Burn, baby, Burn!

Burn ball-carrier (in black) heads turfward in the grasp of a Comets tackler at Saturday's exhibition game. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Opening day nears
for some bruising hons

playing women's football

Baseball season may be upon us, but even with an Oriole victory over the hated New York Yankees on Opening Day, my heart right now goes out to the Baltimore Burn women's football team.

With the season opener two weeks away, the Burn took on – and took a few licks from – the Columbus Comets Saturday in an exhibition game at Baltimore’s Northwestern High School.

In case you missed the link two weeks ago to my featured story and Bonnie’s photos at the growing news blog BaltimoreBrew.com, the Burn play in the 38-team Women’s Football Alliance. Tackle football. Helmet-crunching football. Colliding-bodies football. Lying-limp-on-the-ground-for-two-minutes-after-colliding football.

Scary-stuff football, particularly when you’ve got a vantage point standing at the sideline and can hear the crunch of the offense and defensive lines, the grunts and oomphs of collisions and tackles, and… yup… occasional unladylike expletives.

Ranging in age from 18 to almost 50, these hons have the hearts of lions… and not the Detroit kind, although I’m sure those lions are also fierce. This is Baltimore!

About 100 spectators attended the game, and watched the Burn fall a couple of touchdowns behind in the first half – then rally with a pair of TD’s and two-point conversions, but not quite enough as the visitors from Ohio took the game by a score of 21-16.

A few problems for the Burn: The lack of a kicker Saturday, which meant turning over the ball deep in their own territory several times; and a novice quarterback whose initial passing attempts were far off the mark or fell into opponents’ hands.

The Comets seemed better organized on the field in the first half, but the Burn defense grew considerably stronger in the second half while the home team rallied for its touchdowns – one on a long run by Stephanie Walker, the other on a pass from quarterback Tracy Deuber to receiver Robyn Munford.

Lacking a place-kicker, the Burn ran successfully for the two-point conversion after each touchdown.

Among the players seeing action on defense was Burn co-owner Deb Miller, a 49-year-old middle school gym teacher and six-time grandmother who is the oldest on the roster.

Keeping stats on the sideline was another 49-year-old on the roster, psychiatrist Betty Jo Salmeron, who was dealing all week with problems on the home front – talk about irony for a player on the Burn, her house in suburban Towson was heavily damaged by a fire. No one was in the house at the time, and a neighbor alerted the fire department, she said.

Dr. Salmeron, who played last year as a rookie kicker and defensive cornerback, was joined on the sidelines Saturday by the youngest of her three daughters – the only one not “mortified” that mom plays football.

For locals interested in checking out the team, the next practice takes place Saturday morning, beginning about 8 a.m., at Southside Academy in Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood.

The Burn’s eight-game season begins on the road April 18 against the Connecticut Cyclones.

Home games – all at 4 p.m., at Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High’s Art Modell Field – are scheduled April 25 (Philadelphia Liberty Belles), May 16 (Cyclones), June 6 (Keystone Assault) and June 20 (New Jersey Titans).

Tickets are $10, and there’s a discount for military and police, and seniors 60 and older. Season tickets are available at $30 by emailing a request to burnmob@yahoo.com. The Burn Web site is http://www.baltimoreburnfootball.com/.

Check it out. Buy a hotdog. Applaud the cheerleading-and-drum troupe, and root for the home team. They’re not making a million bucks. They’re out there for the love of it, and in sports these days, that alone is something to cheer for. Let the Baltimore Burn light your fire for a couple of hours!

(If you missed the earlier story, here's the link: http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=1414#more-1414)

Bonnie’s exhibition opens

I might have posted the football report in a more timely fashion, but the weekend calendar was overloaded as Bonnie’s two-year photographic project, “Defining Ourselves,” had its gallery debut Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis.

In case you hadn’t read or heard about or participated in the project, Bonnie asked a diverse range of people to answer this question: “How do you define yourself?” The reply had to be in a single sentence, of any length, beginning with the words “I am….” Answers were not shared with participants until they, themselves, had submitted a response.

Bonnie worked with most participants on a collaborative portrait illustrating their answers, which was a huge challenge given the geographic spread across the planet… some as far away as Australia, New Zealand and Japan. In one case, we drove about 650 miles out of our way on a road trip for Bonnie to take the picture of art professor Petronio Bendito, a Brazilian on the faculty at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.

We had to get his picture. His answer was one of the shortest, yet one of our favorites:

“I am all that I love.”

We drove to upstate New York to get Texas-based singer-songwriter Dirk Hamilton, while he was attending a folk music convention. His answer was subtly deep, and even shorter:

“I am here.”

Some of the photos taken that rainy weekend ended up as the front and back cover illustrations for Dirk’s new, just-issued CD, “More Songs From My Cool Life.” (http://www.dirkhamilton.com/)

We hung the 13-by-19-inch portraits Thursday and Saturday, taking up every available space in the church gallery with 52 of them – people ages 4 to 102. Others that didn’t fit were hung in smaller images on a tabletop “tree.” There’s also a bulletin board for visitors to post their own self-definitions.

Bonnie’s exhibition will remain on display at the church until April 29, and she’s hoping to find other venues for it in the future.

It’s not your average art show. It’s unlikely that visitors would be purchasing the photo portraits of strangers. Like those football women who play for the love of the game, Bonnie’s project came straight from her heart. And touched the hearts of others -- participants, and the dozens of folks who attended the opening reception on Sunday.

And by the way, if you haven’t thought about it before, how do you define yourself?

Remember, just one sentence beginning “I am….”

Message to Conrad

Thanks for your recent comment on my blog. Wasn’t sure how best to message back, but since you indicated you’re going to keep visiting – thanks for taking the time here. I think I’m averaging 35 visitors a day, and that makes you one of my favorite people!

Today’s fortune cookie message

You always bring others happiness.

Daily number: 272

Saving the planet

Robert Howell, on visit last year to Maryland, gazes at Chesapeake Bay. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Quaker group's new book

aims at keeping Earth

from tipping point

I had a telephone chat early today with my New Zealand friend Robert Howell, who reports that the book he labored on for several years with a group of fellow Quakers from around the world on the little matter of saving our planet has at last been published.

Aside from the common bond of being Quakers, the folks who wrote and edited the book are experts in diverse areas – Robert, for example, having been an organisational and strategy consultant, teacher and city manager in New Zealand. He also founded and is CEO of a little group there called the Council for Socially Responsible Investment.

We first met Robert more than 25 years ago, when he was enrolled in a program at Johns Hopkins University and spent a weekend in our home through our shared membership in the global peace organization Servas.

Robert, who holds a master’s in philosophy and doctorate in health planning and management, describes himself in brief these days as an ecological philosopher and strategist. He noted in our half-hour catch-up telephone discussion that the news media there has been reporting on New Zealand’s influx of eco-migrants – people moving to his incredibly distant nation because it will be least affected by the coming environmental disasters. (How distant? 11 p.m. Wednesday in Maryland is 4 p.m. Thursday in Auckland.)
Robert also noted, sadly, that New Zealand changed administrations last year, electing a conservative-Republican type prime minister who is moving the country in the wrong direction on environmental issues just as the United States seems to have reversed course politically and morally in a better direction with the election of Barack Obama. (“A breath of fresh air,” Robert says of the new American president.)

I well remember on the visits Bonnie and I made to New Zealand and Australia in 2006 how just about everyone we met disliked George W. Bush. (Disliked is really too soft a word.) Alas, the global economic meltdown precipitated to a large degree by the Bush administration has cut even into the socially responsible investments as far away as Robert’s homeland, he says.

The book is “Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy,” by Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver, from Berrett-Koehler Publishers. You can have a peek at http://www.bkconnection.com/static/Right_Relationship_EXCERPT.pdf.

On a visit to North America last year, Robert made time for a stop at our home in Pasadena and participated in Bonnie’s then-growing project on self-definition and related photographic portraits that will have its debut Sunday at the Annapolis Unitarian Universalist Church. Robert talked with us then about his group’s book and its underlying thesis that Earth could reach its tipping-point in sustainability over the next few decades if major steps are not taken to change the global economy.

"From 2030 onwards the effects of a 2 degree plus warming to the planet will begin to have very significant effects," Robert said Thursday.

Bonnie took Robert’s picture (above) as he gazed out at the Chesapeake Bay from an overlook at nearby Downs Park. It was an appropriate spot, given the bay’s worsening environmental woes.

If you know anyone of influence on the economy and environment, please forward a link to the group’s book. We might not all be here in 2030 (Robert and I would be about 84 years old then), but surely our children and succeeding generations will be dealing with the dire consequences if change does not come.

Here’s a description of the book from the publisher’s Web site:

Our current economic system—which assumes endless growth and limitless potential wealth—flies in the face of the fact that the earth’s resources are finite. The result is increasing destruction of the natural world and growing, sometimes lethal, tension between rich and poor, global north and south. Trying to fix problems piecemeal is not the solution. We need a comprehensive new vision of an economy that can serve people and all of life’s commonwealth. Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver use the core Quaker principle of “right relationship”—interacting in a way that is respectful to all and that aids the common good—as the foundation for a new economic model. Right Relationship poses five basic questions: What is an economy for? How does it work? How big is too big? What’s fair? And how can it best be governed?

Brown and Garver expose the antiquated, shortsighted, and downright dangerous assumptions that underlie our current answers to these questions, as well as the shortcomings of many current reform efforts. They propose new answers that combine an acute awareness of ecological limits with a fundamental focus on fairness and a concern with the spiritual, as well as material, well-being of the human race. Brown and Garver describe new forms of global governance that will be needed to get and keep the economy in right relationship. Individual citizens can and must play a part in bringing this relationship with life and the world into being.

Bonnie’s big project

For two years, my wife Bonnie Schupp has been engaged in a photographic project called “Defining Ourselves,” in which participants were asked to do just that – in a single sentence beginning with the words “I am….”

Try it. Not easy to do it well. But close to a hundred diverse people, ages 4 to 100 and representing a dozen countries, gave it a whirl, and Bonnie went to great lengths to take photographic portraits inspired by their answers.

The result will have its first exhibition debut at noon on Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis, 333 Dubois Road, and Bonnie will give a brief talk on the project which will remain on display in the church gallery through much of April. (Suggestions for future venues are welcome.) A little more detail can be found at Bonnie's blog at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/.

Today’s fortune cookie message

The brain is not a vessel to fill but a fire to ignite.