Scene may 2, 2018 by Chava Communications

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MAY 2-8, 2018 • VOLUME 48 NO 44 Dedicated to Free Times founder Richard H. Siegel (1935-1993) and Scene founder Richard Kabat Group Publisher Chris Keating Publisher Andrew Zelman

CONTENTS Upfront

Associate Publisher Angela Nagal

Editor Vince Grzegorek

Cimperman’s past catches up to him, fresh eviction data puts numbers behind America’s invisible housing crisis, and more

Editorial Music Editor Jeff Niesel Senior Writer Sam Allard Staff Writer Brett Zelman Web Editor Laura Morrison Dining Editor Douglas Trattner Stage Editor Christine Howey Visual Arts Writers Dott von Schneider Copy Editor Elaine Cicora Interns Michael Wu, Matt Poshedley

Feature

Advertising Senior Multimedia Account Executive John Crobar, Shayne Rose Multimedia Account Executive Kiara Davis

Toxic: Jim Brown, manhood, and violence against women

Creative Services Production Manager Steve Miluch Staff Photographer Emanuel Wallace

Get Out!

Business Sales Assistant/Receptionist Megan Stimac Controller Kristy Dotson Circulation Circulation Director Don Kriss Euclid Media Group Chief Executive Ofﬁcer Andrew Zelman Chief Operating Ofﬁcers Chris Keating, Michael Wagner VP Digital Services Stacy Volhein Digital Operations Coordinator Jaime Monzon

All the best things to do in Cleveland this week

Stage

Neighborhood Fave Pepper’s Italian Restaurant

www.euclidmediagroup.com

Lazy writing and other unfortunate factors combine for a soggy Appropriate at Dobama

National Advertising Voice Media Group 1-800-278-9866, vmgadvertising.com Cleveland Scene 737 Bolivar Rd, #4100 Cleveland, OH 44115 www.clevescene.com Phone 216-241-7550 Retail & Classiﬁed Fax 216-241-6275 Editoral Fax 216-802-7212 E-mail scene@clevescene.com

Eat

Pepper’s has built a following in Lakewood, plus the end of the line for La Cave du Vin

Cleveland Scene Magazine is published every week by Euclid Media Group. Veriﬁed Audit Member Cleveland Distribution Scene is available free of charge, limited to one copy per reader Copyright The entire contents of Cleveland Scene Magazine are copyright 2018 by Euclid Media Group. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Publisher does not assume any liability for unsolicited manuscripts, materials, or other content. Any submission must include a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All editorial, advertising, and business correspondence should be mailed to the address listed above. Subscriptions $150 (1 yr); $80 (6 mos.) Send name, address and zip code with check or money order to the address listed above with the title ‘Attn: Subscription Department’

Music

The E-Street’s Max Weinberg on his allrequest band, Trixie Mattel brings her tour to the House of Blues, and all the shows to see this week

Savage Love

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UPFRONT CLEVELAND’S PROPOSED AMAZON HQ2 SITE SHOULD BE PUBLIC, SAYS COURT THE OHIO COURT OF CLAIMS, responding to a complaint filed by Cleveland.com, recommended that all 18 reports created by the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency for the city’s failed Amazon HQ2 bid should be made public. Those reports are expected to include information related to prospective sites. The court’s special master, Jeffrey Clark, penned an 18page decision that shattered to smithereens the bogus claim by NOACA and Team NEO, the economic development nonprofit corralling Cleveland’s HQ2 horses, that the information represented confidential “trade secrets.” Clark said that the publicly funded NOACA failed to show that any of the information in the documents it created for the bid should be secret. Clark said much of the information consisted of “descriptive, conclusory statements and promotional rhetoric,” and that much of the same information could be found on NOACA’s own website and in its readily accessible published work. “There is no evidence,” Clark said, “that a competitor who wishes to distinguish its attributes from those of Cleveland cannot obtain a wealth of specific data and declared attributes from NOACA’s published material and elsewhere online.” As we’ve mentioned before, Cleveland.com’s Mark Naymik was the force behind this decision. He pestered the participating agencies for information and, by his own account, personally wrote the complaint to the Ohio Court of Claims. (Cleveland.com was represented in this matter by attorney Melissa Bertke for Baker Hostetler). Naymik quoted editor Chris Quinn in his write-up of the court’s decision, which was an A1 story in the Sunday Plain Dealer. “We thought from the beginning that public officials in Cleveland were wrong to operate in secrecy in the Amazon deal, and I’m glad this independent ruling fully supports our belief that the records created in the failed pursuit of the Amazon headquarters are public,”

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Photo by Sam Allard

Joe Cimperman, right, with Kerry McCormack

Quinn said. “I wish ofﬁcials had released the records from the start rather than leaving us to represent the public’s interest by hiring a law ﬁrm to pursue this action.” — Sam Allard

Joe Cimperman Will Pay $10,000 Fine for Ethics Violations as Part of Deal with State Former Cleveland city councilman Joe Cimperman will pay a $10,000 ﬁne as part of a plea deal with the State of Ohio. The penalty amounts to about $385 for each of his 26 counts of “unlawful interest in a public contract,” announced last week by the state auditor. As Ward 3 councilman, serving downtown, Tremont and Ohio City, Cimperman voted for multiple city contracts that went to LAND Studio, formerly ParkWorks, a nonproﬁt that works to activate public spaces with art and sustainable design. Cimperman’s wife, Nora Romanoff, serves as associate director there. Cimperman appeared before Cuyahoga County judge Dick Ambrose Friday morning to be arraigned in a courtroom crowded with TV cameras. Stephanie Anderson, of the Ohio Auditor’s

Public Integrity Assurance Team, filed the charges Wednesday. She was present Friday and outlined the deal for Judge Ambrose. Anderson said that as far as the state was concerned, the matter was “fully pre-tried” and all matters had been resolved. Cimperman would plead guilty to all 26 counts — all of them first-degree misdemeanors — and would pay $10,000 in total. (Each count is technically punishable by up to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine.) Judge Ambrose said the case would be assigned to judge Michael Russo, who can officially accept the plea deal. A pre-trial hearing in Russo’s courtroom will be held at 9 a.m. on May 8. In the meantime, top city officials have rushed to Cimperman’s aid, lest his name be tarnished. Both mayor Frank Jackson and council president Kevin Kelley issued statements calling Cimperman a friend and praising the work he accomplished in Ward 3. Kelley called him an “inspiration.” Neither acknowledged the charges against him. The board of directors for Global Cleveland, where Cimperman has served as executive director since shortly after his council resignation

in early 2016, issued a statement saying they had “tremendous faith” in Joe, and that they’d voted unanimously to retain him as their leader. They noted unselfconsciously that they were aware of his ongoing ethics investigation when they hired him. Paul Nick is the executive director of the Ohio Ethics Commission. In a statement yesterday, he said, on the flip side, that “the public expects that its elected officials will not betray the public’s trust by misusing their positions to benefit family members.” The language of Ohio’s “unlawful interest” statute is explicit: “No public official,” it says, “shall knowingly authorize, or employ the authority or influence of the public official’s office to secure authorization of any public contract in which the public official, a member of the public official’s family, or any of the public official’s business associates has an interest.” As others have noted, Cimperman was not casting deciding votes on these contracts, and LAND Studio is a respected local organization that has performed good work. More relevantly, given the rapid-fire nature of city council’s “emergency” legislating, it’s possible, in fact likely, that Cimperman cast his votes without even knowing what he was doing. (Cimperman, ever a schmoozer, would often be in conversation with other officials or guests during council meetings.) But he broke the law 26 times over the course of many years. And even if he didn’t do it on purpose, someone ought to have known that this was a no-no. The failure to recuse himself (as he was required to do) was not a one-time bloop; it was an ongoing practice. It’s a problem that Cimperman, his colleagues and other officials were either too heedless or too inept to recognize the ramifications. Current city council members should take this as a strict reminder to apprise themselves of the laws governing elected officials. Furthermore — and this should go without saying — they should familiarize themselves with the legislation that they often cast votes for so inattentively. — Allard

There Are An Average of 12 Evictions Every Day in Cleveland. New Data Puts Numbers Behind America’s ‘Invisible Housing Crisis’ Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City was the inaugural choice for One Community Reads, a joint effort in Cleveland between libraries, Playhouse Square, the City Club and Cuyahoga County. “Not only will One Community Reads bring our residents together through a shared reading experience, but it will give us the opportunity as a community to discuss challenging issues of economic inequality and housing,” county executive Armond Budish said at the launch of the project. Those challenging issues of economic inequality and housing included not only the systemic and structural issues of eviction (limits on housing vouchers, the dearth of affordable housing, problems with reliable public transportation, discrimination, poverty, tenants being booted for as little as $49 in back-rent) but also the stunning lack of hard data for America’s invisible housing crisis. In reporting on the book, Desmond found there wasn’t any nationwide data, so he started the Eviction Lab with Princeton University to tackle the information gap. They recently released the first country-wide data set (for 48 states) after analyzing some 80 million eviction records. The resulting data allows for comparisons across cities, counties, states, and against Census numbers spanning 2000 to 2010. It is, of course, just a start. “The breadth and depth of America’s eviction epidemic — and its data trail — requires attention from a wide array of people with different perspectives and skills,” Desmond said in an Eviction Lab post. “This is why we’ve adopted an open-source model of data sharing. We need more researchers, city planners, court officers, political leaders, and concerned citizens to join us in filling in the gaps.” Cleveland averages slightly more than 12 evictions per day, according to the site, with an eviction rate two percentage points higher than the national average. “These new data are essential for our understanding of eviction in America. Eviction data are notoriously difficult to obtain, especially over time. Some

researchers have calculated rates for specific cities for a short period of time, but that often involves combing through court records,” says Megan Hatch, an assistant professor of Urban Policy and City Management at Cleveland State University’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, who has studied eviction extensively. “Before this, we really did not have a good understanding of the variation in eviction rates across the U.S. Now that we know the scope of the problem, we can start targeting policies toward reducing evictions and evaluating if those policies are successful.” But, again, it’s just a start. Hatch cautions that these numbers represent only official court filings and judgments. Oftentimes, evictions are achieved through more informal methods, meaning

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the numbers are actually far higher. “These data points are low estimates of evictions. They only measure court ﬁlings and judgments,” Hatch says. “Many evictions happen informally, such as by the landlord threatening eviction, paying the renter to leave, or even changing the locks or calling a health inspector. Therefore, policymakers and the public need to understand the eviction crisis is likely much higher than even what these numbers suggest.” Zooming out from Cleveland proper, a report released this week by the Fair Housing Center for Rights and Research notes there were some 27,696 eviction ﬁlings in municipal courts throughout Cuyahoga County in 2016. It’s a daunting number, and one made even more harrowing considering the February closure of the Cleveland Tenants Organization, due to lack of funding. The Tenants Organization had been serving predominantly low-income tenants in the region for more than 40 years before shutting down. There’s a lot to digest here, and a lot for policymakers to pay attention to. “I think an important point here is that even though rental housing in Cleveland is relatively less expensive than, say, San Francisco or New York City, we are still experiencing a lot of evictions. Affordability is part of the equation. So is housing quality and the state and local laws that protect renters,” Hatch says. “Policymakers should use the data to identify trends, such as if there are increases or decreases in evictions, and target policies toward the areas with the highest eviction rates. As always, however, they need to work with renters themselves, advocates, and scholars for a more complete picture of eviction in a particular area. The new data tell us rates and other important information, but not the qualitative impact those evictions have on renters’ lives. When I look at these numbers, I try to remember that each eviction represents a family. The negative impact of evictions on children, families, and communities is huge and lasts a long time.” — Vince Grzegorek

MetroHealth Hosting Annual Free Transgender Job Fair For the fourth year in a row, MetroHealth is hosting a job fair for individuals who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming. Resources and workshops to aid in career development and job placement are available, in addition to workshops regarding social and professional networking. As noted in the Human Rights Campaign’s research paper A Broken Bargain for Transgender Workers, “Despite the progress made at the local, state, and federal levels, transgender Americans face workplace discrimination at alarming rates.” According to a study from the Human Rights Campaign, transgender workers report unemployment at twice the rate of the population as a whole, 44 percent of transgender people currently working report being underemployed and transgender workers are nearly four times more likely to have a household income of under $10,000. “Unfair laws and policies impose real, everyday burdens on transgender workers across the country,” Ineke Mushovic, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) told the HRC. “It’s shocking that in this day and age, federal non-discrimination law still does not explicitly protect a high-performing worker from being ﬁred just because he or she is transgender.” Participating employers include (but are not limited to) Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Metroparks, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Giant Eagle, Hyland, Keller Williams, KeyBank, MetroHealth, PNC Bank and Starbucks. The job fair will also feature a presentation from keynote speakerNickieAntonio,representative from Ohio House District 13. MetroHealth is also offering a free resume clinic/career fair readiness program on May 1st from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., where people can have their resume reviewed by experts and get feedback from PNC recruiters and hiring managers on what they look for in potential candidates. The job fair takes place Saturday, May 12, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with a complimentary hot breakfast served at 8 a.m. Both the job fair and resume clinic will take place at MetroHealth’s main campus, 2500 MetroHealth Dr., in Cleveland. — BJ Colangelo

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FEATURE

LAST MAN STANDING Toxic: Jim Brown, manhood and violence against women By Dave Zirin IN THE HISTORY OF humanity, spouse-beating is a particularly odious tradition — one often employed by men looking to exert power over women. Just as lynching in America is not a phenomenon wholly confined to black people, spouse-beatings are not wholly confined to women. But in our actual history, women have largely been on the receiving end of spouse-beating. We have generally recognized this in our saner moments. There is a reason why we call it the “Violence Against Women Act” and not the “Brawling With Families Act.” That is because we recognize that violence against women is an insidious, and sometimes lethal, tradition that deserves a special place in our customs and laws. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You are Eva Bohn-Chin. You are an internationally successful model with dreams of the silver screen. Just twenty-two years old, you are from Germany, of German and Jamaican ancestry, giving you a degree of worldliness and exoticism that is catnip to the new fashion movement of the late 1960s. A movie star ten years older than you sidles up and asks you to be “Jim Brown’s girl.” That’s how he says it: “Jim Brown’s girl.” He’s not a smooth, beautiful man, like the models you meet backstage. But he’s handsome and his body puts a catch in your throat. He was some kind of American football star, but you don’t know much about that. Just that he has status, and people — Americans in particular — part when he enters a room. He’s married, but he convinces you that his wife, a woman named Sue, accepts that he will never be faithful. “I believe in the European

view of man-woman relations,” he says. You know what that means. You begin a torrid affair, one with heat, fights, and makeup sex that shakes the chandeliers of fancy hotels throughout Europe and the United States. One night, the fight is particularly bad and neighbors call the police. After the police struggle with Jim just to get through the door, investigators find blood on the walls as well as the floor and “a five-inch patch of hair on a large rug.” You are found semiconscious below the balcony, after a twenty-foot fall onto concrete, the bones in your shoulder shattered. Your famous lover is charged with attempted murder and pins are put in your shoulder. When you revive in the hospital, you don’t press charges, insisting that the entire ordeal was a misunderstanding. You tell Jet magazine, “I fell from the balcony

by myself. Jim was nowhere near me at the time. He was just opening the door for the police when I went over the railing. I must have fainted before falling.” Then you light a cigarette and comment cryptically, “That’s not to say it wasn’t a pretty bad ﬁght we were having.” You stay with your man after the “incident” and your asking price as a model soars, as you learn the value of being infamous. People make comments behind your back. You hear that the joke among sportswriters is, “Jim Brown’s got to be the best lay in the world, because he’ll throw you off a balcony and you won’t even press charges.” Let them joke. You’re getting paid. But eventually you part ways, the offers dry up, and life sours as you go into hiding, reliving that night more than you will ever admit. Thirty years later, you speak to Spike Lee for a documentary on | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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FEATURE this lover from times long past. It’s your first interview in years. The director tells you that Jim has said emphatically that he did nothing to you. You are asked to respond. Your voice shakes. Your confidence in your English has never been great, but you press on. You look at the camera and say, “He pushed me. He slammed me.” You then point out scars on your body and say, “I was young, good-looking, a person who loved life. Why would I jump?” IN 1994, O. J. SIMPSON WAS ON the run, having fled his home after the double homicide of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her acquaintance Ronald Goldman. The world was abuzz over the ex– football star whose friendly, smiling image was so at odds with someone who may have committed a double homicide. As O.J. and his friend A. C. Cowlings took to the highway in their Ford Bronco, old audio was released of 911 calls featuring a terrified Nicole Brown Simpson asking for police help as a bellowing O.J., his behavior greatly contrasting with his commercial brand, shouted and slammed doors in the background. One person who was in high demand to speak about O.J. was Jim Brown. For decades, Brown had been a critic of Simpson’s for lacking a social conscience. Also, over the years he had made several statements, which, in the light of the murders, seemed prophetic: that the O.J. the public knew was not the real person, that he “wore the mask.” In Out of Bounds, Brown wrote presciently, “I never look at [O. J. Simpson] the way I do a Bill Russell, or a Walter Payton. I talk to those guys, see them speak, I know what I’m hearing is the real man. Too often, I can’t say the same about O.J.” After O.J. was arrested and awaiting trial, Andrea Kremer of ESPN was in Brown’s home to interview him about the Simpson case. The producer of the segment was Jeremy Schaap, who remembered, “It was clear that Brown did not like or respect O.J. Pretty much the first thing he said in the interview, before he could even be asked a question, was, ‘O.J., for once in your life, be a man, and admit what you did.’” But what has remained with Schaap in the intervening years was something that was said when they were setting up the interview,

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

before the cameras were rolling. “Jim Brown was talking about O.J. and said, ‘Man, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a man in my life that I couldn’t handle, or that intimidated me or gave me any trouble, even. But women will mess you up.’ That stuck with me.” It is unclear whether Brown ever actually bought the hype and believed himself to be Superman. But he clearly has always seen women as his own personal kryptonite. Whether women have “messed up” Jim Brown is less important than seeing how he has “messed up” when it has come to these personal relation ships. Racism and toxic masculinity have deeply scarred our society. Resistance to racism has often meant having to assert very traditional definitions of “manhood.” Yet because the most traditional avenues to masculinity as defined in U.S. culture — economic selfsufficiency and home ownership — were largely denied to black men, the fields of sports and entertainment (two fields with a lottery’s chance of success) have become for too many the markers of excellence and respect. Absent those opportunities, the ways in which a black man could assert that he was in fact “a man” were through that universal cultural marker of male status: the ability to bed and/or control women. Jim Brown is someone who has used his personal assertion of manhood as a bulwark against racism over the course of his entire life. He is also someone who has gloried in his history of sexual conquest and been accused often of violence against women. He speaks today and has always spoken about the charges that have accrued over time as a coordinated conspiracy, saying, “My activities can’t be attacked, but with my private life it is different. They can take an incident and blow it up. I’m always attacked. They get you in any area they can. Now, you know there isn’t a man in this country who hasn’t a private life that they could pin some headline on if they wanted to. ... A lot of papers [carry photos] of me in handcuffs and chains.” “I’m no angel,” Brown said to reporter Will Grimsley back during his Cleveland Browns playing days. “If I was a goody-goody, I’d be a psychological wreck by this time. I’d be in a [straitjacket].” But Brown has consistently been adamant that he is innocent of criminal wrongdoing in all instances of violence he has been accused of. “Do you think I could keep throwing girls out windows, knocking policemen forty feet in

the air and running down guys on the turnpike without them nailing me for it one day? I’d have to bribe every jury and judge in town. But I’ve never been convicted. I’ve just been harassed. I’ve been hit so much I don’t sting anymore. They can call me a ‘nigger.’ It doesn’t bother me. When a controversy comes up, I take it and look my accuser in the eye.” For a very complicated man, this part of his life is simple. As Brown lived this post-football life on a terrain that frustrated his ambitions — whether in the world of sports promotions, the Black Economic Unions, or Hollywood — women were often his pastime, his distraction, his proving ground, and at times the repository for his frustrations. The world of Jim Brown’s time was a place that looked the other way, accepted or venerated these kinds of relationships, and never as a rule attempted to hold men accountable for them. Brown, in his own words, walked “out of football and into the sexual revolution.” While older white sportswriters were awed by “the animal” in Jim Brown and black observers saw their Superman, a layer of younger white male journalists, influenced by the politics of the 1960s, saw a kind of synthesis between the Superman and the sexual: he was this stud who also held the power and promise to smash white supremacy. In Jim Brown they saw not only the potential to inspire the fight against racism, but also an ideal of manhood rooted in strength, sex, and swagger. Journalist and future filmmaker James Toback wrote in his 1971 book Jim: The Author’s SelfCentered Memoir of the Great Jim Brown that Brown was “a consistent and spectacular warrior ... a crystallization of physical potency.” He went on to write, “Jim Brown was without peer in affording insight into the injection of sexuality into every area of American life and learned tales of freaky scenes, brutality, and an ineluctable erotic flow.” For Toback, there was no separation between the joys of sex and violence. This inability to separate the two can be seen as prologue to Toback’s life in Hollywood. In 2017, more than two hundred women came forward with stories of his being a serial sexual harasser. Oliver Stone, who directed Brown in the film Any Given Sunday, called him a “Superman in the tradition of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. ... For Nietzsche, the Übermensch carries a heavy load. Knows how to hit. Can take a hit. Incredible force and

strength and stamina. Awesome and beautiful and powerful.” Former Syracuse All-American football player turned activist and educator Don McPherson rebukes all these formulations, saying, “The Superman myth is a form of protection. It’s protection from having to be examined. One of the ways that power maintains itself is to not be examined. With Jim Brown, his whole thing doesn’t get examined: his problems, instances of violence against women — all of that doesn’t get examined because at the end of the day, Jim Brown’s still a bad motherfucker.” It wasn’t just starstruck men, fascinated with his combination of sexuality and ability to kick ass, who were giving Brown a pass. An article about Brown by Gloria Steinem published in 1968 only superficially touched on Brown’s stormy personal relationships, despite his arrests for violence against women — without convictions — that had taken place in the very recent past. If Steinem didn’t care and the New Left didn’t care, we should not be surprised that Hollywood and the NFL — only now barely confronting decades of institutional cover-ups of violence against women — didn’t care either. Given the history of accusations, the fact that uniformly it is black women who have brought these charges makes the collective lack of concern all the more disturbing. As McPherson said, “Jim Brown is going to talk about all the racism that he faced, and therefore black men and many socalled well-meaning white people will not examine all of Jim’s shit. He just hides behind that badass masculinity. And he has street cred with young black men who can see that Jim’s fighting the system. Jim’s fighting on our behalf so you can’t say shit.” Sex, violence, and power have long walked in lockstep with one another. Whether the man in question is a Kennedy or a camp counselor or a Walmart worker, the same metric of manhood in this area applies: Male heterosexual sex brings a measure of authority when in the company of men, which some crave even more than the sex itself. This idea of sex as a powerful symbol of the black revolution was catnip to the middle-aged men who chronicled the struggles of the time. It is readily apparent in the writings of Tom Wolfe, William F. Buckley, and Norman Mailer. But bell hooks put it in more political terms: “White men were attacking black men in the sixties for not fulfilling the patriarchal role when it came to

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work and family, and black men were telling white men that sexuality was the only real site where manhood mattered and there the black man ruled. ... Black male public discourse about sexuality pointed the ďŹ nger at white males and accused them of being pussies who were unable to get it up and keep it up. The black male who could not demolish white male power with weaponry was using his dick to â€˜bitch slapâ€™ white men and by doing so sexually subjugating them. ... No matter the daily assaults on their manhood that wound and cripple, the black male is encouraged to believe that sex and sexual healing will assuage his pain.â€? Jim Brown in so many respects represented this synthesis of the political and the sexual. He was an outspoken leader who also had a very public reputation as a ladiesâ€™ man, which he was not shy about sharing. It afďŹ rmed his cultural weight as someone who was to be respected. A Black Economic Union ofďŹ cial was quoted in 1971: â€œJimâ€™s image is founded mainly on sex. His life is supposed to be an orgy from one end of the earth to the other.â€? Sex is ideally an act of mutual pleasure. But when Brown described his sex life â€” and he has done so in great detail over the years â€” it sounds less like sex for pleasure and more like sex for ego and power. Brown has said that his desire to exert dominance over women stems from his own absence of control that he felt in relation to women in his infancy. He wrote that his having grown up being raised by women â€œmight make people think Iâ€™d have a lot a problems. I donâ€™t know. Maybe I have a lot of problems. But I felt community and I felt loved. Then when I was eight, I went to live with my mother in Great Neck. ... They say Iâ€™m fucked up. Maybe I am.â€? Brown has written and spoken about this only rarely, but his relationship with his mother remained volatile throughout his life â€” the periods of calm more akin to walking on eggshells. In high school, he could not control who she dated or what she did and it drove him to solitude, silence, and anger until he eventually found escape in the home of his girlfriend Henrietta Creech. In 1981, Brownâ€™s mother was approached by journalist Pete Dexter for a proďŹ le on her son and all she would say was, â€œHeâ€™s the only

one I got. Things are right between us now and I wouldnâ€™t say nothinâ€™ to upset that.â€? Older, or even similar-aged, women never held any appeal for Brown as sexual partners. In Out of Bounds, the ďŹ fty-three- year- old Brown talked about his romantic preferences: â€œPhysically, between a young girl and an old one, there is no contest. ... I donâ€™t like being told what Iâ€™m supposed to want. For instance, I prefer girls who are young. My lady right now is nineteen.â€? Whether Brown was twenty-ďŹ ve, thirty-ďŹ ve, forty-ďŹ ve, or ďŹ fty-ďŹ ve, that remained his preference. He wrote, â€œWhen I eat a peach I donâ€™t want it overripe. I want that peach when itâ€™s peaking.â€? He also expressed a desire for women who are physically small: â€œI donâ€™t mean mousy small. I mean tight. Petite. Delicate. No excess. Thin legs, nice butt ... small. When I get into the bedroom, I donâ€™t want to see anything thatâ€™s big like me. That includes big breasts. I donâ€™t want big breasts anywhere around me. Keep those big breasts away.â€? He told Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated, â€œI mess with young women. I know itâ€™s bad, but Iâ€™m bad.â€? Dating a younger woman, of course, also ensures a power imbalance of experience and education that otherwise would not exist. Brownâ€™s home has been a place of gang truces and fundraisers for political and civil rights leaders across the decades. In the 1970s, it was also a place to party and have sex in imaginative numbers and combinations, where women were shared and the stories of experimental couplings became Hollywood lore. Brown has said that his house was a place of â€œCreative Orgies.â€? These events were mired in sexual and gender roles that sound less than revolutionary. Brown wrote, â€œIt was our way of life and we had certain rules. ... The main reason we called them Creative Orgies was that weâ€™d look for women who normally would never even consider going to an orgy. That was our particular quirk. Weâ€™d ďŹ nd women who are sweet and seemingly innocent. Thatâ€™s when I started learning about appearances: Some of these sweet little innocents turned out to be total freaks! ... Just between you, me, and the tabloids, Iâ€™ve had up to eight girls in my room, maybe four on my couch and four on my bed. I might have sex in one night with four or ďŹ ve of them. But only if Jim Junior was feeling

Photo by Erik Drost Flickr CC

Jim Brown statue in front of First Energy Stadium.

exceptional. Some people think that makes me a pervert. I think it makes me lucky.” Other memoirists, including Jennifer Pryor, have written descriptions of these parties that include Quaaludes and small groups watching Brown have sex. These stories do not age well. They also sound uncomfortably like something Sweet Sweetback’s “Baadasssss Song” was critiquing, with people crowding around to watch Jim Brown, physical specimen, show his prowess without pads. Then in 1985, in a sensationalized and widely publicized case, a thirty-three-yearold schoolteacher named Margot Tiff claimed that the forty-nine-yearold Brown beat and raped her when she refused to engage in sex with him and another woman. She said that the violence occurred when she got cold feet before the proposed ménage à trois. Because Tiff gave contradictory testimony, Los Angeles prosecutor Dino Fulgoni dropped all charges,

saying, “I would not wish anyone to be forced to stand trial with the contradictory nature of the proof that came forth before this court.” Tiff also attempted to sue Brown for $10 million — claiming, according to court documents, that Brown had “battered, tortured, physically and psychologically abused and raped and attempted to rape.” This was also thrown out of court. When asked about the incident by Sport magazine, Brown reportedly looked “amused” and said, “You must have read about it in the papers, or I don’t think you would have come here.” Sport describes the woman as having “clearly been beaten,” but the charges of rape, sexual battery, and assault were dismissed after she “gave confused and inconsistent testimony.” This “confusion” included the successful efforts of Brown’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran — who later, of course, defended Brown’s nemesis O. J. Simpson — to challenge Tiff’s assertion of rape since there was

only “partial penetration.” Brown described his arrest: “The next morning when I walked to get my paper there were ten policemen there. They handcuffed me without telling me anything. They had a search warrant. They said there was marijuana in my house. They said my companion was involved. At no time until they set me down at a table with my hands behind my back did they tell me what it was all about.” Brown’s defense was that he and his partner were the victims, put off by what they called “a lesbian advance” from Tiff, and defended themselves after she became violent. But the charges disappeared. The Los Angeles Times described it as a “dramatic courtroom about-face” by Fulgoni when the prosecution dropped the charges. It is difﬁcult to believe that Brown and a partner would be put off by “a lesbian advance,” since that element of group sex was central to the West Hollywood scene. Brown has

described these orgies as personal and intimate, even tender, but then wrote in Out of Bounds : “At times I desire two girls, or three girls, or one girl — as long as it’s new pussy.” Brown went out of his way to make sure his readers knew that when it came to his sexual relationships, his libertine approach was a one-way street. “I’m a double standard man my self,” he wrote. “I want to be truly liberated. It’s logical. It’s fair. And I’m not. I want to freak when I want to, but I don’t want my woman to. I want her to be something I’m not willing to be.” Brown also boasted, “Talk all you want about brain power, but the intellectual gets the secondary women. It’s the physical giant who gets the premium women.” This pursuit of sexual conquest has been a part of Brown’s public life as long as he has had a public life. In his 1968 Alex Haley Playboy interview, Brown said, “I have a nickname, ‘Hawk,’ which comes from having very good eyesight. Visually, | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

FEATURE I appreciate anything that I consider beautiful — if it’s a car, if it’s a suit, a painting, a woman or what have you. And the woman I appreciate most is my wife, Sue, who seems to be happy and very much in love with me. I have never denied her and I have never denied those three big babies we have at home in Cleveland. So I’m sure that I’m doing no big damage by looking.” Of course he was doing far more than looking. Brown justiﬁed his sexual life to Steve Rushin in an article published in Sports Illustrated : “I know this is America and we like to have our heroes, but hell: Martin Luther King was screwing around — people are still in denial about that. The Kennedys, Bobby and John, they womanized. I look at the good and at the bad. Do I like a lot of women? Hell, yeah. What bothers me is when people hold on to the falseness of something.” He would go on about his love of young women, telling awardwinning journalist Pete Dexter, “Young girls, they touch you. They

say what they feel, they do their choosin’ from the soul. You come home and pull off your shoes, and she loves you that way, too. I like tight bodies and pretty faces. You bring in Methuselah, if she’s got a tight body and a pretty face, that’s all right, too. I tell all of them, though, nature’s got a plan. There’s a pretty girl turning [sixteen] years old every day. It’s none of this takin’ advantage thing. Marlon Brando said it once, ‘I don’t want my bitch pushin’ me around in my wheelchair.’ I feel like that, too. It’s not forever. When it’s up, it’s up. And when I cut a lady loose, she’s takin’ something away. She’s going away knowin’ how to deal better. I show her that and maybe it makes her stronger the rest of her life.” In a very odd 1981 article in Inside Sports magazine that looked uncritically at the forty-ﬁve-yearold Brown, drinking vodka and apple juice from mason jars and picking up young girls on roller skates, Dexter described an exchange between Brown and a “twenty- or twenty- one-yearold girl.” They talked for ten minutes and then she said, “I’d like to go with you tonight, but if your thing is, you know, beating up women ... ” He laughed in response to this. “People meet

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me,” he later commented, “they don’t know what’s goin’ on. They’re always waitin’ for me to jump up and down and kick some body’s ass.” His ex-wife, Sue, put it this way: “Everybody’s afraid of that black side of his temper, but who’s ever seen it? He doesn’t go givin’ himself away in public.” This “black side of his temper” has created these many stories of abuse: all involving very young and mostly black women. There was the aforementioned eighteen-yearold Brenda Ayres, the high school dropout who in 1965 accused Brown of assaulting her in a Howard Johnson motel in Cleveland. There was the rape charge filed in 1965 by an Ohio State student who withdrew the charges before it ever came to trial. In 1971, he was accused of battery of two young women. In 1985, he was charged with rape and assault. In 1986, it was assault of his fiancée, Debra Clark. In 1999, it was a domestic disturbance with his twenty-five-yearold wife, Monique; on the 911 tape from the incident, Monique said Brown threatened her, a claim she later recanted. Not one conviction of violence against women emerged from any of these charges. Yet in almost all of these cases, Brown was not

vindicated by a jury as much as by the women in question, who in nearly every instance refused to bring charges after initially calling the police. It should be noted that these matters were not taken seriously by the court system or even much of the feminist left. Gloria Steinem, writing about Brown in 1968, touched on his reputation of violence against women in surprisingly cursory fashion. She mentioned the cases that were brought in and then dismissed, and approvingly quoted an ally of Brown’s who said, “Any guy with a reputation like that has got to be blackmail-prone.” Of a high-proﬁle charge of battery, involving a model, brought against Brown in 1968, Steinem wrote: “Movie people either cursed the Los Angeles cops or said he’d be in jail if he weren’t a Negro, depending on their political beliefs. Many assumed, with all that money tied up in unreleased pictures, that the ﬁx had gone in somewhere. Meanwhile, the model, a long time girlfriend of Jim’s, kept right on seeing him. And she still is. It’s the kind of Rashomon story that no one, possibly including the principals, will ever be totally clear on.” Steinem described Brown as

someone who â€œturns up at Hollywood parties and the worldâ€™s best discotheques in a ďŹ‚owing silk shirt open down the chest, brass-buckled belt, hand made boots, pants so tight it takes him a minute to wedge out a $100 bill.â€? When pressed about such incidents of violence, Brown said only, â€œThereâ€™s been lies written about me, thereâ€™s been some truth, too. Iâ€™m no angel, but what I do, I tell the truth about.â€? It is not merely that Brown did not take violence against women seriously. Nobody took it seriously. In one interview, Art Modell, former owner of the Cleveland Browns, said with a smile that Brown â€œgot into trouble because of, shall we say, a rough social encounter with a gal, or two, or three.â€? The cases against Brown are extensive. He has often said that he has â€œnever been convicted of violence against women,â€? which is true. He also laughs and says, â€œViolence against women ... shit,â€? as if he cannot believe this still follows him at this point in his life. Yet the cases span the years from 1965 through 1999. Itâ€™s a remarkable stretch that cannot be written off as just an endless series of law-and- order conspiracies, coincidences, or bad

luck. Brown and others have seen these as politically motivated attacks attempting to tear down a strong black man. His defenders conďŹ‚ate all the charges with the two times he was in court for physically assaulting other men. The ďŹ rst time, in 1970, he was found not guilty of assault and battery after a 1969 road-rage incident that ended with a man thrown on top of a car. The second was in 1978, when Brown was sentenced to a day in jail and two yearsâ€™ probation for choking and striking his golďŹ ng partner Frank Snow. After being cleared in the ďŹ rst case, Brown told a journalist, â€œThis was supposed to kill me. It was supposed to take my black manhood and put it on the ground. But when the jury heard the case, they took less than a half hour to ďŹ nd me not guilty. So I know they are singling me out. But it wonâ€™t work, because my head wonâ€™t drop down to my chest. Youâ€™re going to say that I sound bitter. But I donâ€™t sound bitter, man, Iâ€™m just real.â€? Even without convictions of violence against women, there are enough 911 tapes and testimonials to see that this is not a fantasy created by those trying to destroy him. Debra Clark was ďŹ fty-yearold

â€œFULL OF ENERGY... F-U-Nâ€?

Brownâ€™s twenty- one-yearold ďŹ ancĂŠe. In August 1986, he was released on $5,000 bail three hours after being arrested at 5:15 a.m. as a result of an â€œincidentâ€? with Clark. To judge from photographs, Clark, slender and ďŹ ve feet, ďŹ ve inches tall, was exactly one of those very petite women whom Brown found so attractive. On this occasion, she had a bruised arm and a scratch on her face, as well as a cracked rib. She had called the police from inside Brownâ€™s house while armed with a pistol, which she discharged while inside. A few days later, Clark told police she did not want to press charges. After the incident, Sport magazine called and asked Brown if Clark would come to the phone. â€œHe put Debra on the phone. â€˜Hello,â€™ said a small voice. Brown took the phone back and laughed. â€˜I donâ€™t know what that proved,â€™ he said. â€˜That voice could have been anybodyâ€™s.â€™â€? Speaking to me today, Clark says, â€œWhat most experts say is that a good relationship must have the eighty/twenty rule. What Jim and I shared was more like ninety-ďŹ ve/ďŹ ve. However, that ďŹ ve percent was like an inferno. . . . I choose to forgive, which was pretty easy to do when you loved someone so intensely. ... Life is a series of choices, and I

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choose to get better and not bitter.â€? It is very difďŹ cult to get people who know Brown to speak about this area of his life. They donâ€™t deny that gender violence is a part of his past, and none will go on the record to say that they believe it all to be lies made up by racist media. They do believe that the reason people care, however, is highly racialized. They insist that if he were white, then no one would want to examine this part of his history. But this is a part of Jim Brownâ€™s narrative. To deny it on the basis of the good works he has done serves to erase Debra Clark. If this part of his history does not matter, then one is also saying that Clark does not matter. In 1981, Pete Dexter wrote that it is â€œa fact that Jim Brown scares people. He scares people, and he controls them. The relationships he has â€” family, friends, women, strangers in the street â€” are on his own terms. When he says he wonâ€™t lie and he wonâ€™t change, that is his integrity and it doesnâ€™t shift with the situation.â€? At eighty-two, even though he is older, more mellow, and more philosophical, Brown still intimidates. Yet people with a distance from him, like Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, have a great deal to

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FEATURE

Jim Brown in Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off, 1973.

say about how to understand the intertwining of his personal and political selves. “We do hold Jim Brown personally accountable for his behavior. But we also put that behavior in a larger context,” says Dr. Neal. “In some ways this violence against women in the 1950s and 1960s was seen as normal. The question for Jim Brown is, how does he go forward from that period of time? How does he own up to any criticism of instances of violence against women in his life and how do we find a way to find a common ground between private and public Jim Brown? Whether we’re talking about the musical genius of Miles Davis versus his brutality or a figure like R. Kelly or, today, an athlete like Adrian Peterson or Ray Rice, how do we find that perfect ground that allows us to hold them accountable for their actions but also provides space for redemption that allows them to come back into the black community?” But Brown has never had to ask for redemption or for reentry into any community. Quite the opposite.

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

He has taken the accusations of assault and used them to paint himself as a victim of a power structure determined to tear him down. The fact that there actually was a power structure that was invested over the course of years in seeing him fall only adds to the confusion many confront when trying to disentangle his private, public, and political lives. No single case of violence against women has stuck, however, quite like the case of Eva Bohn- Chin, the twenty-two-yearold model who either was thrown or fell from a balcony of a hotel room she was sharing with Brown. After receiving reports of shouting, breaking objects, and screaming inside the hotel room, the police arrived. Two deputies were blocked by Brown, who according to police reports said, “If you’re coming in, you’re going to have to go over me.” Brown later couched what he said to the ofﬁcers in more political terms, claiming that he shouted, “You big white cops and your goddam system. Everything is against the Negroes. If you’re

coming in you’re going to have to shoot me first. Well, come on ahead, but you’re going over me.” He then, again according to police accounts, straight-armed one officer, launching him seven feet backward into a wall. The police on the scene had to call for reinforcements to push him backward and enter the room. Bohn- Chin lay semiconscious below, from a twenty-foot fall onto concrete, and Brown was arrested on multiple charges including assault on a police officer and “assault with intent to commit murder” against Bohn- Chin. Except — and one might be sensing a pattern — she did not press charges. Almost immediately, the story became part of Jim Brown’s legend and lore. The truth of what actually happened behind those closed doors has mattered less than the oft-repeated phrase “Jim Brown threw a woman off a balcony.” Even though Bohn- Chin insisted at the time that she had climbed out on the balcony out of fear of the police and slipped, and

even though she continued her relationship with Brown after the incident, the simplest and most violent explanation better ﬁt people’s preconceptions of the type of life that Brown led. New York Times journalist Judy Klemesrud wrote about his career in 1969 and mentioned the incident with an eroticized fascination: “This Jim Brown is usually thought of in terms of bulging biceps ... paternity suits ... broken football records ... beautiful girls falling mysteriously from balconies ...” Gloria Steinem even predicted that this could “spice up his screen image; give it an edge of real-life scariness. Because he is potentially the Bad Black Man, and both Negro and white audiences enjoy it.” Once again, Brown was cleared of all charges, including those of assault against a police ofﬁcer. Brown would comment with mock regret that the incident made him even more of a target of lust, as women sought him out on the basis of the incident. Steinem portrayed him as a victim, writing that

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FEATURE because Brown loves women, he â€œis vulnerable to them.â€? Brown also painted the attention he received for it in political colors, telling Klemesrud of The New York Times : â€œThe cops were after me. They tried to tell her Iâ€™d thrown her off the balcony. We had had a ďŹ ght that night, and neighbors called the cops. Eva was always giving as much as she was taking. If the cops hadnâ€™t interfered, she wouldnâ€™t have tried to get away down the balcony. The cops had ransacked her apartment a couple times and they had tailed her car. They were after me because Iâ€™m free and black and Iâ€™m supposed to be arrogant and supposed to be a militant, and I swing loose and free and have been outspoken on racial matters and I donâ€™t preach against black militant groups and Iâ€™m not humble. Besides, most of these cops are Birchers anyway.â€? Yet this story has not aged well. Some of that has to do with the changing culture. In 1968 the idea that an abused partner would stay despite the abuse, or refuse to press charges, was neither understood

nor explored. The idea, in a world where the police were killing Black Panthers in their homes, that the authorities would go out of their way to frame Jim Brown, was also something that did not seem farfetched. It rang logical and true. Sure enough, the balcony incident did not derail Brownâ€™s movie career. It also led to a greater demand for Eva Bohn- Chin in the fashion world, showing that in the decades before reality television, infamy has always sold. Helpful to Brown was that Sue, to whom he was still legally married, said, â€œThe day the headlines broke that he was being charged with attempting to murder Eva, I knew he didnâ€™t do it. I thought maybe he hit her â€” he has that temper â€” but I knew Jim wouldnâ€™t try to kill any woman. Thereâ€™s things in him nobody will ever understand, but it isnâ€™t that heâ€™s mean. Heâ€™s just who he is.â€? In Spike Leeâ€™s Jim Brown: All American, Brown said, â€œI am going to say something emphatically to you and the world. I never threw Eva Bohn- Chin off of the balcony. It was totally fabricated ... she tried to get out of the apartment. She tried to get down so the cops would not mess with me.â€? Yet Lee found the reclusive Bohn-

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Chin and was able to interview her on camera, the ďŹ rst time she had publicly spoken about the incident. For decades, she had stood by her story that she feared the police, climbed on the balcony, and fell. But when asked by Lee, she says, â€œHe pushed me. He slammed me.â€? She then pointed out scars on her body and said the harrowing words: â€œI was young, good-looking, a person who loved life. Why would I jump? To become a cripple or whatever? Why would I do this? I am a damaged person.â€? When one attempts to understand why Jim Brown did not receive the Obama White House honors his friend Bill Russell did, this story is often cited. Yet similar accusations have not proved to be a problem for Donald Trump, who similarly writes off multiple accusations of sexually predatory behavior made against him as some sort of conspiracy narrative or â€œfake news.â€? Some of the people closest to Brown, people who have lived with violence and believe his intervention saved their life, do not care. Rockhead Johnson says forcefully, â€œPeople say to me, â€˜You know he threw a girl off the balcony?â€™ And Iâ€™m like, â€˜God damn, you know I went to jail for killing somebody?

Or ... for pulling out a gun, or ... for shooting somebody in the head? Or I was in jail stabbing people? Youâ€™re going to tell me that Jim supposedly throwing somebody over a balcony, a small balcony, is more severe than hurting somebody and going to jail for most of my life for it? Yâ€™all are some strange people.â€™â€? The difference, though, is that Rockhead had to pay a price for his violence. Not only did Jim Brown not have to pay that price. He has also been protected by friends who look at these charges and dismiss them without any analysis. His former teammate and dear friend John Wooten said in 2016, â€œIâ€™m loyal to Jim, and he and a bunch of us from the Browns days remain close friends to this day, so I say this in that context: I donâ€™t get into his personal life. But I do think a lot of the troubles Jim went through were invented by people. They took advantage of the fact he was famous. None of us is perfect and we all make mistakes, but I really do believe a lot of that stuff was bullshit. Iâ€™m not going further than that.â€? Yet Brown himself, even while dismissing accusations of violence against women, has hinted that there is something to them. He told People magazine in 1991, â€œI

Wikipedia

don’t always claim to be the person who’s done the right thing, but the media’s singled me out as the most brutal cat that ever lived. I try to treat women with respect. The ones that know me like me and trust me.” In a 1994 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in response to a question about his treatment of women, Brown said, “I’m not going to go over all that driedup s— about women I supposedly beat up. ... Anything I did regarding the law is part of the record.” It would be one thing if that was all Brown said. But as far as these situations with women, he also speaks about his potential to be victimized and being an easy target. “I’m very vulnerable. I don’t have much chance if someone wants to get me.” He is a victim in one respect: a victim of the sports world’s inability to own the fact that a big part of jock culture is seeing women as the spoils of gladiatorial combat — “gladiator” being a word Brown often uses for football players. When we consider the dropping of the charges against Jim Brown, speciﬁcally by black women, the words of radio journalist Esther Armah come to mind. She says, “When you’re talking about the period of history when Jim Brown would’ve come to prominence — the 1950s and 1960s — you’re talking about witnessing just the state of hostility, aggression, and violence towards black men in every single form. And that negation of life at the hands of white authority was the primary issue for the civil rights movement. It was dealing with racism as it came at you from white authority. And so the lives of women were secondary. Not even were they just negated, but girls were nurtured to understand implicitly that to turn a black man, and to put a black man in the hands of white authority, was to hand him to certain death, and that’s something you were unwilling to do. ... You would more likely be willing to die at the hands of that man than absolutely call any kind of white male authority, because it’s really sort of kill or be killed. And at that time, you’re talking a resistance to white racism that was all- encompassing. Going to authority was also something for which you would likely be condemned by the community as a whole. And that in a space where white men are the other enemy, all you have is your community. It’s not as if you have that other community that you’re ever going to go to.

Jim Brown in 1961.

And so you are, in a lot of ways, trapped.” The most illustrative example of Brown’s attitude toward this question of violence against women, his stubbornness to admit any wrongdoing, his distrust of the state and the ways in which he would fiercely clutch to the idea of his own manhood as a shield, was the case in 2002, when, after smashing the windows of his twenty-five-yearold wife Monique’s car in June 1999, Brown found himself for the first time behind bars, at the age of sixtysix. He believed his imprisonment to be so unjust that he stopped eating, shedding twenty-five pounds during his six months in jail. Ironically, given his years of work with prisoners, he was kept segregated from the prison’s general population, against his wishes. For all but one

hour a day, he was on lockdown in a six-by-fourteen-foot Ventura County Jail cell. “The prison’s rationale for the twenty-three-hour isolation is that they need to protect me because I’m a celebrity,” Brown said at the time. “But it’s like being buried in a hole. ... I have not eaten since I’ve been here. I’m fasting. I’m on a spiritual fast. That way I am setting the terms of my imprisonment. ... I’ll fight as long as I have breath in my body. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ve always been.” It was quite the collision of Brown’s greatness and his flaws. Years of anti-gang work uniquely qualified him to do something positive with his time behind bars and collaborate with fellow inmates, yet he was isolated from this very activity, struck down by his own

fame and by a criminal justice system happy to make his time behind bars as terrible as possible. The awful coda to this story is that if Brown had chosen to accept the original sentence, he would not have had to spend a day in prison. Brown had been charged with making “terroristic threats” against Monique and for vandalism. He was acquitted of the former but not the latter. His sentence was initially not six months of jail time. Instead he was handed four hundred hours of community service or forty hours of cleaning up streets and ordered to pay $1,700 to a domestic abuse charity and a women’s shelter and to attend counseling. But he didn’t accept that sentence, calling it “mean- spirited and vicious,” and chose jail time instead. He said, “I’m going to take six months. You | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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are not going to humiliate me. I’m not going to pick up trash on the freeway.” Brown again painted this entire situation in political terms, telling journalist Jon Saraceno of USA Today, “There’s no doubt that I’m a political prisoner, but race in America is always under the surface. If I were domesticated, I would be accepted racially. I’d have approval if I stayed in my place. The worst thing an African-American man can do is be as free as those more powerful than he is.” Then he invoked the leitmotif of his political life: “The last thing I’m going to give up is my manhood.” Brown told the press that he should be praised for destroying Monique’s car with a shovel, saying, “I went the opposite of domestic violence that night. In angermanagement training, they teach you never to hit a person — hit an object. That’s what they teach you.” Brown also rejected the idea that he had done anything wrong. “The issue isn’t about the safety of women,” he said. “It is about [the courts] making a political point. I can deal with any persecution or prosecution. Your enemy wants you to walk one mile, you walk two.” The only person who publicly apologized for the incident was in fact Monique Brown, who testiﬁed that she had never felt threatened and that she had authorized her husband to attack the car as a therapeutic form of anger management. She said she had called 911 to humiliate her husband, whom she had suspected of cheating on her. She later said, “I challenged him. I shouldn’t have done that.” Monique commented that she should have thought about his history with police: “It made me realize who my husband is. Not who my husband is inside but who he is in America.” She also said she should have been more sensitive to the fact that Brown was in a very dark place, his dear friend George Hughley having died in a February 1999 motorcycle accident. Monique’s political explanation for her husband’s conviction only ampliﬁed what Brown was saying behind bars. He told Jeff Adler of The Washington Post, “I could have been a domesticated African and taken what the judge gave me. But I chose to be a man of character.” Brown, very tellingly, does not paint this particular political

stand in the traditional language of Black Power. Instead he directs his ire against a powerful cabal of white women, and portrays it as an organized campaign by these women to bring down a prominent man. Brown said, “[Female judge] Dale Fischer is the CEO of a radical and extremist group of white, upperclass women who target men of color, including Jim Brown. Judge Fischer has converted the court into a command post used to wage a war against all men, and black men.” He added, speaking about himself in the third person, “Jim Brown has a duty to his people, Americans, to stop a matriarchal corporation from using the bully pulpit to manufacture domestic-violence crimes when they don’t exist.” This group he was referring to is the American Inns of Court, a benign legal organization whose mission is to “foster excellence in professionalism, ethics, civility, and legal skills.” The board of trustees is about half male. Brown chose the six months behind bars because above all else he refused to concede that anything he did was connected to domestic violence. Upon leaving prison, Brown said, “I served my time ... I did it as a gentleman. The conditions of my [initial] sentence were ridiculous. If I had accepted those conditions I would have been condoning something that could have represented the way that the law was administered for many, many years. ... The system itself has been corrupted.” Deputy city attorney Grace Lee scoffed at this characterization, calling the affair “a very ordinary case about domestic violence.” But Brown didn’t see it as ordinary at all, and his comments at the time bring him back toward using his one-time bulletproof masculinity as a shield. “You cannot take my dignity. You cannot take my manhood,” he said. “Fifteen years, twenty years, twenty- seven years Nelson Mandela spent to fight apartheid in South Africa. Only that man did it. Maybe God made me a catalyst, because I know if I go to jail and spend my six months with dignity and pride it’s going to mean a lot to the young people I work with around this doggone country.” In court, Detective Brian Gasparian had testified that Monique Brown asked officers not to arrest her husband “after she came to a police station and tearfully told them of a history of abuse in their twoyear marriage. ... Monique Brown was tearful, trembling but open

Photo by LBJ Library Flickr CC

in discussing what she described as incidents of abuse, some of which involved threats on her life. ... She seemed upset. She was crying. She asked me what was going to happen, if her husband was going to be arrested. I said I didn’t know.” Gasparian later said, “She advised me that she didn’t want him arrested. ... She said she wanted me to just take a report in case something were to happen in the future. Her eyes were red. She was kind of shaky.” Outside the courthouse during the trial, Jim and Monique held hands as he again made this a political issue, speaking about the tearing down of men and the over-empowerment of women. He railed against domestic violence laws that he said give all the power to women to accuse men who are deemed instantly guilty. He said, “Under these laws she is now the boss of my life forever. ... She can pick up a phone and call the police and that’s it. ... This law forever makes [men] totally unimportant in our home.” Speaking later, Brown commented, “I can deﬁnitely get angry, and I have taken that anger out inappropriately in the past. But I have done so with both men and

women. So do I have a problem with women? No. I have had anger, and I’ll probably continue to have anger. I just have to not strike out at anyone ever again. I have to be smarter than that, smarter than I was. What I would say is that with wisdom, I will only use my mentality or my spirit aggressively. I will never use my hands [that way] again.” The story was not as explosive, invasive, and damaging to the Browns as it might have been today, in this era before social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Yet there was still a great deal of copy written about the case in the country’s biggest newspapers. Brown was also able to control this narrative somewhat by delivering interviews from behind bars to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets. But not every columnist was friendly. USA Today’s Jon Saraceno went for the jugular with the headline “True Manhood and Perspective Elude Brown.” Saraceno eviscerated Brown for his “misogynistic, violent history.” Brown, he wrote, “is not yet the man he wants us to believe he is. ... Personal responsibility and selfcontrol are issues at the core of his long- standing activism. Instead, he

chooses to hide behind ’60s- style militant rhetoric and black-power salutes, railing against the ‘evils of government.’ He is out of step with society, black and white. He is missing the message of selflessness he has preached over the decades. ... “Choosing jail,” Saraceno said, “was not a selfless act by a wronged man but the epitome of selfabsorption and martyrdom.” Saraceno is most cruel and betrays his superficial understanding when describing Monique Brown: “She sounds brainwashed, or she’s a coverup artist. Either way, her perspective is skewed. Maybe she’s afraid, which is understandable. When she tries to explain away her husband’s actions, she is worshipful.” Calling an abuse survivor “a coverup artist” is shameful, revictimizing the victim in this case. It’s not altogether surprising, however, that this callous way of writing about abuse survivors went unnoticed at the time. Since the 1999 incident, Brown has not been accused of violence against Monique or any other woman. In the meantime, the power dynamics in his house have changed, as he and Monique have had two children, Aris and Morgan,

and Brown has slowed as the years have passed. Monique runs the house. But Jim Brown’s value system, at least publicly, has not budged. There was a fascinating exchange between the media and Brown in 2013 that also revealed a good deal about Brown’s stance on violence against women. ESPN asked Brown for his thoughts about Kobe Bryant. In recent years, most people in the sports world genuﬂect at the mention of Bryant, with his two decades in the NBA. Brown did not. Instead he referred to Bryant’s infamous efforts in 2003, after being charged with rape in Eagle, Colorado, to get the local police to investigate his teammate Shaquille O’Neal instead of him. The Los Angeles Times quoted a police report that said Bryant told detectives that “he should have done what Shaq does ... that Shaq would pay his women not to say anything” and already had paid up to a million dollars “for situations like this.” (Shaquille O’Neal has never been accused of violence against women and was enraged with Bryant when these reports went public; the rift between the two men lasted for years.) For Brown, Bryant’s being | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Photo courtesy Cleveland Memory Project

FEATURE arrested on charges of violence against women was not what disgusted him. It was the snitching. He then connected the snitching to why Bryant would never have been invited to the Ali summit ﬁve decades earlier. On The Arsenio Hall Show, Brown said that Bryant had thrown Shaquille O’Neal “under the bus” and “is somewhat confused about culture, because he was brought up in another country.” [Bryant spent much of his childhood in Italy.] Bryant, Brown went on, “doesn’t quite ﬁt what’s happening in America. In the days when we had a summit and called the top black athletes together to talk to Muhammad Ali about his status with the armed forces, there were some athletes we didn’t call. If I had to call that summit all over, there would be some athletes I wouldn’t call. Kobe would be one of them.” Once again, it’s the snitching, not the alleged violence against women, that makes Bryant unworthy. Another window into his thinking came in September 2014 when Adrian Peterson, star running back at the time for the Minnesota Vikings, was arrested on charges of abusing his own young son with a stick. Brown responded to the story by saying, “In this society, there’s a thing called child abuse. Adrian lives in a time with women’s rights and all that shit. You could get run over standing in front of women when they’re talking about their rights, domestic violence and child abuse and shit.” When asked if he had something more to say about domestic violence and violence against women, given his own history, he said, “Yeah, domestic violence is different to me than child abuse. It’s strange, but child abuse, to me, would be a deep sickness. I mean there’d be some deep shit going on there if you want to whip the hell out of your kid where your kid would have welts and shit, I don’t know what the hell that’s about. “Now, here’s my honest feeling about it: Child abuse is one thing that’s very clear-cut and doesn’t carry, in my mind, the same emotion that [abusing] a woman carries. So, I’ll put it to you this way: As I grow older, I would not touch anybody. I will not follow anyone into that hole where they are trying to take me where I could get angry and provoke

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Jim Brown’s ﬁnal game at Cleveland Stadium, 1965.

their satisfaction by succumbing to that anger. You need education to learn not to fuck with some shit like that. When you’re talking about being in love, being emotional, feeling certain ways, that’s some deep shit. And it’s not predictable. All rejection is difﬁcult to take and who rejects you more than a fucking woman? “And since society says there’s not two sides to the coin, she’ll spit on you or hit you across the knee with a hammer and that’s not an excuse for you to hit her. It really isn’t. But, in that emotional state, you might knock her out, unless you’re at the stage in your development where you’re ready to walk [away]. And if she is not [ready to walk away], then you’re dealing with two people. You’re depending on her to feed you something that’s logical that ﬁxes the argument, right? [But] she don’t give you nothing that’s logical and shit. So then your only alternative is to walk. You have no other recourse

but to walk. But then you got ties, legal ties, all kinds of shit that you gotta cooperate with each other on, to work out how to leave each other. That shit’s all fucked up. That will screw with you on another level. ... “I’ve never seen a man that was perfect with his woman. I saw two quotes in the paper today by these teammates of Ray Rice. One guy called him a ‘piece of shit.’ And they put that shit in the damn paper. ‘That piece of shit.’ Like I said, he’s falling into the trap that they lay to assuage the females. ... If someone spits in your face, someone slaps you, what’s going to be the reaction? And individuals don’t really want to [talk about what that reaction would be]. They don’t really want to address it because what it suggests and what it does is a form of reality that individuals don’t want to address.” Brown would not talk about any of the cases that he was involved in over the course of his life. His mind did wander toward speaking

about the Ray Rice video. “Did you see that elevator?” he said. “She made some kind of move and it looked like she said something, or spit at him or something. And then she went back and he knocked her out. But the piece of the video that bothered me most wasn’t the blow. Did you see how he treated her outside of the elevator? Kicked her with his shoe. Like a piece of fucking trash. Man, what kind of shit is that? Everyone’s saying the punch [ruined Rice’s reputation]. No, that shit outside the elevator did it for me, from the standpoint of the lack of respect that he showed. She’s knocked out now. I don’t know what he could have done but he sure could have done something different than he did. Yeah, I didn’t see nothing but disrespect. Disrespect don’t appeal to me under any circumstances. ... What are the rules in an argument? Leave the fucking house [laughs]. Get out of Dodge. That’s all you can do.” He then spoke about an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer comparing him to Ray Rice. He was tickled that people still felt the need to attack him on a basis that he absolutely believes is not about his own failings, but is politically motivated. That narrative still holds in his mind: Anything that had been done to him was also done to tear him down. “I am honestly trying to do what I can do in this society to make it better. And I’m long past the stage of needing anyone to validate me. My thoughts now are about leaving here and my family and my friends and doing what I can do before I get out of Dodge myself. And to have someone taking slaps at you, it’s like, ‘Damn, man. This is desperation time! You’re still fucking with me? You’re fucking with an old man? What kind of shit is that?’” He obliquely referred to his years of court cases: “How do I come at everybody? I just deal with the evidence. I stood up to my accusers. What you do in this country is you stand up to the accuser and you go through the process, whatever the process is, and then if you got to pay the price, you pay the price, and if you don’t, you don’t.” Journalist Kevin Powell is someone who has been open, repentant, and deeply analytical about the topic of violence against women. Powell explains why he thinks Brown, despite these rock bottoms, seems so resistant to confront any of this history. “Unfortunately, as black men we feel a particular kind of weight

Photo courtesy of Blue Rider Press

that’s really unexplainable if you’re not a black male in this country,” he said. “Then if you add into it what you might have gone through with your family — a black family in America with residual effects of slavery and segregation and all of these emotions and insanity that come from that — it makes it very, very difficult to look in the mirror because you’re talking about traumatized people. Any group that has been traumatized, I guarantee that you’ll find in that community people who are profoundly successful, but also profoundly wounded. “But what’s missing is the ability to pause and do some deep reflection and healing. ... I think that most men, regardless of race, just don’t know how to stop. Because one of the twisted definitions of manhood is that you always have to be doing something. It does not lend itself to critical self-reflection, healing, and being vulnerable or being honest about what’s hurting you and causing you pain. And I think that’s the case with Jim Brown.” Attempting to discuss this with “critical self-reflection and healing,” however, gets undermined by the belief that it is rife with racialized double standards. Academic and bestselling author Michael Eric Dyson said, “There’s a racial aspect to the perspective on personal flaws. The magical appeal of black pathology is that the public narrative always ascribes greater power to black misfortune and black misconduct. So now Michael Vick becomes the face of dogfighting. Adrian Peterson, the face of brutal practices of disciplining your children. Ray Rice, of violence against women. And so on ... Racism and racial barriers can always be held up when black people are candidates to represent American pathology.” Dr. Harry Edwards has done remarkable work in recent years on gender issues and has also been a close friend of Jim Brown’s. He stated: “What makes heroes heroic is the fact that they are human and yet are able to accomplish and contribute these extraordinary things. And far too often, because the public in general, and people with a vested interest in certain outcomes in particular — in other words people who want to see African-American men fail — want to find a reason to discount that greatness. They

Cover from Jim Brown: Last Man Standing, by Dave Ziron.

will go to human frailties, and say, ‘See there? He’s not what he claims to be.’ I mean, they said that about Dr. King. The reality is that what is at the very heart of the heroic contribution — someone who comes from among us, walks off into that dark and frightening forest of challenges, and comes back having achieved the height of expectations, of possibilities — is that they came from among us. Jim Brown didn’t descend upon this earth from some alien planet. He came from among us. And the fact of his humanity means there are going to be frailties, shortcomings, and so forth. It’s human beings who are heroic, because they are everyday people just like the rest of us who manage, through some gift, greatness, capability, sometimes through sheer determination, to do extraordinary things. “I don’t discount or ignore any

issues that may have tarnished, or have appeared to tarnish, Jim Brown in terms of wiping out some illusion of utter perfection. I take those as part of his humanity, understanding that it’s probably the case that we don’t even know and completely understand what those imperfections and frailties really were or amounted to. What we have is what was put out there, oftentimes by people who are literally interested in not just discounting his achievements and accomplishments, but in discounting him.” This can be true and yet we also have to acknowledge that there is a deep degree of enabling that takes place with this kind of response. The contradictory part of these various defenses, however, is Jim Brown’s refusal to publicly recognize any of his own frailties. He does not confront this part of his history, and

because he’s a public figure who built his political reputation as someone who fights injustice, this has undoubtedly hurt him. But it also creates a chorus of people who marvel at his indomitability. It creates admirers who have interpreted one man’s refusal to partake in one of the most difficult public acts in American life — admitting political and personal wrongs — to be a badge of honor. But this ignores the fact that part of what made Malcolm X so remarkable — such a role model as a human being — was that he very publicly shifted his views on race, struggle, and resistance. He went from preaching a doctrine of black self-help and self- defense against white devils to a mass international resistance to oppression. A similar argument applies to Dr. King, who shifted his views on the scope of his struggle and publicly stated that he would never again speak solely against southern racism or what today some call “black on black violence” when the root causes of both extended far deeper. He said, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” Brown never did that, and it’s a weakness, when compared with these other great men. Ossie Davis said, “Malcolm is our manhood.” Jim Brown may be Superman, but being a real flesh- and- blood man is much more difficult. The tragedy is that many will support a Jim Brown more for aspiring to be Superman than for scrutinizing himself. The message from our culture is that real men don’t reflect on anything. Most of us cannot live our lives in such blinkered fashion, so we need that Superman, that exemplar, that symbol that says our own emotional constipation is not only understandable, but even noble. There is an appetite, a craving, for that Jim Brown, and that’s why he is celebrated for being the last man standing.

Adapted from JIM BROWN: Last Man Standing by Dave Ziron, to be published May 15, 2018, by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2018 by Dave Zirin.

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For Ticketing Information call (216) 771-6655 or Visit us on The Odeon Concert Club All Tickets Available at: ticketweb.com 26

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

SHADOWTomOFPettyDOUBT BAND Tribute Sunday, May 6 | 2pm to 6pm SPRING HOURS: Friday: 5:00pm- Close | Saturday & Sunday: 12:00pm- Close

www.facebook.com/whiskeyislandstillandeatery www.whiskeyislandstillandeatery.net

GET OUT everything you should do this week Photo by Natalie Brasington

WED

05/02

COMEDY

Maria Bamford Known for telling jokes about her dysfunctional family and making fun of her battles with depression and anxiety, comedian Maria Bamford is the thinking woman’s comic. She even successfully turned her life story into Lady Dynamite, a terriﬁc Netﬂix original series. Last year, the brainy comic gave the commencement speaker for the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts. She makes a rare appearance in town tonight for a standup show that takes place at 8 at Hilarities. Tickets start at $25. (Jeff Niesel) 2035 East Fourth St., 216-241-7425, pickwickandfrolic.com. COMEDY

Mike Bonner Call the sitter. Comic Mike Bonner takes the stage at the Improv tonight for a parent-friendly routine. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s kidfriendly. Bonner has made a name for himself as a relatable, down-toearth comedian who understands the everyday struggles of being a father. From dirty diapers to his daughter’s ﬁrst boyfriend, the BET comedian explores the small joys and annoyances of parenthood through a sardonic lens. The show starts at 7:30 p.m., and Bonner performs at the club again at 7 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $17. (Niesel) 1148 Main Ave., 216-696-IMPROV, clevelandimprov.com. SPOKEN WORD

Cleveland Stories Dinner Parties Cleveland Stories Dinner Party is a weekly series that pairs ﬁne food with storytelling. Through it, the folks at Music Box Supper Club hope to raise awareness of the mission of the Western Reserve Historical Society’s new Cleveland History Center. The goal of the Cleveland Stories Dinner Party is to “bring to life some of the fun, interesting stories about Cleveland’s past — from sports, to rock ’n’ roll, to Millionaires’ Row,” as it’s put in a press release. Admission is free, with no cover charge, although a prix ﬁxe dinner, designed to complement the night’s theme, is $20. Doors open at 5 p.m., dinner is served at 6, and the storytelling starts at 7. Tonight, John Gorman,

Flash Ferenc and Denny Sanders discuss the rise and fall of the local rock station WMMS. The menu includes Buzzard Stew, Roadkill Steak and Chocolate Cake. (Niesel) 1148 Main Ave., 216-242-1250, musicboxcle.com.

cynic. He puts a new twist on the typically goofy nature of live comedy. He likes to joke that Halloween was a fun holiday for him as a kid. “I was poor and I used to have to wear a garbage bag and go as a raisin,” he jokes in one bit. He performs tonight at 8 at Hilarities. Tickets are $18 to $23. (Niesel) 2035 East Fourth St., 216-241-7425, pickwickandfrolic.com.

THEATER

Disney’s Aladdin Part of the KeyBank Broadway Series, the hit musical Disney’s Aladdin comes to the State Theatre today for a month-long run through May 27. Directed and choreographed by Tony Award-winner Casey Nicholaw ( The Book of Mormon, Something Rotten! ), the production features sets, costumes and lighting from Tony Award-winners Bob Crowley ( Mary Poppins), Gregg Barnes ( Kinky Boots) and Natasha Katz (An American in Paris). Tonight’s performance takes place at 7:30. Tickets start at $40. (Niesel) 1519 Euclid Ave., 216-241-6000, playhousesquare.org. SPORTS

Indians vs. Texas Rangers The Texas Rangers got off to a rough start this year as they lost three of four games. Of course, playing the World Champion Houston Astros will do that to you. Still, the takeaway from the series was that the Rangers’ bullpen needs help and the bottom part of its order needs more offensive ﬁrepower. Expect the Tribe to exploit the Rangers’ weaknesses at today’s game, which begins at 1:10 p.m. at Progressive Field. Tickets start at $15. (Niesel) 2401 Ontario St., 216-420-4487, clevelandindians.com. SPOKEN WORD

Keep Talking Keep Talking is an exciting storytellers program where locals can share their real-life experiences on a theme. The monthly series offers attendees the chance to grab a drink and a dog while listening to some of their Cleveland neighbors tell tall tales. The theme for tonight’s storytelling is “My Last,” and the hosts are Adam Richard and Zachariah Durr. The program starts at 7:30 p.m. sharp at the Happy Dog. Admission is $5. Want to be a storyteller at a future session? See details on the website. (Niesel) 5801 Detroit Ave., 216-651-9474, happydogcleveland.com.

MUSIC FESTIVAL

Comedian Maria Bamford comes to Hilarities. See: Wednesday. FILM

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World Part of the Rock Hall’s 2018 Film Series, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World looks at the Native Americans who made serious contributions to the history of popular music. The new feature documentary premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and features such musical icons as Robbie Robertson, Jimi Hendrix and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Tickets are free for Rock Hall members, or $5.50 for the general public. (Niesel) 1100 Rock and Roll Blvd., 216-515-8444, rockhall.com.

THU

05/03

FILM

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The Capitol Theatre celebrates its 97th anniversary tonight with a special screening of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play that stars Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The event begins at 6 p.m. with hors d’oeuvres, a champagne toast and birthday cake. The movie shows at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20. (Niesel) 1390 West 65th St., 216-651-7295, clevelandcinemas.com.

Pyro de Mayo Trevor Hall, Nahko and Rising Appalachia are among the notable acts performing at this weekend’s Pyro de Mayo music festival at Nelson Ledges Quarry Park. The event promises “a weekend of music, dancing, camping, ﬁre art, interactive workshops and illumination.” Gates open today for a special pre-party kick off; the festivities continue through Sunday. Check the website for ticket prices and more details. (Niesel) 12001 State Route 282, Garrettsville, 440-548-2716, pyrodemayo.com. FILM

The Sax Man The late Maurice “Sax Man” Reedus was best known as a street musician who played outside the Q and Progressive Field before and after sporting events. But prior to that, he had been a member of the ’70s Motown band Sly, Slick & Wicked. As a tribute to the man, who recently passed away, Tower City Cinemas will screen The Sax Man, a documentary movie about the musician, at 7:30 tonight. The movie premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival in March of 2014, winning the Local Heroes award and playing to sold-out crowds. Tickets to this memorial screening are $10, and proceeds will be donated to Reedus’ family to aid in his funeral expenses. Additional donations for the funeral fund will be accepted at the theater that evening. (Niesel) 230 West Huron Rd., 216-621-1374, clevelandcinemas.com.

FRI

05/04

COMEDY

Dave Landau Last Comic Standing has introduced us to dozens of incredible comedians, but none quite like Dave Landau. Sharp, dark and sarcastic, Landau’s stand-up act is stand-up for the

THEATER

American Idiot A coming-of-age musical about three suburban teens struggling to “ﬁnd meaning and purpose amid the paranoia, apathy and | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

GET OUT noise of a media-saturated post9/11 America,” American Idiot became a smash hit when it made its debut on Broadway in 2010. Based on the Green Day album 21st Century Breakdown , the musical also includes a handful of Green Day tunes, including “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “21 Guns” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” This weekend, the Brecksville Theatre hosts a new local production of the play. Tonight’s performance takes place at 7:30. Tickets are $15. (Niesel) 49 Public Square, Brecksville, 440-736-7749, thebrecksvilletheatre.org.

a show on MTV, has had roles in movies such as Road Trip and Freddy Got Fingered and was once a guest host for late-night icon David Letterman. All that fame and fortune came about in the early 2000s. Since then, Green has been under the radar, hosting an internet talk show in his living room and returning to standup. His standup act usually involves

COMEDY

Tom Green Funnyman Tom Green used to be the king of comedy. Green, who got his big break while hosting

ALL FILMS START AT 7 PM | ROCK HALL’S FOSTER THEATER

3/7 3/21 5/2 5/16 5/30 6/6

WED.

Cedric the Entertainer One of the few comedians who has truly made the transition into acting, Cedric the Entertainer has certainly come a long way from the days when he was trying to make an impression on programs such as It’s Showtime at the Apollo and Def Comedy Jam . Not all of his films have been hits (2007’s horrid Code Name: The Cleaner was a real bust), but movies such as Barbershop have showed off his acting abilities. And he even held his own on Broadway, where he acted in a revival of American Buffalo. Expect Cedric, who has a big, booming voice, to take on current events and use lots of slang in his monologue. He performs at 7:30 and 10 tonight and at 7 and 9:30 tomorrow night at the Improv. Tickets are $45. (Niesel) 1148 Main Ave., 216-696-IMPROV, clevelandimprov.com.

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Mix: Philosophy The first Friday of each month, the Cleveland Museum of Art hosts its popular Mix at CMA event. The museum stays open later than normal for the occasion, which features dance, drink and a themebased program. Tonight’s event celebrates the special exhibition

SCHEDULE

THEATER

Beehive: The 60s Musical Produced by Great Lakes Theatre, Beehive: The 60s Musical features 40 chart-topping songs from the years as it aims to relive “one of music’s truly golden eras.” You’ll hear tunes from the Supremes, Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin. Tonight’s performance takes place at 7:30 at the Hanna Theatre. The play runs through May 20, and tickets start at $15. (Niesel) 2067 East 14th St., 216-241-6000, playhousesquare.org.

NIGHTLIFE

WED.

Lady Gaga: Five Foot Two 2017 • 1 hour, 40 minutes • TV-MA

What Happened, Miss Simone? 2015 • 1 hour, 41 minutes • Not Rated, Courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World 2017 • 1 hour, 43 minutes • Not Rated Who the F**k is That Guy? The Fabulous Journey of Michael Alago 2017 • 1 hr, 25 minutes • TV-MA

Head 1968 • 1 hour, 26 minutes • G

Purple Rain 1984 • 1 hour, 51 minutes • R

Members FREE w/RSVP • Non-Members $5.50 1100 Rock and Roll Boulevard, Cleveland, OH 44114 | rockhall.com | 216.781.ROCK

a series of rants about things like social media and health care; he’s been known to smash a guitar on occasion too. Expect lots of yelling and cursing as Green likes to exaggerate his anger. He’s at Hilarities at 7:30 and 10 tonight and at 7 and 9:30 tomorrow night. Tickets are $30 and $33. (Niesel) 2035 East Fourth St., 216-241-7425, pickwickandfrolic.com.

Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe with live music, dancing and wearable art. There will be specialty cocktails and free admission to the exhibition. Tickets are $10 in advance, or $15 at the door. CMA members get in for free. The party runs from 6 to 10 p.m. (Niesel) 11150 East Blvd., 216-421-7350, clevelandart.org.

SAT

05/05

MUSIC

Bowieoke Formed out of the ashes of the glam-punk band, the Angry Inch, which performed in Cleveland Public Theater’s production of the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Vanity Crash has become one of Cleveland’s more outrageous bands. With its stage costumes and provocative attitude, the group is one of the only bands on the local circuit that keeps the glam rock ﬂame burning brightly. It has pumped out good, gritty records with regularity. Last year, the band hosted Bowieoke, a tribute to the late David Bowie, at Musica in Akron. This year, it will move the show up to Cleveland, where it takes place at 8 tonight at the Bop Stop. As the program name suggests, audience members will have the opportunity to get on stage and sing their favorite Bowie song. Local acts such as Sarah Arafat, 45 Spiders (From Mars), Frigid Touch, Emily Keener, Kiss Me Deadly, Vanity Crash and Nick Wilkinson will perform Bowie songs as well. In addition, CoolCleveland’sThomasMulreadywill givehismultimediapresentationabout Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie. Tickets are $15. (Niesel) 2920 Detroit Ave., 216-771-6551, themusicsettlement.org. MUSIC

Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra Spring Concert An ensemble of aspiring young student musicians, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra performs its annual spring concert tonight at 8 at Severance Hall. The ensemble will perform Beethoven’s Overture to Coriolan and Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Consult the Cleveland Orchestra website for ticket prices. (Niesel) 11001 Euclid Ave., 216-231-1111, clevelandorchestra.com. FLEA MARKET + MUSIC

Punks for Profit Outdoor Flea Market & Punk Show The westside punk and indie rock club Now That’s Class turns into a flea market today for the Punks for Profit Outdoor Flea Market & Punk Show. The fun begins at 2 p.m., and Plasma Alliance, My Name is Joe, Black Static Eye and Hep Z are all slated to perform. Punk, hardcore and metal vendors will set up inside and outside the venue to sell “records, tapes, T-shirts and whatever.” Admission is free. (Niesel) 11213 Detroit Ave., 216-221-8576, nowthatsclass.net.

FOOD

Rocky Horror Picture Show It’s the ﬁrst Saturday of the month again, so tonight the Cedar Lee Theatre hosts its usual midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 cult classic that still draws an exuberant, costumed crowd that likes to throw rice and dry toast and sing along to the songs in the movie. Tickets are $9.50. (Niesel) 2163 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, 440-528-0355, clevelandcinemas.com.

Veg Fest An annual event put on by the Cleveland Vegan Society, Veg Fest shows off the city’s ﬁne assortment of vegetarian and vegan eateries and advocates. The event’s popularity has steadily grown and it now attracts some 10,000 patrons. There will be food demonstrations, children’s activities, ﬁlm screenings and yoga sessions. Celebrity chefs such as Sonia “Vegan Vicki” Steele, Doron Petersan, David Huffman and Da’Ves Malone will be on hand. Admission is free, but a $5 donation is requested. The event takes place from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Huntington Convention Center. (Niesel) 500 Lakeside Ave., 216-928-1600, clevelandvegansociety.org. .

THEATER

The Royale Set in 1910, The Royale centers on Negro Heavyweight Champion Jay “The Sport” Jackson, a ﬁghter who wants to prove that he’s as tough as his white counterpart. The Cleveland Play House production of the play opens tonight at 7:30 at the Outcalt Theatre. It runs through May 27. Tickets start at $25. (Niesel) 1407 Euclid Ave, 216-241-6000, clevelandplayhouse.com.

SUN

Employees Receive $2 Drafts & $2 Well!

Thursday STAND-UP COMEDY OPEN MIC

Wednesday

Hosted by Gary Graham Sign-up at 7:30pm Show Starts at 8:00pm

05/06

FUNDRAISER

Russo Rama Former Clevelanders Anthony and Joe Russo return to town to celebrate the release of their new blockbuster, Avengers: Infinity War, with a day of special screenings of their most recent films at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. Dubbed Russo Rama, the triple bill includes Captain America: The Winter Solider, which will show at 1 p.m. After a short intermission, Captain America: Civil War will show at 3:30 p.m.; and after a one-hour dinner break, Avengers: Infinity War will show at 7 p.m. At the conclusion of Infinity War, the Russo brothers will answer audience questions about their work and career. Special package admission to all three films is $35 or $25 for Cinematheque members and students. (Niesel) 11610 Euclid Ave., 216-421-7450, cia.edu.

Arthritis Foundation’s Cleveland Walk to Cure Arthritis More than 1,500 walkers will support the Arthritis Foundation’s mission to cure arthritis and help arthritis sufferers live a full life as they participate in today’s 2018 Walk to Cure Arthritis. The event takes place at 8:30 a.m. at the Great Lakes Science Center in downtown Cleveland. The Walk to Cure Arthritis is the nation’s largest arthritis gathering, celebrating the foundation’s warriors, raising funds for research, resources and a cure for arthritis, which is the nation’s leading cause of disability. The disease impacts more than 1.3 million Northeast Ohioans. You can register on the website. (Niesel) events.arthritis.org.

Suicide Awareness Beneﬁt Concert An athlete and local comedian who also served in the National Guard, Nick Ramsey tragically took his own life earlier this year. As a way of paying tribute to him and as a way of raising money for the Ohio SuicidePreventionFoundation,several Cleveland bands will play a special Suicide Awareness Beneﬁt Concert at 8:30 tonight at Mahall’s 20 Lanes in Lakewood. The show will kick off a number of fundraisers in Ramsey’s honor. Acts such as Nothing Major, Kel SD, Times10 and Trios will perform. Tickets are $8. (Niesel) 13200 Madison Ave., Lakewood, 216-521-3280, mahalls20lanes.com.

SIN NIGHTSERVICE INDUSTRY

Darts and $1 Sliders

FILM

FUNDRAISER

Tuesday

MUSIC

Rob Kovacs in Residence After forming 15 years ago, the local indie pop band Return of Simple released a couple of records and became a ﬁxture on the scene before eventually relocating to New York in 2009. A few years ago, after getting “burned out” in New York, the band’s frontman, singer-pianist Rob Kovacs, moved back to Cleveland. He just recently relaunched Return of Simple. Now Kovacs has announced a Euclid Tavern residency. He’ll perform at the venue at 8 tonight and every Sunday through May 13; each week’s program will be unique. Admission is free. (Niesel) 11625 Euclid Ave., 216-231-5400, happydogcleveland.com.

38107 Second Street Willoughby, OH 44094

(440) 602-9780 Monday:

Jamo, Pizza Mug Specials after 7PM 5/7 Tattoo night with Cindy Tuesday

Guest Bartending Tuesdays 5/8 FAT’s Adult Slumber Party Wednesday:

Thursday:

20¢ Wing Night

Lyric Master

Saturday:

5/12 Angry Young Men Band at Garage

ANDERSON’S Sports Pub & Eatery

6082 Andrews Rd., Mentor-on-the-Lake, Ohio | 440-290-7805 visit us at: www.Andersons.pub

TUESDAY HOPPY HOUR$2 TACOS, TALLS, & JAMO, $1 OFF CRAFT Now booking special events! Bring the ofﬁce for a complimentary after work party

Garage Bar, Frank & Tony’s, and Anderson’s are hosting the Dieter Crawl on May 12th. Dieter & WMMS friends will be joining us for challenges & games against Deiter on our patios. Sampling’s & prizes from Leinenkugel ladies at each location. First stop on the crawl is Anderson’s @ 7:00pm, followed by Garage Bar @ 9:00pm & then FATs @ 11:00pm.

FILM

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

GET OUT MUSIC

Late Night with Leonard Bernstein Late Night with Leonard Bernstein celebrates the life and legacy of iconic composer Leonard Bernstein with a multimedia portrait of the man. Hosted and narrated by his daughter Jamie, today’s program — which takes place at 2 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art — features soprano Amy Burton and pianists John Musto and Michael Boriskin. The ﬁnale of the 2017-2018 Tri-C Presents Classical Piano Series, the event marks what would have been Bernstein’s 100th birthday. Admission is free. (Niesel) 11150 East Blvd., 216-421-7350, clevelandart.org.

BOOKS

Sunday Beat As part of a Sunday Beat promotion at Visible Voice Books, if you purchase a New York Times at the store, you’ll receive a free cup of coffee or tea and a Jim Alesci’s Place pastry. An added bonus: A jazz, Americana, samba or bossa nova band will perform from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Anyone who shows a Sunday receipt from Music Box, Prosperity Social Club or any of the Tremont restaurants that offer brunch can enter a same-day drawing for a $30 Visible Voice gift certificate and a $25 Visible Voice Loyalty Card. They’ll also receive 10 percent off any Visible Voice book purchase. The bookstore is open today from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Niesel) 2258 Professor Ave., 216-961-0084, visiblevoicebooks.com.

COMEDY

YOU AND A GUEST ARE INVITED TO A SPECIAL SCREENING

TUESDAY, MAY 8 7:00 P.M. PLEASE VISIT WBTICKETS.COM AND ENTER THE CODE

SMLOTP2C TO DOWNLOAD YOUR COMPLIMENTARY PASSES! RATED PG-13 FOR SEXUAL MATERIAL, DRUG CONTENT AND PART YING.

Please note: Passes are limited and will be distributed on a ﬁrst come, ﬁrst served basis while supplies last. No phone calls, please. Limit one pass per person. Each pass admits two. Seating is not guaranteed. Arrive early. Theater is not responsible for overbooking. This screening will be monitored for unauthorized recording. By attending, you agree not to bring any audio or video recording device into the theater (audio recording devices for credentialed press excepted) and consent to a physical search of your belongings and person. Any attempted use of recording devices will result in immediate removal from the theater, forfeiture, and may subject you to criminal and civil liability. Please allow additional time for heightened security. You can assist us by leaving all nonessential bags at home or in your vehicle.

IN THEATERS MAY 11 SOUNDTRACK AVAILABLE NOW lifeoftheparty-movie.com #LifeOfTheParty

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Bill Maher As the host of two political talk shows, the author of five best-selling books and the documentarian behind 2008’s Religulous, Bill Maher has been making his rounds for more than 30 years. In that time, he’s been nominated for numerous Emmys for his live standup specials and talk shows, though the controversial comedian hasn’t been popular with everyone. Maher’s first foray into latenight television, Politically Incorrect, ran from 1993 until 2002, when it was canceled after the quick-witted and strong-willed comic referred to George W. Bush as “cowardly.” Whoops. However, just a year after the remarks, HBO picked him up for Real Time with Bill Maher. The ongoing series blends comedy with serious political and social criticism. Maher performs tonight at 7:30 at Hard Rock Live. Consult the Hard Rock Rocksino website for ticket prices. (Brittany Rees) 10705 Northfield Rd., Northfield, 330-908-7771, hrrocksinonorthfieldpark.com. COMEDY

Miranda Sings Live ... You’re Welcome Ten years ago, actor, comedian and singer Colleen Ballinger created her sarcastic alter ego Miranda Sings, a social media sensation who has more than 20 million followers on the net and has surpassed more than two billion views on YouTube. She appeared in one of the more bizarre episodes of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. She appears tonight at 7:30 at Connor Palace. Tickets start at $40. (Niesel) 1615 Euclid Ave., 216-241-6000, playhousesquare.org.

MON 05/07 NIGHTLIFE

Shit Show Karaoke Local rapper/promoter Dirty Jones and Scene’s own Manny Wallace host Shit Show Karaoke, a weekly event at the B-Side Liquor Lounge that allows patrons to choose from “an unlimited selection of jams from hip-hop to hard rock.” Participants are encouraged to “be as bad as you want.” Fueled by drink and shot specials, it all goes down tonight at 10 p.m. (Niesel) 2785 Euclid Hts. Blvd., Cleveland Heights, 216-932-1966, bsideliquorlounge.com.

TUE

05/08

MUSIC

Vinyl Night Jukebox owner Alex Budin has described his 1,350-squarefoot music-focused bar in the Hingetown ’hood as “a place where people can expect to hear and learn about music of multiple genres, all of which is concentrated in a constantly evolving jukebox.” The club hosts a vinyl night every Tuesday that serves as a listening party for new releases, partnering with Loop in Tremont, so patrons can hear a new album on vinyl. You can bring your own vinyl and spin it too. It all starts at 5 p.m. (Niesel) 1404 West 29th St., 216-206-7699, jukeboxcle.com.

scene@clevescene.com t@clevelandscene

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

STAGE A FAMILY DRAMA … EXECUTED Lazy writing, other unfortunate factors combine for soggy Appropriate at Dobama Theatre By Christine Howey IT’S PROBABLY NOT NEWS TO you that families have secrets, including yours. Also, it’s probably not surprising that some of those secrets will eventually be revealed (including that thing with Aunt Doris). Yes, secrets can rip families apart, which is why such stories have been a staple of playwrights for eons. In Appropriate, the oftenoutrageous, often-brilliant young African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has opted for a very traditional form of storytelling. Borrowing types and tropes from a variety of family dramas, he presents the all-white Lafayette family, assembling in sweaty summertime Arkansas, in mid collapse. It is a bold choice, since JacobsJenkins has muted his own inventive voice in the service of a conceit that attempts to reveal the unthinking, natural racism that infects many people in this country. But in this production, the usually splendid director Nathan Motta leads his cast into multiple dead ends that ﬁnally become as exhausting as the overamped cicada sound effects that accompany each scene change. The Layfayette clan (you should excuse the term) is gathering after the death of Pappy F., the old man who held the brood together. They are there to commiserate and pick over what’s left of the family’s rundown homestead Not only that, the big house is surrounded by separate graveyards, as was the custom back in the day down there — one for the deceased family members and one for the slaves. At the beginning, son Frank, who has renamed himself Franz, sneaks in through a window with his self-named ﬁancee River. Why they sneak in is never quite explained, since it becomes clear later on that they’ve been summoned to the old man’s casa. But never mind, it allows for moody lighting and a surprise when Franz’ nephew Rhys rises up from where he was sleeping under a blanket on the couch like a Halloween spook. Yes, you guessed it: This is a ghost story, and every member

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Photo by Steve Wagner Photography

of the eight-person family will be touched by some scary stuff by the end. These include Franz’ sister Toni, an edgy middle-aged divorcee who’s been caring for Pops. She is joined by her brother Bo, his wife Rachael, and their kids — teenager Cassidy and rug rat Ainsley. It doesn’t take long for the sparks to start ﬂying, as Toni clashes with just about everyone in sight. When Rachael laments her status as “Bo’s Jew wife” and sarcastically invites the acidic Toni to call her a couple hateful epithets, Toni snarkily obliges. But most of the tension arises from a scrapbook which comprises photos of lynched black folks, which was evidently kept as a treasured family heirloom by

allows his cast, many of whom have extensive stage experience, to attack each other in similar tones of voice and speech patterns. As a result, the supposedly sizzling family dynamics soon devolve into predictable sitcom-like shouting matches. In the pivotal role of Toni, Tracee Patterson spits nails with panache but doesn’t manage to ﬁnd a more interesting core at the heart of this damaged woman. As Franz and River, Abraham McNeil Adams and Kelly McReady lend a new-agey gooﬁness, especially in Franz’ monologue about forgiveness. And Ireland Derry’s Cassidy, Jacob Eeg as Rhys, and Miles Pierce as Ainsley show their confusion as the next generation growing up into

APPROPRIATE THROUGH MAY 20 AT DOBAMA THEATRE, 2340 LEE RD., CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, 216-932-3396. DOBAMA.ORG

their dead daddy. The playwright proceeds to show how each of the family members reacts to this rancid object, from outright horror to dreams of cashing it in on eBay. Unfortunately, that authorial cleverness is slowly dampened by a production that ﬁnds itself stuck in a one-note rut too soon and too often. Director Motta

this toxic landscape. There’s a lot going on in this nearly three-hour play, and some characters just get lost. As Bo, the excellent actor Tom Woodward seems a bit adrift, caught between defending his father’s reputation and protecting his wife. And although Ursula Cataan as Rachael matches Patterson’s Toni in terms

of argumentative energy, her character as written is almost totally reactive and thereby unable to assert a clear identity of her own. The magnificently shabby set designed by Cameron Michalak is a fine and proper mess. However a series of concluding vignettes, featuring only the set as it crumbles, is meant to symbolize disintegration. Unfortunately it is so over the top it triggers (unintended?) laughter from the audience. Even a big and well-executed fight (nod to fight choreographer Ryan Zarecki) near the end of the play feels both extraneous and pro forma. By lazily trying to co-opt existing scripts and characters, playwright Jacobs-Jenkins has painted himself into a corner. Some minor but significant production wrinkles combine with the less-than-incisive script to leave Appropriate in the nether world between serious family drama and a parody of the same. Perhaps it would have been better if a giant cicada had crushed the collapsing home at the end. But no, either way the sound effect would still be crickets.

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| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Photo by Emanuel Wallace

EAT STAYING POWER Like many neighborhood Italian restaurants, Pepper’s has a devoted fanbase By Douglas Trattner WRITER CALVIN TRILLIN famously said, “Anybody who doesn’t think that the best hamburger place in the world is in his home town is a sissy.” Swap out Italian restaurant for hamburger place and the sentiment still holds water. For as long as I’ve been covering food, complete strangers have been counseling me on “the city’s best Italian restaurant,” which invariably sits down the block from their home. Every hamlet’s got at least one redsauce joint that dishes up heaping portions of rib-sticking fare that could go apron-to-apron with Nonna. One of the restaurants that habitually comes up is Pepper’s, which turns 20 years old next year. Two visits later I’m reminded that user experiences may vary. Few cuisines have the ability to satisfy so thoroughly, so purely as Italian-American, an ethnic comfort food for the masses. You know what’s on the menu before you ever step foot inside, and half the fun is mapping out a journey that ends, invariably, with equal parts glee and regret for what we managed to pack away. First impressions at Pepper’s are encouraging, with warm welcomes and intoxicating aromas of garlic filling the air. For a first-timer, little lifts the spirit and boosts the confidence like a packed house, and Pepper’s is always full. Granted, “full” tops out at about 30 guests squeezed like anchovies into a diminutive dining room. Do as the locals and order a beer or glass of wine to help pass the time while you wait in the tiny vestibule for your table. It’s then and there that flashes of skepticism begin to nibble away at the reverie. Sure, it’s just decoration, but faded plastic grape vines, a dust-covered ceiling fan, and aged window air conditioner units with dangling cords don’t do much to kindle the appetite.

At its best, Italian-American is unfussy cooking that transforms a few humble but high-quality ingredients into more than the sum of their parts. At its worst, it’s an order of breaded zucchini sticks ($9) that get dumped from freezer bag to deep fryer. Inside the crunchy but bland shell is a watery, mushy paste that might as well have been okra. When the breaded sliced eggplant ($7) was recommended to us on a subsequent visit, we gave it a chance, only to face the same disappointing results.

alongside regulars to scribble down an order. In a small space like this it’s impossible to overlook how eager, earnest and efﬁcient the team is. Bottles of wine appear and are uncorked with proﬁciency. Expect markups on the largely budget selections to exceed 300, and even 400, percent over wholesale. When our server announced that the night’s special was gnocchi, we asked if it was made in house. No, was the answer. When our server rattled off a list of salad dressings,

PEPPER’S ITALIAN RESTAURANT 12401 DETROIT AVE., LAKEWOOD 216-226-6191 PEPPERSLAKEWOOD.COM

Trial and error (and error) rewarded us with sausage pizzaiola ($10), a warm skillet loaded with sliced and sauteed Italian sausage, onions and bell peppers. Making tasty little sandwiches with the house rolls and the accompanying marinara is about as close to Little Italy as one will get here. The garlic bread ($6) consists of soft Italian bread enrobed in melted cheese, nothing more, nothing less. Service here is fun-spirited, intimate and informal, with waiters copping a squat in a booth

we posed the same question and received the same answer. That became clear when our salads arrived with small plastic ramekins of commercial dressings that were so viscous from thickeners that they were difﬁcult to pour. How hard is it to make a little vinaigrette? Some highlights from the menu include the lasagna ($17), a corpulent stack of noodles, meat, cheese and sauce baked in a skillet and delivered hot and bubbly. In an effort to stretch a buck,

perhaps, the kitchen doubles up on the noodles — a pair for every layer —which sends the ratio out of whack. The breading on the chicken Parmesan ($19) had long since lost its crackle and crunch, but the portion was robust and the ﬂavors familiar and pleasant. All the pastas, from the included side of spaghetti that came with the Parm to a bowl of penne pesto, were plucked from the water at just the right moment. A wide crock of mac and cheese with “langostino lobster” ($15) has a luscious, creamy texture and crispy bread topping. But the seafood was arranged on top, likely in an effort to advertise its presence, and dried out in the broiler. Langostino, by the way, has nothing to do with lobster. What irked us most was a brief exchange with the owner one night while we were waiting for our tab. When he visited the table and asked how everything was, I noticed him glance down at the fried zucchini that had lingered untouched since the start of our meal. I responded, “mostly ﬁne,” and gestured to the appetizer. And then the check came, zucchini and all.

dtrattner@clevescene.com t@dougtrattner | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

EAT

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LA CAVE DU VIN CLOSES AFTER MORE THAN 20 YEARS By Douglas Trattner

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| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

LONG BEFORE THERE WERE wine bars in every neighborhood — heck, before there were wine bars at all — La Cave du Vin had carved out a niche separate and distinct from the city’s other clubs and beer bars, thanks to its worldly wine catalog and selection of far-flung brews. For 23 years, La Cave du Vin has been a delicious anomaly in Cleveland Heights, where college-aged coeds often got their first sip of good hooch, always served with a sidecar of great conversation. While there have been various owners, managers and staffers over the years, the mission has always remained true: to serve as a grownup alternative to the puke and punch palaces that typically represent college-bar communities. From its beginnings in 1994, La Cave du Vin has been the hospitable, subterranean wine cave where many of us first learned about the Bavarian purity law of 1516 and what the hell “meritage” actually meant. Of course, we have Erich Lasher to thank for that and more, as the house expert on all things beer, wine, motorcycles and other esoteric factoids. Owner Laura Honeycutt Baxter announced recently that La Cave du Vin would close on Sunday April 29. “It’s with mixed emotions that I must announce that La Cave du Vin will close its doors after almost 23 years in business,” she says. “While I am immensely sad that this era has come to a close, I am filled with pride to have called this place home for almost half of my life.” At present, there’s no word on what might become of the space.

Polpetta Moves Up to Brick and Mortar in Rocky River “We’re moving the Polpetta concept out of Porco and to a brick and mortar, which has been the goal all along,” says chef Brian Okin. “We used Porco as a means to present the concept to the city and for us to work out the recipes.” Polpetta is a joint venture from the folks at Cork and Cleaver and Porco

Lounge. A lease was signed yesterday for the space most recently home to River Dog Cafe (19900 Detroit Rd.) in Rocky River. (That concept now lives on as popular food truck.) The plaza, near Wooster Road, also is home to Bomba Tacos. The concept, in play at Porco Lounge for just over a year, was inspired by a trip to New York, says Okin, when he and colleagues visited the Meatball Shop on the Lower East Side. “I was blown away by how obvious and simple and great the concept was and the fact that there was nothing even remotely like this in Cleveland,” the chef reports. “I thought to do something like that in Cleveland — not their exact concept, but to be inspired by it and do something based off of it — would be an awesome idea.” When it opens in June, Polpetta will be casual full-service restaurant and bar that will seat between 70 and 100 guests. As for the menu, it’s pretty straightforward, adds Okin. “It’s your basic build-your-own setup where you pick your ball, pick your sauce, pick your side.” Okin says that diners can expect between eight and 12 varieties of meatball on the menu at any given time that range from vegan to “fullblown carnivore.” Sauces include pomodoro, mushroom gravy, Parmesan cream and pesto. Sides might feature braised Italian greens, creamy polenta, mashedpotatoesorrigatoni.Meatballs can be ordered on their own, as sliders or in large sandwiches. Salads and appetizers will round out the roster. Because the Porco team is involved, guests can also expect “world-class cocktails,” Okin notes. While it won’t be “Porco 2.0,” he adds, you might run into a tiki drink or two at some point. There will also be beer and wine. Going forward, Porco Lounge will always feature a meatball as part of its “gloriously eclectic set of theme nights across the week,” but it won’t be the main event.

dtrattner@clevescene.com t@dougtrattner

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MUSIC JUKEBOX HERO The E Street Band’s Max Weinberg talks about his ‘all-request-from-the-audience’ band By Matt Wardlaw MAX WEINBERG’S FIRST ROCK ’n’ roll jukebox, figuratively speaking, was the speakers of his radio when he was growing up. As he recalls now, his favorite thing was learning the songs that were on the Top 40 charts, and he took that knowledge and played with a variety of bands as a kid. “Of course, when you look back on that time, the ’60s and ’70s, before I got with Bruce, apart from taking drum lessons, it was how I learned to play the drums and to perform,” he says during a phone interview. He brings Max Weinberg’s Jukebox to the Winchester at 9 p.m. on Thursday. “I grew up as a drummer having to play all different kinds of music. Not just rock, but a little bit of everything. My first love, of course, was rock, and as a drummer, you know, bands always need a drummer. And if you know the songs, even better.” With Springsteen currently playing to sellout crowds with a solo show on Broadway, Weinberg found himself with some time to fill. His manager had an interesting idea about how the veteran drummer could keep his chops sharp during the downtime. “You love to play the old rock tunes, and people love to hear them,” he told Weinberg. “How about a small ‘all-request-from-the-audience’band?” “As he described it, it sounded like a human jukebox,” Weinberg says. “You pick the songs! So I decided on the basics, which is two guitars, bass and drums, and Max Weinberg’s Jukebox was born!” Weinberg gave his manager some instructions: He wanted to play small clubs with a specific reason in mind. “I [needed] to play places like the Stone Pony or the old Agora Club in Cleveland, where it’s a drinking establishment. Because this isn’t a concert, it’s a party! Playing everything,” he says. “People get to pick from about 400 songs on revolving video screens that are placed around the venue. The audience picks the songs, and they just call them out. The idea is to create a little bit of pandemonium. A little Bruce, Van Morrison, the Beach Boys. You name it: The guys who I’m playing with are incredible. They know every song. They sing

like Crosby, Stills and Nash, they play unbelievably and we’ve been having a blast with it.” Weinberg’s band, as he indicates, is made up of ace players who he’s “known forever, individually.” Singer-songwriters Glen Burtnik (Styx, the Orchestra) and Bob Burger, plus singerguitarist John Merjave form the usual core of the band. When they’re not playing with Weinberg, they work steadily with their own project, the Weeklings, a New Jersey-based group that performs a blend of original power pop mixed with Beatles classics. “I’ve always been impressed by Max’s professionalism and his drumming,” Burtnik writes in an email. “I’m very much enjoying playing this music from my [and his] youth alongside Max on stage.” Weinberg admits there was a bit of homework in learning to play songs from outside Springsteen’s body of work. “As Bruce has said in interviews, ‘As long as me and Max know it, we can play it and everybody else can ﬁgure it out.’ He got into a thing in Australia a couple of tours ago where in each city, we played a big hit song from that city. We played [songs like] ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ ‘Friday on My Mind,’ which took a lot … you know, ‘Friday on My Mind’ is not something that

Photo by Melissa Korma

type of evening. “If somebody has a question, I answer it. I talk quite a bit,” he says. “There’s a little bit of, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it comedy, but I did pick up a certain amount of perspective on the world working with all of these great writers for all of those years on TV, so that comes out. It’s very interactive.” One song that seems to ﬁnd its way into the show each night is “American Girl” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. “I think that it’s a song that

MAX WEINBERG’S JUKEBOX 9 P.M. THURSDAY, MAY 4, THE WINCHESTER, 12112 MADISON AVE., LAKEWOOD, 216-600-5338. TICKETS: $67.50-$174.50, TICKETFLY.COM

you just go up there and play. You have to work out the parts. They’re very intricate.” But, he adds, “I have one of those memories, it’s just weird, that if I’ve heard a song on the radio once, I can play it. Bruce’s songbook is about 800 songs and he could virtually pull out any one of them at any time. We did like 200 different songs, I think, on this last tour. So you do sort of have to be ready for almost anything.” Weinberg describes a Jukebox show as an “audience participatory”

captured, it seems, in all four corners of the United States, at least where I’ve played with this band, everybody’s imagination,” he says. “I’m sure the fact that he passed away made it even more poignant, but everybody loves that song. We also get the Band’s ‘The Weight,’ [originally] sung by Levon Helm — people like to hear that, it seems, every night. But then it could range, some nights it could be a little bit heavier crowd that wants to hear Bad Company, or everybody loves ‘Highway to Hell,’ and I love playing

that song. He still gets a thrill out of nailing the really difﬁcult sections of classics like Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times, Bad Times.” “[That’s] particularly challenging for me. Because no one ever has approached the kind of drumming that John Bonham displayed throughout his short career. It’s what kind of keeps me going. And it may be because I’m a drummer and not a songwriter or a guitar player, but I really get off on playing ‘Nowhere Man,’ you know, stuff that I learned how to play the drums to. So as long as I can keep doing that, I don’t think there’s any books in my near future.” “Books” as in a memoir, a topic which comes up when we ask Weinberg if he has any plans to write his own book. He tells us that it could happen someday “when I get old.” “Playing with Bruce keeps me in shape, because that’s so intense. I need to expel that kind of energy. It’s just in me. I guess that’s why I became a drummer in the ﬁrst place.” He calls Springsteen’s best-selling memoir “a tour de force,” and says, “I really enjoyed it and I thought the tone he hit and everything was really unbelievable.” For now, though, he’ll keep playing, wherever his drumming might take him. And as for the chance of further shows with Springsteen and the E Street Band? “You know, I really don’t know. I’m asked that question everywhere I go,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t really know. None of us really know. He doesn’t know. His management doesn’t know. But I’ve always lived by the line in ‘Thunder Road.’ ‘Show a little faith/ There’s magic in the night.’ There’s never been a discussion of what’s next. At least not between us. But yeah, I have a lot of faith and I have a lot of energy left. I’ll keep drumming regardless of whoever’s stage it’s on. I certainly hope so, that we play again. I have no crystal ball, but I do have a lot of faith.”

scene@clevescene.com t@clevelandscene | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Photo by Jeff Niesel

MUSIC ONE OF A KIND Trixie Mattel brings her Now with Moving Parts tour to House of Blues By Michael Wu THIS IS HOW TO DESCRIBE Trixie Mattel to someone who has never heard of Trixie Mattel. Think Barbie, but with eyes the shape of a rounded rhombus, taking up a third of her face, and hair so tall it grazes the ozone layer it helps to destroy with all the hair spray needed to keep it upright. Think Dolly Parton circa 1975 — but a drawing of Dolly by someone who’s only seen her face a few times and maybe took a hallucinogenic a couple of hours before. Then there’s the business of explaining why Trixie Mattel is famous, why she’s amassed millions of followers on social media, why people are willing to wait hours in lines at convention centers to meet her and take a selfie, and why a web series she appeared in became so successful that Viceland came calling, making her and co-host Katya the first drag queens to headline a talk show since RuPaul. It may be easiest to say she won the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. There’s also her music. Like many Drag Race alum, Mattel capitalized on her time on the show (initially on season seven, then on All Stars) with an album release. But she went a different route. While most drag music leans toward dance/ club music, Mattel’s first album, Two Birds, drew from her love of classic country and folk. “Drag is what gets people to pay attention to me, but it’s also what makes people initially convinced there’s no way I could be a proficient musician. It’s sort of like if James Taylor was in a chicken suit,” Mattel says in a recent phone interview. Mattel’s nearly 50-city Now With Moving Parts tour comes to House of Blues on Friday. “If Two Birds didn’t work, then it was a vanity project, and everyone laughed at me.” Though she exists in an industry of artifice, Trixie Mattel’s personal life — or more accurately, that of her out-of-drag persona, Brian Firkus —is inextricably tied to her drag, her comedy and her music. Take her name. Though “Mattel” is

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

an homage to the creators of Barbie, an obvious visual reference, “Trixie” entered Firkus’ life as an insult hurled at him as a young man when his stepfather felt he was acting too feminine. “I think of myself as a comedian and a musician who happens to be in drag,” Mattel says. “But I love drag and the license to kill that drag gives me. … There’s something compelling about a crying clown, looking like a wind-up child’s toy and singing some clever and surprisingly poignant folk music.” Two Birds is made up of a succinct six tracks, meant to mimic the songs of old country radio Mattel grew up around. It’s a product of the time she spent, as if her life was the ﬁrst verse of a country song, being taught the basics of guitar by her grandfather in the middle of America. “At 13, I was sitting in a tree in northeast Wisconsin learning to play guitar barefoot like a wild animal,” Mattel says. “I never started with music because I thought I could be a professional musician.” Somehow, the draw of the crying clown — of James Taylor in a chicken suit — turned Trixie Mattel into a professional musician. She had transformed fans of a show about grown-ups in extravagant makeup into country music devotees. Two

it’s a little more like maybe you’re not the protagonist in every story,” Mattel says. “I wrote all the music on One Stone for just my own human development.” One Stone’s highlights include “Little Sister,” a gentle plea written to Mattel’s younger sister to venture out of the small Wisconsin town where they grew up. There’s also “Red Side of the Moon,” about the challenges Mattel has faced maintaining a relationship as a touring performer, written from the perspective of Dolly Parton”s rumored lover Judy Ogle. Once again, plumbing the depths of her own anxieties, heartbreak and other aches of being an adult proved a success for Mattel. The album charted on Billboard and scaled the Top Albums on iTunes, propelled

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Birds sold well enough to propel the album onto the Billboard charts and to the peak of iTunes top albums following its release. The success of Two Birds was enough to convince Mattel to create its followup, One Stone, released last March, timed perfectly to coincide with the night she won All Stars. While the ﬁrst album was made up of what Mattel calls “melodramatic breakup songs,” One Stone ﬁnds the artist casting out further into her expanding musical universe. “One Stone is a little more folksy,

partly by the attention she received as the winner of All Stars. As if she had released a genie and was cashing in her ﬁnal wish, Mattel also received glowing messages from some of her favorite ﬁgures in modern music. Miley Cyrus and Kacey Musgraves each mentioned wanting to collaborate with her. Michelle Branch — Mattel’s all time favorite artist —reached out to her over social media. “These are people that shouldn’t even know if I’m alive. I’m not sure if my mom knows if I’m dead or alive,

but Kacey Musgraves knows I’m alive and that’s way more important,” Mattel says. Mattel wrote, sang and played guitar for every song on One Stone, a project she financed herself. She also recorded the entire album in three days to accommodate filming episodes of the Viceland series, The Trixie and Katya Show. “I make all my music for my own human fulfillment. There’s no grand scheme. There’s not a cabal of people devising this business model,” Mattel says, before we get any ideas about a cushy life after Drag Race success. “I’m a drag queen. I’m lucky if someone pushes the handicapped button on the door, so I can get through with my suitcase in full drag.” Although her face can be recognized just about anywhere from just about any distance, Brian Firkus, currently in his late 20s, doesn’t expect to be dressing up as Trixie Mattel in his 50s. He’s interested in exploring characters outside of Trixie, like the closeted Vietnam War vet/art teacher with Bob Ross hair who is introduced in the “Little Sister” music video. But for now, Trixie Mattel, the television star, the heartland Barbie that slipped past quality control, the crying clown, is as viable as she’s ever been. “There’s a million and one white guys with guitars. Who cares?” Mattel says. “But there’s only one Trixie Mattel.”

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| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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| cleves clevescene.com essce cene. ne.com ne m | May M y 2 - 8, 2018 Ma

LIVEWIRE

all the live music you should see this week Photo courtesy of Flariella Records

WED

05/02

5J Barrow/Maura Rogers & the Bellows/David Mayﬁeld: 8 p.m., $8 ADV, $10 DOS. Beachland Tavern. Killswitch Engage/Hatebreed/The Word Alive: 7 p.m., $26.50 ADV, $30 DOS. The Agora Theatre. The Lucky Losers: 7 p.m., $15. Nighttown. Mastri/Le Cointre Duo: 7 p.m., $12. Bop Stop. Project/Object: The Music of Frank Zappa/CuDa/KrishNa & CuDa: 8 p.m., $20 ADV, $25 DOS. Beachland Ballroom.

THU

05/03

For The Sake Of A Narrative Closure: New Opera And Electronics: 7 p.m., $10. Bop Stop. The Happy Fits/Moon Rocks/ Strange Messenger: 8:30 p.m., $6 ADV, $8 DOS. Beachland Ballroom. Max Weinberg’s Jukebox: 9 p.m., $67.50-$174.50. The Winchester. John McCutcheon: Master of the hammered dulcimer, veteran folk singer John McCutcheon learned to play the instrument by happenstance. He had a girlfriend back in the early 1970s who went to a summer workshop at a West Virginia college. One of the classes was instrument building. Students built a couple types of instruments; a hammered dulcimer was the ﬁrst. So on a visit to see her, McCutcheon learned to play it. Turns out, he was good. Expect him to play the instrument tonight at Nighttown, a venue he loves, as he comes to town in support of his 39th album, Ghost Light. (Jeff Niesel) 8 p.m., $30. Nighttown. Messthetics/Terminal Lovers: 9 p.m., $10. Survival Kit Gallery. The Molice/Womantra/Mild Animals,: 8 p.m., $4 ADV $7 DOS. CODA. Ohm/Shy Moon: 8 p.m., $8 ADV, $10 DOS. Now That’s Class. Phat Cat Swinger!: 7:30 p.m., $20 ADV, $25 DOS. Music Box Supper Club. Protest the Hero/Good Tiger/ Destrange: 7 p.m., $20 ADV, $22 DOS. Grog Shop. Red Rose Panic/The Katy/ SANKURO, Mister Moon/ HR3: Beats Drums & Music/

LuvAbstract: Akron duo Red Rose Panic expanded into a ﬁvepiece a few years back, recruiting members from their church. Inspired by N.E.R.D. rapper and songwriter Pharrell Williams, the band issued the EP One Night Standard in 2014 and followed it up in 2016 with the single “Party Time, Excellent.” The group has just ﬁnished cutting Time Attack, recorded at Central 8 Studios in Akron. Tonight’s show serves as a release party. The groovy, guitardriven “Been There” shows how capably the band embraces hiphop, funk and pop. Expect to hear it along with a slew of other new tunes. (Niesel) Free. Annabell’s. Amy Rigby/Johnny Dowd: 8 p.m., $10 ADV, $12 DOS. Beachland Tavern.

FRI

05/04

Chuck Auerbach Band/Ray Flanagan: Chuck Auerbach was always a bit of a “rocker dad” to his singer-guitarist son, Dan, encouraging him to follow his own musical path. The emotional investment paid off. A former Akronite, Dan Auerbach has gone on to win numerous awards as a producer and solo artist and as a member of the Black Keys. Two years ago, Chuck Auerbach, who lives in Akron, decided to launch his own musical career. He recently performed at South by Southwest, where he played his original tunes with a little help from a ﬁve-piece band. Auerbach brings that band, which includes Russ Flannigan on keyboards, Kevin Martinez on upright and electric bass, Danny Tommy Jenkins on percussion, Cathy Grady on violin, viola, guitar and vocals, and Michael Grady on guitar, harmonica and vocals, to the Beachland Tavern tonight. The group will release its debut, which Dan Auerbach produced, on Father’s Day. (Niesel) 8 p.m., $10 ADV, $12 DOS. Beachland Tavern. The Clarks/The Jack Fords: 9 p.m., $16 ADV, $18 DOS. Grog Shop. Cleveland Chamber Collective: Bernstein Centennial Concert: 8 p.m., free. Bop Stop. Hollywood Nights, A True Bob Seger Experience: 8 p.m., $20$30. Music Box Supper Club. The Hot Club of Cowtown: 8 p.m., $20 ADV, $25 DOS. Beachland

Singer-songwriter Iris DeMent comes to the Music Box. See: Sunday.

Ballroom. Jazz Jam Session: 11 p.m., free. Bop Stop. Koss Music Center Fundraiser with Bridesmaid/The Sibs/Dead Set Ready: 9 p.m., $8 ADV, $10 DOS. The Winchester. Trixie Mattel: 8 p.m., $40.50 ADV, $45.50 DOS. House of Blues. Nile/Soulﬂy: 6 p.m., $9.99 ADV, $15 DOS. The Agora Theatre. Odesza/Pluko/Kimbra: 7:30 p.m. Jacobs Pavilion. Queensryche: 8 p.m. Hard Rock Rocksino Northﬁeld Park. RADATTACK/Leaf Borbie & The Family Tree/Mitchell Plank: 8 p.m., $4 ADV $7 DOS. CODA. Tom Rush/Christine Lavin: 8 p.m., $30-$35. The Kent Stage. Corky Siegel & Howard Levy: 8:30 p.m., $30. Nighttown. Caitlyn Smith/Andrea Davidson/ Josee McGee: 9 p.m., $15. Musica.

SAT

05/05

Blindspot /The Electric Grandmother/Johnny La Rock/ Loi Loi: 8 p.m., $4 ADV, $7 DOS. CODA. Cats On Holiday, Cinco de Mayo Party (in the Supper Club): 8 p.m., $8 ADV, $10 DOS. Music Box Supper Club. Dead Kennedys/T.S.O.L./Gay Black Republican/The Snakes/Stalker:

7 p.m., $15 ADV, $20 DOS. The Agora Theatre. The Dream Syndicate/Falling Stars: 8:30 p.m., $20. Beachland Ballroom. Archie Green/Dom Deshawn/Feed the People/H9RU/Sam Supreme: 9 p.m., $10 ADV, $15 DOS. Grog Shop. PJ Morton/Brik.Liam/Toobe Fresco: 8:30 p.m., $20 ADV, $25 DOS. House of Blues Cambridge Room. Pharmakon/Jim Davis/Fana/DJ Geauga Lake/Moth Cock: 9 p.m., $10. Now That’s Class. Dan Pugach Nonet: 8:30 p.m., $20. Nighttown. Red Sun Rising/The Outside Voices: 9 p.m., $18. Musica. Ruby the Rabbitfoot/Biitchseat: 8:30 p.m., $7 ADV, $10 DOS. Beachland Tavern. Suicide Prevention Beneﬁt Show in Honor of Nick Ramsey with Kel SD/Nothing Major: 8 p.m., $8. Mahall’s 20 Lanes. Wish You Were Here: 9 p.m., $18.50 ADV, $21 DOS. House of Blues.

SUN

05/06

The Brevet/The Midnight Slander: 8 p.m., $10 ADV, $12 DOS. Beachland Tavern. Cleveland Sessions: The Whiskey Hollow (in the Supper Club): 6 p.m., free. Music Box Supper Club. Iris DeMent/Sam Baker: To stand out in a sea of singer-songwriter wannabes, a person’s vocals must sound wholly organic. In Iris DeMent’s voice, there’s wildness but also purity. She aimed to emulate her mother’s voice, as well as the sound of the preacher’s wife from her hometown church. When she sits at the piano, she says she does her best to let “something ancient and spirit-ﬁlled come through and move around the music.” Expect her to tap into those emotions for tonight’s show. (Laura Morrison) 7:30 p.m., $35 ADV, $40 DOS. Music Box Supper Club. Faux Ferocious: 9 p.m., $5. Now That’s Class. Toobe Fresco/Uptowne Buddha/ Jul Big Green/Curly Chuck: Local rapper Toobe Fresco says “there’s high energy, excitement and soul” in his live show, and we believe the guy. Musically, Fresco does it all — he writes, he produces, he engineers. Fresco’s | clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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LIVEWIRE new album, Never Better, is due to be released shortly, and he promises an abundance of truth, soul and encouragement. Expect to hear tracks from it at tonightâ€™s show. (Emanuel Wallace) 8 p.m., $10. Grog Shop. A Tribute to Cindy Barber with Alex Bevan/Colin Dussault/Neon Don Buchanan/Stutz Bearcat/ Eva Dilcue/David Smeltz/Marc Lee Shannon/Rachel Brown/ Alexis Antes/Tracy Marie/David Krauss/Robert Kidney & Friends/ Bob Frank/Ray Flanagan/Maura Rogers: 8 p.m., $20. Beachland Ballroom. SayWeCanFly/Braden Barrie/ Fairview/Lauren Widdoes: 6:30 p.m., $12. Musica. Stryper: 7 p.m., $24.99 ADV, $30 DOS. Agora Ballroom. Jsaxx Watkins: 5 p.m., $20. Bop Stop. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal/Lil Zubin/Fantasy Camp/Dark Spring/ Seth Hasan: 7 p.m., $13 ADV, $15 DOS. Mahallâ€™s 20 Lanes.

MON

05/08

Coma Cinema/Kid Tigrrr: 8 p.m., $13 ADV, $15 DOS. Mahallâ€™s 20 Lanes. John Popper: 8 p.m., $40-$55. The Kent Stage. Sunï¬‚ower Bean/Dream Wife: 8:30 p.m., $12. Beachland Tavern. Uptowne Buddha/Dandu: 8 p.m., free. CODA. The Writers Block Featuring Alex Zinni and Hanna Stakolich/Kim Haffey/Phil Carroll/Alyssa Boyd/ Jessica Yafanaro: 8:30 p.m., $5. Grog Shop.

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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Ceramic Animal/Marco Ciofani/Ray Flanagan: 8 p.m., $4 ADV, $7 DOS. CODA. Coping Skills/Shade/Self Taught No Lessons: 9 p.m., $5. Now Thatâ€™s Class. Ellis Dawson: 8 p.m., $15. Bop Stop. Smallpools/Great Good Fine OK: 7 p.m., $18 ADV, $22 DOS. House of Blues Cambridge Room. Y La Bamba/Kid Tigrrr/ LittleBoyBigHeadOnBike: 8 p.m., $10 ADV, $12 DOS. Beachland Tavern.

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| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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SAVAGE LOVE QUICKIES By Dan Savage I wish I had a better question, but this is all I have: My friends and I were discussing the nuances of a straight orgy (a roughly equal number of male and female participants) versus a gang bang (one woman, many men), and we observed that there is no proper name for a one man, many women situation. The internet tells me it’s just a “reverse gang bang,” which is a very disappointing name. Can we please establish a new one? Curious Nonparticipant

this winter. During that time, he went to another state. We got back together long-distance, and I received many letters from him saying how much he wanted to have sex with me. He moved back two weeks ago, and we’ve had sex only twice. He used to say he wanted me to make the ﬁrst move. But if he really wanted me, wouldn’t he make a move? I feel so neglected, yet he claims he loves me. Please give me some insight. No Sex For Weeks

How does “pussy riot” grab you? And while we’re on the subject of ﬂipping gendered expressions: A number of years ago, I was asked to come up with a female version of “sausage fest.” Sticking with the food theme, I proposed “clam bake.” Still mystiﬁed as to why it didn’t catch on.

He says he wants sex (with you), but he doesn’t make a move. You say you want sex (with him), but you don’t make a move. So how about this: The next few times you want sex, NSFW, make a move. If he fucks you two out of three times, maybe he was telling the truth when he said he’d like you to make the ﬁrst move. If he rebuffs you every time, then he doesn’t want to have sex with you — and you’ll have to make a move to end this relationship.

Married from 28 to 36, single the last three years, and celibate most of the last couple years. The last two years of my marriage were sexless, and I saw professionals until I was priced out. I could probably earn twice what I’m making now if I moved away, but my current job gives me the flexibility to spend afternoons with my young kids. Last year, I had a brief relationship (that included the best sex of my life), but I ended it because I needed more me time. So I lack the willingness or the confidence to be in a relationship, and I don’t have the cash to see pros. I’m not fussed by this. Should I be concerned? Absolutely Not Getting Sex Today Seeing as your celibacy is intermittent and by your own choice (you walked away from the best sex of your life for me time? What kind of mid-’90s Oprah bullshit is that?), ANGST, you’re unlikely to wind up hanging out on an “incel” forum filled with angry, violent, socially maladapted men who blame the fact that they can’t get laid on women and feminism. So long as you continue to take personal responsibility for all the sex you’re not having, there’s nothing to be concerned about.

My boyfriend and I have been together for two years. When we ﬁrst got together, we had sex every day. Then it dwindled. We had major problems along the way and separated

I’m a youngish man who’s been in a loving relationship with an older woman for a year. The only area where the age difference comes into play is largely unspoken between us — she wants kids. I’m nowhere near ready, and I sometimes question whether I want to be monogamous for life. We never discuss it, but I can tell how deeply this bothers her and that in her ideal world, I’d be ready to start planning a future with her. I’m racked with guilt at the possibility that by the time I’m ready for that level of commitment (or, worse, by the time I realize I never will be), she’ll be biologically incapable of having kids. This is all complicated by the fact that this is easily the most loving, trusting, respectful relationship I’ve ever been in. Bond Afﬂicted By Years Speak, BABY: “Look, you want kids. I’m not ready, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. Also, I’m not sure about lifelong monogamy. If we need to part ways so you can ﬁnd someone who wants the same things you do and wants them now, I’ll be devastated but I’ll understand.”

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Your premier choice for classy & fun entertainment providing firstrate entertainment for all occasion, including a wet & wild bachelor parties, divorce parties, birthday celebrations & retirement parties! Whatever the reason is that you request our services, rest assured that we have what you’re looking for! Our carefully selected adorable playmates cater to any occasion! We offer a diverse selection of exotic, classy, sophisticated & gorgeous ladies for you to choose from.

| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

Cleveland:

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Professional Services JC’s Cleaning Service

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Will clean homes & offices. Call 216-941-5688 & ask for John.

Massage - Licensced Relaxation Limited 3834 west 140 st Cleveland Ohio 44111 The Relaxation In Town Walk Ins Welcome 216-671-3813 Relaxationlimited.com 12pm -9 pm Mon -Sat

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1-216-377-6290

METRO LOFTS APARTMENT

PARKSIDE

Located at 3307 Scranton Rd., in Cleveland. 216-351-6936. 21 Loft Style Apartments Secured Entry Off-Street Parking Available Pets welcome w/ fee Central A/C

Spacious 1BR and 2BR suites available. Steps from Lakewood Park. Heat included. 216-392-5384

Real Estate: West/Suburbs Hedgewood Manor Spacious updated 1 bedroom and 2 bedroom suite, Secured entry, laundry on site. Air conditioning. 440-829-8444.

Real Estate Services

WATERBURY Large, remodeled 1br and 2 BR suites. Heat included. Off-street parking available. 216-392-5384.

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EDGECLIFF Large, upgraded suites. Heat included. Overlooking the metro parks. Free off-street parking available. 216-392-5384

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1 BR suites. Backs up to Cleveland Metroparks. Heat Included. Secured Entry. Off-Street Parking Available. 216-392-5384

BROOKSIDE OVAL APARTMENT Located on Park Fulton Oval near the Cleveland Metroparks! 216-351-6936 Choose from any of our newly remodeled 1 & 2 bdrm apartments, all w/ modern kitchens & bathrooms. All feature air-conditioning & Garage parking also available. Brookside is located close to I-480, I-71, and I-90, just minutes from downtown Cleveland. Come home to the beautiful park-like setting of Brookside Apartments! You’ll be happy to call Brookside home.

Who are you after dark?

216-703-4846 Outcall Hours: 2-10 Monday - Thursday Incall Hours: 10-10 and only on Friday, Saturday & Sunday | BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

ELBUR Located on a private tree lined street, 1BR and 2BR suites available. Off-street parking available. Heat included. 216-392-5384.

LAKEWOOD CLIFFS APARTMENTS 18900 Detroit Extension Newly Renovated 1-2 Bedroom Apts Heat & Water Included Updated Laundry on Site Off Street Parking Air Conditioning Secure Entry Lake and Park Views Call for our Specials 216-392-5384 *****some restrictions apply*****

HOME BUYERS!!! Sit down with your guests. Advertise with SCENE. Call 216-241-7550 for more information.

PARK PLACE Spacious 1BR and 2BR suites available. Steps from Edgewater Park. Heat included. Off-street parking available. 216-392-5384

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| clevescene.com | May 2 - 8, 2018

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