Riverfront Times, December 9, 2020

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DECEMBER 9-15, 2020

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MARCH 6-12, 2019

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THE LEDE

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PHOTO BY THEO WELLING

“I can remember when we had our first scare with HIV. HIV is nothing compared to COVID. But I just cannot live in fear. I just can’t say that enough: I can’t live in fear. I was put here to do a job, and that’s what I’m doing. Pray every day that I don’t get this.”

STEPHANIE HOUSTON, CLINICAL MANAGER AT A ST. LOUIS DIALYSIS CLINIC, PHOTOGRAPHED ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 riverfronttimes.com

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The Life and Times

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ver the years, as anti-abortion activists have failed to ban the procedure, conservative lawmakers in Missouri have pursued stiffer regulations and more red tape, forcing all but one clinic to crumble under the burden. Kawanna Shannon, director of surgical services for Planned Parenthood in Missouri, knows that battle well after nineteen years with the organization. For this week’s cover story, Riley Mack goes past all of the shouting and rhetoric to give us a window into Shannon’s day-to-day life. It’s a revealing look at a mother of five who cares deeply about her work. The feature is all the more impressive in that it’s a first RFT cover story for Riley, one of our interns, and it was photographed by fellow intern Steven Duong. Both have done outstanding work this semester. Keep an eye out for them in the future.

— Doyle Murphy, editor in chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS CAN’T

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Publisher Chris Keating Editor in Chief Doyle Murphy

E D I T O R I A L Digital Editor Jaime Lees Interim Managing Editor Daniel Hill Staff Writer Danny Wicentowski Contributors Cheryl Baehr, Eric Berger, Jeannette Cooperman, Thomas Crone, Mike Fitzgerald, Andy Paulissen, Justin Poole, Theo Welling, Ymani Wince Columnist Ray Hartmann Interns Steven Duong, Riley Mack, Matt Woods A R T & P R O D U C T I O N Art Director Evan Sult Editorial Layout Haimanti Germain, Evan Sult Production Manager Haimanti Germain M U L T I M E D I A A D V E R T I S I N G Advertising Director Colin Bell Account Managers Emily Fear, Jennifer Samuel Multimedia Account Executive Chuck Healy, Jackie Mundy Digital Sales Manager Chad Beck Director of Public Relations Brittany Forrest

COVER Persistence

C I R C U L A T I O N Circulation Manager Kevin G. Powers

A day in the life of the director of surgical services for Missouri’s last abortion clinic

N A T I O N A L A D V E R T I S I N G VMG Advertising 1-888-278-9866, vmgadvertising.com

Cover photograph by

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STEVEN DUONG

INSIDE The Lede Hartmann News Feature Short Orders Culture Film Savage Love 6

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HARTMANN Passing the Pandemic Buck Missouri’s COVID crisis takes a sharp turn for the worse

BY RAY HARTMANN

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issouri is sick and getting sicker. Thanks in no small part to the abject failure of its state government, it has cracked into some top ten national rankings in the past week that nobody wants.

Missouri has risen to number five among states in hospitali ations per capita for COVID-19 and number ten in the percentage of positivity cases for the virus, as of

Sunday. The statistics are updated daily on a database maintained at the Washington Post.

The positivity rate only re ects the proportion of tested people who show up positive for COVID-19, and since Missouri continues to lag nationally in the amount of testing it does, the gravity of the situation may be worse than it appears. Speaking of lagging, the state health department dashboard on the pandemic is so slow and unreliable that some health officials fear the extent of the spread — and even deaths — may be understated in Missouri.

The hospitals aren’t filling up with statistics, however. They are overrun with human beings who are at best suffering gravely from the effects of a pandemic that is spiking far worse in Missouri than in the large majority of other states. That is not a coincidence.

Missouri is one of only thirteen states whose governors have declined to issue statewide mask mandates for the virus. Governor

Mike Parson hasn’t just declined; he has ignored repeated, emotional pleas from medical and publichealth officials to take this simple step that has been scientifically established to matter, notwithstanding some denial among cult worshippers.

Of the thirteen states in the dubious no-mandate club, five of them are in the top ten for positivity rates today, including Idaho and South Dakota at numbers one and two. There’s not a direct correlation between this dereliction of duty and the spread of COVI -1 , but to the extent state governments can mitigate the pandemic, inaction has not proven all that effective.

That said, the most scandalous part of Parson’s inaction extends beyond the political cowardice on mask policy. Perhaps the greatest outrage is the state’s unconscionable failure to distribute nearly $900 million in federal CARES Act relief funds that have literally been sitting undistributed since

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last spring, while Missourians get sick and die.

“We gave the governor every authority in May to spend all of the CARES money Missouri received, which was $2.2 billion,” state Rep. Deb Lavender, D-Kirkwood, says.

After dispensing $1.3 billion back then, the state has simply failed to do its job.

Whatever disagreements there have been about Parson’s authority to spend have not been a partisan issue between the governor and his Democratic opposition.

As early as March, it was Parson’s own Republican legislative caucus that astoundingly refused to trust the administration of their own political party to spend COVID-19 relief funds responsibility.

The emocrats were fine with deferring to Parson given the nature of the emergency.

There is some dispute about the wording of the spending authoriation, but Parson called a parade of special legislative sessions over

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the summer, any one of which could have been used to send out needed money. Instead, Parson chose to choreograph the sessions for election-year demagoguery in his campaign for governor. So he was still seeking spending approval as recently as last week, when the Senate passed a bill that still awaits his signature.

Lavender, known across the aisle as perhaps the most informed student of the budget process in the legislature, isn’t buying any of that. In her waning days there — having lost a state senate bid to Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-Neanderthal — Lavender says Parson is uninformed at best.

“We in the General Assembly passed a budget that included all he needed — in every way he could have wanted to spend it,” Lavender says. “It does beg the question of why he came back with a different bill in November.”

When Lavender refers to November, it’s the part that came after November 3, when Parson won election as governor against state Auditor Nicole Galloway.

Even if Parson received a mandate for malfeasance, it has proven disastrous for so many people, in so many ways. Among those are struggling business owners — especially proprietors of bars and restaurants — who are teetering on losing their livelihoods in the face of health restrictions imposed by local officials hung out to dry by the governor.

From the outset of the pandemic, Parson was very clear about his intention to pass the buck to local officials. ere’s how one of his initial orders laid out his hands-off philosophy: “Missouri is a diverse state with diverse communities. A core principle of Missouri government is that we embrace local-level decision making tailored to each community’s unique needs,” it read, before giving some meaningless lip service to the state setting “baseline standards” that never were more than a suggestion.

Setting aside the irony that the Republicans stubbornly refuse to respect “each community’s needs” on such matters as gun-control or minimum-wage policy — or even law enforcement if the local prosecutor is a certain type of Black person — the damage done by Parson’s cowardice has been immeasurable. Throughout the state, local city and county elected leaders and public-health officials have

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been left to navigate difficult decisions rendered nearly impossible by the lack of state leadership.

In St. Louis County, for example, County Executive Sam Page and his health officials have taken a harder-line approach to restricting indoor dining than the city and neighboring counties — actions that might be debatable but are motivated by legitimate concerns for the health and lives of residents. It’s understandable that local bars and restaurants are angrily pushing back, but in the absence of a uniform, science-driven set of health standards, local officials are in a no-win situation.

It’s hardly a St. Louis problem.

Across the state, at least a dozen health department officials have resigned — under great stress and even threats of violence — as they’ve tried to wrestle with the tough decisions ducked by state government. They also have to fear retribution in their budgets should they anger county commissioners, many of whom are driven by national voices of COVID denial.

Still, with unspeakable chutzpah, Republicans are trying to champion the cause of the very business owners they have injured beyond recognition by their politically driven failure at the state level. The likes of Koenig and Senators Bob Onder and Bill Eigel of St. Charles County are raging about health measures being taken and attacking Page, in particular, as a tyrant.

It would make good sense for Onder, Eigel and Koenig — the unfunny Three Stooges of the Missouri Senate from our region — to spend a little time as candy stripers at some of the traumatized local hospitals. They talk a good game in other contexts about valuing life. Maybe they can get a front-line look at what their political party has wrought in human terms.

These are horrible times for everyone. The best of state governments are struggling to cope, largely because of the atrocious failure at the national level of the exiting administration to face hard choices. When you have one of the worst of state governments, it’s beyond horrible. It’s sick. n Ray Hartmann founded the Riverfront Times in 1977. Contact him at rhar tmann1952@gmail.com or catch him on Donnybrook at 7 p.m. on Thursdays on the Nine Network and St. Louis In the Know with Ray Hartmann from 9 to 11 p.m. Monday thru Friday on KTRS (550 AM).

NEWS COVID Only Paused the Public Defender Crisis Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

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n April, as COVID-19 sparked the shuttering of normal court operations in Missouri, the state’s public defender system marshaled its unused funds for a different mission: hiring attorneys for hundreds of indigent criminal defendants whose cases had languished on waitlists for months and, in some cases, years.

Mary Fox, director of the state’s public defender system, revealed efforts to clear the waitlist in her testimony during a bench trial last month, noting that her office had incurred savings as a result of not having to pay for in-person court services like transportation, taking depositions and holding training sessions.

“So we took those funds,” Fox testified November 17, “and used those funds to eliminate as many of the cases on the waitlist as possible when that person was confined in a county jail.”

The efforts paid off, reducing crowding in jails at a time when the virus was already infecting inmates and staff in correctional facilities across the state. Under questioning by the Missouri attorney general’s office, Fox said that while March and April saw “significant numbers of applications on the waiting list who were confined in jails and prison,” that has since changed.

As of mid-November, the number of in-custody applications on the waiting list was zero, Fox testified, although that doesn’t include people on the list who aren’t in custody. At the beginning of the year, the number of incarcerated people on the list was 900.

But the trial which featured Fox’s testimony wasn’t focused on the re-

Missouri public defenders used the pandemic to clear an inmate waiting list. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI sponse of Missouri’s justice system to COVID-19. At issue is the waitlist system itself: Since 2017, thousands of Missouri’s poorest criminal defendants have wound up on waiting lists for public defenders, and many do their waiting inside a jail cell. But whether this system is an imperfect solution to the ongoing crisis in the state’s overworked public defender system, or just straightup illegal, is a question awaiting a ruling from Phelps County Judge William Hickle.

Appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court, Hickle presided over the two-day bench trial in a class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU, which argues that a waitlist that keeps defendants unrepresented for months violates their constitutional rights to an attorney.

On the other side of the case is Missouri’s public defender system, represented by the Missouri attorney general’s office, which called Fox as a witness. She testified that the waiting list has been dramatically reduced since the beginning of 2020, not long after she took the position as the state’s top public defender. At the time, the list featured 5,800 cases, most of whom had spent at least four months waiting for a lawyer.

“There was an expectation that the waitlist would quickly grow to about 7,000,” Fox said. “The waiting list was growing, and there didn’t seem any good way to reduce it. There was significant concern that there were people on the waiting list without counsel.”

The concern for defendants’ legal rights should go much further, the ACLU argues. In the lawsuit filed in February, the civil rights group

Michael Barrett, former director of the Missouri State Public Defender system. | PROVIDED wrote that the 2013 state statute that allows overworked public defenders to petition a judge to create a waitlist “violates the right to counsel, due process, and equal rights and opportunity guaranteed to all criminal defendants.”

The waitlist is a product of the perilous situation in which Missouri’s public defenders work.

The system is underfunded by millions and, according to a 2014 study by the American Bar Association, understaffed to the point that attorneys were able to work an average of just nine hours on serious felony cases “compared to the 47 hours deemed necessary.”

On the other hand, public defenders don’t have the option to turn down a case assigned to them by a judge. This created what the ACLU calls an “impossible” situation for the overworked attorneys, who juggle massive caseloads while still being obligated to ethically represent clients no

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matter what charges they’re facing, from low-level theft to murder.

The problem is that even shoplifting cases can be complicated.

Regardless of the seriousness of a crime, the ethical standards for representation — and the labor required to meet them — doesn’t change the work an attorney is obligated to do for their client.

“It’s investigating a case, interviewing witnesses, holding depositions, having hearings, doing the types of things that a lawyer does,” explained Michael Barrett, the former head of Missouri’s public defender system until 2019. He oversaw the creation of the waitlist system.

At trial, Barrett was the only witness called by the ACLU. He explained that the waitlist was created in 2017, inspired in part by a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that year that suspended 21-year veteran public defender Karl Hinkebein for failing to adequately represent six clients. At the time Hinkebein was handling more than 100 cases while also battling serious health problems.

The ruling against the public defender “was rather sobering from an attorney’s perspective,” Barrett said from the stand. (In a 2017 interview with St. Louis Public Radio, Barrett had compared the pressure facing public defenders to having two guns pointed at their heads: One demanding they take more cases than they could handle, the other threatening to punish them if they failed to represent clients properly.)

“My concern was that it would greatly increase our turnover in the public defender system,” Barrett added, “because it would make the job that they had all but impossible.”

To confront the catastrophic turnover, Barrett had lobbied for additional funding and, in a moment of trollish brilliance, even tried to legally appoint then-Governor Jay Nixon as a public defender. Those solutions failed.

The next solution was a system of district-level waitlists, but these systems weren’t the strict creations of a central organizer. In fact, waitlists can vary in size and structure between districts. In Columbia, for instance, the waitlist functioned as a literal list of 600 people waiting for legal representation. St. Louis

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[OPINION]

PUBLIC DEFENDERS Continued from pg 9

has no waiting list at all, but in St. Louis County, where a circuit judge in 2018 found that sixteen of the district’s twenty public defenders were “unable to provide effective assistance of counsel,” the waitlist represents a “private appointment system,” according to St. Louis County District Defender Stephen Reynolds.

In an interview, Reynolds explains that St. Louis County’s version of the waitlist was created in 2019 to connect defendants to private or public attorneys within 60 days. Then COVID-19 hit, and the county’s waitlist was canceled before its first appointment could be made.

Reynolds, though, anticipates the list will be reactivated once the pandemic passes.

“Judges don’t want people hanging out for six months,” he says.

“There’s always going to be some kind of list. We’ll look through our 2,200 open cases and have to determine which ones are appropriate for private appointments.”

St. Louis County’s public defenders are not a party to the class-action lawsuit that went to trial last month. But the outcome of the case could once again tilt the landscape for Missouri’s poorest criminal defendants and the public defenders obligated to take their cases. In an interview after the trial’s closing arguments on November 18, ACLU attorney Jason Williamson pushes back on the state’s suggestion that eliminating the waiting list entirely “will just make things worse” for the beleaguered public defenders.

“The people that are suffering the real harm are the people who have been charged with real crimes and don’t have the money to pay for an attorney,” he points out.

The root of the crisis, Williamson argues, remains the lack of resources given to Missouri public defenders.

“This case was never about questioning the motives of the MSPD or their commitment to their clients,” Williamson says. “This was always about the fact that, no matter what the MSPD does, unless they get some additional resources or the state stops prosecuting as many people, it’s not going to matter.”

After efforts to clear the waitlist of in-custody defendants, the list still features some 2,000 names, Williamson says. More than half have waited at least months without a lawyer. More than 200 have waited for more than a year. n

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COVID Doesn’t Care What We Believe Written by

STACEY NEWMAN

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his past Thanksgiving Day, 900 St. Louis COVID-19 patients were hospitalized as numbers soar.

St. Louis-area hospitals predict shortly ICU oors will be full while hospitals both rural and local search surrounding states, desperate for emergency critical care beds.

DePaul Hospital in St. Louis County is waiting for deaths to open up more beds and, like many other hospitals, has ordered a refrigerated truck because their morgue is already over capacity.

Read that again — “waiting for deaths.”

Dr. Alex Garza, chief medical officer of SSM ealth and head of the St. Louis Regional Pandemic Task Force, begs Gov. Mike Parson for a statewide mask mandate, as do numerous medical professionals. Herb Kuhn, president and CEO of the Missouri Hospital Association, implores the governor to immediately act, stating “the wolf is at the door.”

Out of sheer desperation, Dr. Micah Luderer, a local frontline physician, launched a petition appealing to the governor to “save lives” via a mask mandate. Dr. Kenneth Remy, a Barnes-Jewish Hospital ICU physician, posted an online video simulating the eerie labored breathing of a COVID-19 patient in the final moments of life, pleading for us to simply don a mask.

Meanwhile, state Sen. Bob Onder (R-Lake St. Louis) taunts me on social media as I present current public health facts. He asks, “Does the actual wearing of masks or the feel-good mandate on a piece of paper, ‘save lives’?”

The answer is yes.

Saving lives is the point.

All of us depend on hospitals and their staff, especially in an emergency — to repair broken bones, save us from debilitating strokes and brain bleeds and to shock our hearts back to life.

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Stacey Newman, executive director and founder of ProgressWomen. | PROVIDED We’ve never in our lifetimes NOT known them to be there.

Then the pandemic hit, attacking populous urban centers first as the virus wound its deadly way through small rural towns. At the same time, naysayers propagate messages that it’s all a hoax, taking their cues from QAnon and the White House.

One of those naysayers is Onder, a physician legislator representing St. Charles County, a county resisting a county mask mandate although depending on St. Louis-area hospitals for care.

Onder, with a history of discounting medical science, is challenging Dr. Garza, former chief medical officer for the U.S. epartment of Homeland Security, insisting on evidence of maskmandate efficacy. is disregard for the lives of frontline medical workers, let alone his own constituents, is disgusting.

Never mind that the CDC compared counties in Kansas, publishing a study in November adding to the growing body of worldwide evidence that mask mandates slow the spread of COVID-19. A new study by Saint Louis University compared mandates in St. Louis and St. Louis County against outlying counties without mandates and concluded that county mask mandates significantly and quickly slowed virus infections.

National public health experts concur. Large-scale mask mandates, even limited and temporary on a national scale during the coming winter months, could save tens of thousands of lives.

Last April, as I directed St. Louis-area COVID-19 relief efforts via ProgressWomen, a statewide social justice organization, donating needed PPE, thousands

of hand-sewn masks and meals to ICU staff, I met many on the frontline. The fatigue and sad exhaustion in their eyes was alarmingly unforgettable.

Additional nurses and physicians reached out for help and spoke hauntingly of fears of infecting themselves and their families. They asked us to please take mask precautions seriously.

They told us once patients hit COI -1 ICU oors, they would be triaged as to who would get the few life-saving ventilators. Today frontline physicians tell us they are doubling up patients in ICU rooms, unthinkable in previous hospital protocols.

Still Missouri Governor Parson urges only “personal responsibility,” leaving shutdown decisions to local school districts and disavowing public health warnings.

Legislators in the state capitol still balk at wearing masks and still host public events throughout the state as in the “Before Times.”

Meanwhile, the coronavirus does what it does best — spread.

I personally understand pandemic fatigue as well as cancelling holiday celebrations, even the hard decision to postpone a daughter’s wedding. But COVID-19 is not fatigued.

Missouri remains one of thirteen states without a statewide mask mandate, leaving rural counties — many without hospitals, ICU beds or local mask mandates of their own — defenseless.

This holiday season means a spike in gatherings of people traveling outside their households. It means exhausted medical staff bracing for soaring outbreaks, knowing their own lives are at risk.

Several weeks ago, Dr. Garza in an emotional press briefing begged the governor one more time for a mask mandate, warning that no locale in the state is safe.

Missouri is averaging 42 virus deaths a day with 4,000 deaths and over 300,000 cases reported.

Still, no mask mandate or emergency stay-at-home order.

Sen. Onder can call me “woke,” cry about “freedom” and dispute his fellow medical colleagues’ expertise.

Here’s the thing.

COVID-19 doesn’t care. It’s just going to keep on winning. n Stacey Newman is the executive director and founder of ProgressWomen, a statewide organization focused on justice and equality issues. A former Missouri state legislator, she represented a St. Louis district for nine years.

Deadly Outbreak in Veterans Homes Fed by Failures Written by

DOYLE MURHPY

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he state did too little too late to prevent or slow COVID-19 outbreaks that have killed more than 100 residents in Missouri’s veterans homes, an investigation has found.

Through the early months of the pandemic, the seven long-term care facilities that are under the watch of the Missouri Veterans Commission appeared to be a model of coronavirus management, says a report from Armstrong Teasdale LLP, a St. Louis-based law firm hired to handle a review of operations. The MVC’s leadership acted quickly in March to stock up on personal protective equipment, shore up supply lines and change procedures, including banning outside visitors.

Even as the virus began spreading through the state in the spring and early summer, the commission reported just one case — a veteran in St. Louis.

“Unfortunately, MVC Headquarters was lulled into a false sense of security and failed to capitalize on its early successes,” the report says.

In late August and early September, the first signs of what has become a deadly outbreak now hitting all seven facilities began to pop up in homes across the state. On September 2, a single positive case at the Cape Girardeau home had spiked to three cases within 72 hours among veterans. Five positive staffers increased to seven within two weeks.

The numbers were still small, and the commission’s administrators “failed to appreciate the need to move quickly to isolate positive patients,” the investigation found.

In mid-September, the state still hadn’t recognized what was happening.

Gov. Mike Parson and his wife Teresa toured two homes, including a September 15 visit to the Mount Vernon facility where the governor spoke in person to staff. He later tweeted out photos from the trip. During a news conference the next day, he praised the work being done to protect the former soldiers.

Within two weeks of that visit, a fullfledged outbreak was underway in Mount Vernon with 31 of its 150 residents testing positive. Parson and his wife also contracted the virus, announcing on September 23 that they had tested positive.

A spokeswoman for the governor told the Riverfront Times in late September that there was “no connection” between the spread of the virus in the homes and the Parsons’ visit.

Part of the problem in the homes was that their leadership in the commission

Gov. Parson tweeted this photo of himself at the Mount Vernon home before an outbreak. | TWITTER was slow to respond — even as information about the virus improved, experts predicted a fall surge and staff at the homes reported concerns about rising cases.

The MVC administration didn’t raise any concerns other than staffing levels during regular meetings with the state’s Fusion Cell, the group of state department leaders formed to coordinate the state’s COVID-19 response. And even when they reported additional cases, no one in the Fusion Cell asked any followup questions, the report says.

The MVC is largely autonomous in state government. It is technically under the watch of the Department of Public Safety, but it operates primarily on its own, with the authority resting with a volunteer board of commissioners who have little hands-on oversight of the daily operations within the veterans homes, Armstrong Teasdale’s investigators noted.

During the early months of the pandemic, when MVC administrators could have been preparing for a plan to deal with an outbreak, they just continued doing what they had been doing since March, largely ignoring what was happening at other facilities across the country and even in their own nursing homes.

Veterans, even some with COVID-19 symptoms, were allowed to continue mingling with other residents, eating with them in dining halls and sharing rooms while they awaited test results.

Staff members also continued with their duties while awaiting tests, despite evidence from across the country that the majority of people who turned out to have the virus showed no symptoms at the time of their tests.

“The lack of a comprehensive outbreak plan led to confusion and inefficiencies, and it almost certainly contrib-

The investigators report widespread loneliness, depression and atrophy. “The Veterans are alive, but not living,” the report says. uted to the inability to contain the spread of COVID-19 once it was introduced into the Homes,” the report says.

When the virus hit in earnest, all the mistakes and squandered opportunities of the previous months became obvious, setting off a cascade of problems the facilities weren’t equipped to handle. In one example, the report notes that the MVC administration failed to set aside anywhere close to enough beds in which patients could quarantine, resulting in “at least one isolation area filled with fifty patients in one week.”

Staff shortages increased so quickly that by the time the MVC recognized it was a bad idea to have staff caring for vets in multiple units, it was too late to reverse the mistakes. There just weren’t enough employees to split between COVID-19 patients and other parts of the homes, because there was no one else to fill their spots.

It wasn’t until the first week in October, more than a month after the first signs of an outbreak, that Parson ordered the review of operations and began to take

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emergency steps, such as providing additional tests, to stem the spread.

When Armstrong Teasdale’s team began looking into problems and taking calls from vets and their families through a hotline they set up, they encountered a dismal scene. Stressed-out staffers had been left to deal with the fallout of the administration’s failed preparations, “and many are overwhelmed by the emotional toll of caring for COVID-19 affected Veterans, the negative media attention, and the added demands of COVID-19 protocols — especially when many of them live in Missouri communities where mask mandates and social distancing are not enforced.”

But the saddest anecdotes in the report describe the veterans isolated from families as the virus rampages through the homes. The investigators report widespread loneliness, depression and atrophy.

“The Veterans are alive, but not living,” the report says.

The prolonged separation from relatives while the state reacts to outbreaks coincides with emotional carnage — some vets have “stopped talking and eating, several cry ....” Others now require wheelchairs for the first time or grow confused when loved ones no longer show up.

“One Veteran asked if his wife had divorced him since [he] has not seen her in more than 6 months,” the report says.

“Another asked if his daughter had died since he had not seen her in person.”

Family members also told auditors they worry about the medical care, noting that they often helped communicate with doctors during checkups and helped with numerous small tasks, such as coaxing vets to eat, cleaning out their ears so they could hear better, brushing their teeth and trimming their eyebrows.

The report writers suggest creating protocols that would allow limited numbers of designated family members to visit, reasoning that with the right precautions the risk would be no greater than interactions with staff members.

The report emphasizes that the investigators found that staff and MVC leadership care deeply about the vets in their care but have been overwhelmed by failures by the administration to recognize or prepare for the length and severity of the pandemic. The investigators offer a series of recommendations, including developing outbreak plans, coordinating with outside agencies and implementing updated protocols for caring for infected residents and preventing the spread of the virus.

“Ordering this rapid independent external investigation is only the first step in a series of future endeavors the MVC and other external stakeholders should take in order to ensure the protection of the Veterans under their care,” the report says. “It is our hope that these findings and recommendations will serve as a launching point of positive change for those who deserve it the most.” n

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A day in the life of the director of surgical services for

Missouri’s last abortion clinic

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hirty minutes — that’s how long it takes Kawanna Shannon, a 41-year-old St. Louis native, to get to work on a normal day. But the drive is much more than just a morning commute for her. She stops at Smoothie King, gets her usual and merges into a highway lane filled with droopy-eyed, middle-aged men and women making their way to the office for the day. She sips on her drink, turns up her arth, ind Fire playlist and zones out about the long day ahead of her.

Shannon has spent the past nineteen years of her life overseeing abortions at Planned Parenthood in the Central est nd. It’s a job she cares deeply about, but that doesn’t

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make it easy.

As she nears the Forest Park Avenue facility, she mentally prepares, pulling on what she calls her “invisible onder oman gear” before

she turns into the lot and parks her car. A blue banner that reads “STILL ” hangs overhead, covering half the gray cinder-block building.

The mother of five will pass a few morning-shift protesters who roar that she is a murderer defying the word of God himself as she makes the twenty-foot walk to the front door. At this point they’re little more than background noise, a fixture of the job, to Shannon.

Once inside, the atmosphere changes instantly. Shannon walks through the glass entryway, past a

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Kawanna Shannon, director of surgical services for Planned Parenthood in Missouri is still passionate about her job, even after nineteen years. | STEVEN DUONG riverfronttimes.com

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receptionist. She is greeted by a security guard who guides patients to their destinations within the three-story building. The first oor is the source of Planned Parenthood’s controversy and the target of protesters and conservative state politicians. With tiled oors lit by uorescent lights, it’s where the abortions and vasectomies take place. A second medical oor is above.

Shannon makes her way to the third oor and begins working with her staff of 40 a crew of physicians, surgeons, medical techs, medical assistants, educators and a research team. As the supervisor of all abortions for Planned Parenthood in the St. Louis and southwest Missouri region, Shannon sees a rotating cast of coworkers and patients each day. ven with the plethora of people Shannon must oversee, she makes sure that each patient feels comfortable and knows her options. If a patient comes in for an abortion, Shannon says, the staff makes sure it is the choice the patient wants to make for herself. That’s a part of the job that she doesn’t think opponents of Planned Parenthood understand.

She considers education before, during and after these tough decisions the key to good care.

Shannon still finds passion for her work after nineteen years in this profession because of the people. When she receives the notes that say “thank you for not judging me,” she loves using it as an excuse to celebrate her two favorite aspects of the job: her coworkers and patients. ut she’s mindful of the others who’ve been working for years to put an end to the work Planned Parenthood does.

“There are people who really don’t want us to exist,” Shannon says. “There are people that don’t want us to be able to help a woman in need.”

T

o see the daily crowd of protesters outside the clinic, passersby might think that Planned Parenthood’s primary function is performing abortions.

Shannon encourages anyone with this idea in mind to “dig a little deeper,” as abortions are only to 4 percent of the total services carried out at the center. ne of Planned Parenthood’s leading services is actually its well woman exams. The assessments can detect all sorts of diseases, infections

Anti-abortion protesters are a daily presence outside of Planned Parenthood’s clinic in the Central West End. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI and even cancer for women.

It’s not that the nonprofit organization tries to downplay or hide the fact that it performs abortions it’s just that there is so much misinformation surrounding its operations.

When it does come to reproductive services, Shannon says the biggest goal is always preventative care, whether through sex education, birth control or family planning resources. If all else fails, Planned Parenthood, of course, provides abortions to its patients.

“If you were in a situation that was out of your control or something is just not the timing you need, we are proud to also offer abortion,” Shannon says. “ e do not sweep abortion to the side it’s a service that we offer. Just like we offer a well woman exam, we offer abortion.”

In 201 , Planned Parenthood clinics across the country performed 4 , 72 abortions in medical centers such as the one on Forest Park Avenue. ut epublican lawmakers in Missouri have worked steadily for decades to restrict access in the state. In 200 , there were five clinics statewide that offered abortions as one of their services. In 2017, just two remained.

After the 201 landmark court case Whole Woman’s Health v.

Hellerstedt, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the law could not place an unnecessary burden on women seeking health care, the number of abortion providers

expanded in Missouri. For a brief stint in 201 , there were three spread across the state, including the Forest Park Avenue Planned Parenthood. et, in just months, the Joplin and Springfield clinics were shut down by quickly adopted state restrictions.

Now Planned Parenthood’s clinic in the Central West End is the only in-state option for more than 1 million patients of reproductive age across Missouri. That’s left women in rural areas driving hundreds of miles, or even crossing state lines, to get a safe, legal abortion.

It’s also made the clinic even more of a target for opponents.

If they could force the facility to close, Missouri would become the first state in the country without an abortion provider since Roe v.

Wade was decided in 1 7 .

“It’s a bit of an honor, and sometimes a little scary, knowing that you have the whole state on your shoulders,” Shannon says.

I

n 201 , the Missouri epartment of ealth and Senior Services’ licensing supervisor, illiam oebel, visited Planned Parenthood’s Forest Park Avenue clinic for an inspection. This was new. The clinic’s operations were typically reviewed every year by an inspector, but this was the first time the department’s top regulator had visited to personally handle the inspection.

In fact, it was the first time oebel had inspected any medical facil-

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ity. ut oebel and or members of his team visited five times that year, and even though there had been no problems with previous years’ inspections, Shannon says these new probes had an “accusatory demeanor.”

“It seemed as if they didn’t understand their own regulations, as if they didn’t understand the women’s anatomy,” Shannon would later testify in a state hearing. “They started asking questions as if they didn’t understand how to do an inspection.” ne point of contention between Planned Parenthood and the state was a new regulation to administer two pelvic exams, instead of one, to women prior to an abortion. With patients traveling from across the state to come to the clinic, the re uirement meant women would have to travel to St. Louis multiple times, an added and invasive hardship that Planned Parenthood says served no medical purpose and was only designed as another barrier to women seeking the procedure.

“Patients were made to get unnecessarily violated,” Shannon later testified. hen Planned Parenthood refused to conduct the extra exams, citing their duty as health-care providers to do what was best for their patients, the clinic was issued a citation. The complaint was filed by oebel.

At the same time, the state was dragging its feet on renewing

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DHSS director Dr. Randall Williams at the state hearing in 2019. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI

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Planned Parenthood’s license.

With the license set to expire at midnight on May 31, 2019, the organization went to court and persuaded a St. Louis judge to issue an injunction, allowing the clinic to temporarily continue operations while the licensing issue was worked out.

Under court orders to make a decision on Planned Parenthood’s license, the state announced in June 2019 it would not be issuing a renewal. Koebel’s boss, state health director Dr. Randall Williams, claimed state inspectors had uncovered 30 violations, including botched procedures.

“We feel we have a duty to prevent future harm, to prevent future accidents or bad outcomes from happening again,” Williams told reporters during a June 21, 2019, news conference.

But Planned Parenthood claimed the denial was politically motivated and argued the state had “weaponized” the licensing procedure as a backdoor way to end abortion in Missouri.

Circuit Court Judge Michael Stelzer eventually ordered the two sides to take up the dispute in front of the Missouri Administrative Hearing Commission, which has authority over licensing disputes in the state.

A hearing scheduled for that fall pitted Planned Parenthood against top state health officials.

Shannon was among witnesses due to testify. If her side lost, it would mean more than a single

clinic closing — it would be the end of legal abortion in Missouri.

S

hannon says her work is the easy part. It only gets overwhelming when the state throws hurdles and regulations in the way. To know it could be so much simpler to use Planned Parenthood’s services is an aspect of the job she despises.

On October 31, 2019, she found herself fighting those forces directly. Called to testify in front of the state commission, she spoke about the clumsy, confrontational inspections by Koebel and the state health department. She explained that the clinic initially agreed to perform the second pelvic exam mandated by the state, but she and her staff decided it was too “unbearable” for patients to endure. The court took a recess after Shannon broke down in tears recounting the new regulation. er testimony came on the final day of the commission’s hearing.

Most of the headlines followed the revelation that the Department of Health and Senior Services had mined medical records to create a spreadsheet that tracked patients’ menstrual cycles in hopes of finding evidence of failed abortions.

In the end, Planned Parenthood’s review of more than 4,000 cases turned up two concerning cases, both of which an outside expert testified were handled appropriately. Planned Parenthood’s leaders and supporters felt good about their chances by the end of the hearing, but there was no guarantee they would prevail.

It was up to a single commissioner, Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi, to decide, and it wasn’t clear when that decision would come. For the next six months, Shannon and her colleagues went to work never knowing what each day at the office would bring. Shannon recalls worrying about her patients, who depended upon their representatives for their right to a safe, legal abortion.

“There were many days where we felt weary, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” she says. “We knew we had to stay in the fight for the women.”

On May 29, 2020 — a full year after Planned Parenthood first took the state to court — Shannon was in a meeting on the top oor of the building when she overheard cheering ooding in from the halls. Dandamudi’s decision was out, and he had sided with Planned Parenthood.

“Planned Parenthood has demonstrated that it provides safe and legal abortion care,” Dandamudi wrote in his decision. “The physicians who perform abortions at Planned Parenthood through Washington University and [Barnes-Jewish Hospital] are all exceptionally competent and well trained.”

A year of persistent effort to continue serving Missouri residents finally came to fruition. Shannon stopped the meeting she was in, raced down the hall, jumped over office supplies that were strewn across the oor and leaped straight into a coworker’s arms.

“We were crying and hugging, because we see that someone else understands our hard work and why we are meant to be open,” she says. “It felt victorious.”

The festive mood spread rapidly beyond the office. A rally had broken out in the city, mainly to celebrate the lawsuit’s outcome.

Shannon joined the group near the Arch, taking the stage at one point to speak alongside Planned Parenthood colleagues and activists in between the crowd’s chants of “Stand up, fight back” and “ ey, ho, Parson’s got to go.”

Shannon remembers it as one of the proudest moments of her career. “ e had finally stood up for ourselves in a way that we had never done before,” she says in a recent interview, “and it took all of us.

There wasn’t any going back.”

E

enjoyable.

ven on the more mundane days at the office, Shannon and her coworkers find ways to make her work

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“I am leading a team of people who care about people, and that’s enough for me,” she says.

The Missouri Administrative Hearing Commission decision ordered the renewal of Planned Parenthood’s license until May 2021.

It was a relief, but it has still been a difficult year as health-care providers in the midst of a pandemic.

The staff has been forced to come up with new, socially distant care for many of their services.

Shannon recalls seeing coworkers cry because they couldn’t be present for their favorite part of the job — face-to-face time with their patients. The hug-rich culture of the Forest Park Avenue location has had to turn to “air fives” for the time being.

And even in a pandemic, the protesters remain.

Shannon says they will sometimes pose as Planned Parenthood workers and tell arriving patients that the location is shutting down or that they can help a patient before they even enter the building. With this, they attempt to steer patients away from using any of Planned Parenthood’s resources. It’s about the only time they get to Shannon — when they deceive patients and interfere with them getting care.

“Abortion is a deeply personal and complex decision,” she says.

“Information should never be used to coerce or shame or judge anyone who is pregnant.”

But most days, as she steps out of the office for her 0-minute commute home, the angry faces shouting at her from the sidewalk barely register. She’s already switching out of her worker mode as she walks past them. Her invisible Wonder Woman gear begins to dissolve for another night. Shannon’s boys are waiting at home.

If she’s having trouble separating from the job, she will put extra care into teaching them lessons she’s learned during her nineteenyear-career: open-mindedness, respecting one’s needs and being able to meet people where they are, all values which she adheres to in her job daily.

As she pulls her car up to the wrought-iron gates surrounding the parking lot of Planned Parenthood, she can see protesters standing just outside its boundaries.

They hold up neon posterboard signs with Bible verses scribbled across them in bold permanent marker, condemning the workers in the name of God. Shannon, making the first turn down Forest Park Avenue, reminds herself of a similar quote from scripture that she lives by each day: “Don’t get weary in well doing.” n

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[SIDE DISH]

The Extra Mile Brian Hardesty of Guerrilla Street Food and 9 Mile Garden rises to the challenge Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

T

his past February, Brian Hardesty had a lot on his plate.

Guerrilla Street Food (43 South Old Orchard Avenue, Webster Groves; 314-274-2528), the restaurant and food truck he owns with his friend Joel Crespo, was shutting down all its locations except for one, and the pair were trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding. At the same time, Hardesty was overseeing the construction and impeding opening of 9 Mile Garden (9375 Gravois Road, Affton; 314-3902806), the city’s first food-truck venue, which he manages.

It was a lot to handle, but as anyone who knows what pandemicrelated news March would soon bring, it was about to get even more stressful.

“When all of this started happening, we were negotiating with landlords and trying to put some sort of plan together for Guerrilla,” Hardesty says. “Luckily, they were very understanding, and we were situated to continue because we are fast casual, so we made the pivot to carryout pretty easily. At 9 Mile, it was like, ‘OK, this is terrible,’ but at the same time the concept was made for being outdoors, so we felt like we could safely execute it. e figured with both concepts] that we could sustain ourselves until a grant or loan or some kind of assistance came through and by July, this would all be over and we could move on.”

Well before July came and went, Hardesty realized the pain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic would not be alleviated anytime soon. As the months progressed and cases rose, it became clear to him that

Brian Hardesty has spent the pandemic reworking and executing plans for his Guerrilla Street Food and 9 Mile Garden. | ANDY PAULISSEN he and his business partners at both Guerrilla Street Food and 9 Mile arden would have to figure out how to meet the present moment. Since March, he’s been doing that for both concepts, trying to navigate public health concerns while also remaining committed to serving guests and providing the hospitality that undergirds all that he does.

He admits it hasn’t been easy.

Though Guerrilla has been simpler to manage because of its fast-casual setup, 9 Mile Garden has proven to be a special kind of challenge.

On the one hand, the food-truck park is designed to be an outdoor venue — an ideal setting for how people are to safely gather during the pandemic. On the other, the place opened to a crowd that was too large for comfort, prompting Hardesty and his crew to work hand-in-hand with the St. Louis

County Health Department to institute strict rules that put everyone’s health and safety at the forefront of their operations.

For both concepts, though, the constant pressure he and his staff are under to maintain these standards and navigate the evershifting landscape of new rules and regulations has been quite challenging.

“We’ve had to train our staff to let everyone know that these are the rules,” Hardesty says. “Unfortunately, we have to act like the police sometimes. It’s pretty hardcore how we operate, but we don’t want to be perceived as being the sort of place where there are no rules and there are all these crowds. That’s not who we want to be.”

In the midst of all the challenges, though, Hardesty remains committed to taking care of his staff and guests, who have been

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loyal and supportive throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Though he admits that things are different, he feels that there are still opportunities to connect with people — something he believes is more important now than ever.

“With our staff at 9 Mile and Guerrilla, we always make an attempt to take our time with people, whether it’s a phone call, a curbside transaction or someone just stopping by the window to look at the menu,” Hardesty says. “We want to thank them for still coming out and let them know we appreciate that they are still curious. I feel like the answer to hospitality is still inperson interaction. That may have to be distant right now, but we can still take that extra time to let people know we appreciate them.”

Hardesty took a moment to share his thoughts on the state of

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BRIAN HARDESTY Continued from pg 19

the St. Louis food and beverage industry, what it’s like to be a hospitality professional during such a challenging time and the things that give him hope in the midst of difficulty.

As a hospitality professional, what do people need to know about what you are going through?

We are all in survival mode. Landlords want rent, utilities need to be paid, payroll, all of these bills.

All of this while revenue is down sometimes by 50 to 75 percent.

Even still, the instinct is to innovate, and we are all constantly at the drawing board and talking to other restaurants about any idea that makes sense to bring in dollars and survive.

What do you miss most about

the way you did your job before COVID-19?

Hugging my friends, blowing off steam, not having to question everywhere I go and perform a risk assessment.

What do you miss least?

Customer reviews. I haven’t read one review in eight months. My thought is that people wouldn’t be such jerks as to disparage any business during these times. I know it happens, but I can’t bring myself to read them, and I don’t miss it.

What is one thing you make sure you do every day to maintain a sense of normalcy?

Play with my kids, laugh with my wife and talk with my friends.

Check on people. Everyone needs it, and it gives me comfort.

What have you been stress-eating/drinking lately?

I’ve been on a local whiskey kick and am in love with Switchgrass Spirits. As far as food, I order

three entrees for just myself when I get to visit Balkan Treat Box. Comforting and always perfect.

What are the three things you’ve made sure you don’t want to run out of, other than toilet paper?

1. Eggs are a hot commodity in my house, and with three kids, we go through a couple dozen a week. 2. read our. I’m a terrible baker, so I need a lot to continue to practice and learn. 3. Family time. If I run out of time to be with my family and friends, COVID or not, I won’t be in a good place.

You have to be quarantined with three people. Who would you pick?

Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Yoda.

Once you feel comfortable going back out and about, what’s the first thing you’ll do?

I’ll have a party with all of my friends, go to Sidney Street Cafe for a multi-course meal, and then hop on a ight to ora ora for a month.

What do you think the biggest change to the hospitality industry will be once people are allowed to return to normal activity levels?

My hopes are that people will have a newfound respect for personal space, that we see less petty complaints and more understanding, and that masks, to a certain extent, will remain a useful tool for hospitality professionals for the foreseeable future.

What is one thing that gives you hope during this crisis?

Professionally, I’m given hope by my partners at 9 Mile Garden and our future plans for St. Louis and beyond. That every day Guerrilla Street Food survives and keeps getting better and better and our team never quits. Personally, that my children never complain about this time in their lives and they only enjoy the present and keep talking about the possibilities in the future. n

[JUSTICE]

Gus Gus Fun Bus Killer Sentenced to Twenty Years in Federal Prison Written by

DOYLE MURPHY

A

n East St. Louis man who swiped a truck in 2018 during a violent confrontation and then ran over Gus Gus Fun Bus owner Mike Arnold has been sentenced to twenty years in federal prison.

Curtis Alford, 22, pleaded guilty to one count of carjacking resulting in death.

Arnold was a longtime AAA employee but was best known for ferrying revelers between bars and restaurants in his popular party bus. He endeared himself to St. Louis’ chefs and barkeeps because he was a relentless champion of the region’s bars and restaurants.

On June 16, 2018, he was characteristically in the city’s center for the Taste of Downtown STL food festival. Authorities say he spotted the carjacking, pulled out his cellphone and tried to shoot a photo.

Alford had spotted two other festivalgoers as they put money in a parking meter and attacked. He pepper-sprayed the two and wrestled with them for the keys to their pickup. According to the U.S. attorney, Alford grabbed one of the victims by her hair and neck, dragging her to the sidewalk before he snatched the keys and bolted for the truck.

Alford fought off one of the victims while he started the truck and drove off.

Arnold, who was in the street, tried to get

Curtis Alford. | ST. LOUIS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS out of the way, but Alford drove over him and dragged him before jumping a curb and hitting another person and a fire hydrant.

Alford then drove around the corner and picked up an accomplice, Jana Stowers, but they didn’t make it far. Authorities say Alford drove at a crowd that included two police officers at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut streets, forcing them to flee. He then crashed and was taken into custody.

Arnold survived for several days in the hospital before he died. He and his wife Suzanne Arnold had eight children between the two of them.

“My heart breaks for the Arnold Family and I greatly appreciate the cooperation of the other victims. This is a senseless tragedy,” U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen said in a news release. “Curtis Alford deserves every day of his sentence.”

Suzanne and the couple’s daughter, Molly Arnold, also released statements through the U.S. attorney’s office following the sentencing.

“The loss of Mike is always with us and that will never change. This day is

Mike Arnold is still missed every day. | COURTESY GUS GUS FUN BUS about what the defendant took from all of us. However, now we may be able to move past the criminal aspects of this terrible event,” Suzanne said. “More than anything, though, I hope we can remember all the beautiful things Mike was to us. Hopefully he gets the justice he deserves.”

Molly added, “My dad was such a major part of this community and of my family. It’s been over two years of trying to get past the responsibilities that came along with his death. When the pandemic required shutting down the courts, I felt like we’d been thrown back into uncertainty and this looming last loose end wouldn’t get tied up any time soon. It feels now like we can grieve the way we were meant to grieve. Thinking only of Dad and not wor-

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rying about whether we will see justice, if our statements are ready, and what our next steps have to be. I appreciate the love and the support that we’ve received from so many, and I appreciate that I find myself coming across kind words and happy memories even now. It has helped us to get through the hardest parts of this, and I’m so grateful for that. The fact that people still honor him over two years after his death is a true testament to the kind of person my father was. The love that he sowed reaches farther than I could have expected and it continues to grow through the community. It’s a legacy that most dream of.”

Alford’s accomplice Stowers has pleaded guilty to carjacking and is scheduled to be sentenced later this month. n

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CULTURE

[BLANKETS]

Creepin’ While You’re Sleepin’ St. Louis artist Jason Spencer stays busy during the pandemic by bringing monsters to life Written by

DANIEL HILL

J

ason Spencer has largely spent his months of pandemic life in his home, surrounded by monsters.

A scaly warthog creature with three eyeballs, nine pupils, sharp fangs and a nose ring. A demented clown-demon with a knife through its head and a scowl on its face. And, of course, various fish-beasts with huge breasts, waving crosses with their alternatingly super-buff and pathetically scrawny human arms.

It sounds scary, sure. ut for Spencer, it’s just another day at the office.

Spencer is best known in St. Louis for the many jaw-dropping murals he’s painted on walls throughout the city. ou’ve surely seen his work his skeleton surfing on a slice of pi a while firing lightning out of a guitar on the side of Pi a ead on South rand his wraparound mural depicting sandwiches and cans of beer as spaceships rocketing through the galaxy on the ramophone’s patio the murder of deranged crows that recently appeared on the back of the patio at the still-closed Crow’s Nest in Maplewood.

“And that was a wild one too, because I finished that right before the week that everyone closed down,” Spencer says of the latter.

“So I was talking to enny Snaryk, Crow’s Nest owner no one knew at the beginning saying, eah, maybe we’ll just hold off and hang it up whenever you guys open back up.’ ut nobody knew how long shutdown would actually last. ventually, we got it hung

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Jason Spencer is best-known for his huge, eye-popping murals, but he’s found a new hustle in pandemic times: woven blankets. | JASON SPENCER up over the summertime because they were making more plans for the Crow’s Nest, which is cool.” ver since the C I -1 crisis took a sledgehammer to the pocketbooks of the breweries and businesses that funded those mural projects, Spencer has mostly been creating his insane work within the confines of his own home. Under his iller Napkins brand, he’s been peddling various wares depicting monstrous creeps through his online store, shopkillernapkins.com.

“I opened the online store, this newer online store, at the beginning of the year,” Spencer says.

“And I think that was even before pandemic times. ut then that gave me even more incentive,

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when everything was kind of feeling like it was moving to the digital world, to really kind of bump and learn more about online sales and marketing and stuff.”

Spencer’s efforts in those regards, and his uni ue artistic talents, have ensured that he stays occupied and, importantly, financially stable throughout the pandemic. Though the bulk of his income these days comes through commissions for logos and art from brands and bands Spencer has a longtime working partnership with local act the Maness rothers, but he’s also worked with many other local and national acts including Panic At The isco , he’s found a somewhat un-

likely revenue stream during this time as well: blankets.

“I feel like I first started seeing some woven blankets pop up on my sponsored ads from some other company,” Spencer says. “I was curious to see what the process is with that, because they look really cool. asically, it’s a print-on-demand, drop-shipping sort of situation where you can submit your artwork to them and then they’ll produce you a blanket. Now, you always get varying results of what that means, because you’re limited to a color thread count with that process. ut yeah, I just thought it was a cool way to make a uni ue product with some of my art instead of just a T-shirt or pa-

Why crawl in bed with just one monster when you can have seven? | JASON SPENCER

Spencer’s art tends toward the bizarre. | JASON SPENCER per print or something.”

Spencer started selling his first tapestries, depicting five monster heads of varying states of absurdity, in January. The reaction from the blanket-buying public was so overwhelming and immediate that he has since added ten more designs in his signature batshitcra y style, including one in which a fish with arms chugs oil over a banner that says “Skip Class, uff as,” a depiction of a weeping irgin Mary with alien features and, naturally, a few more covered in monsters. is efforts to step further into the digital world have helped with the marketing side of things. A former construction worker, Spencer recently built an elaborate setup that allows him to stream in-process videos on social media while drawing his demented works.

“I’ve always wanted an easy way to document the process of artwork. Just having a stable camera system going on, documenting the

process of it and documenting the final products,” Spencer explains.

“And so at the beginning of the pandemic I got this badass drafting table for like 1 0 on Craigslist it’s humongous too, takes up most of the room but after a while I was like, Man, I need to build a little rig that goes over the top.’

I invested in a nicer camera that could then tether to my computer so I can remote control the camera and take pictures, take video. r I can also, I set it up to where I can just start streaming and having some top-down, high- uality camera streams of art creation.

“For the most part, I’ve been pretty much hunkering down in the house and trying to make the home art studio a lot cooler,” he adds. “ hich so far has been kinda successful.”

To say that Spencer has been keeping busy is an understatement his drive to create makes those of us who have spent most of the pandemic baking sour-

Next up: sculpture creeps. | JASON SPENCER dough bread or watching trash documentaries about tigers and the mutants who cage them look like a bunch of slouches. And to top it all off, he’s recently started experimenting with other disciplines as well namely, sculpture art though he preposterously characteri es that work as though he’s dropped the ball.

“I’ve been kind of looking at the same sculpture for a while now,” Spencer laments. “I’ve always wanted to make a full-si e latex mask, so I got a little investment into some mask-making sculpture supplies, different clay stuff. I think I’m gonna pick that back up

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To say that Spencer has been keeping busy is an understatement; his drive to create demented creatures makes those of us who have spent most of the pandemic baking sourdough bread look like a bunch of slouches. again. I just gotta finish the sculpt a little bit and make a mold and then cast it. ut I think doing smaller things in the future, like some resin casts and stuff, would be pretty cool and also could be filmed as a process thing on that table, too.”

Asked if the completed mask would be C I -safe to wear on a trip for groceries, Spencer laughs.

“I guess you could wad up some filters inside,” Spencer says. “ ut you’ll be scaring the hell out of everybody.” n

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FILM

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[FILM]

Witchy Woman The Witches is worth watching for Anne Hathaway’s performance Written by

MACKENZIE MANLEY

S

omething wicked this way comes — and it’s the uncanny valley.

Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Roald Dahl’s fantastical and terrifying novel The Witches may not live up to its cult classic 1990 predecessor, but it’s at least worth a watch for Anne Hathaway’s clearly-having-thetime-of-her-life performance.

Released on HBO Max, Zemeckis’ story unfolds in the 1960s American South. Our protagonist, a recently orphaned boy — who is never referred to by name in this film, but is endearingly played by child actor Jahzir Kadeem Bruno — goes to live with his sweetbut-tough grandmother (Octavia Spencer). Chris Rock, as Bruno (but older), narrates the tall tale in his usual wisecracking way.

When the boy goes to a grocer with his grandmother, he encounters a woman who offers him a piece of candy. While in the aisle, a snake slithers out of her clothing and inches toward him. The boy tells his grandmother what he saw and she then spins a yarn about witches, with their bald, scabby heads (from wig rash); deformed claw hands; huge nostrils for sniffing out children, who smell like dog poo to them); and demon mouths (which open from ear to ear and can be covered by makeup).

Witches love nothing more than seeing children suffer, or better yet, exterminated altogether, she says, and recalls the time a witch turned her childhood best friend, Alice, into a chicken.

As legend goes, a witch never truly leaves a child alone once she has her eyes set on them, so to avoid a similar fate, the pair

Anne Hathaway stars as the Grand High Witch in the new The Witches. | COURTESY HBO MAX set off to an upscale hotel off the Alabama Gulf Coast in hopes of hiding out. Irony has it that their escape plan lands them in the middle of a conference at that same hotel, swarming with dozens of kid-hungry witches.

As grandmother and grandson, Spencer and Bruno are a charming duo and their bond warms the heart. The first chunk of the movie develops their relationship enough to make viewers care about whatever fate may befall them.

This setup also accounts for the ick’s largest divergence. oth Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation and Dahl’s story take place in the UK and Norway, versus America, and definitely do not star lack protagonists. Much of the rest, however, is the same. Zemeckis, unlike Roeg, stays mostly faithful to Dahl’s original end. (Still, Zemeckis’ take is sugarcoated.)

This iteration is not as macabre as its forerunner, which relied on Jim Henson’s creepy puppetry and prosthetics. That’s not to say the witches of 2020 aren’t ghastly, but their stretchy CGI faces — with giant, Glasgow-smile-esque grins seemingly the in uence of co-writer Guillermo del Toro) — are more unnerving than fodder for nightmare fuel. Hathaway’s Grand High Witch often steps into

Set in a post-Jim Crow South, the film occasionally points to racism but doesn’t tweak the narrative enough to create any solid commentary beyond the basics. the uncanny valley. Like Anjelica Huston, she turns in a full-camp performance.

Also on deck is hotel manager Mr. Stringer, played by Stanley Tucci, whose main characteristic is that he’s very, very confused and most definitely doesn’t get compensated enough to deal with such shenanigans.

Spoiler ahead: The boy, along with a newfound pal from the hotel, are turned into cute mice via a new witch potion (dispensed in

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candy). And we discover the boy’s pet mouse he carries with him was also once a kid. My cat found a lot to love — the CGI mouse-children had him pawing at the screen throughout The Witches’ 105-minute run.

Set in a post-Jim Crow South, the film occasionally points to racism but doesn’t tweak the narrative enough to create any solid commentary beyond the basics, like staff suggesting a woman like Spencer wouldn’t be able to afford a stay at the hotel. More could have been subverted to root out the problems of its source material. Dahl was known to be antiSemitic, racist and misogynist. His books are not divorced from these views — many of his characters, subtext or not, are based on hateful caricatures. Yes, his stories have in uenced generations of children, but those adapting his work should do so with modern understanding or not at all.

Zemeckis’ The Witches had the potential to say something new but instead chose to drop the same story into a different setting without texturing it to the context of its period. hat results is a film that, while families will likely find it spooky (not scary) fun, prompts the question: Why did this remake need to exist? n

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SAVAGE LOVE THE CASSEROLE

BY DAN SAVAGE Hey, Dan: Something is bothering me and I don’t know where else to turn. I’m a bisexual man. I’ve been married to a great guy for the past six years. Despite COVID we gathered safely for an outdoors Thanksgiving dinner with my family. My mom, my brother and sister-in-law, and my adult nieces and nephews and their partners were there. Each household contributed to the feast and we had a wonderful evening. While my husband and I were snuggling in bed later he said that my casserole was a big hit thanks to the “secret ingredient.” When I asked what he meant, he informed me that he had deposited my come from a blowjob he’d given me earlier that day in my half-finished casserole.

When I asked why he did this, he said he thought it was hot and he was aroused watching my family ingest it. To me, this seems a bit twisted and feels like a deeply disrespectful act toward my family. Now I cannot sleep and it is impossible for me to think of anything else. I wish he had never told me. I am writing to you as I don’t know where else to turn.

Confused And Shuddering Sleeplessly, Entirely Revolted Over Loaded Entrée Some letters you suspect are fake, some letters you know are fake, and some letters you hope are fake. I wish I could say this letter fell into the second category — a letter I knew to be fake — but I once got a letter from a man who would excuse himself at dinner parties, quickly rub one out in the bathroom, and then dip the bristles of his hosts’ toothbrushes in his semen. (That was twenty years ago and I still secure my toothbrush in a secret, undisclosed location whenever we have company.) So as much as I wished we lived in a world where something like this could never happen, CASSEROLE, we sadly don’t live in that world.

That said … some details don’t add up. I’ve been in the receiving end of plenty of blowjobs in my time, CASSEROLE, and there are

tells when a guy doesn’t swallow.

A man who’s holding your load in his mouth has a certain look; his mouth and jaw are set in a particular and revealing way. There’s also no post-blowjob kissing or snuggling. And if you were to say, “Thank you, that was great,” and they hummed back, “Mmmhmm,” instead of saying, “You’re welcome,” you would immediately know the guy didn’t swallow.

And yet you would have us believe that your husband somehow gave you a blowjob and somehow didn’t swallow your load without you noticing and then… what? He strolled around the house with a mouth full of come until the opportunity to defile your casserole presented itself?

Then again … impromptu blowjobs sometimes happen, CASSEROLE, and they sometimes happen in kitchens. So I suppose it’s possible your husband interrupted you while you were making a casserole and then quickly leaned over and spat your load into your casserole and managed to give it quick stir … without you noticing the spit or the stir? Sounds improbable…

But even if he did all of this — blew you, didn’t swallow, created a diversion, spat your semen into a casserole you planned to share with your entire family — would he tell you about it? The guy who was glazing his friend’s toothbrushes didn’t brag to his friends about it. He wrote to me about it, described it as a compulsion, and asked me how to stop. That your husband would be so clueless as to think you wouldn’t be revolted and upset by this is, if you’ll forgive me, a little hard to swallow.

Still … your nieces and nephews are adults … so it’s possible you and your husband are getting up there in years … and he could be suffering from early-onset dementia; inappropriate sexual behavior and poor impulse control can be early symptoms.

So on the off, off, off chance this actually happened, CASSEROLE, here’s my advice: If your husband spat your load into a half-finished casserole and then watched your whole family consume it and then assumed you would think it was hot, CASSEROLE, then you absolutely, positively need to divorce him. Let us count the ways you can’t trust this man: You can’t trust

him with your semen, you can’t trust him not to feed your come to your mother, you can’t trust him around your siblings and nieces and nephews. You can’t even leave him in the company of an unaccompanied casserole. So unless you looked into his eyes on your wedding day and thought, “This is a guy who would feed a woman her own son’s semen and I’m fine with that,” your husband isn’t the “great guy” you thought he was. He’s a monster and what he did unforgivable, even criminal. Divorce the asserole.

You might want to consider calling the cops and pressing charges for sexual assault — here’s hoping you saved some of the casserole for DNA testing — but you’ll have to weigh involving the police against burdening your mother with the knowledge of your Thanksgiving casserole’s secret ingredient.

P.S. A casserole is really more of a side dish at Thanksgiving, isn’t it?

Hey, Dan: Forgive my English. I write from Italy. I’m a quarter of a century old and I have been with my girlfriend for seven years.

I can’t tell you how long the “sex high” lasted — the time when she wanted to have sex as often as possible — but it was maybe three years. Now if she’s stressed, if we are not in a bed, if she hasn’t just shaved her legs, if she’s just woke up, if she’s nervous for any reason at all, she doesn’t want to have sex. I’m not one of those men who thinks exclusively about his own pleasure. I have asked her if she has any fantasies. She does not. I have asked her if I should be doing anything different. She says not. She doesn’t masturbate, she doesn’t watch porn. I purchased a sex toy for us. She will not touch it. And when I try to talk to her, she says that her sexuality is none of my business. I am miserable. I don’t know what to do. She says I am “ fixated on sex” and that there is more to life than that. I jerk off a lot, of course, which she only just started to accept. At first she considered it equivalent to cheating.

Is it wrong to end a relationship of seven years because of a matter of different views on sex? I love her so much and leaving would be hard.

Please help me.

Who Has Yearnings Forgive my bluntness: Either your girlfriend never liked sex all that

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much or, after seven years, she’s no longer excited by sex with you.

If she were willing to talk about it, WHY, you might be able to do something about it; you might be able to revive your sex life by trying new things together, experimenting with toys, having adventures. But she’s made it clear she’s not interested in discussing things, much less doing things. And while she doesn’t think her sexuality is any of your business, she clearly sees your sexuality as her business, e.g. until recently she thought you were cheating on her when you jerked off … which is kind of nuts, considering how infrequently she wants to fuck you.

There’s nothing wrong with ending a sexually exclusive relationship when the sex doesn’t work and your partner couldn’t care less that you’re unhappy and only grudgingly allows you to masturbate. As much as you love her, it’s not working and it’s only going to get worse. You’re at once every two weeks now and will soon be down to once a month, then once every three months, then once a year. Eventually you’ll cheat on her out of sheer desperation and the breakup won’t just be painful, WHY, it will be messy and painful and you’ll be cast as the bad guy.

Don’t wait for your dick to slam itself down on the self-destruct button. End it now.

P.S. Your English is so much better than my Italian!

A personal note: Allena Gabosch was a towering figure in Seattle’s sex-positive community.

She co-founded Seattle’s Beyond the Edge Café, which quickly became a warm and welcoming home for Seattle’s queer, kink, and poly communities. She went on to lead Seattle’s Sex Positive Community Center, a.k.a. “The Wet Spot,” and helped launch the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival.

She was a gifted public speaker, a tireless advocate and a hilarious storyteller with a giving and generous spirit. She also made the best chocolate chip cookies in town. Allena will be missed and she will be remembered. My condolences to her many friends and many families. mail@savagelove.net @FakeDanSavage on Twitter www.savagelovecast.com

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