Down-to-earth diva

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ARTS&LIFE Coming next week

DEVO, 2010 EDITION

SUNDAY JULY 25, 2010

Online

Literary sleuthing

COMICS ON STAMPS

Thurber picnic to host crime novelist E4

‘Whip It’ band updates

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Dispatch.com/multimedia

SO TO SPEAK

No need to dash to finalize this gash

DOWN-TO-EARTH

DIVA On the road beyond ‘IDOL,’ BOWERSOX still searches for a place to spread her roots

FOX PHOTOS

Crystal Bowersox performing on American Idol

By Kevin Joy | THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH “American Idols Live!,” a tour featuring the top 10 finalists of the ninth season of American Idol, will stop at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Nationwide Arena, 200 W. Nationwide Blvd.

Tickets cost $40.50 to $70.50. Call 1-800-7453000 or visit www. ticketmaster.com.

ong before the final vote, Crystal Bowersox was a winner to millions, an idol in their hearts. ¶ She connected deeply with a wide swath of viewers: single mothers, small-town dwellers, struggling barroom entertainers and music fans. All saw the refreshing appeal of a scrappy, soulful contender — a Midwestern gal who wrote her own tunes, played an instrument with gusto (alongside a makeshift microphone stand made from an old lamp, no less) and refused to alter her salt-of-the-earth persona. ¶ She breezed through most weeks on the latest season of American Idol, rising above country and teen-pop wannabes to land praise from the show’s judging panel, including the notoriously snide Simon

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Bowersox with fellow contestants Casey James, left, and Michael Lynche

TELEVISION

PROFILE

Acclaimed ‘Mad Men’ returning for round 4

Ohio native comfortable amid undead

By Frazier Moore | ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Ryan E. Smith

EW YORK — On the season finale of Mad Men last fall, Don Draper’s wife was seen flying to Reno for a quickie divorce. ¶ Draper, Sterling Cooper’s creative director, was jumping ship with a few other expats from that advertising agency to form their own shop camped in a Manhattan hotel suite. They and everybody else were still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy just a month earlier.

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And Mad Men viewers were left to eagerly await the return of this zeitgeist-seizing drama, waiting to find out how its bygone world would rise from the rubble.

Answer: engrossingly, in unexpected, chancy ways, adhering to the AMC series’ steadfast lack of formula.

You can check out last season’s finale on the AMC website.

Then, the fourth season begins tonight, setting the stage for a new round of discovery with the episode’s first words: “Who is Don Draper?”

A good question, but one aptly dodged by the magnetic,

The fourth season of Mad Men will premiere at 10 tonight on AMC. Don Draper (Jon Hamm)

»

enigmatic and tormented Draper (series star Jon Hamm), who, it turns out, is being interviewed by a writer from Advertising Age magazine. Draper doesn’t like this kind of grilling.

He thinks his work should speak for him.

Almost a year has passed.

It’s nearing Thanksgiving See MAD MEN Page E2

AMC

07-25-2010

THE BLADE

Before Zach Roerig dedicated himself to bringing characters to life on television, he wandered among the dead.

“I spent a lot of my summers in cemeteries, which sounds kind of messed up but really it’s not, because cemeteries are some of the most beautiful places,” he said.

The native of Montpelier, about 55 miles west of Toledo, had good reason: Making cemetery Zach Roerig memorials is the family business. By coincidence, he stars on the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, which recently began shooting its second season.

Roerig, who has also appeared on the soap operas As the World Turns and One Life To Live, comes from a village of about 4,000 and grew up baling hay on his grandfather’s 100-acre farm.

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Freeways are ugly. Cities want to be beautiful. Hence, the dissatisfaction with plans for rebuilding the I-70/71 split Downtown.

We’re attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable.

The specific objections to the design — it doesn’t do enough to ensure pedesJOE trian safety, BLUNDO accommodate bicyclists or re-knit neighborhoods — are legitimate concerns. But even a safe, friendly, neighborly gash would still be a gash.

We know this in our popculture bones.

In movies and on television, urban freeways are, more often than not, unsightly symbols of frustration or danger. Chases happen on them. Crimes occur under them. In a movie, when a guy meets someone beneath an overpass, you just know he’s going to turn up dead in the trunk of a car.

I wondered: Did it occur to no one many decades ago that plowing freeways through major cities would result in something so alienating?

Actually, yes, it did, and even before the freeways themselves arrived.

“The motor car has raced around the country leaving destruction long enough; it’s time we woke up, unless we are to be conquered by it,” said a spokesman for a citizens group protesting a road widening in Seattle. The year was 1928.

The quote is from From Streetcar to Superhighway, a 1981 book that I find cited often in more contemporary studies of why we allowed freeways to tear through the hearts of our cities.

The book, by Mark S. Foster, now a University of Colorado history professor emeritus, explains how planning in the early 20th century set the stage for the interstate age that came later.

Keep in mind, Foster advises, that big cities at the dawn of the automobile age were crowded, dirty, disease-ridden places.

Many planners argued that building elevated highways through cities would clear slums and ignite development. One even proposed building urban neighborhoods with houses that had freeways as their backyards.

The “open space” would make the property desirable, he thought.

And trolleys and streetcars weren’t the cuddly conveyances they are now. Their owners were often resented as greedy monopolists whose fares were too high and safety standards too low.

Building streets and highways was seen by some as a more democratic way of providing transportation, Foster says.

(Buses would serve those who couldn’t afford cars.)

The planners weren’t completely crazy.

Parkways — the tree-lined, low-speed divided highways that preceded interstates — had, in fact, beautified parts of New York. But for a variety of economic and political reasons, when urban sections of interstates began arriving in the 1950s, they were utilitarian structures with high-speed traffic flow, not aesthetics, as their chief concern.

We live with the results.

Opponents of the state’s I-70/71 plans are asking the Columbus City Council to hold off voting to approve the preliminary phase of the project on Monday. And it should. We need to make sure we get the best gash we can.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist. jblundo@dispatch.com

PubDate: 07-25-2010

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DAILY ALMANAC Today is Sunday, July 25, the 206th day of 2010. There are 159 days left in the year.

HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY On July 25, 1960, a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, N.C., that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whitesonly lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.

In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.

In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

In 1956, the Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast; at least 51 people were killed.

In 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain initialed a treaty in Moscow prohibiting the testing of nuclear weapons in the air, in space or underwater.

In 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein signed a declaration at the White House ending their countries’ 46-year-old formal state of war.

Ten years ago: The Middle East summit at Camp David collapsed.

Five years ago: The AFL-CIO splintered as the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters announced they were leaving the labor federation.

One year ago: President Barack Obama continued to press for health-care reform legislation, citing a White House study indicating that small businesses were paying far more per employee for health insurance than big companies.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY “Life is not a matter of milestones, but of moments.” — Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995) Source: Associated Press

What’s happening in entertainment and the arts? Throughout the week, our reporters’ blogs offer perspectives you won’t find in print. Read more at Dispatch.com/blogs.

Highlights this week include: CELEBRITIES For gossip you really need, check Lea Delaveris’ Celebrity Surveillance blog.

JOE BLUNDO How’d you do on the Attractive Ohio quiz?

Joe has the answers and a new challenge.

MOVIES Nick Chordas ponders Grease Sing-a-Long, as well as a few other films that invite the audience to make their voices heard.

ROMANCE LIT Got the summer blues? Need a little love? Holly Zachariah will tell you what’s new on the shelves.

THEATER Sea monsters in the Alley at South Campus Gateway? It’s just Michael Grossberg talking to the Whistling in the Dark troupe about its area premiere of Shipwrecked, a fantasy based on the true story of a 19th-century man who fooled the world with tales of monsters and adventures.

HOW TO REACH US ARTS EDITOR Nancy Gilson ..........614-461-8868 ngilson@dispatch.com

WEEKENDER LISTINGS E-mail.....weekender@dispatch.com Mail: Weekender Listings, The Dispatch 34 S. 3rd St., Columbus, OH 43215 Fax .........................614-469-6198 For more extensive listings, see Dispatch.com/weekender.

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Arts

SUNDAY, JULY 25, 2010

BREAKING NEWS: DISPATCH.COM

DIVA

NATIVE

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Cowell. He called the 24year-old singer-guitarist “outstanding” and “the one everyone has to beat.”

After advancing in May via audience-driven text and telephone votes into Idol’s remaining three, she returned to Toledo a rock star. A homecoming concert dubbed “Bowerstock” attracted thousands, while an appearance before a Toledo Mud Hens game — at which she sang The Star-Spangled Banner while cradling her toddler, Tony — drew a recordbreaking crowd.

She even found a fan in Gov. Ted Strickland, who, on May 25, issued a news release urging Ohioans to vote for Bowersox before the Idol finale, where she performed like a natural alongside Alanis Morissette and Joe Cocker.

When the Elliston, Ohio, native came in second to soft-spoken Chicago paint salesman Lee DeWyze, she may have been the only one unfazed.

“I woke up that morning, I had a gut feeling, and I was OK with it,” Bowersox said. “It was a mix between statistics and an innate feeling.”

On the road through Aug. 31 with the “American Idols Live!” tour (arriving Tuesday in Columbus), she spoke by phone last week from Hershey, Pa., Even in defeat, Bowersox has been consistently positive.

She has referred to DeWyze as a brother and a friend, a nice guy who deserves the glory.

She is excited to work on a solo album that has attracted interest from Melissa Etheridge, Linda Perry and Michael Franti.

And the woman who once had to beg for insulin at a pharmacy as a cashstrapped teenage diabetic can now provide for her own child.

“There’s stability,” said Bowersox, whose family is watching her son during the tour. “He’s surrounded with nothing but love and support. He’s having life experiences I couldn’t have dreamed of having.”

In her youth, Bowersox sang in taverns and bluecollar bars before sparse crowds, trying to find a place in the Toledo School for the Arts before she dropped out.

She remembers sitting on the front porch of a friend’s house in Elliston, a microscopic town of about 75 residents, where she wrote Holy Toledo — a wistful ballad that has

MICHAEL BECKER

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The top 10 finalists from season nine of American Idol, clockwise from lower right: Aaron Kelly, Crystal Bowersox, Michael Lynche, Andrew Garcia, Katie Stevens, Lee DeWyze, Siobhan Magnus, Casey James, Didi Benami and Tim Urban sensation in Toledo — and tabloid fodder.

Her rumored early deOn her earliest performances: parture hit TMZ.com after I started playing gigs when I was about 10. My dad was my she expressed homesickroadie. He’d take me to local pubs. I was iffy on my guitar skills ness to Idol host Ryan the first year. It was a different scene.

Seacrest. She was briefly On her dreadlocks: hospitalized in March following what was beI hate fussing with my hair. I just put it up and go; it’s great. I lieved to be complications was 15 or 16 the first time, and then I took them out for a from diabetes. And, shortly while. before her final performPeople attribute dreadlocks to Rastafarians and Bob Marley. ances, her relationship The thing they don’t understand is that goes back to biblical with Ohio boyfriend Tony times, Indian holy men.

Kusian ended.

On performing Falling Slowly with Lee DeWyze: Gossip magazines scoured Elliston for dirt, It’s very special to me. We cut that duet (from the tour’s set later claiming she was list). I didn’t want to do that song every show for the rest of the pregnant or engaged. Insummer. ternet forums lit up with Lee felt the same way. It’s for us. We’ll hammer it out together chatter about her dreadon our time. locks (inspired by her readOn her road travels with Idol finalists: ings about Buddhist and biblical studies) and, more Oh, there are prank wars going on. I’m on team Aaron Kelly. recently, a dental proceThe boys pick on him a little. dure to close a gap beThe toughest part is being away from my son. tween her teeth.

Bowersox is flattered by the attention but finds The judges, along with such energy misspent. since found steady airplay guest panelist Shania “People get their teeth on several Toledo radio Twain, issued unanimous done every day — why are stations and will likely approval, and she was off mine any more special?” appear on her album. to Hollywood. she said. “The gulf’s on fire “Things weren’t so well On television, she blosand full of black sludge, in my childhood,” said somed. and people are talking Bowersox, whose parents “I still don’t get nervabout my teeth. It’s silly.” divorced when she was 2. ous,” Bowersox said.

She plans to involve “I was young. I was plot“When I walk onstage, it’s longtime bassist Frankie ting my journey to Chicatime to play.”

May in upcoming recordgo. The song was about She took Cowell’s criting sessions, after the tour. hope for what else was out icism gracefully and She hasn’t decided there.” worked with mentors rang- whether to live in Los AnShe fled to the Windy ing from Harry Connick Jr. geles, but she said the tour City at 17, hitting the subto Alicia Keys. has given her peeks at way platforms at 4 a.m. to Her matriarchal “Mama plenty of potential places secure a spot where musiSox” nickname became to settle down. cians could legally play. vernacular.

Wherever Bowersox Her mix of cover songs The only slip came lands, home won’t fade. and original fare connect“Nothing comes easy in ed with commuters. Some April 20, when Bowersox northwest Ohio,” she said. missed their trains to catch burst into tears at the end of covering the Impres“People work hard and a few more minutes, and sions’ People Get Ready — appreciate the things they others would return the have. It’s a lot of honest next day wondering, “What the result of seeing her was that song you played?” father, Bill, in the audience people just trying to make their way in life — that’s After becoming pregnant for the first time.

Cowell didn’t flinch, what I want to take with by a man who has since deeming the performance me. left the country, Bowersox “in a completely different “I’m seeing some really returned to Ohio about a cool cities and cool people, year ago, attending an Idol class” from the night’s but I’m just a country girl.” casting call in Chicago on a competitors.

Bowersox fast became a kjoy@dispatch.com whim.

Mama Sox talks

force.

Weiner readily acknowledges the risk of exploding FROM PAGE E1 both the family life and the 1964, with the strain of the gorgeously realized cirholidays soon to be visited ca-1960s workplace of his on many of the characters. complicated hero.

“It was terrifying when I By now, Don’s frosty ended last season,” Weiner ex-wife, Betty (January Jones), has remarried. Don said, “and terrifying when I started this season. But I’m has largely lost custody of their three kids and dwells invigorated by risk.

“These people are going in a somber flat in Greenwich Village where, at least to have a whole new set of problems, and it will keep on Thanksgiving, he preme from repeating myself. fers the company of a hooker to more traditional Why tell the same story again, about how bad companionship.

Don’s marriage is? We told The scrappy startup that story. I also felt that agency (whose team inwe’d covered every inch cludes characters played and corner” of the stage set by co-stars John Slattery, for Sterling Cooper’s Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, Christina Hen- offices.

Never fear: Reflecting the dricks, Rich Sommer, Jared obsessive research that Harris and Robert Morse) underpins Mad Men, its has lately taken space in producers reached back Rockefeller Center. across the half-century And, as ever, Don is pitching new business with divide to locate the “right” silver-tongued defiance, as real-life address (the Time & Life Building) for the with Jantzen swimsuits, new Sterling Cooper Drapwhich, he declares, must er Pryce agency. meet the bikini craze with “We know what the a less-prudish marketing square-footage cost in that strategy. Bluntly challengbuilding was in 1964, and ing the stubborn Jantzen what the floor plan was,” bosses, Don poses this Weiner said. “We investimind-twister: “You want gated what they could women who want bikinis to buy your two-piece — or afford with the accounts they had.” do you just want to make In the season opener, sure women who want a Don, who typically is simtwo-piece don’t suddenly buy a bikini?” Very smooth, mering beneath his charismatic, cool veneer, seems Don! more snappish and tightly In sum, Mad Men is wound than ever. But back.

Weiner sees potential “I wanted to hit the growth in the character ground running,” says who, up to now, has preMatthew Weiner, the series’ creator and guiding vailed by fashioning a false

MAD MEN

identity and zealously tending it.

“There’s a sense of hope with Don on his own, and a sense of relief that he is able to be himself on some level,” Weiner said. “He is still living a lie, but there’s a lot less constraint on what he can tell the truth about than there used to be.”

Mad Men was the longnurtured brainchild of Weiner, who, while trying to sell the show, wrote for The Sopranos in its powerful last seasons.

But as someone who struggled to even get his dream project on the air, Weiner remains hardpressed to explain the stir it has created since its debut in summer 2007.

It’s been showered with Golden Globe, Peabody and Emmy awards (plus 17 more Emmy nominations this year).

Meanwhile, the cultural link Weiner always sensed between the ’60s and today has clearly been confirmed, infusing Mad Men — a cocktail of hope, anxiety, delusion and disgruntlement — with startling immediacy as well as retro chic. The shorthand terms “Mad Men” and “Draper-ish” are fraught with meaning, even among those who have never seen the show.

“I don’t know what the cause of it is,” Weiner said, marveling at the Mad Men phenomenon. “For me, the show is very much a process of how I feel.”

Tonight, the process resumes wondrously.

“It was amazing,” said Roerig, 25. “That’s the kind of stuff I was doing before I went to New York.”

That move — which came just three days after graduating from a high school where he was on the wrestling, football and track teams — was a leap. But it wasn’t out of character for someone from his family; his father had been active in area theater and others in his family were musicians.

For two years during high school, Roerig traveled to Cleveland every weekend for acting and modeling lessons.

After receiving a strong response at an International Modeling and Talent Association convention, he decided to try acting in New York.

“I used to The Vampire call my folks Diaries airs at bawling all 8 p.m. Thursthe time,” days on the CW. he said.

The new season “New York’s will premiere a big city, Sept. 9. but when you first move there it can be a real lonely place.”

When his friends were home having fun around a bonfire, Roerig was alone in the Big Apple as trash accumulated everywhere during a garbage strike. Andrea Roerig, his mother and president of Fackler Monument Co., said she and her late husband, Dan, were Zach’s biggest supporters.

“My famous words were: ‘How bad do you want it?’” she said.

His persistence paid off.

Before long, her son was appearing on an episode of Law & Order.

The soap opera stints followed, first on As the World Turns for two years as Casey Hughes and then on One Life To Live.

Later, Roerig showed up on the critically acclaimed drama Friday Night Lights, where he was cast as a rodeo star who was the bad-boy beau of the character played

by Toledo native Adrianne Palicki.

Most recently, he’s been hanging out with a more bloodthirsty crowd. The Vampire Diaries, a drama based on the books by L.J. Smith, made its debut last year on the CW. Roerig plays Matt Donovan, an all-American guy and ex-boyfriend of a girl caught between two vampire brothers.

The unmarried actor hasn’t forgotten his real family, though.

“He was always very good about coming home,” his mother said. “He is just a really good, generous, bighearted person. . . . I hope that part of him never changes.”

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