and plan and plan but never do anything just make me sick.” I was never called upon to write about Monaghan. Thank God! After a while, this humble guy, who kept appearing in the press, started to make me sick, and my clipping stopped.

April 30, 1992: “9 Dead in L.A. Riot: Street violence flares following verdict in videotaped beating case.”

After 17 years, I’d forgotten about the Rodney King verdict and the following riots. On parole for a robbery conviction, King was driving drunk when the police chased him. A King update, courtesy of Wikipedia:

• After riots, receives $3.8 million in civil case, starts hip-hop label
• 1993: crashes car into a wall in downtown L.A., goes into alcohol rehab
• 1995: Sentenced to 90 days for hit and run after knocking down his wife with the car, bringing to mind his famous, “Can’t we all get along?”
• 2003: Breaks his pelvis after slamming SUV into a house, drunk, fleeing cops for running red light
• 2007: Takes birdshot blast to face, arms, back, torso from thieves who try to steal his bicycle (resolves to go back to driving)

December 1993: “Irons in the Fire,” by John McPhee

Twenty New Yorker pages about cattle brands! Once invested in something like this, how can I dare to let it go?

December 30, 1993: “Heeding the Call of the Autobahn: Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic by Car Window”

Those alluring photos of gray skies, sleet, and people wrapped in heavy coats—how could I have not heeded the call myself? Maybe it’s the reporter’s telling observation: “I got lost trying to find my sleeping quarters in Prague, but I wasn’t surprised. The same thing happened in Berlin and Warsaw, and virtually every other city I had visited.”

March 1, 1993: “Arthur Ashe Remembered,” by John McPhee.

Susan had read Ashe’s memoir. I wasn’t a particular fan—just my curatorial obsesessiveness getting out of hand.

December 1994: “The Longest Yard: Howie Long is the Foxy face of the TV gridiron”

Recently retired from the playing field, Long admits, “I can’t go to bed without a room being clean. I don’t know why that is.” He also says he wouldn’t care if a fellow is gay. “If you can play defensive tackle, please line up.”

May 30, 1994: “Hillary the Pol: Hilary Rodham Clinton has navigated difficult territory as Bill Clinton’s full partner, and throughout her career she has shown a remarkable resiliency and a willingness to reposition herself as many times as necessary to get the job done—her way”

This one spanned more than 40 New Yorker pages. Something I’ve learned when filing away any long piece is to underline the key passages as a way of quickly reacquainting myself with the high points. As for Hillary, how my perceptions of her have changed in the past 15 years! The low point was during the primary campaign when she looked miserable knocking back a shot and a beer in a Pennsylvania bar. It was as bad as John Kerry’s goose-hunting expedition in Ohio a couple of days before the 2004 general election. Nevertheless, this is an exhaustive treatment of the subject Hillary, and I remember it being very well written by Connie Bruck. Maybe I’ll surprise one of my young nieces by sending it in the mail.

Waiting for the game was like waiting for Christmas itself. We woke up on Monday, pinched ourselves, and counted only three more days. On Tuesday, two more days. And then an interminable Wednesday, the clock using a walker to drag itself around. Finally, it arrived: Thanksgiving Day, 1971. The Nebraska Cornhuskers would play the Oklahoma Sooners. “The Game of the Century,” the TV was saying, but even a 16-year-old recoiled from the hype. More than a quarter of the century remained to be played out. But it was a huge game. When the Cornhuskers won in thrilling fashion, yet again retaining their number-one ranking, we experienced euphoria in equal measure to the pre-game anxiety, waking Friday, pinching ourselves, and counting the first day since the great victory, and the second, and third, eager to return Monday to school and talk about Johnny Rodgers’s Etch-a-Sketch punt return and share the feeling that we Nebraskans were finally important.

It had never occurred to me that someone would write a book about all this, but my friend Budd recently passed along Michael Corcoran’s “The Game of the Century: Nebraska vs. Oklahoma in College Football’s Ultimate Battle,” published by Simon & Schuster in 2004. I could hardly wait to dip into a slick writer’s treatment of the subject. The opening chapters’ pace is excellent as Corcoran summarizes how Bob Devaney bounced around in Michigan high schools and was almost resigned to a mediocre life as a school administrator when Michigan State’s football staff solicited his services. (It isn’t explained the Spartans had won the 1952 national title and the program was a fecund producer of coaches.) Eight years later, Devaney brought his quips, garrulity, and football savvy to Lincoln.

My view of Oklahoma’s coaches had always been predictably dim, but Corcoran changes all that through his humane portrayals of the likable and accomplished Bud Wilkinson, the beleaguered but determined Chuck Fairbanks, and of course Barry Switzer, who was touched by tragedy. Something the three coaches shared in common, incidentally, was an excellent command of English. (Wilkinson had a master’s degree in literature and liked to sit down at the organ.) After a season of listening to Michigan’s Rich Rodriguez mangle his cases, a yearning arises.

The narrative builds momentum. It is clear why the looming game would be so important. But at an early point in the book I found myself beginning to chafe at some of Corcoran’s contrivances. Before 10 pages pass, the work is already creaking under the strain of the clichéd theme which asserts that football naturally flourished in a state inhabited by people of “pioneer stock,” to whom no game could seem too violent because life was so hard. (Through the rickety sides of a corn crib, do I hear the wind soughing?) Having grown up in Omaha and benefited from such advances as Cinerama, a sprayer attachment at the kitchen faucet, and daily radio serenades from Charlie Graham Buick (“That’s why Omaha-town is Buick-town, they’re all driving Buicks, best car around”), well, my pioneer stock had become diluted, I guess, and I really didn’t see it in my parents, either. Admittedly, Corcoran applies his asseveration to the much earlier era that produced song lyrics like these:

Where the girls are the fairest,

The boys are the squarest,

Of any old school that I knew.

But following his line of reasoning too closely would produce shock that, in 1952, for example, it was possible to drive an automobile from Florence, at Omaha’s northern edge, over to Iowa by crossing
a toll bridge over the Missouri River. (Why would anyone have wanted to go to Iowa, especially if paying a toll?) Or that the Nebraska Capitol, completed in 1932, is a modern masterpiece. It’s possible to lean too hard and long on the rickety fence that surrounds the state’s pioneer history. While also leaning a bit too often on sportswriters’ shopworn phrases like “particularly stellar,” Corcoran still manages to generate the anticipation of a thrilling climax to his tale. Here, I was disappointed. Note to journalism students across the land: it’s sometimes possible to do too much interviewing. Corcoran lets his tape recorder take over the story in the last 20 pages. It’s no longer a book but instead an ESPN retrospective, with each principal taking his turn in the spotlight. All the tension fizzles out as oral history intercedes. The author’s abdication is hard to figure out. It’s like giving up command of your cruise liner too early to the harbor pilot and being dashed against the rocks: hardly a salutary end to the journey.

Anyone who faults that metaphor, pointing out my landlubbing origins, is hereby referred to Corcoran’s line about Bob Devaney, who “looked more like a man who would give you an easy smile as he pushed his cap back slightly on his head and said he was sorry but your radiator was shot and that it’d be a day or two before the parts came in to fix it.” Hmmm. Maybe Corcoran knows something I don’t, but even in jalopies like those the Okies drove to California, the repair of radiators’ brass tubes and tanks just required a flushing out and bit of brazing before you were on your way. Which formula could be applied to “The Game of the Century,” as well.

All the singer from Newcastle knew was that a rock band in London was looking for a front man. It was guaranteed worthwhile to come down and audition. He borrowed money for a rental car and made the trip. Arriving at the address, he found some fellows playing pool and assumed they were the musicians—but they were just the crew. After 20 minutes the band’s manager came downstairs looking for him and summoned him up to the rehearsal room. Brian Johnson was stunned when he entered, asking, “Is this who I think it is?”

The one-of-a-kind singer and lyricist Bon Scott had died of acute alcohol poisoning a few weeks earlier, in February 1980. His ill-timed departure occurred not long after AC/DC had completed its “Highway to Hell” tour, which positioned the band at the pinnacle of international success. Now they had to re-forge their identity, come out with a new album, and hope their fans would accept the result. By April, Johnson was leaving his car roofing and windshield replacement business and for Compass Point Studios in Nassau, the Bahamas, with his new band mates, producer Mutt Lange, and engineer Tony Platt. What resulted from their labors was “Back in Black,” one of the most powerful rock records ever. The subsequent tour established Johnson with the group, a position he still holds 29 years later.

His audition episode arrives more than 300 pages into “AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll: The Ultimate Story of the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.” Authors Murray Engleheart and Arnaud Durieux keep their comprehensive history trundling along well enough so that an American reader, such as this one, can make it that far. It must be remembered that until “Back in Black,” the outrageous band had received very little airplay in the U.S., so few of us knew the story through the first five studio albums and one live release. Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles dominated the airwaves, along with disco tracks like “Funkytown.” As Shane cleared out a frontier town, AC/DC arrived to clean up all that with catchy ditties like “Hell’s Bells.”

The authors do a fine job of portraying the band’s origins. Malcolm and younger brother Angus Young came from a close family in which an older brother had enjoyed some success in the music world. Especially vivid is the gritty struggle AC/DC fought to achieve Australian success and then take that to London for something greater. On just a couple of occasions the narrative doesn’t satisfy. To the dilettantish reader like me, learning that Angus settled for a Gibson SG guitar instead of a Les Paul doesn’t mean a thing. And even though I like cars, I have only a vague idea of the significance inherent in drummer Phil Rudd’s choice of wheels, an HK Monaro. It sounds more like a brand of cigarettes. Sometimes I just need the full explanation.

On the other hand, the book more than answers questions about the dynamics within the band. Malcolm willingly ceded the soloist’s role to Angus, yet he has always called the shots. Despite Angus’s devilish posturing, their solid character is a Scottish birthright. Something I’ve always enjoyed about AC/DC is the lack of U2-style social philosophy. Why don’t we just rock? Perhaps there are blessings to be derived from going only so far in school. As Angus told Rolling Stone last fall, “I didn’t have any prospects for a career, with the education I had. When I started doing this, I thought, ‘You gotta give it 200 percent.’” Yes, there were drugs, alcohol, and women. But Angus seems to exist more on comic books, milkshakes, and sitcoms. And the Youngs have a fabulous work ethic. The mere fact that they had to endure until “Highway to Hell” before the money started rolling in attests to it. Not to mention the unshakable belief they would be big. But they hadn’t anticipated their charming crooner Scott’s death. How the Youngs found the perfect guy for the gig is a tribute to their astuteness.

“Brian sounded as if he had been buried alive for decades and had finally burst free,” the authors write. He warmed up for gigs by screaming. Working out became a necessity for keeping up with the sustained explosion of energy the shows required, and he once passed out onstage in the stifling St. Louis heat. But his earthiness and good humor, and an altogether different virility from Scott’s, helped to transform the band. The recent “Black Ice” album—which made its debut at number one here and in two dozen other countries—was acclaimed by Jason Fine, of Rolling Stone, as the best since “Back in Black,” and the world tour is showing legs.

Which brings us around to the (second) subtitle: Is AC/DC the world’s greatest rock and roll band? In the U.S., only the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Eagles have sold more records. After 35 years, AC/DC puts out a disc as good as “Black Ice.” In the live show, the school boy shtick and pants-dropping still works, at least a little bit. Elitists may laugh, but I didn’t hurry down the road a month ago when the Eagles came to town. They’re very good, but I was under the impression they cordon off their stage with yellow tape that warns, “Ballad Zone.”

Speaking to my Uncle Tim about the airplanes used for business travel in the years after World War Two by my grandfather, Reginald Oscar Tillotson, led me to make a cartoon of one of them, called a Stinson Station Wagon. Then my Uncle Chuck wrote the following narrative in response to some questions I had about the airplanes operated by the business and the nature of the company itself. With his response comes the proviso that his recollections may or may not be entirely accurate!

Looking back, Dad was really an adventurous contractor. Way ahead of his time but I guess he was driven to flight because he was worn out from driving. During the early years of his business, driving 100,000 miles a year was the norm.

Reginald in his mid-20s

Although Dad took a few flying lessons and probably took the controls while in the air sometimes, he never actually piloted the plane. He had a couple of engineers/salesmen working in the office that got him into flying—both were ex-Air Force pilots. They flew for Dad from time to time but eventually one of them, Marvin Melia, became his full-time pilot. When he wasn’t flying, he was a general overall maintenance/handyman for the business. Dad had double hernias, which I think also prevented him from getting a license. And of course we were glad he couldn’t because of his drinking.
 
My Grandpa Charles was in the business of constructing wooden grain elevators back in ’20’s thru the late ’30’s. He passed away in 1938 and left the business to his two sons and daughter Mary. The boys, Joe and Mike, (nickname for R.O.) were already working in the business, and shortly before Grandpa Charles died the company started experimenting with constructing grain elevators using reinforced concrete via a method called slip-forming. This method allowed a contractor to build a concrete storage building very fast, which not only provided a more substantial structure but also far more grain storage capacity than the smaller wooden elevators.
 
After the war, the increase in production of corn, wheat, sorghum, rice, etc., caused the NEED for huge amounts of grain storage, which was virtually non-existent save the old wooden ones. So Dad, Joe, and Mary took off building concrete grain storage, and their business exploded. Many of the grain elevators that you see as you travel the grain belt—from Calgary, Alberta, to Brownsville, Texas, and from Colorado to Illinois, and even some southern states as far east as South Carolina (rice storage)—were built by Tillotson Construction & Development. 

A Tillotson job, Ashland, Nebraska.

Shortly after the war, my Dad and Joe decided they couldn’t see eye to eye, so they split. Joe moved to Denver to form his own company and Mary remained with Dad in Omaha. As the business grew, the company took on a few employees, including the pilot types, and developed a cadre of field superintendents to handle the construction work. Dad was the initiator of the contracts. His job was to sell, sell, sell. Hence, the 100,000 miles per year of road travel. During the war years, synthetic tires were all you could obtain and of course they weren’t as good as rubber, so Dad went through many tires in those days. He used to come home with a trunk full of casings for retreading and at least one dog, which kept him company during the long hours of driving. He also came home with turtles, tarantulas, cats, shrimp on dry ice, and other sundry items that we got to consume or take care of!
 
Anyway, between 1940 and 1957, Dad built out hundreds, maybe thousands of elevators. I have no way of knowing how many nor exactly their locations other than to point you to the Midwestern Plains and look for the tall concrete storage tanks. Acquiring a plane was an obvious step. It provided him with faster travel, exacted less wear and tear on his body, and enabled him to spend more time at home.

When I went back for my 55th high school class reunion, we were invited out to some friends’ home in Gretna, and we drove from Omaha out the old highway, U.S. Route 6, to get there. On the way, I stopped and paid homage to Dad and my aunt in three little towns (spots in the road) where they had built. They didn’t build much in Nebraska, but in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas they built one in every little farm town where a grain crop was produced. Of course, as the years passed, they had competition, some of which came from men who spun off from Dad—so he wasn’t the only company out there building these units.
 
By the late ’50’s, the need to build more capacity began to diminish and his business started to decline, and it was the end of an era for Tillotson Construction & Development. Dad passed away in 1960 at the early age of 51. He had literally worked and drank and smoked himself to death. I didn’t appreciate all that he did for us kids until much later in life, but to do today what Dad did would be next to impossible with all the government/environmental/safety controls and taxation that now exist.  

'Tillotson Construction, Omaha, Nebraska,' is legible after 60 years or so. Photos by Charles Tillotson.

About Margaret Tillotson: http://baggyparagraphs.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/things-beyond-control/

“Prairie Cathedrals” article about photographers Bruce and Barbara Selyem, who document grain elevators:  http://www.americanprofile.com/article/31661.html 

History of concrete:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#History 

Recommended book:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307351785/?tag=yahhyd-20&hvadid=42537719511&ref=pd_sl_8yzx0tx6xo_e

The Nebraska Cornhuskers used to win the Big Eight football title and get to the Orange Bowl pretty regularly. The Cornhuskers first appeared in the Miami classic in 1955, the year of my birth, losing to fourteenth-rated Duke, 34-7. Returning twice in the 1960s, they had a win over Auburn and a loss to Alabama. Then, in the 28-year period that started in 1971, the road between Nebraska and Florida was traveled 14 times. During that same epoch, the Cornhuskers also played five Fiesta Bowls, three Sugar Bowls, and one Cotton Bowl when it still counted as a biggie. People in my home state got used to planning for an early winter vacation, and Miami was the preferred destination.

Quarterback Scott Frost led Nebraska in the 1998 Orange Bowl.

Miami was a hell of a long way off to us kids who grew up secure in our provincialism. Omaha seemed like the true center of the United States. I couldn’t figure out why the evening news programs like the NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” which aired from 1956 to 1970, concentrated so much on what happened in Washington and New York. So what if Chet Huntley’s anchor desk was in New York and David Brinkley sat his bum down in Washington for each broadcast? Omaha had big companies and important things going on. The Union Pacific railroad was headquartered there, and of course Mutual of Omaha sponsored the weekly “Wild Kingdom” program from 1963 onward, challenging a boy like me to calculate the logistics of getting Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler from our city on the Mighty Mo—the Missouri River—to the Serengeti Plain of Africa on a weekly basis. Did I say there were large undertakings? The reeking Omaha stockyards were vast. It frankly shocked and disappointed me to learn Chicago had stockyards as well. Everything Omaha did, Chicago had to copy or steal. The Chicago Bears had the greatest running back in the National Football League, Gale Sayers, who just happened to have grown up in Omaha. It’s a good thing no one confused me with the information that Marlin Perkins had been director of Chicago’s Lincoln Park zoo.

On top of all this other stuff was Omaha’s importance in the Cold War. Just south of the city, which is situated near the geographic center of the country and therefore at a point far away from Russian missiles, Offutt Air Force Base was home of the Strategic Air Command, where all-out nuclear war could be directed from a bunker. We were used to looking at B-52s rumbling overhead as they approached the base. Later, the 747s of the airborne command center joined the procession. And an allied country occasionally contributed an exotic aircraft like the otherworldly delta-winged British Vulcan bomber. It instilled the belief that Omaha’s real significance far exceeded anything the modest metropolitan population of 400,000 would suggest.

And then the Cornhuskers won their national titles in 1970 and 1971. The four previous champs had been Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, and Texas. It must be remembered that throughout the 1960s, the slogan on our license plates boasted “The Beef State.” A head count barely produced 1.5 million Nebraskans. Omaha and Lincoln accounted for about one-third of the state’s population. The next largest city was Grand Island, with something like 35,000 people. The teeming Memorial Stadium game-day crowd of fans clad in scarlet and cream more than doubled that total. I remember my surprise upon learning the small cities in the population range of 15,000 to 25,000 like Columbus, North Platte, Hastings, Fremont, and Norfolk (which we pronounced NOR-fork), indeed, these cities had their own daily newspapers. It seemed like a waste of time when they could have just read the World-Herald, along with us Omahans, and found everything they needed to know. Anyhow, nothing besides natural-born killers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate had ever happened outstate (and their murder spree was a kind of national champion of its own, unlike anything previously, at least outside of gangland). How could a state with just three congressional districts come away with the national football title? We must have been naturally superior.

With its national championships, Nebraska not only joined the ranks of elite programs from huge states, we kicked their asses. Orange Bowl appearances in 1971, 1972, and 1973 resulted in three victories. We squeaked past LSU, 17-12, in that first one. But the next year’s game against Bear Bryant’s houndstooth hat was a 38-6 blowout. And the next year provided the utmost gratification for someone who loathed, detested, and reviled all the claptrap about Notre Dame. Quarterback Tom Clements led the Fighting Irish, but the Cornhuskers’ David Humm only needed to rely on Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Rodgers, who jittered and juked for three rushing touchdowns, tossed a 52-yard pass to Frosty Anderson for six more points, and later received a 50-yard TD lob from his lefty QB. The Irish trailed 40-0 after three quarters, when the Cornhuskers’ scrubs went in and surrendered six points. As a footnote to all this, I should include that the vacation and victory destination for 1974 was the Cotton Bowl, where we defeated Texas, 19-3.

As I say, we Nebraskans were becoming aristocrats of football and had begun to take for granted a nice excursion, at least to Dallas or New Orleans if not to semitropical Miami. But then Coach Bob Devaney retired, handing off the Cornhuskers to Tom Osborne, and it was a while before he could beat Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma Sooners in the Big Eight. After a few tries, we did manage to drop the Sooners in 1978, the reward being a league title and, alas, a rematch with them New Year’s Day in Miami. (Oklahoma won by a touchdown.) Our next Orange Bowl, in 1982, was the first of another skein of three appearances, which culminated in the unforgettable loss to the Miami Hurricanes, 31-30, when our two-point conversion attempt failed with 48 seconds remaining and the ’Canes spoiled our undefeated season and claimed the national title.

A couple of years later, in the autumn of 1986, my parents, who were lifelong Nebraskans, startled everybody by announcing they were moving to the Tampa Bay area. They were in their mid-50s, so this wasn’t retirement. My father just wanted a change. He had once mentioned his dream of puttering up and down the Gulf coast of Florida in a boat. They made their plans accordingly.

Julie before going to work at Casa's in 1987.

Not too long before they loaded the truck and headed off, my younger sister, Julie, then 24 years old, called up to say she had decided to go along with them to Florida.

“I wonder what I should do about the two-hundred-and-seventy-five dollar red-leather outfit I put on layaway,” she said.

Hearing this from her made me cringe. Not only did I happen to know, through our mother, that Julie’s credit cards were maxed out, but there was also the delicate consideration of whether such a costume was in exquisitely good taste. The owners of the shop probably had my sister specifically in mind when they acquired such a clamorous item of apparel for their inventory.

“You can take it off layaway, can’t you?” I asked.

“Oh, I definitely plan to buy it.”

“Red leather?”

“Yeah, for the football games.”

“How many Nebraska football games will you go to in Tampa?”

“I could wear it to the Orange Bowl.”

Maybe she should also have picked out a space suit in case NASA invited her along on the shuttle. The Cornhuskers next appeared in the Orange Bowl in 1989. My sister had initially gone to work at Hooters, but as our brother Dan subtly expressed it, “I think she put on a little weight and they had to let her go.” If she kept the red leather outfit and was still able to wriggle into it, good times lay ahead: during a seven-year stretch of the 1990s, the Cornhuskers qualified for the Orange Bowl six times, winning three of those games and bringing two more national championship trophies back to Lincoln. The year they weren’t in Miami, they claimed yet another national title at the Fiesta Bowl, hammering Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators, 62-24, and reinforcing lessons about the essentiality of Nebraska to a new generation of youngsters from Omaha to Benkelman.

College theater productions usually have a weak spot or two in the casting, a player who can’t hold his own vocally or just doesn’t look the part, but the recent run of “42nd Street,” by the University of Michigan Department of Musical Theater, lacked any hint of weakness. The bunch we saw on Saturday night at the Power Center gave a strong and spirited performance that made us feel privileged to live in Ann Arbor.

Mary Michael Patterson, of Aledo, Texas, starred as Peggy Sawyer, the underdog who defies million-to-one odds and becomes a Broadway star in “Pretty Lady.” When Julian Marsh (Max Spitulnik, Rockville, Maryland) gives Peggy a pep talk before the show premiers, he refers to her “golden talent,” and it also seemed true of Patterson, whose wondrous dancing and singing did indeed suggest a rare gift refined by untold hours in practice studios. (I couldn’t help thinking how proud her parents must have been to see her perform, if they did, and the same for all those parents who got to see their kids on stage in this glittering production.)

Marken Greenwood (Palos Verdes, California) gave a fine turn as Dorothy Brock, the fading star whose sugar daddy Abner Dillon (hilariously portrayed by Brant Cox, Kirkland, Illinois) is backing “Pretty Lady.” But it’s Beth Kuhn (Deerfield, Illinois) who was truly commanding as Maggie Jones, one of the co-writers. Her scenes were delicious, and one wishes this member of the senior class great luck in her newest pursuits.

“42nd Street” is such a wonderfully uplifting show, and two hours weren’t enough. If the company toured the state with it, I’d have to tail along and see them again and again.

George Will, who wears bow ties, has raised his blade against denim. He owns a single pair of jeans, worn once as a party costume. He alludes to the immaturity of adults who do wear them. How, he wonders, can you respect a guy in Levi’s?

Will’s starting point for this pinking indictment, this quivering of his quill against cotton twill, is a Wall Street Journal piece by Daniel Akst. Far more wittily, Akst condemns denim as “an unusually dreary form of sartorial conformity by means of which we reassure one another of our purity and good intentions.” He proposes a denim tax.

Complaints against the pants are hardly new. I remember a fashion editor lamenting, around 1980 or so, the ovine conformity of women who so readily wore jeans.

In our house, my father never wore denim. He aspired to the entrepreneurial and managerial class. A school portrait—it would have been taken in Monroe, Nebraska—vividly stands out in memory: the poor kid had to wear his bib overalls. His eyes had pensive look, perchance born in thoughts of percale. He wanted out of that clodhopper getup in the worsted way. When I started wearing overall pants—Levi’s—during high school, he probably wondered what had gotten into me. Answer: a parasite (the fashion bug). I wore my jeans with a colorful tee-shirt under a brown sports jacket that had somehow come into my possession.

Will is wrong about jeans. They’re highly flattering, making a good tushie look even better. The patch pockets deserve all the credit that doesn’t go to the hip-riding seams in back. And contrary to Akst’s assertion, I find that fat people look their best in denim.

Anne Hollander, the author of “Sex and Suits,” which is surely one of the best books of criticism ever written, explains why jeans are so popular. After World War Two, a strong impulse toward conformity swept America. Great suspicions developed about fashion. The sexes became equal. “The expressive material used for fighting the [romantic myth] came … from mass-produced male working clothes, most notably the celebrated bluejeans that took over the second half of [the 20th] century,” Hollander writes.

She isn’t surprised that tee-shirts and jeans “swept the world … encompassing all sexes and classes and nations in a universal common nakedness.” With an emblem or a slogan on a tee-shirt, one wears more than clothes.

“Because poor adolescents in cities also wore the original jeans-and-tee-shirt costume, it had the repeatedly modish look of youthful lawlessness along with its older flavor of honest work. In the 1960s, it became the new sans-culotte costume, the scary dress of the restive urban masses. Like the original one, it came to stay and develop great variety in all social groups. Tee-shirts and jeans keep their fashionable subversive authority, their ability to weigh heavily among any proposed set of modes and to keep looking new, chiefly because their form is old and familiar, but also because they always suggest the Naked Man, the universal human being, dressed in neutral bareness to show that sex is not the issue for the moment.”

Attention, George Will and Daniel Akst:

“Their rough, lower-class male origins nevertheless combined with their stretching and clinging capacities to keep them pleasantly rakish and daring for women, and these flavors have only enhanced their latter-day, faintly perverse life as elegant garments.”

Here, Hollander would be writing about:

1. tee-shirts
2. jeans
3. lingerie
4. sweaters

The answer is that Coco Chanel adapted sweaters to feminine fashion after the Prince of Wales had made elegant these shepherds’ and fishermen’s garments. Might Will take up the cause against sweaters? Based on his slack judgments against denim, it’s clear he’d be in over his head.

Sans-culotte: A lower-class Parisian republican in the French Revolution

The dull finiteness that has governed household appliance design ever since the days of coal- and wood-burning stoves is now a thing of the past. The Magic Chef® Quasi-Force™ Self-Cleaning Ricoh High-Speed Color Oven/Copier not only advances the art of cookery but also introduces revolutionary new functions that even Leonardo couldn’t have dreamed up 500 years ago.

From its deeply recessed cooktop with an 18,000-BTU burner that serves double duty in toner cartridge recycling incineration, to its bottom storage drawer that also holds three sizes of copier paper, the Quasi-Force Oven/Copier is loaded with unprecedented features.

Just think how many times you have looked at a splendid Tarte Sablée au Chocolat in the pages of Bon Appétit—after you’ve been through their latest recipes for possum and coon—and said, “Lord Almighty, I’m sure a-wishin’ I could bake up one of these here pies.” Now you can! Merely tear out the picture, place it face-down on the oven-door-glass scanning bed, and select the “dessert” feature on the copier settings. After that, just enter the desired finish time.* All you have to do is load plenty of bitter chocolate and unsalted butter into the data ports to ensure a scrumptious treat for all your kin.

Another crossover feature that will prove useful, especially when young Chandler brings home the other two members of his ménage-a-trois from Haverford College, is the enlargement function that allows the upsizing of a pot roast on a moment’s notice. If both members of the ménage prove to be female, it’s highly likely that one or even both will greet you with a polite but definitive statement on the order of, “Hmmm. What’s that’ smell? I’m vegan.”  No need for churlishness or incivility on the part of the hostess. As long as the roast remains within a few minutes of finishing time, simply select “reduce” and downsize as deemed appropriate.**

The manufacturers could go on and on listing every marvel this new product is exclusively capable of performing, but for the moment there is only space to elaborate on the multiple copies mode that allows the user to insert one tuna-and-noodle casserole and select up to four copies. The invariable result is perfect, piping-hot color replicas that are up to 100-percent edible.

The Quasi Force Oven/Copier is available at home-improvement emporia and office-supply concerns nationwide. And it is being offered in a unique arrangement with Williams-Sonoma, which will also carry the hybrid KitchenAid 9-Speed Hand Mixer/Better Sex 16-Function Super Vibrator ($169.69)—coming (and coming) for Mother’s Day.

* Because of reasoning by the Oven/Copier unit’s artificial intelligence system, dessert does not apply if the “breakfast” feature is chosen for the item.

** Should Chandler bring home, say, a Kayla and a Tyson, consult page 34 of the operating manual: “Male Bisexuality on Campus and How You Can Hope It Stays There When He Goes off to His Investment Banking Job on Wall Street,” reprinted with joint permission of the Readers Digest and the Journal of Sex Research.