Category Archives: Oh My Ohio

Great Google-y moogly: An alternative “about me”

So, she recommended that whether we’re headed for BlogHer or not, women bloggers consider introducing themselves to the wider community by posting about the perverse-sounding act of Googling ourselves.

This isn’t, by any means, my first time at this. As a freelance writer, it’s something you do semi-regularly to find out who might be republishing your work without permission. The biggest offenders are music fan sites, and sometimes the musician’s site itself, although it’s hard to be offended when someone has taken the trouble to translate your review of Cher’s farewell tour into Spanish. And it’s a little confusing when Josh Groban fans reproduce your concert review and flank it with little flashing tulips, in spite of the fact that you refer to their vanilla heartthrob as “Donny Osmond Giovanni.” But this is the kind of stuff that happens.

Nowadays, the first thing that appears (beyond the links to that you can already find in the margins of this page) is a piece of my past persona as an alternative weekly staff writer, including the listing of an award I won with my colleagues for best local political story many years ago. We addressed the rise of hate groups in Ohio. My piece was an interview with Floyd Cochran, an ex-Aryan Nations recruiter who turned his life around to become a vocal advocate of social justice. This was a shining moment in my 20s, as the story was reprinted in alternative weeklies in Detroit, Los Angeles and many smaller cities in between. It was also picked up by PBS’s Not in Our Town campaign against American hate crimes and included in their education materials for years.

I wasn’t a journalism major in college. In fact, I went to a college that had “concentrations,” not majors, and mine was an amalgam of American history, American literature and creative writing. My work study job was student activist. I fell into journalism because I always knew that first and foremost, I wanted to write, and the close second was that I wanted to make a difference. So these pages of links, this life happened (at least a little) by accident.

Once upon a time, I went to a mall and asked a bunch of teenage girls what they thought feminism was. (I miss doing stories like this.) The article I wrote, “Feminism by Osmosis,” has been used in custom published women’s studies courses for several years since. No matter how much I have written in between, this is one of those pieces that keeps coming back high up in my Google image.

Another bit of feminist history that has followed me online (I think because I reprinted one on my first web site back in 1997) were two stories I wrote about the first woman to run for president, Victoria Woodhull – who was all the rage in historical non-fiction a few years ago.

I know more about Columbus, Ohio than you do. I spent two years as the senior editor of columbus.citysearch.com, therefore I wrote or edited a kabillion restaurant, hotel, attraction, bar, club, retail store, gallery, coffee shop, movie theater, park, weekend destination and other miscellaneous screen-length profiles that still live online.

Strangely, the work I’ve been doing as a Storyteller for the KnowledgeWorks Foundation for the past four years doesn’t appear until the bottom of the third page of my Google results.

There are also an endless number of artists’ web sites that list my stories about them on their resumés. You might already know who some of them are.

I am linked to a piece of my husband’s ignominious past by some obsessive Judge Judy fan site that tracked down a bunch of info about him after his appearance on that completely absurd show. (I didn’t go on the set with him. I knew he was going to lose. Declan — who wasn’t yet six months old — and I spent the day wandering around Hollywood instead. )

Without the Zollinger, my name is pretty common. Common enough that I was once in a video store and someone yelled for me from the front desk saying I had a phone call, and when I answered, the woman on the other line said “you’re not my sister-in-law.” I handed the phone back to the clerk, who then yelled: “Is there another Tracy Turner here?”

It’s almost enough to make me want to change my name to my husband’s.

I am routinely asked about business stories I have not written for the Columbus Dispatch, because another Tracy Turner wrote them.

Googling my shorthand name reveals that I also share it with an established artist, a BMW salesperson, a Texan OB/GYN, someone who takes still photos on horror movie sets and a guy from Kentucky who wrote a book of railroad tales and a biography of his brother, who died in a tragic car crash.

What happens when you Google you?

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at a City, Part I

Hello, Columbus.

This is a view of Downtown from the Whittier Peninsula Metro Park construction site, soon to be home to an Audubon Center with urban nature programs. The existing river trail is lovely and flat and shady, but we ventured up the unfinished trail to get a preview of what’s to come.

The future of the water tower is said to be in question. According to sources we encountered on the trail, the contractors there desperately want to demolish it because knocking these things down is the most fun a demolition team can have.

I say paint the thing so it’s visible from I-70.

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Good neighbors embrace road rage

My mother, brother and I moved to Columbus in the summer just before I started fourth grade. Ohio was home to us long before then – a place with the most magnificent banister you could ever hope to slide down, cousins to play with and cavernous rooms to hide out in while anticipating the arrival of Santa Claus.

One of the first, most noticeable differences in my education on the East coast versus my education in Ohio was simply this: No one ever required me to learn a song about New Jersey, and I think it’s unlikely that anyone would have had I stayed. But literally within my first few weeks as a student in the Buckeye state, I was taught the Ohio State fight song, Carmen Ohio, a musical rendition of the riddle “What’s round on the ends and hi(gh) in the middle?” and the state rock song “Hang On, Sloopy.”

Somewhere around sixth grade, I was exposed to new Ohio rituals and traditions. There was one where one boy goes home for lunch the day before the OSU-Michigan football game and returns to school dressed in maize and blue (one of the colors in Big 10 sport teams has to have a Tweeds catalog-like name, so that no one mistakes it for a more ordinary shade). All of the scarlet and gray-wearing boys then dogpile on him, mock-beat him and strip him of his colors before math class. Then there are the bonfires with the marching bands, during which everyone sings all of the Ohio songs they had to learn in school. It a rivalry so fraught with insanity, HBO made a documentary about it.

As a non-sports fan with a son, I’m apprehensive about the day that Declan asks me for, say, maize and blue clothes so he can offer himself up to his classmates for mock sacrifice. Or worse – a day where the outcome of any particular game visibly dampens his mood (his dad – a big sports fan – is actually pretty good at shaking off this kind of disappointment). When I lived near the OSU campus, where I had to pay attention to the football schedule as a practical measure to keep my car from getting towed, you could sense the manic glee after a victory and the angry frustration after a defeat. (There didn’t have to be a riot happening to sense it.)

True sportsmanship, after all, is about common respect, no matter how hard the game is fought. Everybody shakes hands and moves on after the game. Or so I thought. But this billboard, which has been all over town for several months, doesn’t strike me as very sportsman-like:

And like a good neighbor, State Farm says it’s okiedokie to hit one with your car.

Where do you draw the line between healthy competition/rivalry and insanity?

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Comfest diary

I was 15 or 16 years old the first time that I went to Comfest. It was the Reagan ’80s, in a town perceived to be middling-to-conservative, in a generation that wasn’t supposed to care about anything. And yet here was a place where, for one weekend, you could find all kinds of politics and countercultures and live music and radical buttered corn and people who delighted in being odd. It was beautiful. It still is… now with value-added naked painted breasts!

Last year, Comfest was emotional and strange for me. It was the year when people approached me gingerly to ask me how my husband was doing in the final days before he was to close his business of nearly 20 years. The festival gave him its first “Patron of the Arts” medal for his many years of giving local musicians a stage. I got my brain picked by some gossips and some voyeurs and some armchair concert promoters who figured his club’s closing was always coming because they felt they understood his business better than he did all along. (Truly, he might as well have been working in politics, because there is at least one Bill O’Reilly/Keith Olberman-style pundit of music promotion for every square block of this city.)

But there were also people who came to me with tears in their eyes, sorry for our loss, sorry for the community’s loss and concerned for our family. And then there were a few who came to Dan directly when I was with him to say thank you and I’m sorry, whose faces puzzled as they met Declan and I and realized that Dan wasn’t walking off into some rock-and-roll bachelor’s retirement, but an uncertain future with a wife and two-year-old.

This past year has been hard. We moved to a part of town where we don’t know many people, a few months before the nexus of our social lives was cut away – some elements of our social lives had already peeled off as we eliminated alcohol from our menus and became parents . Dan jokes that we’ve been in the witness relocation program.

Who still calls and who doesn’t has been illuminating, now that there are no gigs or free concert tickets or drinks on the house that may result from friendship with us. Once you get past the sadness of that, it’s kind of liberating. Our lives aren’t any more certain now, but I do think that we’ve become more comfortable with uncertainty.

Comfest has this reunion quality for those of us who have lived in the local counterculture for a long time, and this weekend, it’s reminded me how lucky we are. I’ve watched my son worship and be adored by several of Dan’s closest friends. They are an oddball bunch. Less the cynics and know-it-alls so closely associated with the image the club had than men and women who do T’ai Chi and watch sports and read and play brilliant music and meditate and dance like maniacs and laugh really loud and have a soul love of music and volunteering and Declan. As he splashed through mud puddles and danced, they praised his spirit and his smoochable, nom-able cheeks.

And then there are the new vistas that this blog has opened up for me. On Friday, I found and met Amy of Dooblehvay selling her elegantly crafted and playful wares in the street fair. I also connected with his family for a few sweet moments on the street. They are longtime friends of ours (his wife worked for Dan for many years) and their daughter Sophie is awesomely fun. I love that being online lets us better keep up with their lives.

And while Friday was a little rough on us because Declan didn’t get the nap he clearly needed, we had a few wonderful moments. He sat in his stroller and ate fruit and I sat on the curb facing him as he gesticulated and said “now.. how can I explain the Big Bang? Well…” Later, he nestled his face through tree leaves as he talked to the sweetest grandmother and granddaughter, who were dressed in matching fairy outfits, carrying anti-war canvas bags.

Our arrival yesterday was peculiar, as I found a sharp knife sticking in the ground near the pond that I picked up and gave to a volunteer to dispose of. That alarming discovery was quickly brushed off by a welcome from a large group of young and old people greeting festival-goers with handmade signs that said “Free Hugs,” so Declan and I each took one. This year, there seem to be a few families freestyling the message and spirit of the festival in increasingly adorable ways. (This year, the shirts say “Be the change.”)

A major storm hit by Dan’s third song with his band The Wahoos, but they played right through it, to an enthusiastic group of puddle-splashing dancers. Luckily for Declan, they performed his two space-themed songs first. In the aftermath of the rain, Declan splashed about with a group of fun kids during the Mendelsonics‘ set, and we had to drag him, literally kicking and screaming and unbelievably muddy, back home. And while the time once was that we’d be there until the park closed, moving on to Dan’s club afterwards, it felt good to leave as the drunkenness ramped up and come home to clean up and settle down together.

This morning, Declan told me that he caught a rainbow between his fingers. (It was the city’s Pride celebratio
n yesterday too, so rainbows have been everywhere.) He put in his hair, then mine, then daddy’s. And it stormed for a few moments this morning, but the sun seems to be out for now, and so, as crispy as we are, we’re getting ready to go for the last day, where we’ll see a little of them, and a lot of her, among other things. If it rains, we’ll probably just get wet.

Dan will be on Curt Schieber’s Invisible Hits Hour on CD101 from the site at 9 p.m. as it closes (Dan’s been his traditional Comfest wrap-up guest for the past few years).

Happy Comfest.

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The house shook, the perp was caught…

I thought a serial killer was being apprehended in my usually quiet neighborhood late on Saturday morning. There were helicopters swooping up and down the block, and about a dozen police cars on the street.

It seems that a man was trying to break into a house that is for sale, but that happens to still be owned by a member of the local police force. The neighbors spotted him as he tried to wriggle his way into a basement window.

Dan went out to see what was happening. His chat with the neighbors went something like this:

Dan: So what happened?
Neighbor #1: Someone was trying to break into that house, which is owned by a police officer.
Dan: In the middle of the day?
Neighbor #2: That’s when break-ins happen. They do it during the day, when no one is home.
Neighbor #1: Uh, people are usually home on Saturday.

The men laughed. Then a police officer drove his cruiser the wrong way down our one way street, and several of his colleagues laughed and jeered.

What a jovial crime scene!

When I was just a baby bird of a reporter, I used to dig through high stacks of downtown police reports for a local rag in order to write a column about dumb and bizarre crimes on these fair streets of Columbus.

Ah, Naked City, you’ve returned to me.

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Stopping to smell the roses

We walked through the fragrant pathways of the Park of Roses at its annual festival for Father’s Day. We usually try and make it there on some uncrowded day when the blooms peak, because there’s something oddly calming, and yet completely decadent about strolling around 11,000 rose bushes.

There are other reasons that I feel connected to the place. My great uncle contributed to the growth of the park for many years before I was born. He was a master surgeon and a rosarian – a President of the American Rose Society for many years. Most will tell you he had a lot in common with the brilliant and thorny flowers that he tended so religiously throughout his life. That generation of my family has passed, but many of the things at the festival seem preserved in their time. The people who conceived of this park knew how to take nature and shape it into a field of fantasy, and they didn’t require computer simulations to do it.

One of the first things we saw was a men’s glee club, where the median age was probably somewhere around 75. The group put on animal noses to ham up “Old MacDonald” quite adorably, especially the exuberant duck. Then they took off their hats and held them over their hearts to sing “God Bless America.” The gentle sincerity of their performance caught me completely off guard. Dan and I both got choked up.

Declan fell asleep soon after the performance, missing out on cool things like this wind-catcher, which I might have purchased if it hadn’t been sixty-odd dollars.

http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1181401&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1
In the wind from Tracy on Vimeo.

And of course, being in the city, not everything about the festival is old school. Note the only political campaign on the grounds:

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Saturn has rings!

It’s roughly a light hour (or 746 million miles) away, but when you look through a telescope it’s just right there, so clear with its rings and its many moons. I thought about Galileo seeing it for the first time 400 years ago, how he must have puzzled, the stir his telescope created.

I teared up a little after I looked at Saturn, wondering how I made it to my late 30s without looking so closely at the heavens before. It’s yet another gift my son has given me.

We also examined the surface of the moon and saw a distant galaxy (M105, I think). Then it clouded up and other people left, allowing Declan ample time to play with some computer program that let him fly through the universe, as well as to chat with an astronomer who also happens to clearly enjoy kids.

I got the last-minute notion to run us up to Perkins Observatory on Friday night (thanks to Ed for the reminder). I’d considered it last summer, but hadn’t gone because Declan was still just two, and three was the suggested youngest age, although I think they’d have made an exception if I’d just asked.

At any rate, I’m so glad we went – what a wonderful, family-friendly place, full of people who are just thrilled to tell you whatever they can about the skies. Dec was excited to see through the different telescopes, but he also could have spent hours looking at their book collection, examining globes of Mars and Venus, and trying out all of the different astronomy computer programs. (His mouse skills are so good, it’s a little bit freaky.) I think we’ll be making regular visits back, so that we can see more of the planets as they come into view. And celebrate the sun in July.

If you are in Central Ohio, I highly recommend visiting Perkins. They recently lost their major source of funding (OSU), because while they have the second-largest telescope in Ohio, there are more powerful ones out there nowadays that the university can lease to do its research. However, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more enthusiastic proponent of science than Director Tom Burns, and that makes the place a real local treasure. He seemed genuinely thrilled to be with people in the crowd who were about to undergo the life-changing experience of seeing Saturn through a telescope, and he was so, so kind to my son.

They are currently on a drive to increase their endowment and save the observatory, so bring plenty of change for the change vortex, money for a Moonpie and whatever else you can spare when you visit.

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