RABBIT TRAILS: DISPATCHES FROM THE SHED
Updates, news and blog stories from around the Ted and Company universe.
March 16 we, Tim Ruebke and I, were in McPherson Kansas for a Peace Pies and Prophets show, in the historic McPherson Opera House, originally built in 1888. Jerry Bowen of McPherson Church of The Brethren and Kathy Neufeld Dunn, First Menno of McPherson — both Christian Peacemaker Teams alumni — were the hosts and organizers. Kathy is an old friend from the Ted and Lee Armadillo Tour days. She was host and instigator for a memorable show in Ann Arbor in the mid 90’s. That’s one of the perks of having pastors move around. Sometimes those connections take you to another community, another part of the country. Jude and Doug Krehbiel of “Road Less Traveled” opened the evening and we had one of our most spirited shows ever while setting a record for money raised in support of CPT. For the first time we netted over $9000 for Peacemaker Teams. In addition, once again…
Read More →
I’ve been thinking about Christmas recently… haven’t we all? No? There’s something slower-paced and more reflective about considering this significant event apart from the holiday season itself, don’t you think? Christmas. It’s a bit odd at times to consider the kind of event Christmas has become…ostensibly it is an event to celebrate the birth of Jesus, more often a co-opted excuse to sell and buy stuff. It’s an old complaint, one that has almost become its own cliché. So that by the time we finally reach Dec. 24, instead of anticipating a celebration, many of us are relieved it’s almost over, completely overrun by incipit Christmas songs, and even tired of non-incipit carols. At Ted & Company, we have become known for doing biblical story well, but offering something… different. It’s not your typical church drama. Our first impulse when looking at a story is to ask what’s funny and…
Read More →
Do you know where Gretna, Manitoba is — without checking an atlas? You remember atlases right? Those wonderful maps travelers used before mapquest and GPS’s? The woman in the post office didn’t know and before I visited, I wasn’t exactly sure. It is literally a few hundred yards from the North Dakota border, a small town in the prairie of Manitoba, population 574 as of 2006. When I arrived April 25th, there was still about 2 feet of snow on the baseball field, enough to depress any baseball fan. However! The students and faculty at Mennonite Collegiate Institute and fine folks of Gretna provided one of my favorite performance experiences of the past 5 years. I performed in Buhler Hall a new performance hall listed as one of the attractions of the town on their official website. On Friday I rehearsed the one act play, “Applications” with a dozen MCI students.…
Read More →
A cover. So the cliché is not true. You can, in fact, judge a book by its cover. Or that’s what I’m being told. I’ve had some say they couldn’t buy the book, or a distributor wouldn’t carry it, because of the cover. I wrote a book which was published last year. This is the cover: The photo on top is of me and my brother Tim, embraced by our grandmother. It is emblematic of my childhood memories. The photo on the bottom is 50 years later. It is a close-up, with high-end calibration and with lots of pixels thingies. It was taken by Lowell Brown of Lancaster county Pa and if you are in that area and need a photographer, call Lowell. The shot is of Schmidick, a character from “Just Give “em the News”, our Christmas show, written with actor-writer-composer Jeff Raught. Schmidick is a shepherd, one who is…
Read More →Recently I was guest at the congregation my sister Tina and her family are members, Germantown Mennonite. I wrote a reading Doug Brunk, Tina and I performed. The text was The Prodigal Son parable. We, of course, were mining the text for humor and perhaps another angle to an excruciatingly familiar text. Here is an excerpt from the reading: TED: And so the son took the money. DOUG: I hope he invested well. TINA: Mutual funds. DOUG: Something stable, yes. TED: No. TINA: No? TED: No. DOUG: Alas. TED: …alas no. He wasted it… TINA: Hedge funds. DOUG: Ah. TED: He wasted it on wild living. DOUG: A life of lust, debauchery and tax collecting. TED: Again, there was no evidence of the collecting of taxes. TINA: But there was sin. TED: Yes. DOUG: So, normal stuff…gluttony, drunkenness…women…drunken gluttonness women.. TED: Yes…normal stuff. Then…the money ran out. DOUG: It always does…the money. TINA: Runs out. TED: There was a famine… DOUG: They had eaten all the food…the glutteness drunken women……..…
Read More →
Christmas…I love the idea of God entering humbly into our lives…I detest the whole Santa Claus BS…as well as the manufactured War on Christmas: It’s about time we should declare war, or at the very least a “police action,” on civil religion masquerading as faith, and take your inflatable Santas and once a year indignation that God actually can be removed from any sphere and place them, along with the Easter bunny, in a compost pile behind the barn and embrace the difficult world of actually living as Jesus gave us example. Thoughts that run across my mind: Life should imitate art I’ve reached 56 years old, and am trying to be more mindful and reflective of moments while they are happening. In a radio interview recently I was lauded for my ability to be fully present on stage, which is one the building blocks of good acting. It was…
Read More →