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Un-funny Uncle

Letters published June 06, 2007

Brar no silver fox: Uncle ["Say Uncle," May 9] needs a good bashing and should be put in jail for the rest of his life. The judge sounds like a dumb loser who couldn't see who was taking advantage of whom. If the girls were so desperate, I am sure they would have found somebody younger than a 60-year-old uncle. This shows how many flaws we have in our justice system.

Princejeet Hayer

San Francisco, California

Anyone got a pillory handy? There should be severe punishment for such guys. He has scarred these girls for life -- emotionally and physically. How can he say the girls initiated it? Even if they did, he was the adult. He was a father figure. He should have not exploited them. Brar should be the one feeling outcast, not the girls.

Irene Blake
Defiance, Ohio

Public Defenders
Wiping up scum: A policeman's dirtiest job: It is a tragic shame that someone like that is still running free, especially when the person is known as being nothing but trouble ["The Quick and the Dead," May 23].

The American judicial system does suck. But please do not say it is the police. Officers are doing their jobs on the streets. They risk their lives every day for us and have families and loved ones of their own. They can only do what the American judicial system allows them to do. I feel they should have more rights when it comes to the scum they deal with. The scum don't deserve life, let alone the right to take life away.

Brandon Sayer
Painesville

Huzzah! Huzzah!
She only writes about chopped liver: You can rest assured that the local daily would have made front-page huzzahs had one of its writers won a significant national accolade. So Scene's Elaine Cicora walks off with a James Beard Award at the beginning of May -- and in desperation, she's obliged to share the news in her own column last week?

What is she, chopped liver? Doesn't Scene care that an affiliated alternative weekly took a Pulitzer Prize this year? A little immodesty's quite permissible, you know.

Rice Hershey
Cleveland

God's Midwife
Jerry & Jesus -- guarding the unborn for you: I am not overly familiar with Jerry Falwell ["God's Wrath: The PD pays tribute to . . . Jerry Falwell?" First Punch, May 23], but I believe that he did his best to follow Jesus Christ. He may have just articulated His teachings in a less-than-gentle way.

But he was articulate about his vision for a society that, rather than killing unborn children by the millions, would view them as a blessing to our lives. It must have been frustrating to him that so many women view their unborn as possessions to be disposed of and not as spiritual beings coming to life through them.

According to surveys in America, most of us view this man's words on respecting life not as a subject of scorn, but as a praiseworthy goal. Unfortunately, the reverend's outrageousness overshadowed his laudable points.

Megan Enos
Fairview Park

Well, we know he had the nerve: I'm a bit puzzled. In the First Punch item "God's Wrath," it was noted the late gay-bashing minister died of cardiac arrhythmia. This implies Falwell had a heart. So it couldn't have been cardiac arrhythmia.

Maybe Falwell had a cerebral aneurysm that burst. Oh, wait. That implies he had a brain.

Jeepers. Now I'm really confused.

Do Scene readers have any ideas about what was Falwell's actual cause of death?

Louis H. Pumphrey
Shaker Heights

As Clear as Stained Glass
Use that review to gift-wrap a Norelco: Christine Howey couldn't have been more unprepared for her review of Fourth Wall Productions Stained Glass Ugly by Qui Nguyen ["Fugly," May 30]. Please allow me to respond to what I think is a huge detriment to the Cleveland theater scene - ignorant, subjective critiques.

First off, she called Nguyen "a playwright who is intent on proving to the audience how bright he is." This was only overshadowed by a critic trying to prove how brilliant she is, with witty remarks such as, "Hey, if an electric razor can be that destructive, we should be supplying field-hardened Norelcos to our soldiers in Iraq." If Christine Howey did her research, she would see that electric razors did explode in 2001, leaving several men disfigured. The quick-paced style of the play cornered Rebecca Cole into not having Dash Combs wear prosthetics on his face to show his disfigurement; but that's the world of theater. Since the days of yore, the audience has had to use their imagination for such things. Have we really grown into an age where we now expect everything to be shown to us? Was she disheartened that Fourth Wall Productions shut the lights off when the razor exploded? Or did she expect to see Dash Combs' lower jaw fly off his face into the front row?

Carli Taylor Miluk made two women cry and everyone laugh in the audience on preview night. Dash Combs stimulated me with his eyes. For a stage actor to be able to connect to an audience through a mask -- I could tell this actor was well trained at Ohio University.

So, kudos for commending Fourth Wall Productions, but shame on you for remarking that the "talent at hand" (I assume you mean "Cleveland talent") can't pull off such a feat. Fourth Wall Productions is one of the most entertaining and engaging theater companies we have. And because they are upstarts, I feel we should direct our attention to welcoming them, instead of giving "witty" reviews with "witty" headlines, which garner no constructive criticism whatsoever that will help in their growth.

Colleen O'Patry
Cleveland