My Family's Always Been in Whiskey
TUNI 250, Simulation in
External Organizational Communication
Spring, 2018
A Rich Holt Joint
That Certain Female
Spring 2010
That Certain Female represented our first simulation set in a present-day, real-world (that is, not an imaginative or fantasy) environment. That said, the simulation did depend on the past in that it used a present-day rebellious young woman to invoke the spirit of the man who is perhaps her country's most beloved citizen ever. The country is Ukraine, and the young woman is Anastasja (Stasja) Shevchenko, who's distantly but quite clearly descended from the famed Ukrainian poet, writer, painter, and revolutionary symbol, Taras Shevchenko.
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In That Certain Female, I wanted to capture some ideas about how external organizational communication would be handled by and around a young person famous through no fault of her own (Stasja fronts a rockabilly band called "That Certain Female," named after the well-known song by rockabilly legend Charlie Feathers [immortalized as the background music to Michael Parks' famous "four aviator sunglasses on the dashboard" scene from Kill Bill Volume 1], though her band is little known beyond the Kiev rockabilly/psychobilly subculture) and who is moreover thrust into the limelight by advancing to the championship round of an international game show called Geocash, where contestants hunt for clues in the outdoors to locate previously hidden objects (geocaching). Stasja is hoping she can take advantage of winning Geocash to get both money and recognition to advance her musical career.
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Wise Words
"One of the beauties of teaching is that there is no limit to one's growth as a teacher, just as there is no knowing beforehand how much your students can learn."
--Herbert Kolb
But with fame comes recognition from unfriendly quarters, in this case the remnants of the Russian intelligence services who once terrorized Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. In their mind, Stasja's Geocash quest includes historical treasures created by her famous ancestor and whose retrieval and public unveiling will cause serious public relations problems for Putin's new Russian aristocracy.
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Among all these simulations, That Certain Female represents perhaps the pinnacle of skill in the compilation of the final script for the simulation performance. I deliberately threw into the mix three features I thought no one could combine: famous ancestor, lesbian/rocker heroine, and media empire--and not only did the class successfully interweave these, they did so in a concise, aesthetically pleasing, professionally presented fashion and even completed the script much earlier than any other class had.
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Fun Facts and Trivia
-- When the person who was originally slated to play Stasja had to leave school mid-semester due to a family emergency, Jacqueline Megow (that's her picture at the top of the page and is used with her permission) stepped in to portray Stasja in the final simulation performance and thereby take on one of the most daunting tasks I'd ever seen any student, graduate or undergraduate, handle. Since the script was probably the tightest and most complex of any in this simulation series, there was scarcely room for a misstep and "Jem" (as I came to call her) performed her lines, from memory, in a production where she appeared in over a dozen scenes (nearly every scene in the script), with a little over two weeks to prepare. It's a graduate course, obviously, but sometimes we see an undergrad like Ms. Megow step up and show us all how it's done--at the final performance the graduate students rose to give her a standing ovation. Thanks for everything, Jem!
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-- For the second time in the simulation series, the inimitable Chris Raftery treated us to his comic acting chops (he'd also played Reginald "Al" [don't ask!] Hawaii, head sleazy promoter in a den of sleazy promoters in Original G), this time creating not one, but two, characters: the hapless agent Ira, in the espionage game way over his head (which, in Ira’s case, is to say “in the espionage game”!); and Tomko Adamovich, restaurant owner, starstruck fanboy and blogger for his favorite Ukrainian all-girl lesbian psychobilly band.
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-- Some fantastic inside material for the simulation came via the instructor's wife, Dr. Hui-Ching Chang, who (by some bizarre coincidence) was pursuing her Fulbright fellowship in Ukraine. The assistance of Dr. Chang and her kind associates in Ukraine went a long way to establishing verisimilitude in our exercises and our final performance.
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