Pop Culture and Religion: Grilled Cheesus

One of my favorite things is finding where pop culture and religion intersect. I love when tv shows or movies inject some questions about faith. Better yet, I love when an entire movie (or tv episode) is a metaphor about faith. This interest serves me well as Director of Faith Formation (overseeing service and learning for all ages); I do a lot of youth ministry in my role.

As part of my job, I help host evening events for middle school students. Every two months or so, we offer our middle school students the opportunity to come spend time together on a Friday or Saturday night. We play games, sing songs, eat pizza and other snacks, and get to know each other better. We used to also show a movie, but the kids were generally uninterested. They preferred having time to just hang out together. So that past two events, we've switched gears a little bit and we've shown a tv episode to them and used it to have a conversation about faith.

Last spring, we showed "Grilled Cheesus," an episode from the second season of Glee. It's a great episode and shows several of the characters exploring faith - from a devout Baptist to an atheist. It allowed us to talk with our middle school students about prayer in a nonthreatening way. Even if you aren't hosting a middle school event at your church, check out this episode. Last I knew, the entire series of Glee episodes was available on Netflix.

Post-Thanksgiving Watching

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I spent the day with my family at my parents' house. It was a pretty relaxing day with delicious food and good company. I even managed to not overdo it at dinner!

I spent some time yesterday and today thinking about Thanksgiving from years ago. And I was reminded of two pretty awesome videos. Whatever your plans are today, you should take the time to watch these. You won't be sorry.

"The Peanut Killer" is a short slasher movie that my nieces, nephew, brother, husband, and I made on Thanksgiving Day in 2007. I'm sure the nieces and nephew are going to be thrilled that I'm posting it here, but seriously, it's a pretty decent story.



The other video is from 2008, and is about a special Thanksgiving festival. This video was made by Tweedee Productions, a video production company where I used to work. I think I helped edit this video, but I don't really remember. You may not want to be eating while you watch this one.




Enjoy! And now that Thanksgiving is over, I can start listening to Christmas music!

$40 per ticket?!?!

$40. That was the price for a ticket to the Isthmus's first Beer and Cheese Fest this past weekend. That amount, even when we were both fully employed, is out of our budget. But we went! That's the beauty of volunteering. We volunteered for a 2-hour shift and in return, we got free entry. The nice thing, too, was that our shift was vendor check-in, which had to take place before the Fest (obviously). We "worked" from 10-noon, and the Fest started at 1.

They had about 23 beer makers and about the same number of cheese makers. They had the vendors set up alternating beer and cheese, too, so you could sample some beer and some cheese without having to go too far. For their first fest, I thought everything was really well done!

The best part of the day, though, was the 45-minute session we attended about Beer and Chocolate Pairing. I'm sure some of you are disgusted by that prospect, but I'm telling you, it was great!! Gail Ambrosius (from Gail Ambrosius Chocolates) and Aran (from Furthermore Brewery) discussed the pairings, leading us through what to notice with the flavors and why they chose to pair what they did. In my mind, there are few things better than beer or chocolate, so what's better than enjoying them together?

Nothing has changed on the job front. Einar has taken his bartending certification class, and he's just waiting for the city to process his license. That will allow him to be more available for shifts at The Malt House, since he will be able to be the only bartender on duty. Unfortunately, as I've seen over the past several months, there are not a lot of jobs being posted. We both continue to look for options. I've decided to get my WI teaching license. I'm still not sure I'm ready to give up on video, but at least I'll have my license if I decide I want to move in that direction.

If you're looking for a good video to see, I'd highly recommend Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. It's a sweet little movie. And we watched Roxanne the other night for the first time in a long time, and that's well worth a re-viewing. Steve Martin is fantastic!

Looking for Work

On October 26, my bosses called me into the conference room and told me that they needed to cut my hours. In half. Effective November 1. While I wasn't totally surprised that they were cutting my hours, I was surprised by the size of the cut and by the short notice. I had been reading about the crummy job market for months, and now it's my turn to see for myself. I've applied for a few full-time jobs, but so far nothing has come of them. Luckily, my church was in need of a part-time custodian. That means I'm now working 3 part-time jobs. Not fun. At all. But it's what needs to happen for now. Please keep your eyes and ears open for any opportunities you think would be good for me.

I put together a video slideshow for my father-in-law, and he wanted his kids to see it. So I'm posting it here for them and for you. I hope you enjoy it!

Annual Review

Yesterday I had my annual review at Tweedee. My official start date was September 6, 2005, so I just celebrated my 4th anniversary at Tweedee. This is the longest I've worked at the same place. My review went well, and I still have a job. *whew* I've learned a lot about video production since I started working here 4 years ago, and I still have a lot to learn. My bosses are great, and they continue to provide me with new responsibilities and positive feedback. I am ready to take on more tasks and projects, and they are slowly but surely giving me opportunities to grow professionally. I honestly couldn't ask for a better place to work or better people for whom to work. And now it's time for our weekly Brown Bag Theater - a good time to socialize with co-workers, watch some TV or a movie (today is The Beatles' "Let It Be"), and have lunch. You should join us sometime!

ELCA video contest

I haven't written anything on here for over a month, and I will try to get some photos of our trip to Seattle and Vancouver posted soon. In the meantime, go on over to the Tweedee blog to see what I wrote about the ELCA video contest.

Favorite Online Sensation

I had to write another blog entry for the Tweedee Productions blog today. You can read it here.

"My Favorite Madison Moment"

At Tweedee, we've been working on a video that has included interviews with some BIG NAMES in Madison. We've done 5 interviews so far with 1 left to do tomorrow.

We started with Suzy Favor Hamilton, former UW track athlete and 3-time Olympian.







We moved on to 2 UW Hospital employees. And then Mayor Dave.








This afternoon, we interviewed Ron Dayne, former UW running back and Heisman trophy winner.

Blogs

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been put in charge of getting 2 blogs for Tweedee up and running. The first one is for Tweedee itself. All 6 of us will take turns writing on the blogs, and it will be updated at least once a week. Check it out here. We started the blog, in part, because we wanted to get "Samie the Intern" episodes available as a video podcast on iTunes. However, we ended up needing to start a separate blog for "Samie" to do that. You can watch the video episodes on that blog OR you can open iTunes and search the podcasts for "Samie the Intern" and download them. If you didn't know this, I am completely in charge of "Samie the Intern." I schedule the shoots, come up with ideas (with a lot of help from Samie and my bosses), shoot the video, edit, and encode as a QuickTime movie for the Tweedee Productions website and the "Samie" blog. It's a pretty fun thing to get to do. I hope that you'll check out the videos, if you haven't already.

The Peanut Killer

Last Thanksgiving, my niece Hannah, my nephew Noble, my niece Disa, my brother Erik, my brother-in-law Bruce, and I made a short horror movie called "The Peanut Killer."  I shot and edited it.  Einar helped behind the scenes, and both of my parents also made appearances.  I don't know why it took me so long to actually get it finished, but I finally did!  Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

 

I'm not sure whether or not we'll be making another movie this Thanksgiving, but if we do, I promise to get it done and posted in a more timely manner.