Bras hung all over the Bentwood Country Club golf course and were proudly worn on the outside, in a reflection of the bravado it takes to fight breast cancer.
On Monday, men and women came together under the sun to play golf and raise money for Shannon Hospital's annual Tee-Off for Ta-tas, a fundraiser for breast cancer research, treatment and awareness. The event started three years ago as an idea from Dana Calhoun, owner of Grigsby's Boutique.
"Who but Dana would've thought of a bra drop.It's so fitting," said Sarah Post, a breast cancer survivor helping out at the event.
Calhoun became aware of the prevalence of breast cancer through daily interactions with her customers.
"I wanted to have something to include men.to raise awareness," Calhoun said.
The event Monday was sold out, with 144 players. Silent auction items included golf shoes, a YETI cooler, a Christoval winery outing, and a Dewalt circular saw.
"It's just about having fun for a good cause," said Sharon Flippin, an 11-year breast cancer survivor who wore a colorful peacock shirt with a turquoise bra on the outside.
Women were able to get away with wearing bras outside their shirts, and many men wore pink polos and visors.
Sue Sorrells worked at the registration table wearing a brown bra covered with baseballs, baseball gloves and plastic gems that had the words "Playin' Tough" across the top.
Post, who worked at the silent auction table and helped serve beer, wore a white bra covered with stickers of beer bottles, glasses and limes.
"I dressed appropriately," Post joked.
Post, an energetic woman who was constantly distracted by people wanting to give her hugs, was impressed by the response.
"Lots of people just write a check. This way they get to be a part of lots of fun things," Post said.
Post had begun having mammograms when she was 40 and was able to detect breast cancer early through one of her routine screenings.
"It was a shock," Post said. "I had no family history."
She said at the time, she did not know if she would get to see her unborn grandchild.
"You absolutely never know. It absolutely stops your life. ... Usually when you're in sheer terror.people start showing up," Post said.
The highlight of the event — the bra drop, during which bras were dumped from a helicopter over a pink golf cart with a basket on the roof — was held at the end of day. Donors who bought individual bras got a chance at winning half the proceeds, a prize given to the buyer of the bra that landed closest to the basket. The other half goes to the Cancer Empowerment Center and Resource Center.
The Empowerment Center provides support groups — for both men and women — and various classes to anyone who wants more information on oncologic care and prevention.
Flippin said the silver lining of her battle is being a part of events at which she can share her experience with others.
"There's a sisterhood that we develop from being a part of stuff like this," Flippin said.
Post agreed it's important patients don't feel like they are going through the battle alone. One in every eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and she feels that people need to learn how to be supportive of those who are fighting it.
Amid the fun, the socializing, the prizes and the warmth of the sun, this event is a reminder of finding enjoyment in life through difficult circumstances.
"You appreciate a lot of things you took for granted. You see life in a different way.Hopefully you can grow from it and not shut down," Post said.
2012年9月26日星期三
what looks like dirty orange mattress ticking and knocked
The only thing anyone wonders, wants to read, or even needs to know
about a pretentious, elliptical and utterly worthless load of
tongue-tied gibberish imported from England by the Roundabout Theatre
Co. called If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet is the answer to a single
question: How is Jake Gyllenhaal? In his New York stage debut, I am
pleased to inform you, he acts the impossible role of a human zero in a
profoundly professional manner. He has energy, presence and a theatrical
dynamic—qualities as affecting onstage as they appear onscreen. He
would be a whole lot better if we could actually hear what he’s saying,
however. Since his most recent screen appearance as a bald L.A. ghetto
cop in End of Watch, he’s grown a head full of what looks like dirty
orange mattress ticking and knocked himself out perfecting a cockney
accent, which he spits and mumbles incoherently through a scruffy beard
like a face on a box of Smith Brothers cough drops. Of course, this
might be a blessing in disguise. The play is so stupendously abysmal it
doesn’t make any sense anyway.
The first thing you see upon entering the Laura Pels Theatre is the water. In the last performance I saw on that stage—a grim revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger—they covered the proscenium with rotting food and garbage. This time they drown it in water. The rain comes down in buckets from the ceiling and splashes into a water tank the width of the stage, into which the four-member cast tosses props, furniture, used appliances and old shoes. If you are foolish enough to pay real money to suffer through 95 minutes of this stuff without intermission, do not sit in the first row without an umbrella. The water tank acts as a moat-like protection that separates the audience from the squalid flat of an ecology professor named George (played by the always-excellent Brían F. O’Byrne, of Doubt), his wife Fiona (Michelle Gomez) and their obese daughter Anna (Annie Funke). While George spouts academic babble from the new book he’s writing about the survival of mankind in an age of global disaster called How Green Are Your Tomatoes? and Annie sulks about reliving the abuse she gets at school from bullying classmates, the gloom is relieved temporarily by George’s brother Terry (Mr. Gyllenhaal), whose welcome presence offers hope that the play might be heading somewhere—that is, until he speaks. Then what comes out is a torrent of four-letter words that makes David Mamet seem like a model of grace, finesse and literary sophistication.
It is never clear what Terry does or where he’s been. He’s been abroad. Postcards have been received. Now he’s popped in for a visit, covered with tattoos and driving everyone nuts in a Faulknerian stream of jabberwocky punctuated with more F-words than any attempt to quote dialogue will allow. Clutching his overstretched, misshapen T-shirt, shifting on his feet and dancing around like a whirling dervish, he smokes a joint, climbs on top of the fridge for no reason and scratches himself in every body crevice. It’s a wild, exhausting performance that for all of its judo is not always convincing. Encouraged by the kind of loopy direction (by Michael Longhurst) that can only be described as spastic, Mr. Gyllenhaal’s fearless vitality is admirable, but he so completely throws himself into a repulsive character that it overwhelms him. The father rants on ad infinitum about polar ice caps, evolution and global warming. Fat Anna strips off her clothes (not a pretty sight), climbs into an overflowing bathtub, slashes her wrists and floods what’s left of the set in a tidal wave. Mr. Gyllenhall takes over the kitchen and tries his hand at making pastry. The direction is simplicity itself. Every scene ends by knocking another piece of the set into the water. Eventually the cast sloshes through the debris with water above their ankles and takes their curtain calls sopping wet.
The writer of this ludicrous trash is Nick Payne, a critical Flavor of the Avant-Garde Moment in London, praised by the London press for thumbing his nose at tradition as a rule-breaking revolutionary Turk, who encourages healthy wrath from theatergoers who still care about the kind of coherent, well-written plays Britain is famous for. If he has any talent beyond inciting protest, it is not the ability to hold an audience’s attention beyond a central conceit. One can only wonder why Roundabout chose to plague the undeserving New York audience with so much obtuse and juvenile irrelevance, or why, indeed, a movie star of Jake Gyllenhaal’s stature and popularity would choose to appear in it. He’s powerful enough to raise the backing for any play he chooses, and financially independent enough to wait until the right one comes along. What on earth, I kept asking myself, could have attracted him to this rubbish? Then I knew. During the final third of If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, he disappears from the watery stage and doesn’t appear again until the water washes it away. Some actors have all the luck.
The first thing you see upon entering the Laura Pels Theatre is the water. In the last performance I saw on that stage—a grim revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger—they covered the proscenium with rotting food and garbage. This time they drown it in water. The rain comes down in buckets from the ceiling and splashes into a water tank the width of the stage, into which the four-member cast tosses props, furniture, used appliances and old shoes. If you are foolish enough to pay real money to suffer through 95 minutes of this stuff without intermission, do not sit in the first row without an umbrella. The water tank acts as a moat-like protection that separates the audience from the squalid flat of an ecology professor named George (played by the always-excellent Brían F. O’Byrne, of Doubt), his wife Fiona (Michelle Gomez) and their obese daughter Anna (Annie Funke). While George spouts academic babble from the new book he’s writing about the survival of mankind in an age of global disaster called How Green Are Your Tomatoes? and Annie sulks about reliving the abuse she gets at school from bullying classmates, the gloom is relieved temporarily by George’s brother Terry (Mr. Gyllenhaal), whose welcome presence offers hope that the play might be heading somewhere—that is, until he speaks. Then what comes out is a torrent of four-letter words that makes David Mamet seem like a model of grace, finesse and literary sophistication.
It is never clear what Terry does or where he’s been. He’s been abroad. Postcards have been received. Now he’s popped in for a visit, covered with tattoos and driving everyone nuts in a Faulknerian stream of jabberwocky punctuated with more F-words than any attempt to quote dialogue will allow. Clutching his overstretched, misshapen T-shirt, shifting on his feet and dancing around like a whirling dervish, he smokes a joint, climbs on top of the fridge for no reason and scratches himself in every body crevice. It’s a wild, exhausting performance that for all of its judo is not always convincing. Encouraged by the kind of loopy direction (by Michael Longhurst) that can only be described as spastic, Mr. Gyllenhaal’s fearless vitality is admirable, but he so completely throws himself into a repulsive character that it overwhelms him. The father rants on ad infinitum about polar ice caps, evolution and global warming. Fat Anna strips off her clothes (not a pretty sight), climbs into an overflowing bathtub, slashes her wrists and floods what’s left of the set in a tidal wave. Mr. Gyllenhall takes over the kitchen and tries his hand at making pastry. The direction is simplicity itself. Every scene ends by knocking another piece of the set into the water. Eventually the cast sloshes through the debris with water above their ankles and takes their curtain calls sopping wet.
The writer of this ludicrous trash is Nick Payne, a critical Flavor of the Avant-Garde Moment in London, praised by the London press for thumbing his nose at tradition as a rule-breaking revolutionary Turk, who encourages healthy wrath from theatergoers who still care about the kind of coherent, well-written plays Britain is famous for. If he has any talent beyond inciting protest, it is not the ability to hold an audience’s attention beyond a central conceit. One can only wonder why Roundabout chose to plague the undeserving New York audience with so much obtuse and juvenile irrelevance, or why, indeed, a movie star of Jake Gyllenhaal’s stature and popularity would choose to appear in it. He’s powerful enough to raise the backing for any play he chooses, and financially independent enough to wait until the right one comes along. What on earth, I kept asking myself, could have attracted him to this rubbish? Then I knew. During the final third of If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, he disappears from the watery stage and doesn’t appear again until the water washes it away. Some actors have all the luck.
2012年9月24日星期一
My first trip into the rural areas south of Palomas
It's mid-morning on Thursday,as I head south from Palomas, Mexico, with Esperanza Lozoya, the founder of the humanitarian program, La Luz de la Esperanza, her granddaughter and her assistant, Maria Dolores Campos.
Our goal is to take beans, medicine and shoes to two rural towns, Colonia Modelo and Guadalupe Victoria. The beans were purchased by Esperanza from Diaz Farms in Deming, N.M. The shoes were donated by Nina Houle, the very supportive owner of a shoe store named On Your Feet in Santa Fe.
This is my first trip into the rural areas south of Palomas and my first meeting with Esperanza. On June 21, however, I observed her summer lunch program in Palomas.
In the space of about an hour, her daughter Sofia and an assistant distributed 600 lunch boxes to needy children there, an extraordinary feat that they continued every weekday all summer.
They also run a midday meal program for the elderly in a building that used to be a rehab center.
Esperanza is originally from Chicago, but she and her family have a long history of community leadership in both Palomas and Columbus, N.M., a few miles to the north. The recreation center in Columbus is named after her father, Andrew Sanchez, for all his contributions.
Her sister, Lupita Otero, manages several food banks in Columbus and was given a “Community Health Leader” award by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2003.
They typify the many heroic people who hold these impoverished communities together in the absence of government services.
We drive about a half hour straight south, then turn off at Modelo, which is just a collection of houses by the road. For safety reasons and as a woman who travels extensively in rural Chihuahua, Esperanza doesn’t announce where she is going in advance so there is no one waiting for us.
We then continue on a few miles to El Entronque, a community built where the Palomas road intersects the highway from Juárez to Chihuahua. There at the Tortería 3 Caminos, we find El Commandante, the officer in charge of that area.
A cheerful man in dark glasses, a white shirt and suspenders, he poses for photos with Esperanza, his unsmiling assistant and his wife. Then he calls on his cell phone and tells another officer to meet us by the town plaza in Modelo.
He also mentions two recent murders. I had assumed that this area was much safer. Esperanza smiles and says that I’m seeing, “The calm before the storm.”
She knows about violence; one of her strongest supporters, the former mayor of Palomas, Tanys Garcia, was murdered in 2009.
A crowd, mostly women, gathers. We open white sacks of beans and Esperanza ladles out five big cups into each woman’s plastic bag. The men are working in the fields, although with the extremely dry weather, there is much less work than usual.
Esperanza has been doing this for nine years. Over the past two and a half, she has distributed some 160,000 pounds of food in the Palomas area. This is in addition to shoes, medicine, basic first aid kits and school supplies. Her job is, if anything, more difficult now, because the Mexican government is limiting the quantity of beans that can be brought across the border. Why, no one knows.
Our second stop is in a farm town named Guadalupe Victoria located some 12 kilometers to the west of the Palomas-El Entronque road. Esperanza and Maria Dolores are both trained as promotoras and can handle basic medical problems.
Their goal here is to provide medicine for the children of migrant farm worker families who have parasites. A longer-term goal is to train local women as promotoras, so that they can deal with basic medical issues like checking blood pressure. The two biggest health problems are high blood pressure and diabetes.
We find the migrant camp, which consists of a long, low, three-sided cinder block building partitioned into a series of living quarters. Outside each doorway is a large metal pan for cooking, a row of chilis, some farm tools, old shoes or clothing and maybe a broom.
Clothing is hung up to dry in a crisscross of wire clotheslines. In the center is a pile of firewood, and the ground is muddy with foul-looking pools of water. It’s a scene from hell, especially when compared to the semi-mansions of the farm owners only a few blocks away.
The women and children we meet are Mixteca Indians from the state of Guerrero way to the south. Many don’t appear to speak Spanish. They line up for the medicine and for what beans remain and are fitted for the shoes I brought from Santa Fe.
I ask several to pose with photos with their new shoes and they agree, but it’s a cheerless place. It’s hard to imagine why government officials haven’t made the farm owners provide cleaner water or better housing, or why these ragged kids aren’t in school. The families have been coming here to work for years; this isn’t a new problem.
We then stop at the local health clinic, are given more medicine by a curt young woman who is the local “doctor,” administers it and return to Palomas.
“I love what I do,” she says as we say goodbye. When I ask about her safety, she adds, “ I have my angel with me.”
Our goal is to take beans, medicine and shoes to two rural towns, Colonia Modelo and Guadalupe Victoria. The beans were purchased by Esperanza from Diaz Farms in Deming, N.M. The shoes were donated by Nina Houle, the very supportive owner of a shoe store named On Your Feet in Santa Fe.
This is my first trip into the rural areas south of Palomas and my first meeting with Esperanza. On June 21, however, I observed her summer lunch program in Palomas.
In the space of about an hour, her daughter Sofia and an assistant distributed 600 lunch boxes to needy children there, an extraordinary feat that they continued every weekday all summer.
They also run a midday meal program for the elderly in a building that used to be a rehab center.
Esperanza is originally from Chicago, but she and her family have a long history of community leadership in both Palomas and Columbus, N.M., a few miles to the north. The recreation center in Columbus is named after her father, Andrew Sanchez, for all his contributions.
Her sister, Lupita Otero, manages several food banks in Columbus and was given a “Community Health Leader” award by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2003.
They typify the many heroic people who hold these impoverished communities together in the absence of government services.
We drive about a half hour straight south, then turn off at Modelo, which is just a collection of houses by the road. For safety reasons and as a woman who travels extensively in rural Chihuahua, Esperanza doesn’t announce where she is going in advance so there is no one waiting for us.
We then continue on a few miles to El Entronque, a community built where the Palomas road intersects the highway from Juárez to Chihuahua. There at the Tortería 3 Caminos, we find El Commandante, the officer in charge of that area.
A cheerful man in dark glasses, a white shirt and suspenders, he poses for photos with Esperanza, his unsmiling assistant and his wife. Then he calls on his cell phone and tells another officer to meet us by the town plaza in Modelo.
He also mentions two recent murders. I had assumed that this area was much safer. Esperanza smiles and says that I’m seeing, “The calm before the storm.”
She knows about violence; one of her strongest supporters, the former mayor of Palomas, Tanys Garcia, was murdered in 2009.
A crowd, mostly women, gathers. We open white sacks of beans and Esperanza ladles out five big cups into each woman’s plastic bag. The men are working in the fields, although with the extremely dry weather, there is much less work than usual.
Esperanza has been doing this for nine years. Over the past two and a half, she has distributed some 160,000 pounds of food in the Palomas area. This is in addition to shoes, medicine, basic first aid kits and school supplies. Her job is, if anything, more difficult now, because the Mexican government is limiting the quantity of beans that can be brought across the border. Why, no one knows.
Our second stop is in a farm town named Guadalupe Victoria located some 12 kilometers to the west of the Palomas-El Entronque road. Esperanza and Maria Dolores are both trained as promotoras and can handle basic medical problems.
Their goal here is to provide medicine for the children of migrant farm worker families who have parasites. A longer-term goal is to train local women as promotoras, so that they can deal with basic medical issues like checking blood pressure. The two biggest health problems are high blood pressure and diabetes.
We find the migrant camp, which consists of a long, low, three-sided cinder block building partitioned into a series of living quarters. Outside each doorway is a large metal pan for cooking, a row of chilis, some farm tools, old shoes or clothing and maybe a broom.
Clothing is hung up to dry in a crisscross of wire clotheslines. In the center is a pile of firewood, and the ground is muddy with foul-looking pools of water. It’s a scene from hell, especially when compared to the semi-mansions of the farm owners only a few blocks away.
The women and children we meet are Mixteca Indians from the state of Guerrero way to the south. Many don’t appear to speak Spanish. They line up for the medicine and for what beans remain and are fitted for the shoes I brought from Santa Fe.
I ask several to pose with photos with their new shoes and they agree, but it’s a cheerless place. It’s hard to imagine why government officials haven’t made the farm owners provide cleaner water or better housing, or why these ragged kids aren’t in school. The families have been coming here to work for years; this isn’t a new problem.
We then stop at the local health clinic, are given more medicine by a curt young woman who is the local “doctor,” administers it and return to Palomas.
“I love what I do,” she says as we say goodbye. When I ask about her safety, she adds, “ I have my angel with me.”
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