Page Ten
I HE MICHIGAN DAILY
Friday, March 7-1,,1,91:) 1
Page Ten I HE MICHIGAN DAILY Friday, March ~l, LVI~
Tra vel,..
Escape...
By SARA RIMER
Two mad students took off for Toronto at the
height of midterm mania last month in a break from
the current infatuation with inflated grade points.
Wearied by the thought of another day in the under-
graduate library or one more visit to the print study
gallery overrun with articulate art history whiz kids,
Myra and Nancy (fearing parental reprisals, they asked
that their last names be withheld) decided to subvert
the usual Tuesday academic routine. "A day off," they
reasoned, "would renew our enthusiasm for hard study-
ing, clearing our minds for an onslaught of new infor-
mation."
At 12:38 p.m. Myra, -forced to give up on her film
paper when neighbors complained about the type-
writer's noise, suggested, "Hey, let's go to Toronto."
Nancy, who was putting off the same paper, readily
complied, and the two ran upstairs to pack before any
harsh bouts of realism could put the roadblock on their
trip.
IN ORDER to make a quick getaway, they skipped
suitcases and made five trips up and down the stairs
with armfuls of clothes. Confronted by a friend who
refused to believe the two were fleeing campus during
midterms Myra demanded, "Where do you think I'm
going with my pajamas?" However, jabbed by guilt
pangs, she picked up her Smith Corona electric and
stashed it in the back seat of the car.
The two scrawled a hasty note to their roommate,
who was holed up in the library, that read, "Went to
Canada, see you tomorrow," and were out the door by
12:45 p.m.
They hopped in Myra's Cutlass, stopped at the bank
for fifty dollars, filled up the tank, and passed go, tell-
ing each other, "You're only young once." With the ra-
dio turned full blast on be-bop AM music, they regres-
sed to a loud round of elementary school class trip
style singing - "Hundred Bottles of Beer in the Wall."
ONLY a thickening fall of snow daunted the two
travelers and they reluctantly modified their initial
Toronto plans, pegging London, Ontario as their new,
closer destination. When they hit London after a three
hour drive, they pulled up to a posh Ramada Inn,
peeled thirty dollars off their wad of runaway bills, and
ordered up a fancy room with two huge, double beds, a
color T. V., armchairs oozing slick leather, and garish
hotel art that would never make the print study gallery.
Meriting no long-winded praise, the art deserved only
a brief, "God, that stuff is ugly."
Luxury-stuffed by their surroundings, Nancy and
Myra bypassed the expensive hotel restaurant and
The Ambassador Bridge stretches across the Detroit river,
to Windsor, Ontario. It is one route which travelers yearn-
ing to escape may take into Canada.
headed instead for the Ponderosa Steak House. The
spot was jammed with hungry families taking advan-
tage of Bargain Night's $1.50 steak dinners. Between
bites the two sputtered, "I can't believe we'reminCan-
ada, we must be crazy." After filling up on meat and
potatoes, they returned to the hotel where they discov-
ered a heated swimming pool that almost spurred them
to locate bathing suits. However, that brief burst of en-
ergy quickly subsided, and they settled down instead for
a night of tube-staring that included Marcus Welby,
Mash, and Good Times. They each dried off after long
showers with about a half dozen hotel towels. The bath-
room featured a sunlamp, and they took turns waiting
under it to turn a Florida tan. Myra pulled out the
Smith Corona in a half-hearted attempt on her paper,
but her hotel neighbors were no happier than her
house mates with the machine's buzz. At 10:00 p.m. the
two disgruntled businessmen next door called up to
bark, "How long is that noise going to continue?"
LONDON lacked Toronto's all-night fun and games,
and at 11:00 the two dozed off with the T.V. still blar-
ing. They awakened early, had a last fling with a room-
service eggs, bacon, and toast breakfast, and snatched
up a cache of matches and stationery as proof of their
Canadian gambit. By 8:30 a.m. they were on the road
back to Ann Arbor, hoping the snow would strand them
in London for another day. However, they breezed back
to town, this time making Jethro Tull's "Bungle in the
Jungle" their theme song. Home by noon, they flashed
their Ramada receipt to skeptical friends who said,
"God, I wish I could do something like that."
The two quickly slipped back into the old studying
routine and hurried off to the library to make up for
lost time."
SOFT PARADE
By BILL PERRY
At first I thought I was sleeping on a train. My
bed was shaking, rumbling and jumping sharply to a
regular but monotonous clacking, and I imagined I was
riding in a berth on the Orient Express, my eyes closed,
my head in a drowsy stupor.
"We're somewhere between Dayton and Toledo."
AHA. I sat up and looked out the window. Rain was
pouring from a cold grey sky and spattering onto a cold
grey concrete highway. So I was in my car, and my two
friends and I were driving back to Ann Arbor from Fort
Lauderdale, Florida.
Ohio looked pretty dismal: flat, grey, wet and cold.
The shaking, rumbling and jumping came from lumpy
mounds of asphalt in the road. My berth was just the
back seat of the car padded with a few dirty pillows.
Twenty-two hours of almost non-stop driving in
a rather compact Plymouth Duster had put me in a
state of claustrophobic melancholy. I wistfully looked
to the south and scanned the horizon, searching for one
or two palm trees that might remind me of sunny
green Florida. I looked east and west, trying to imagine
the acres and acres of orange groves I'd seen just one
sunrise ago. But all I saw was a half-empty, greasy tube
of Native Tan Tanning Gel lying on the backseat win-
dow shelf. That and an Ohio highway patrolman issu-
ing a ticket to some unfortunate caught exceeding the
speed limit. I began to think that I'd left my heart in
Fort Lauderdale. Mytmind drifted back to retrieve it,
and the car was suddenly moving in reverse, back to
Florida.
THERE was the black velvet night spent driving
through the hills of Kentucky and the mountains of
Tennessee. There was the honest old gas station man
who innocently left his cash register wide open in my
face as he cleaned a spoon for my midnight coffee.
Then there was the orange-red brushfire burning up
the Georgia horizon, casting a glow upon the low-lying
clouds.
And the sunshine. Pouring hot from the Florida sky
and blasting away my Northern pallor. Making every-
thing around me thick and green, giving rise to all the
exotic plant and animal life a Michigander gets to see
only on postcards.
The finely-crushed seashell sands of Fort Lauder-
dale were replete with people basting brown in the sun,
three women playing frisbee, five men playing cards. A
FORT LAUDERDALE beaches, like this one, are teeming
every year with northerners who try to escape the winter
blasts. But, most people must at some point return to home
and reality.
retiree snored contentedly in the sand. My ten Michi-
gan friends and I dreamed up a petition which would
request a U. of M. extension in Florida.
IN A week's time I felt I'd become a converted Flor-
ida man. Michigan seemed to be a lot farther away
than the 100 miles indicated by the Ohio road sign.
Somehow I didn't seem to fit in with all this cold and
grey dreariness we were driving through. And this same
cold, snowy dreariness awaited in Michigan. My face
was burned, my body was tanned, and all I could seem
to donow was think about the sun, sand and Florida
green.
Then I realized I was sitting on something uncom-
fortable. I looked down and saw a history book I'd
brought with me to study; and I was brutally reminded
of a paper due Monday which I had completely forgot-
ten about. My Florida memories suddenly faded and I
instinctively gathered together some loose paper and
a pen and began thinking and writing. I thought and
wrote non-stop for the next hour, slipping into the
groove again, wallowing in an academic mudhole of
facts, figures and conceptual thoughts. I opened the
book and searched through the cold, grey pages for
substantiating quotes. I searched hard, thought through
my now coldly academic brain.
I
dow.
-all
to fit
looked up momentarily and glanced out the win-
Once again I saw the rain, the sky, the highway
so grey. I looked down at my work. And I began
in once more.
Hello, Ann Arbor.
Shaky
'I'm a Scorpio, can fly lik
fly, but sting like a bee.
'Got a hundred friends
where I can go, yah, ahc
where I want, and do w
to do.'
-Sh
Jake: Aha, ha!
By VINCE GREEN
cea butter- Shakey Jake rasps out his sales pitch in a flashy
white suit and shades that mark him apart from the
average city street person. Staked out in Angell Hall
with copies of the Ann Arbor Sun and a pile of Shakey
and places Jake tee shirts, he pulls off sales in a cross between
burlesque comic and bullfighter. A passer-by observes
i, aha, I go the dapperly dressed black man with olive-drab glad
rha t I wantbag and guitar and asks, "Who is that there masked
man? Is he the itinerant Glad Man in disguise? A
washed up bullfighter that's flipped out?"
Spiffed up with a red carnation, panama hat, and
?akey Jake white shoes, Jake brandishes his wares at students with
a top matador's bravado. Intermittent dog whistles fol-
lowed by a few gutteral laughs beckon students toward
his cape.
A YOUNG woman in army fatigue pants and a J. C.
Penney Tania Hearst beret walks by and Jake yells,
"Still trying to get your shit together. I'm seventy five
years old; I still got mine together. Aha, Ahaa, yah!"
It's difficult to pin Jake down on his exact age. He
darts around the question, "I'm a Scorpio, can fly like
a butterfly, but sting like a bee."
Jake does little to illuminate the personal life of
one of Ann Arbor's most infamous characters. Ques-
tioned about where he stashes his gear down and sleeps
for the night he teases, "Got a hundred friends and
places where I can go, yah, aha, aha. I go where I want,
and do what I want to do. See this guitar, friends gave
it to me."
INSPIRED by his own lines Jake breaks into song
for his interview. He grabs a mike hooked up to a one
foot high buzzer amplifier and announces, "Shakin'
Jake goin' do a concert while interviewed for The
Daily." He scrunches down and begans pounding out a
song on his guitar with no chords, but a pretty good
rhythm.
"Can't read, but I sure can play this guitar," Jake
sighs in his raspy voice.
Shutting off any more questions he packs up his
things and struts down the hall. Shakin' Jake turns the
corner and all that can be heard is his well-known re-
frain, "Aha, aha, aha," echoing through the halls.
Reflections in the glass
String fig
By MARY MILLERD
"I'll make you a mosquito," he
says, and his fingers intertwine in
the string, twisting, and looping
until they produce the string mos-
quito.
Tom Storer, a University mathe-
matics professor and a Navajo In-
dian, has been making string fig-
ures for about 30 years.
"MY GRANDMOTHER taught me
when I was very young," he says.
"I learned a lot more just travelling
around, talking to people."
Storer is still learning new de-
signs; many from string game col-
lectors all over the world. He also
invents his own designs, such as
his double flower.
The best-known string figures,
IL
ires: An
Storer maintains, are diamond de-
signs. "The diamond signifies dif-
ferent things in different cultures,"
he explains. "In places where water
is scarce, it represents a well. In
other cultures diamonds stand for
suns, women, or ovens."
NET FIGURES, consisting of in-
terlaced squares, are also wide-
spread, and can be up to 30 feet
long, Storer says. Up to four people
can make them, and he adds, "Two
strings can be used, usually by two
people."
"Tricks with strings are also very
popular," he comments as the
string around his finger unties it-
self and slips free. Another good
trick, he says, is a noose which cuts
off your head, "if you have enough
rncient art
confidence," he warns.
Storer's fingers work as he talks,
creating bird's nests, fish, kayaks,
and flowers. As the string becomes
a rigid zig-zag between his hands,
Storer explains, "This is lightning.
It is followed by the galloping
thunder-horse," and the string
turns into a horse.
Next, he makes a design of three
A figures. "People everywhere have
a fascination for figures that re-
peat," he comments.
String design has a variety of
functions, according to Storer.
"Some are simple amusement," he
says, while others have "religious
significance."
Storer does it for relaxation.
"It's a personal thing for me."
i
Easy guidelines for
a lush spider plant
By MARLENE DAVENPORT
Next to people and dogs, the most common living
things growing in the city are plants-even in the
winter. Caring for people is self explanatory, and
dogs around here usually manage to take care of
themselves, but plant care is another thing alto-
gether.
There are exotic plants which need special ferti-
lizers, temperatures and humidity to merely sur-
vive, and then there are the common household
plants which could probably live through the win-
ter outdoors; philadendrons, coleus's, wandering
jews, jade plants, ferns, the list goes on and on.
BUT EVEN if it's almost impossible to kill them,
water it thoroughly allowing the excess to drain out
of the bottom of the pot. But don't keep the run-
off water in the saucer. If the plant is in a decora-
tive pot with no drainage holes, be careful not to
over-water it. Make sure the soil is dry before wa-
tering it again. Too much water will cause the roots
to rot and the leaves will turn yellow and drop off.
THE SPIDER plant is adaptable to many lights,
and can survive in semi-shade as well as bright
sunlight. But it grows best at an east or west win-
dow, though it should never be placed in direct sun-
light. Then on the other hand, too little light will
cause the white stripes of the spiders leaves to turn
green.
s ' :-