For those of you who’d like to get some extra credit on yesterday’s assignment, two pieces, one short and one long:

Roy Edroso at Alicublog, on James Brown. (This is the short one.)

Philip Gourevitch in the New Yorker, on James Brown. (Long.) The latter contains a detailed description of his show that pretty much matches the one I saw, but is, of course, about a million times better than my description.

Gerald Ford is dead. People of my precise demographic slice will remember him as a vague collection of impressions, beginning with WIN buttons and ending with Chevy Chase’s pratfalls. Sentenced by fate to clean up after Richard Nixon, he did a good enough job that few people remember him with bitterness (even though he survived two — two! — assassination attempts), but not good enough that he could be reelected. Here’s another fleeting memory: Jimmy Carter calling for a round of applause, in his inauguration speech, for the man who did so much to “heal our land.” I recall Ford seemed uncomfortable with this Hollywood-like moment, even as he stood up and acknowledged the applause.

I was stunned to see he was 93. Didn’t he play football at Michigan? That would seem to place him in the leather-helmet era of the game, but maybe not.

This is probably a reflection of where my head was at the time, but I mainly remember Jerry Ford for his family. After the Nixon robo-daughters, the Fords were a family any American teenager could like. One son was a struggling actor. (Look for him as one of the president’s Secret Service agents in “Escape From New York” — he’s the blonde.) A daughter, Susan, was briefly touted as a Major Babe, a Republican Kennedy, then sort of resigned from the job. She made a commercial for Subaru in which she had to sing three words — Ford drives Subaru — and couldn’t stay on key, but was cute about it. It only now occurs to me how this must have stabbed the other Ford family, back home in the president’s native state, right in the heart; a Michigan politician’s daughter pimping an import! Heresy!

And then there was Betty, who had her own problems, although we didn’t find out about them until after her husband left office. She was a good egg, though, pulling up her socks and becoming the public face of alcoholism. It needed a public face, right about the time we were turning from Foster Brooks and Crazy Guggenheim to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and an ex-president’s wife would do nicely.

Of the president, I simply wasn’t paying attention. There was the Nixon pardon, Whip Inflation Now and…well, what can i say? I was a teenager. I was paying attention to other things.

I’m struck by this passage in his obituary, noting he was “a man of the center. He was an internationalist in foreign affairs, a moderate on civil rights and social questions and a conservative on fiscal matters.”

And this was a Republican. (Amusingly, his position in football? Center.) They didn’t make ’em like that for a long time, although the model seems to be making a comeback. Have you driven a Ford lately?

Here’s my James Brown story. It’s not much of a story.

I used to be a night person. It was a necessity of working 2-10 p.m., night shift at an afternoon paper. But I was young and had the sort of energy and lifestyle that made those hours pretty much ideal. Anyway, one night one of my colleagues, Dave Jones, stopped by my desk and said, “You want to see James Brown later on tonight? He’s playing at the Agora.” It was a crummy but busy rock club down in the campus area (now the Newport Music Hall, for you Buckeyes), seats about 1,000, maybe more.

“The show’ll be over by the time we get there,” I said. Nope, said Jones. He’s playing two shows.

This was 1982, around there, which would have made Brown 50-ish. He’d been in showbiz for decades already, had been its Hardest-Working Man for at least that long. But he was, shall we say, in a trough. The ’60s were long over, disco was dead, hip-hop was still a-borning, New Wave had peaked and radio was starting to split into armed camps of strict formats. “Living in America” was still a few years away, and the baby-boom nostalgia machine had yet to crank all the way up and give him a residual income from getting “I Feel Good” in all those Huggies commercials. And so he and his band were touring and playing two shows a night in 1,000-seat clubs.

We arrived in plenty of time to get tickets for the midnight show. The hall filled with a mixed-race crowd spanning a wide age range. We snared a table off to the side, a few steps above the standing-room main floor, ordered a pitcher and waited.

Brown’s shows always began the same way — with his large, brass-heavy Revue playing a few numbers by themselves, while an MC, Danny Ray, started the crowd chanting “James Brown! James Brown!” I was eager to see the show, but this seemed a little silly, even as we joined in. I looked closely at the Revue. The intimacy of the space and the artlessness of the lighting showed every pill on their powder-blue tuxedos. Their ruffled shirts looked tired. I thought I could see grime on their collars and cuffs, but that might have been my imagination. And it was the second show, after all.

After about 15 minutes of this, Brown made his entrance, lights shining on his trademark pompadour, his forehead already sweaty, his clothing the same tight polyester pants and wide-spread collars he’d been wearing for years. To this day, I can’t tell you a single song I heard or much at all about the music, except that it simply ran over me like a train. By the second song, Jones and I had left our table behind, moved onto the floor and were dancing like a couple of Ecstasy idiots. I felt like a Pentecostal taken with the spirit; the show was that powerful. The Revue played their guitars and horns and Brown danced and screamed and moaned into the microphone, sweat flying from him the way it would from a prizefighter. He stopped once in a while to mop his brow, but not for long. It was just a seamless, two-hour musical throwdown, and I hadn’t seen anyone, yes, work that hard on a stage ever. Still haven’t.

As time ran short, he went through the same wind-down he’d been doing for years: He starts to leave the stage, and MC Ray comes up with a cape and throws it over his shoulders. The first time I saw this was on a TV show in the mid-’60s, and the action was more of Ray trying to save his man from an onstage collapse: Boss, you gotta stop now or you’re gonna hurt yourself! The cape was thrown over him the way a groom throws a blanket on a racehorse that’s just stepped off the track — gotta keep those muscles warm so they don’t cramp up. But no! James Brown is too powerful to stop, and must keep gettin’ fun-kay! He throws the cape off and rushes back to the mic, sings a little more, and after a bit Ray approaches with another cape. This goes on for three or four capes.

On this night, the action was a little stylized, an acknowledgement that this routine was now 20 years old and everyone knew how it played out, but it was still entertaining as hell. By now it was last call in the club, 2 a.m., and the management was ready for it to be over. They turned the houselights all the way up, but James Brown cannot be rushed by the Man. He played two encores, another blur of butt-shakin’ and splits and good-gods and microphone swinging, and then finally left the stage for good and we all filed out to let our sweat evaporate on the sidewalk.

(Two years ago, Jones e-mailed me and said he’d finally seen a show that was better — Prince’s “Musicology” tour. Prince wears tight pants, a pompadour and knows how to get fun-kay. Wonder where he learned that?)

It seemed I saw several shows that year that simultaneously underlined both the joy and the pain of the professional musician. There was also Albert King, blues genius, in a bar so small he had to leave the stage by walking through the crowd. Still buzzing from “Little Red Rooster,” I assaulted him with a bear hug, which he was nice enough to return. (My overwhelming impression: This man is sweaty.) He would have been around 60 at the time, playing tiny bars for college students. And yet, he put everything he had into that show, or at least seemed to. I think about James Brown, already annointed the Godfather of Soul, reduced to two-show nights in small venues, still giving so much that he demanded you give it all back to him. And we did.

A couple years ago, Terry Gross had one of Brown’s longtime band members on her show, and they talked about the rhythmic signature of his music: “Playing on the one,” which is how Brown often cued his band: “On the one!” ONE two three four ONE two three four. The beat was more insistent that way, the musician said. I don’t know enough about music to comment, except maybe this: Amen.

One more quick blog item before I turn off the modem: Colo turns 50 on Friday.

If you grew up in Columbus, you know who Colo is — the world’s first gorilla born in captivity, at the Columbus Zoo. I wasn’t born until almost a year later, and no we don’t share a dad or anything, but it’s one of those things a kid growing up in Columbus would notice: Colo and I are almost the same age. Her first photos showed her in a frilly dress and hat, held on the hip of a zookeeper, like a toddler. Nowadays she lives in the zoo’s ape habitat, probably the best compromise with her native Africa that a captive gorilla is likely to get — a large, open-air pavilion/cage encompassing trees and climbing ropes, part of an extended family, many of them her own offspring.

While I can’t fault the Dispatch writer for the job he did, I’d like to see what a WashPost Style writer could do with the same material, as Colo’s life covers so much cultural territory in the way we regard animals. We’ve come a long way from those dresses and the original glass-fronted, concrete-floor cage she grew up in. Colo gave birth at 11, and her daughter was named Emmy, for the mayor at the time, M.E. Sensenbrenner. (Subsequent babies were Oscar and Toni.) Today the gorillas are given African-sounding names like Jontu, Macombo and Mosuba. Colo was taken from her mother at birth and reared by humans; today’s ape babies are frequently entrusted to their own kind. The opening of the pavilion was a huge step forward in the apes’ quality of life, although I remember some poignant moments, too — they didn’t know what to do on the ropes and trees, having never seen them before. (A radio station promptly sent over its Morning Zoo team to play on the ropes while the gorillas watched from a safe distance. Monkey see, monkey do, etc.)

I find gorilla-watching equal parts painful and fascinating. It’s hard to look into those faces; I identify too strongly. Once I was gazing perhaps a little too hard at one of the silverback males, and he rose up on his legs and beat his chest, Tarzan-style. I jumped a foot in the air.

Anyway, that’s Colo at 50, 100 in human years. A trailblazer from the time she was found lying, still in her amniotic sac, on the floor of her wild-born mother’s cage. Many happy returns.

Columbus Dispatch photo. Used without permission.

Life is unfair. This should be neither a surprise nor particularly upsetting to anyone older than 17 or so, but still, it can sting the most hard-hearted of us. I wonder, should Sen. Tim Johnson recover enough to read the stories about his sudden illness and surgery yesterday, if he’ll be terribly vexed that the political angle to his story emerged in paragraph five and not 25:

Apart from the risk to his health, Johnson’s illness carried political ramifications. Democrats emerged from last month’s elections with a 51-49 Senate majority. If he were forced to relinquish his seat, a replacement would be named by South Dakota’s GOP Gov. Mike Rounds. A Republican appointee would create a 50-50 tie, and allow the GOP to retain Senate control.

Get well soon, senator.

I accepted an editing job yesterday, for a friend, which meant I extended the special Friend Rate of $0 per hour and dinner at my choice of restaurants in the Fort Wayne metroplex sometime during Christmas week. While I try to limit my pro bono work to NN.C, I guess there’s something about the holiday season that puts me in a giving mood. What the hell, it’s only 7,000 words plus multiple appendices and I owe him one. Which is my way of saying, I may be scarce around here for a while, and when I am here, I’ll be boring. But let’s not hold ourselves back from making hash of the issues of the day, shall we?

I see that 10 years later, we’re finally able to put a lid on the death of Princess Diana. The verdict: It was just another tawdry drunk-driving accident, mitigated by pursuing photographers but otherwise pretty routine, as these things go. No one was pregnant, MI5 wasn’t involved, Prince Philip has no blood on his hands. No conspiracy. Also — and I’m amazed this wasn’t in paragraph two — no seat belts. Four people in one of the best-designed cars in the world hit a fixed object at 60 miles an hour, killing three; what did the survivor do that the rest didn’t? He buckled up. If you need a clearer lesson from this tragedy than this, I can’t help you.

OK, maybe this one was clearer: Don’t drink and drive, especially if your job is driving princesses.

I get as irritated with Mark Steyn as any other moderate-lefty, but I still think he wrote one of the most perceptive pieces about these incidents way back when; you can find it here. Bonus: Trashing of a Free Press columnist, and a moment with Whitney Houston.

Proof that those meth labs out in the sticks may be leaching creepy stuff into the groundwater: Seven-legged, hermaphroditic deer killed in Wisconsin. By what else, residents of deer-y states? Yes, a truck. Still. Ewww.

Big news here: Creepy Dr. Kevorkian is being paroled, free to live out his remaining days — of which he is said to have only a few — outside the walls. This is sparking the usual reactions here and there, but mostly they boil down to: Yawn. Also, this: He won, they lost. People outside Detroit either forget or never knew in the first place that the multiple unsuccessful prosecutions of Dr. Death led to the ousting of the Oakland County prosecutor, by an electorate who said, basically, “Time to move on.” (He’s now with Tom Monaghan’s legal eagles, fighting for intelligent design.) Brian Dickerson states the obvious:

No physician I’ve talked to believes physician-assisted suicide ended with Kevorkian’s incarceration, and there is reason to believe it has become more common — albeit under the guise of aggressive pain management, since Kevorkian has been out of circulation. The legal debate over euthanasia will continue, and Kevorkian’s moment (and Michigan’s) at the epicenter of it is probably over for good. But wherever he spends his final days, Kevorkian can rest assured the market forces he set in motion will survive him.

“Market forces” is kind of a cold-hearted phrase, but regrettably, it’s probably accurate. Medical ethicists have long noted that our technology always outpaces our ethical framework for dealing with it. If Kevorkian caused us to at least start that discussion, then he can die in peace.

One book I read recently, which didn’t ahem make the right rail here, was “The Last Days of Dead Celebrities,” by Mitchell Fink. I needn’t have been ashamed; it’s an entirely respectable work of journalism, and if you squint your eyes a bit, it even works as a collection of cautionary tales about how to deal with the end of your life, whether you see it coming or not. I got it from the library because I wanted to read the chapter on Warren Zevon, but I found others more interesting, especially that of Ted Williams, the baseball player.

I lost the thread of the family wrangle over Teddy Ballgame’s remains — as I recall, Bob Greene wrote a really stupid column about it that queered me on the whole story — but it turns out the forces of evil triumphed, and somewhere in California or Florida Williams’ disembodied head rests in a cryogenic suspension, waiting for science to make a whole hell of a lot of advances, so that one day it can…do something. Not sure.

Anyway, it was yet another reminder, if any of us needed it, that families are fractious things. Today comes another: Billy Graham’s sons are fighting over where to bury the old man. The fact he isn’t, technically, dead yet is only one interesting angle of this story. One son wants him buried at the still-under-construction memorial library in Charlotte, which is built to look like a barn and silo, and features a cross-shaped entry and a mechanical talking cow. The other wants what his mother wants — a more dignified and private final resting place in the Carolina mountains. The fact that the sons are even capable of disagreeing over this astonishes me, but probably shouldn’t. We’re all human.

I watched a Billy Graham crusade on TV when I was about Kate’s age. My attention span hadn’t been shredded by the internet, remote-control channel-changing and the like, but I still think it’s remarkable that my attention was captured and held for some time. At the altar call at the end, I stood up and wanted to walk down to Billy and make my commitment to Jesus. Only he was imprisoned in a small black-and-white television, and I remembered I was Catholic and had, technically, already made the commitment. So I sat back down and changed the channel. Still, the man could preach.

OK, subject change: One of the earliest and most lasting bonds between Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde, and me, back in the day, was our shared devotion to the comics page. I still credit the Blonde with handing me one of my most satisfying columns, the great Journal Gazette Doonesbury/Spiderman “Sucks” Flip-Flop, which I’ve shared here before, so I won’t bore you. When Alan became features editor, I was elevated to a post of rare power vis-a-vis the comics page; I had the ear of the Decider. Still, it never came to much, because by the time that happened a new world order was ruling newspapers and especially comics, and it was: Less space, more crap.

The crap mostly came because of, who else, fretful editors, who thought they could hang on to readers by introducing, say, a comic strip featuring a young black couple. The funnies should look like America! And so on.

Of course comics are over. A few stalwarts hang on — Doonesbury is still worth your time, and we always have hope for another Calvin & Hobbes — but in the age of Photoshop funnies and Get Your War On, what more can be said in three panels?

Well, there’s this: “Mary Worth” comics in digital video, including the original camera angles. Enjoy, the Blonde! P.S. You’ll need QuickTime.

A holiday party invitation that recently arrived at NN.C Central promised “piping hot chili.” While I’m pleased that we won’t be having somewhat hot chili, I had one of those moments you sometimes get when you look at a word too long. That is: What the hell does “piping” mean, anyway?

Piping is what pipers do. It’s what plumbers install in your house. It’s the little row of cord or decorative seam that runs along your sofa cushions, or down the leg of an usher’s trousers. Hmm, what else? Adjectives — The child spoke in a piping voice. That is, he piped up. OK, like a flute. But how does something very hot become piping? (Richard Dawson voice.) Dictionary SAYS?! “Because of the whistling sound made by very hot liquid or food.” Huh. In a teakettle, maybe. I’ve had casseroles that sizzled a bit. But nothing that could be confused with actual piping.

Resolved: Never say “piping hot” again. And so, little by little, we banish clichés from our beloved language.

Further resolved: No more “deeply religious” or “badly decomposed” again, either. If you catch me at it, say something.

Gah. A kwazy-busy week stretches before me. I only volunteer for a few school activities a year, and yet they always seem to arrive in the middle of a deadline week. Fortunately, to leaven the seven-grain dough of this week (huh?) I have the rich stew of humanity all around me, which calls itself…Detroit.

Really. It’s weeks like this that I pity those of you living in places like Salt Lake City or Indianapolis. You should hear the morning traffic reports: “And we have a backup on the Lodge Freeway, apparently due to an engine block sitting in the left-hand lane…A pothole on the Chalmers exit ramp from eastbound I-94 has flattened the tires of at least two dozen cars, and they’ve run out of room to pull over, so expect delays there…” (Note: Paraphrasing of actual traffic reports, with very little exaggeration. The pothole actually had only 12 cars disabled and pulled over, and the engine block? Word. A couple weeks ago it was a driveshaft in the road. Ah, Detroit iron!)

And today? A man fleeing police this morning made his getaway by jumping into the Detroit River. Since the likelihood that this was either Mark Spitz or a battle-hardened Channel swimmer is pretty slim, it’s safe to say this tactic constituted suicide and not an unorthodox bid for asylum in Canada. The other day we drove downtown on surface streets instead of the freeway, and Alan pointed out the latest wrinkle in urban life — razor wire around industrial and commercial buildings’ rooflines, to keep thieves from stealing the rooftop air conditioners. And yet, the town refuses to die. You gotta love it. It’s Miami with snow.

A little bloggage today, for your amusement:

Do not, whatever you do, go to the Generator Blog. I mean, if you have work to do. Because you will not be coming back soon:

The NYT has a story today on gay evangelical Christians. You can tell the gay gene is a little weak in these guys because they have a really ugly coffee table. (Regrettably, the online version crops most of it out, but take my word for it — it’s plate glass on top of two ceramic elephants, Pier One c. 1980-something.)

Off to beat my head against the wall of a corporate PR machine make some phone calls. Make merry in the comments.

First shovel-able snowfall of the season fell early this morning. I shoveled for a while, then fired up the snowblower. I love shoveling, but I love the snowblower perhaps a tiny bit more, and not because it’s easier. In many ways, it’s not. You come back into the house covered with a powdered-sugar film of snow, reeking of two-cycle engines. Also, the damn things are loud; why can’t we muffle engines like this effectively? And yet, is there any feeling more wonderful than pushing that thing through the pristine white, the flume arcing off to the side, the bare sidewalk following?

After we bought it last year I told Alan my next purchase would be some insulated Carhartt coveralls, so I could, you know, take it around the neighborhood and make some extra money.

Quiet house this morning. Spriggy’s over at his barber, being handsomed up for the holidays. I forget how much he’s a part of daily life until he’s not here. I just went down and threw the deadbolts, something I’m too casual about other times. I rely on the pooch for protection or at least an alarm, even though he’s having the usual age-related declines. The other day Alan and I came into the house through the front door rather than the back, and Spriggy, snoozing on his bed, didn’t even wake up. It must have been a really good dream.

One thing I love about paying close attention to the news is how it always deals you a mixed hand. On the same day the Iraq Study Group releases its gloom and doom, we get some comic relief in, what else? Mary Cheney’s pregnancy. Or rather, the pregnancy isn’t comic relief so much as the reaction to it. Sniffed the gay-pride faction: “Grandfather Cheney will no doubt face a lifetime of sleepless nights as he reflects on the irreparable harm he and his administration have done to the millions of American gay and lesbian parents and their children.” Yeah, right. Everyone knows Cheney doesn’t sleep at night in any case. He sleeps during the day, in his coffin.

The Concerned Women for America was no less indignant: “It’s very disappointing that a celebrity couple like this would deliberately bring into the world a child that will never have a father,” said a representative. Sorry, but I didn’t see them tut-tutting over all those pregnant military widows standing at their dead husbands’ gravesides lately. Oh, but I guess all those ladies can find new husbands, whereas Mary would have to renounce homosexuality and go through extensive reparative therapy before that could happen. Do you believe in miracles?

Call me crazy — Hey! You crazy! — but in all the discussion of getting news online, my imagination is increasingly taken with the, shall we say, meta. Let lesser drones worry about delivery systems; I’m all about the voice. The syntax. The evolving grammar of a new language of news. (And if you can’t tell I’m being kind of snarky here, move along, you lesser drones.)

I can, and have, gone on for many zillions of words about this, but here it is in a nutshell: I once heard Nora Ephron speak, and she quoted Milton Glaser on car design. (I have looked high and low for the original citation of this, to no avail. So let’s trust Nora for a bit, shall we?) He said the look of cars mimics the prevaling mode of transportation of any era. When cars were first invented, they looked like buggies. As horses gave way to trains, cars started to look like locomotives (witness the Cords of the 1930s). As the interstate highway system began to spread, and cars came into their own, so commenced the glory days of car design, in the 50s, when they looked their most carlike. And then we were in the Jet Age, the come-fly-with-me years, and cars began to resemble airplanes.

(Yes, this train of thought begins to go off the rails in recent years, but I heard the speech in 1980 or so. Nowadays you’d say car design is tapping a deeper vein in the human subconscious. As the gap between the classes grow, we increasingly armor ourselves in quasi-military vehicles, the Hummer being only the most obvious and unimaginative example.)

Anyway, the same can be said for news media. Each technological advance starts by mimicking the one before. When radio news came along, it was little more than newspaper stories being read on the air; same with television. The telephone allowed radio reporters to give live reports on the air, something newspapers could obviously never do. As satellite trucks, ever-shrinking equipment and easy-edit videotape came along, TV news came into its own, fully exploiting its visual potential, and giving us the one-alarm house fire or two-car fatal as the lead story. We could write a whole book about the curious rise of the car chase as national news, but we won’t — I think the New Yorker had a pretty good piece about it earlier this year.

You could cite 1980 as the year newspapers finally acknowledged the obvious, when USA Today debuted with short-short stories, flashy graphics, throbbing color and, just in case you were still too stupid to get it, vending boxes that looked like televisions.

(So ends the in-a-nutshell version of my theory. A very fat nutshell.)

And now here we are in the 21st century, and online news is coming into its own. Newspapers are starting to figure out that putting the same old crap online isn’t going to make it, that you have to use the medium’s unique capabilities to craft a new kind of storytelling, and anyone who sits in a meeting and says, “But if we put links in stories, people will go away from our site and never come back” needs to be told to go make some more coffee. And as this is still a transitional period, occasionally you get a glorious mash-up. I give you this item from the Freep’s main page today, flagged as a “news bulletin:”

A manhunt is under way this morning after a prisoner escaped at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Check back for more developments.

Now that’s immediacy, eh? The story’s main source is a TV report, which tells you the newsroom is still virtually empty but for a few website-updaters, who have the right idea but no staff yet, but screw it, cite the TV guys, information wants to be free. Yet note the language and imagery, which is right out of a Superman movie: manhunt, carjacking, police searching “on the ground and in the air” and then, that bang-up last line, cut off in mid-sentence — can’t talk now, deadline! You can almost hear Perry White: “Olson! You know about these newfangled machines. Get this story on DailyPlanet.com!” (Meanwhile, Clark Kent slips quietly from the room.) Check back for more developments! This story’s so hot we gotta get it out there now!

OK. Maybe I’ve had too much coffee.

I think I have. God, I love this French Roast stuff.

Bloggage:

Slate caps its gallant crusade to promote “The Wire” with a lengthy interview with David Simon, the show’s creator. If you’d like, Wireheads may use this thread to discuss the penultimate episode, although I just watched the finale and can barely speak of it yet. It should win every Emmy and six more Peabodys, just for good measure, but it won’t. Ah, well. No one should go into any business to win awards, but still, some truths need to be acknowledged, and this is one: Best season of television, ever.

Jimmy Lileks writes five, or maybe fifteen, columns a week about nothing. Jon Carroll writes five columns a week about all kinds of things, and once in a while he tackles a real manageable topic that fits well in a 650-word space, like, oh, work and illusion and our lizard-brain fears. Enjoy.

I have no strong opinions about the six imams ejected from the US Air flight in Minneapolis. People are jumpy; these things will happen. Considering the things that have gotten people ejected from flights in this country — everything from having a buzzing sex toy in your luggage to defecating on the beverage cart — my policy is this: Give the folks a seat on the next available and chalk it up to experience.

However. Reading Debra Burlingame’s revved-up account of what got them booted — chanting “allahu akbar” at the boarding gate, bitching loudly about the war in Iraq, asking for seat-belt extenders for no apparent reason, I have to wonder if anyone thinks these things through. Sure, they were acting suspicious, at least as we consider suspicious behavior in a post-9/11 world. But they were acting ridiculously suspicious, at which point it comes around the circle and becomes non-suspicious again. Because really, if you were going to hijack a plane, would you stand at the gate with five other traditionally clad Muslims, chanting “allahu akbar?” Hell, no. You’d shave your beard, wear Western clothes, carry a briefcase and adopt the bored/irritated expression of every other air traveler. That’s how I’d do it, anyway. Just a thought.

Jeff Zaslow wrote the definitive piece of journalism about the Miss Cass Pageant two years ago. (Most of you probably aren’t WSJ Online subscribers, so the link takes you to a forum, where someone has cut and pasted the article. Cntrl/F “zaslow” and you’ll find it quickly.) I won’t try to top it, but he and I saw different pageants in different years, so maybe I can add something.

I was privileged to attend the pageant for the first time this year, this past Saturday. My friend Kate was a judge last year, and she told me it was like nothing I’d ever seen. She was right. You don’t attend a beauty pageant for developmentally disabled women every day. Yes: Retarded women. (I know that word is un-P.C.; I just want to put it in the strongest possible terms.) And men. In a pageant. With Broadway show tunes. And an evening gown competition, and talent, and an on-stage interview. And, at the end, a queen. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Cass Community Social Services agency serves people with disabilities in one of the poorest parts of Detroit; it’s a ministry of the Cass United Methodist Church. This was the 11th year for the Miss Cass Pageant, and if you’ve taken the time to read that WSJ story, you know that not everyone is crazy about the idea. There’s a fine line — no, a thick line — between supportive and mocking, but the laughter sounds the same. And the evening was full of laughter. When a contestant is asked what her favorite store is, and she answers “Farmer Jack” (a grocery store), and then asked what her favorite aisle is, and says “Kroger,” people laugh. It’s funny. What can I say? You had to be there. Much of the audience consists of group-home operators, family members and others whose dedication to the mentally disabled is hardly in question. They’re entitled.

This year’s musical theme was “Annie,” and the opening number was “NYC.” Three men stood at center stage, each holding a large N, Y or C. Every time the phrase is sung, their job was to thrust their letter high in the air. Other members of the community contributed by walking across the stage showing representations of the lyrics. Others danced. Everyone sang, or tried to. That other town has the Empire State / And a mayor five foot two — a man held up a photo of the Empire State, followed by a very short, rotund client with Down Syndrome, in a tuxedo and plastic top hat. I don’t want to say it was heartwarming, as it implies pity and condescension, but that’s really the only word that works. These folks have been rehearsing this since summer, and it went off without a hitch.

Then it was time for the talent. The ladies came out one by one and danced, or sang, or otherwise performed. One waved a tambourine back and forth to “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” while the audience clapped along enthusastically. Another did a pretty fair Michael Jackson dance impersonation. Another recited a Maya Angelou quote, and almost flubbed it, but didn’t: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.” You could hear the audience sigh with relief. No participant appeared to be having anything less than the time of her life.

The male escorts were introduced, each wearing a donated rented tuxedo. They performed “Fully Dressed,” and then it was time for the evening gowns. We learned a little about each woman — one has a goal of learning to print her name, another wants to get a job. Betty, Miss Cass 2004, came out for an encore of her remarkable talent: She has a strong singing voice, and sang the Lord’s Prayer. As she reached the climax, her evening gown started to slip off one shoulder. As it fell lower and lower (Betty was oblivious), it became clear she wasn’t wearing a bra. A breathy “ahhh!” started in the crowd and built until two attendants dashed to her side and took a little drama out of the “amen,” but saved her from disaster.

“And you thought only the Super Bowl had wardrobe malfunctions,” the M.C. said.

Everybody performed “Tomorrow,” waving ribbons on sticks. Six finalists were named, and the interview took place. One woman could only repeat her name. Others told us their favorite colors and TV shows. And then it was time for the big moment.

Geraldine was crowned Miss Cass. She immediately wrung the M.C. in a bear hug, then stood for her crown. I checked my notes; I think her talent was dancing, with an umbrella, to “It’s Raining Men.” Her favorite color was pink. She was led to her throne and wore her tiara with grace and dignity.

The final number was “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” after which we all filed out. The Rev. Faith Fowler, minister of the church and director of the agency, said the participants will talk about this night until July, at which point they’ll start learning the songs for next year. I hope I can be there again.