"ARES' WAR" -- BY WYNTON COOLEY

Dedication

My hero story is dedicated to my grandfather, who I called Papa. When I was a very young boy he taught me many rights from wrongs and many other lessons. I spent a lot of time with him and my grandmother, while my parents were at work.

He allowed me to do various jobs around his house like gardening and using the lawnmower. He would allow me to go on the roof when he would be cleaning the leaves off. He would advise me to always be a hard worker; I gained his trust and respect by trying my best at everything. This is characteristic of a true hero!

He was a Pacific 10 Conference football official. He would officiate many USC and UCLA football games and their daily practices. I got to see a lot of those practices, meet the coaches and players like Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart. He would take me on road trips to various universities; I went to Seattle, Las Vegas, and Hawaii.

When Papa passed away in December 2005, my family was filled with emptiness and sorrow. He will always be with me. I will remember the times we had and he will always be my hero!

Ares’ War

It was a very joyous day in Olympus in the Garden of Love. All of the Olympians were there to see their brother and sister, Ares’ and Aphrodite, getting married. This was the joining of Ares’ destructive and Aphrodite’s blissful forces. Hera was the minister who was attempting to marry them. Zeus was very happy for his second strongest son and his most beautiful daughter. Then a rumbling happened, resembling an earthquake, and it wasn’t Poseidon.

It was Matalos, the robot, which Ares’ defeated once. With one single blast from his omega laser eye, he blasted the wedding rings and flew away to his island called Matala. Zeus shot a thunder bolt at him, but it didn’t help; it was like a feather to a stone. Ares’ signaled his flying vulture, Difia to assist him. Ares’ then grabbed his sword and shield to swing at Matalos. It didn’t even make a scratch, because of his armor. Matalos shot a rocket at Ares’ and it exploded. Ares’ then fell to Earth, but Difia caught him just before he smashed into Areopagus, a hill named after Ares’ by the Greeks.

Ares’ had Difia fly to Hephaestos, the god of craftsmanship, and asked him to make armor worthy of his stature, so he could defeat Matalos. When his armor was finished, he went back to the wedding and saw Matalos stealing Aphrodite. With all his might, he swung his sword at Matalos hand which was holding Aphrodite. Matalos let go of Aphrodite and punched Ares’ so hard that he was airborne for four whole minutes. Ares’ fell to the ground like a meteorite. Matalos wanted to kill Ares’ with his strongest weapon so he shot Ares’ with his omega laser eye.

Ares’ picked up his sword and reflected Matalos laser back at him. Matalos started malfunctioning. Ares’ picked up his sword with all of his might and anger, he cut Matalos core out and stuck it on his sword. By throwing his core to the sun, this made the first solar eclipse. Ares’ brought Aphrodite back to Olympus in the Garden of Love. The gods lit Ares’ symbol, a torch, to honor him. Ares’ kissed Aphrodite in the darkness and they spent eternity together.

-- Wynton Cooley

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

PAUL SILLS AND COMPANY

Paul Sills taught me to work with young people. Working with young people taught me to understand people. What I learned from Paul and Young People is that if one can put one's attention on what happens in the space between people, with an emphasis on mutuality . . . staying together with the other person, that joy is the effortless result. A, Youand approach, if you will.

Paul's teachings are in everything I do with other people.

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut

PAUL SILLS IS IN THE SPACE

Morgan said that.

June 4, 2008

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Paul Sills, a founder of the Second City theater company and the godfather of modern improvisational sketch comedy, died on Monday in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. He was 80.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his wife, Carol Sills.

As a founder and resident director of a series of small theater companies that began in bars, former bakeries and Chinese restaurants in Chicago, Mr. Sills taught an approach to theater that would later feed directly into the creation of “Saturday Night Live” and influence a range of artists including David Mamet and Richard Foreman. Under Mr. Sills’s direction, performances were based on games, audience suggestions and bare-bones scenarios, the basic building blocks of improv comedy.

Many of these techniques Mr. Sills learned from his mother, Viola Spolin, who had used them as a drama teacher with the federal Works Progress Administration from 1939 to 1941 and later codified them in her influential book “Improvisation for the Theater.”

But while Ms. Spolin, who worked closely with her son throughout his career, might have developed and refined the theater-game approach, it was Mr. Sills who spread the gospel, starting the careers of comedy giants like Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin and Paul Sand. While his influence spread, Mr. Sills continued to stick with the basics, moving on to his next opportunity as a teacher and director and remaining mostly obscure.

In 1968, Mr. Sills created the story theater form, in which actors on a bare stage narrate, mime, sing, dance and create plays based on existing stories from the Brothers Grimm, Ovid and others. In 1970, “Paul Sills’ Story Theater” appeared on Broadway; Clive Barnes, writing about it in The New York Times, said it brought back “magic and innocence to Broadway.”

In Jeffrey Sweet’s book “Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of the Second City and The Compass Players,” Mr. Sills explained his approach this way: “Theater is concerned with reality. Reality is shared. And reality of the moment can occur only with spontaneity.”

Paul Silverberg was born in Chicago on Nov. 18, 1927. His parents separated when he was young, and he moved with his mother to a rented mansion on Lake Michigan, where she and her friends lived communally. They relocated to California in 1943, but Mr. Sills returned to Chicago to finish high school. After graduating, he was in both the merchant marine and the Army and then enrolled in the University of Chicago.

During and after college, Mr. Sills began developing his directorial skills in theaters like the Playwrights Theater Club, which he helped to create and where he staged plays by Bertolt Brecht, who strongly influenced him and whom he later met. But in 1955 he and a friend he met at the University of Chicago, David Shepherd, created the Compass Players, an improvisational cabaret theater, where they put on revues based more closely on the Spolin approach.

At the Compass, actors would speak in gibberish, perform sketches in languages they could not speak and generally create plays from scratch while an audience was watching. In 1959, after the Compass had dissolved, Mr. Sills, along with Howard Alk and Bernard Sahlins, created Second City, at which they were joined by many of the actors from the Compass.

Second City, which turns 50 next year, would go on to become a comedy mecca, performing a revue on Broadway under Mr. Sills’s direction, setting up satellite theaters in Toronto and Detroit and grooming alumni including Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Gilda Radner and Tina Fey.

But before Second City became ensconced in the comedy establishment, Mr. Sills had moved on, starting theater companies and teaching workshops using theater games. In 1988, Mr. Sills, Mr. Nichols and George Morrison created the New Actors Workshop in New York, where for the next 15 years Mr. Sills taught and directed productions based on the idea of story theater.

Mr. Sills spent more and more of his time in Baileys Harbor, Wis., where he lived with his wife. His survivors also include a son, David Michael; four daughters, Rachel, Polly, Aretha Amelia and Neva; four grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a brother, William.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Sills put on plays with a community theater group, rehearsing in a large barn and performing at local theaters and town halls. His approach to his career was not unlike his approach to theater in general.

“He always wandered away well before opening night,” Mr. Nichols said in an interview, “because he had no interest at all in results, only process.”

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"The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another." -- Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut