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A Stone’s Throw: “That Abortion Play” 30 Years Later

Thirty years ago, as an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, I wrote a play: A Stone’s Throw. The full-length drama was about the dilution of the human spirit forged against the willful hard-edge of moral exhumation — but my production quickly became known on campus as “That Abortion Play.” You may download an early draft of “A Stone’s Throw” on this Boles.com Prairie Voice Archive Scripts page; and here some of the reviews of the production.

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New York City Union Square Street Performance

Yesterday, I was fortunate to watch a live Memorial Day weekend performance in Union Square in New York City. The performers were wild and quite enjoyable and I have some video tidbits of the event to share with you.


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The Eight-Year Jersey City Crossing Guard Who Lost His Heart

I do a lot of walking in New York City and Jersey City.  There’s one particular corner in Jersey City that always strikes fear deep in my heart and stabs me down betwixt my toes with absolute pity and terror:  The “crosswalk” — angularly located at the bisection of Nardone Place and John F. Kennedy Boulevard West — spans five lanes of traffic, at least six turning car angles aiming straight at you, and a long walk that means you actually must run as fast as you can to make it safely across the street.

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The Wounding of Surprise and the Danger of Imagination

Surprise and imagination can be both wonderful experiences and dangerous concepts.  We’re trained early in life to find surprise in the world around us, usually juxtaposed against the wilds of nature. We are often encouraged to “think outside the box” and to reimagine reality in ways that can fundamentally change the way we view the world and our role within it. Nothing is out of reason. Everything is possible.

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The Unrepentant: Hart Bochner Would Rather Kill You than Kiss You

Hart Bochner is one of those deliciously rare character actors who can grab a role and make it belong only to him. Danger is his essence.  You love to loathe him.  Hart usually plays the bad guy in a movie and he does the dark side so evilly well.

Over the weekend, we watched the middling 1998 movie Break Up on Netflix starring the always fantastic Bridget Fonda — who has been sadly missing in entertainment action since her 2003 car accident when she broke her back — and the always infamous Hart Bochner.

The movie stars Bridget, but the story belongs to Hart.

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The Eggshell Generation: No Freedom for Danger Children

Life has changed for modern children.  When I was growing up in the Midwest, you sought freedom — and if it wasn’t granted with a bicycle, then you found other, more nefarious ways, to run away and play far away from your doorstep.

It isn’t that way any longer.  Today, kids are protected and driven and supervised in organized sports and cultural events.  There’s no spontaneity now because there’s fear of the unknown and danger in the creative.  No sandlot baseball.  No football games with self-set boundaries and special scoring.  Everything is regulation.  There can be no divergence from the norm.

We’re creating a society of young people who are risk-averse and too frightened to set their own agendas and follow their own, unblazed, pathway. Fun is the new mysterious stranger. “Do what you want” is the new monster under the bed.

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The Liberator: Using 3D Printers to Kill

If you had access to a 3D printer and could create only one thing out of plastic, from scratch, what would you make?  An implantable human ear replacement?  A filter for pumping clean water in thirsty third-world nations?  What about forming something fun and whimsical like, say, an acoustic guitar?  Or, would you take the tunnel of least resistance, and the road of the lowest common human morality, and choose to print a plastic gun for killing people?

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