There’s this old Groucho Marx joke that goes, “I wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have me as a member.”

Way back in January, I decided that if I was going to apply to Teach for America, that I was going to do so honestly, publicly chronicling my experience on The Kosmo.  Beginning with an explitive-filled rant, I eased my tone as an interview and subsequent research lead me to ultimately defend the organization, its goals, and its ideals.  Yet despite my new-found admiration for TFA, they remained notably absent from the recently-crowned educational “ground zero” of Detroit.  Then, in ranking each of the 38 TFA regions with a preference from 1-4 on part 37-X of the corps application, there she was—Detroit made No. 39.  At our in-person interview, a good friend inquired as to why Detroit was an option of region preference, when it wasn’t even one of the three “prospective regions” listed on the site.  “Cause you know, I’d like to keep it local, if I could,” he said.  “Detroit’s listed just in case,” our proctor said, “as a contingency.”  No worries.  You don’t really have the possibility of working where you’d really like to if you could.

But my buddy had a point.  Chelsea native Jeff Daniels says that “today, if you’re able to be from Michigan, you need to be from Michigan.” And Michigan needs to be from Detroit.  “Sometimes I say that I’m from Detroit even when I’m not,” Daniels said in his solo act at the Purple Rose back in December.  And he says this without any disrespect towards his nearby hometown.  While phrases associated with “tough economic climate” and “recession” need to be placed in the American literary nursing home, Detroit has borne the brunt of the application of just such political jargon for good reason.  It was not easy being from Detroit.  I can barely count the number of quality New York Times articles I read regarding the D on one hand, let alone on the Fist of a Champion.  But now that the worst is behind us with Government Motors and Chrysler’s successful redefinition of what it means to be an “American” auto manufacturer, it’s time to be from Detroit again.  With Ford on the rebound, the Red Wings having completed a successful comeback campaign of their own, the Tigers in full swing, and President Obama practically on the Michigan commencement circuit, we as the people of the State of Michigan cannot afford to lose this opportunity to redefine not only what it means to be from Detroit, but the meaning and perception of the city itself.

When I learned that I was to work for TFA in Detroit this coming Fall, I was surprised, to say the least.  Last time I checked, the D didn’t even have a program.  The city is in the process of laying off 1,983 teachers, and as many as 28,000 senior teachers statewide may retire this summer as a result of a buyout package designed to close an education State budget shortfall.  Detroit is one of only two or three regions that purposefully assigns corps members with local ties to the region—along with Hawaii—and following training in Chicago this summer, 20 members will be placed in Detroit Public Schools, with 80 going to Detroit charter schools.

Living and working in Detroit proper carries with it all sorts of interesting connotations.  Growing up in Ann Arbor my family would drive into Detroit for College Hockey at the Joe or the Auto Show.  The TFA website describes the city as having a ”friendly Midwestern character, a rich and complex history, and many neighborhood gems to uncover.”  This is slightly more ambiguous than their calling Chicago a  “prominent destination for people looking for new opportunities, both from within the United States and abroad.”  But in the vaguest of terms, Detroit is, of course, “complexly Midwestern.”

When a TFA recruitment director for Kalamazoo mentioned that Detroit corps members had expressed interest in commuting from Ann Arbor, I vomited part of my savory Union beef brisket back into my mouth.  I have been combating the Ann Arbor fetish ever since I heard of a few people leaving K for the opportunity of living and going to school in Ann Arbor my First Year.  The place has been described to me as a “hip little town” from as far away as Albuquerque, NM.  Don’t get me wrong, the Deuce is the Mecca of the Suburbanbohemian.  It makes Boulder look like Canton with its Ikea next to the Target next to the Meijers next to the Best Buy with the Starbucks both in the parking lot and inside the lobby next to the Marie’s hairdresser.  It’s too clean for my purposes. The streets are too nice.  The cops are too bored. I need a little grit.  Come to Kalamazoo if you want to taste beer.  Ann Arbor’s a great place to raise a family if you have a steady income, and till the day I die, Go Blue, but we need to live in Detroit and be from Detroit.

There’s this old Groucho Marx joke that goes, “I wouldn’t want to be apart of any club that would have me as a member.”  I’m glad TFA has returned to Detroit, and I am thankful that I will be going there.  I am glad to be able to keep my energies in the State of Michigan.  We will give ourselves to the City and its children.

Call it ironic, but the combined oral contraceptive pill recently celebrated its fiftieth “birthday” of approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States in 1960. From a controversial renegade to a commonplace form of birth control worldwide, “the pill” has come a long way, and boy, do we love it. YAZ, a popular oral contraceptive, advertises its product with young women enjoying the responsibility of habitual birth control, and the .1 percent chance of being pregnant. They prance down the street in brightly colored clothing and make sexy quick changes in the back of taxis.

Who’s to blame them? Young college women can be carefree and sexually active, some starting earlier than others. Though sexual freedom varies from person to person, options like oral contraceptives exist for a reason: no more do women feel constrained to a big analogous family at the age of 25.

“Yaz is not for everyone,” the advertisements caution. That’s for sure. Artificial birth control is a moral sin according to some religions, and the especially opposed with make that clear. Consider the opinion of the Catholic Church, conveyed by Pope Paul VI in 1968:

“It is the whole man and the whole mission to which he is called that must be considered: both its natural, earthly aspects and its supernatural, eternal aspects. And since in the attempt to justify artificial methods of birth control many appeal to the demands of married love or of responsible parenthood, these two important realities of married life must be accurately defined and analyzed” (Paul IV, Humanae Vitae, 1968)

Catholic consent relies on giving what God gave women and men, and that’s baby-making bodies. Woman and man become mother and father, and mother and father teach their children their kindred beliefs. But someday, those children will meet other children; they will hit puberty, and suddenly it’s not black and white anymore. How do we, as all-knowing adults, address this “problem”?

Sexual education in the United States varies with the laws of each state, but starting around six or seventh grade most students receive some form. Those who don’t rely on comprehensive sex education fight respond with abstaining from sex until marriage.

Basking in its own glow of conservative methods, abstinence promotes morality and places virginity on a pedestal—something to be “saved,” they say. How are thirteen-year-olds expected to have their own opinion about something they have never experienced, and are only recently equipped to understand? If the logistics of sexual maturity aren’t explained at neither school nor home, adolescents will figure it out for themselves. And misunderstanding effective birth control is the best way to lead to teenage pregnancy.

I speak of this confusion from experience. I attended a private Catholic school for eight years with one session of sexual education in its entirety. Locking up fifty pre-adolescents in a room with a devout Catholic woman and her merry pair of two abstinent young adults, their message consisted only of this: a solid relationship cannot be formed with sex before marriage, so don’t even think about it.

Never having received the proper education, I had no idea how to use birth control correctly, and did all my research on my own via the World Wide Web, some websites more valid than others. “Birth control is awesum,” “U shuld take THIS kind of pill,” in the manner of illegitimate forum posts. To this day, I am still finding out details about contraceptives that I should have known from the beginning.

My method of researching the pill is admittedly dangerous, and I would never recommend it to anyone. But had I received appropriate education in the first place, I wouldn’t be making risky steps like trusting misspelled reviews of Yaz written by anonymous sources.

Religious schools have every right to teach morality and its connection of giving sex its deserved significance, but evidently, abstinence-only education doesn’t prevent teenage pregnancy. Though the pregnancy rate of 15-19 year olds has dropped in the past fifteen years, it is enough to create TV shows based on pregnant teenagers. These adolescents have got it tough now because they weren’t taught correctly in the first place. If sexual education becomes more than an awkward, rushed lecture by a gym teacher, students could receive legitimate education about having responsible sex. If students weren’t discouraged from asking important questions, and had the resources to do so, Americans could avoid unwanted pregnancies in a momentous way.

Over the past fifty years, globe-trotting women around the world, regardless of their moral status, altered their mindset of the “perfect” family, discovering a world of opportunities beyond a family of eight. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to promote the convenience of “the pill” to us college women, so that we can take advantage of life’s chances now. The more prepared we are, the more prepared the next generation will be. The oral contraceptive deserves its recognition as a revolutionary drug that challenged what we consider the ideal lifestyle.

Playing in the Dungeon Theatre is a divine performance of Three Days of Rain, by Richard Greenberg.  Directed by Anna Simmons and Georgia Knapp as part of the Senior Performance Series, Three Days features a strong trio cast of Nick Johnson, Abby Wood, and Alden Phillips.  As Dave Brubeck’s piano fills the forty or so stadium seats the Dungeon has to offer, one wishes more could be accommodated to view the urban mania of taxi cabs and jackhammers outside the window of Mr. Johnson’s decrepit Walker, without fear of endangering the intimacy.  Walker’s instability bridges on slight retardation as he storms about the room hurtling cartons and chucking magazines at the innocent bystandards of Ms. Wood’s business-y Nan, narrowly missing Mr. Phillips’  suave actor Pip.

The disheveled loft space had belonged to the silent patriarchal architect back in the 1960s of Act II.  That father, Ned, is portrayed with equal parts sharp demeanor, warmly depressing passion, and ultimately uplifting character by Mr. Johnson.  The transition from the mania of Walker in Act I to the composed and hidden manic genius of Ned in Act II would have been a feat for two actors to accomplish, let alone one whose only physical change was between fitting wardrobes of 1990s money-gushing bum to the conservative suburban of the Cold War America not of the hippie persuasion.

Abby Wood as Lina and Alden Phillips as Theo in "Three Days of Rain"

Such diverse acting is best viewed intimately within a fitting habitat. Alix Reynolds’ transcendingly dusty sky apartment set combines with John Reeves’ perfectly executed lights and the expert inclusion of Brubeck’s piano over scratchy vinyl to effectively set the tone for the city and madness within civilized society.  The conversion of Ms. Wood from her disciplined Nan to the wild yet sultry Lina is equally as impressive as Mr. Johnson’s from Walker to Ned.  While perhaps not with Mr. Johnson’s flare, Ms. Woods provides the perfect female antidote to her counterpart’s -phobias and -philias. Nan, though conservatively dressed in a wretched Bader Ginsberg burgundy and lace business suit, seems tear out from her entrapments of unexpressed emotion–a necessary contrast of restraint to Mr. Johnson’s at times murderous wailings–exploding into the screams of Lina.  Lina is all ’60s sex, but with a tender passion and extreme caring.  She is loving, yet quiet, yet wholesomely real in an apartment-world full of people jockeying for position within the city and within themselves.

Intentionally so, Mr. Phillips’ Pip/Theo is the morally defeatist nadir of the show.  Though Mr. Phillips would do well to not rush quite all of his lines, he, like Ms. Wood’s Nan/Lina, is a necessary weight on the wavery teeter-totter of Mr. Johnson’s Walker/Ned/self-convicted asylum.   Mr. Phillips more than enough makes up for his populist aloofness with coarse energy.  His boyish good looks and colicly curly hair play well into the script’s placement of his character as the outside agitator of the romance between Walker/Ned and Nan/Lina.

These effective elements of convincing yet transcending set, transporting atmosphere, and most certainly excellent acting are not accomplished without exceptional coordination and guidance.   Credit is due to the directing of Ms. Simmons and Ms. Knapp.  Though each directed one Act, the pair were perfectly complimentary, guiding both space and thespian through a dance of hurtful but ultimately redeeming human behavior.

Like all good stories, Three Days is a love story, but it is a love story in the most real fashion, the story of building a home.  A house, yes, literally one of an architect seeking expression, seeing things only he can see, yet can somehow communicate through love.  There are no real villains and there are no real heros.  There is no one there to clean up the crumpled magazines strewn about the apartment of life.  Yet as we switch back in time to before life’s messiness from Act I to Act II, Three Days provides the blueprints of just such a home that is our relationships and our loves and our messy abandonded lofts replete with insane and lost individuals.  As rain washes over us and through us as we are trapped inside our accustomed Manhattan lofts, we pour glasses of rain and take long naps with the pitter-patter against the window pane.  Certain lovers come together with stories of posterity, and certain people go off to die.

Three Days of Rain continues in the Dungeon Theater in the basement of the Light Fine Arts building at Kalamazoo college Friday and Saturday, May 7-8 at 7:30 pm, and Sunday May 9 at 2:00 pm.  Student tickets $5.00, with $1.00 discount on Saturday night for those dressed in drag in association with Crystal Ball.  No discount awarded for those dressed in drag on Friday night or otherwise.