Rick Snyder, the GOP candidate for governor and Ann Arbor businessman, seems to be struggling with more than just weak name recognition. You may have seen an advertisement aired by the Rick for Michigan campaign during the Super Bowl – labeling him as “One Tough Nerd“. Now, last summer during the Mackinac Island conference and the huge initial GOP buildup to the primary season, he adopted a “Rick for Michigan” logo in which the preposition “for” was so small, it appeared as if his name was “Rick Michigan,” a potential miscalculation that has many prognosticators scratching their heads.  However, with the new year came a new rebranding for Rick Michigan, accompanied by the One Tough Nerd spot on Super Bowl Sunday.

I remember my dad often making jokes about people called pencil pushers, wearing something called a pocket protector and using mysterious tools known as slide rules. Even with the great value placed on the pursuit of learning in my family, there was a distinct generational attitude towards the stereotype of the nerd as a negative thing. I can’t speak to whether this was rooted in a 1960s grade school experience or a distaste for bureaucrats coming out of the Reagan years, but either way, older folks just don’t like nerds. The opposite seems to be true of millennials – especially in these uncertain times, both genders favor finding a mate who will be able to carry their own weight financially, and like it or not, that grants a certain advantage to nerds. Apathy is no longer trendy – and being involved and aware of what’s going on in the world requires involvement on several different platforms.

The gamble the Snyder camp seems to be making is that the Tough Nerd message will resonate with a wide swath of the population, but he faces a twin set of difficulties. First is that young people just don’t turn out to vote to the same degree that their older counterparts do, which will be compounded in an August primary. Furthermore, despite the relative unpopularity of the Democratic Party in Michigan today, the fact remains that young people (even or perhaps especially conservative ones) generally don’t like Republicans, and certainly not enough to go to all the trouble to support one candidate over another in a GOP primary.

So Rick Snyder, once considered the frontrunner, seems to be dealing with the age-old dilemma that the more people know about you, the less they like you. But this will only be an issue if he sticks with the One Tough Nerd meme even close to as long as he did with Rick Michigan.

Luke Winslow-King Trio and the New Jazz in Kalamazoo

From left to right: Jason

I am falling in love with everyone as people remove their shoes and begin to prance about barefoot, violating any number of fire, culinary, and social regulations. Luke Winslow-King with his Johnny Cash inmate V-neck undershirt whispers into his mic up on stage, fingering his guitar as Jak Jurzak inflates his holy tuba shofar with enough air to keep Atlantis alive for at least another half-hour. Then there’s Richard “Fingers” Levinson strumming up and down his washboard with the thimble on his middle digit as an old woman mistakes my delirium for sulking against a pole and in an effort to dance spins herself around underneath my outstretched arm. This is where the hipsters have come to barnyard swivel under these reddish lights of the Strutt, a little salsa, some polka, and of course the Individualist Rumba! as I lean against my post watching swaying stomping and dipping, beautiful people generally acting like mating velociraptors. I fade into this haze of sex as a man, forty years old, dressed like an up-and-coming vitamins salesman explodes out into the front of the crowd three feet from the stage and whips out his iPhone. He stands there with a smile on his face like this is the most ridiculous thing he has every seen, tuba, washboard, sentimental James Dean with a guitar strung about his neck, man gleaming with his beer slowly tipping forward in his hand as he snaps flash-less photo after photo from his rolled-up white collared sleeves.

Old/New Baby cover art by Anna Powell

But really this music hasn’t changed much at all since the 1920s or maybe even before that because this jazz music progresses along to the rhythm of life. What Winslow-King has done is put a modern pop to it, and a lot of this comes from his beautiful speak to me in my pillow voice and thoughtful lyrics. It is this date-night romanticism powdered over the spitting surging sousaphone and bric-à-brac washboard that has thrown this packed audience into a trance usually reserved for sounds more rooted in the Aughts than music spearheaded a century ago. Not that there’s a wrong way to dance to music, but people here love the waltzes because anybody can waltz and a waltz is a set thing. As for the rest it’s karaoke improvisation which is cool if you’re flyin’, eliciting the same choreography for church song spirituals as for parade party music as for a sedentary street corner stomp. This summer, the beautiful girl to my left now in dancing blue jeans and billowy white top was wearing the black pants of a bar waitress as she and I walked home along the railroad tracks, saying our goodbyes without ever catching a name.

I shove out the door squeezing past this girl now smoking cigarettes huddled against the band out in the cold, content that the music is moving forward through new interpretation befitting my eclectic-hearted generation. I do the Bed-bound shuffle home through the oily puddles of Burger King with Old/New Baby pressed deep into my pocket while “Birthday Stomp” shouts for joy, “Dragonfly, Dragon Flower” invites a drink and a cigarette, and “Searchlight Waltz” is the lovemaking of loneliness ending in the prayer of “Your Eyes, Your Eyes.” The album is important because the pop of the sound masks the holy sentimentality of the music enough to get the hipsters swinging bouncing off of each other on a Thursday night in Kalamazoo. It’s an evolution of the music into the acoustic age of guitar-strumming sweetheart-wooing that refuses to be a Marsalis jazz historian album like his venerable but jaded From the Plantation to the Penitentiary. Old/New lets the music breathe in the present like opening a bottle of red and letting it sit in the open air before optimal consumption, adding horns, auxiliary strings, and an accordion while Winslow-King’s voice flirts with the demure. Full credit is due to LWK and his team of of song writers for the complete set of original tracks found on Old/New Baby, tunes that could easily pass as everything from old standards to nursery rhymes to songs AT&T should monopolize to add an idealized atmosphere surrounding their 3G coverage commercials. Even down to the cover art rests a sense of the serene-despite-the-world as Anna Powell’s ghost-like New Orleans house comforts with solidarity amidst the deluge of post-Katrina culture forever entrenched in the modern patchwork imagery of the bayou. With Luke Winslow-King, it is an empty porch because conversation has ended, and everyone’s gone off to play music.

Even before the first actor takes the stage for Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan, the announcement to turn off your cell phones, or ‘new fangled devices’, is delivered in a carefully studied Irish brogue. In reading through the playbill I found that several actors’ biographies praise the patience of close friends for putting up with their accent practice for the last six weeks. The practice has definitely paid off, if only Irish accents could count towards foreign-language requirements.

Repetition is a large part of the comedy of the play, as seen in the oft-repeated line “Ireland mustn’t be such a bad place, so, [if such-and-such wants to come here].” The list ranges from dentists to Frenchmen, from Hollywood directors to sharks. The characters search out any justification for staying in Inishmann, and makes Billy’s desire to escape stand out in sharp contrast. In Cripple, Ireland has just come out of a disastrous civil war ten years earlier, the world is in the midst of recession, and the folks of Inishmann need every excuse they can find to love the land they were born in.

McDonagh uses the actual filming of the Man of Aran as the backdrop for much of the play’s action. Because of how important film is to the play, it was thrilling to see the work done by the stage crew and lighting design, as clips from the 1934 documentary played during scene transitions. A new scrim was even set up allowing a showing of the documentary within a church hall on Inishmann.

The story itself is centered around a crippled boy by the name of Billy Claven (Michael Chodos) and the community on Inishmaan. Relationships, however, are really the building blocks of the play. It is a real joy to watch the interactions between different pairs of actors, such as Billy’s aunts Kate Osbourne (Laura Fox) and Eileen Osbourne (Sierra Moore) who spend most of the play bickering and finishing each other’s sentences. At least until Kate starts talking to stones, preferring their company to the other citizens of Inishmann. The sister-brother pair of Helen McCormick (Rudi Goddard) and her younger brother Bartley (Alden Phillips) is phenomenal, and leads to the greatest on-stage egging I’ve ever seen. Poor candy-and-telescope-crazed Bartley always seems to gather just enough courage to set off his violent sister who spends her days abusing her employer, his wife, her brother, and really everyone else on the island. Phillips’ simpleton portrayal of Bartley lets him be the eternal straight man and the perfect foil to the rest of the devious and gossip-crazed town.

The town’s main source of news and extortion is Johnny ‘pateen’ (Sam Bertken), who controls the stage at every entrance. He delivers news with a flourish and buffalos everyone else to drop whatever it is they are doing and pay attention to him and him alone. He does have a soft spot in his heart for his old Mammy (Marissa Rossman), who he spends the duration of the play trying to kill with alcohol poisoning. Even in front of the Doctor (Jacob Arnett), who Johnny has called to see to his ‘sick’ (read: alcoholic) Mammy as a pretense for weaseling out some good gossip, Johnny is pouring his Mammy shots of whiskey. Even at the showing of Man of Aran, Johnny has snuck in a bottle for his Mammy to nurse during the show, at least keeping her quiet and non-confrontational for part of the show.

There are only two characters left without a paired character to bicker with: the kind-hearted widower ‘Babby’ Bobby Bennett (Calder Burgam) and poor Cripple Billy. Bobby shows his community spirit by chucking rocks at Johnny’s head as well as providing a source of transportation to Inishmoore for the filming. Burgam brings a melancholy depth to the character, a strong sense of confidence, and a great excuse to peg cows with bricks. Billy is a much more complicated character, keeping silent in a town full of chatter. Chodos’ leg-dragging portrayal of Billy inspires great sympathy, and his ability to not drop character or character flaw made my hand cramp up just watching. Being the outcast and butt of the town’s jokes has made Billy restless and anxious to get off the island, something that comes across in the desperate look Chodos lends to the character.

Ultimately, Kalamazoo College must not be such a bad place, so, if they want to put on theater like this.

The Cripple of Inishmaan runs this week at the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse begining Thursday at 7:30 P.M (“Pay what you want”), continuing Friday and Saturday at 8:00 PM, and concluding with a 2:00 PM Sunday matinee.  Tickets can be purchased at the box office for $15, $10 Seniors, or $5 students.