Reading Sunny

I commend to your reading interest this week's HI column by Sunny Schubert, Sunny

Playtime Productions founder passes away wherein she reports the passing of Teddy Studt and relates the history of Playtime Productions, "the acclaimed traveling troupe of amateur actors, most of whom are under the age of 14", which Studt founded in 1979 and handed over to her successor Renaye Leach in 2000. 

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Sunny also related her conversation about last weekend's Monona Drive event with former alder and mutual friend Bob Miller. Without coming right out and saying it, Sunny seemed to agree with folks I've talked to that the event was less than a smashing success. Someone posted a comment here that the event sponsored by the Monona Chamber and the Monona Drive's Alive group was 'lame', which I don't quite buy. 
 
There was a lot going on, but what the event really lacked was people and that seemed to be a result of inadequate marketing. For example, the event's poster didn't list the times for the event. There just didn't seem to be much advance buzz. That kind of event is a challenge anyway being stretched out along one mile and twelve hours.
 

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Sunny also reported on the Great Bacon Debate: Ken's Deli or Nueske's. We are talking premium bacon here. According to Sunny, Ken's goes for $3.99 a pound while Nueske's is $6.99 for twelve ounces - that's $9.32/pound! You can buy both at Ken's and try it yourself. By the way, they also Nueske's at Knoches on Old Middleton Road.
 
Or you could visit the Nueske's retail store in Wittenberg. If you go, however, don't follow Sunny's notion that Wittenberg is "up near Green Bay". It is near Green Bay in that sort of vague Up North sense, I suppose, but it's 65 miles from Titletown on STH 29 and about 30 miles east of Wausau. (Of course, I only knew that because my boss, Railroad Commissioner Roger Breske, is from Eland, which really is near Wittenberg.)
Still, her sense of geography isn't as bad as another friend of mine who once drove from Madison to Superior - by way of Green Bay! (Hey, that route only adds about 140 miles to a 325 mile trip and you get to see so much of the UP.)

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I'm sure it was as much of relief to Sunny as it was o me that this week's column went to press without stating her agreement with me on some topic of controversy! I was beginning to think she was coming out of the closet - the political closet that is. Think pink(o) Sunny!
 
And anyway, I meant to offer a slight correction or clarification about her agreement with me in her RTA column. Sunny wrote [link added by me]:
 

But I must agree with Ald. Doug Wood (again!) who said on his blog that Melanie Stebbins made the best comment of the evening.


Stebbins said the people should be allowed to vote now because denying them that opportunity would foster more distrust of government.

Putting it that way makes it seem that I agreed with Melanie Stebbins' position on the RTA referendum. Not so. I agreed with Stebbins' analysis that distrust is behind much of the support for this referendum being placed on the ballot. Here's what I wrote:

Melanie Stebbins, one of the residents who supported the referendum, made the most astute observation of the evening: The driving force behind this anti-train referendum is that a lot of people just do not have any trust that they will get a fair chance to vote on any future RTA-proposed sales tax increase. She nailed it exactly.

As I also wrote in that post, this referendum question is a set-up rigged to yield a No vote. It is an attempt to dupe voters into thinking they are taking a stance against commuter trains when it actually asks whether trains are the only thing that the RTA should fund. That kind of political gamesmanship has contributed to the people's distrust.