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International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (2018)

I am very proud to be a theatrical stage employee for IATSE Local 15 in Seattle, Washington. This is a movie commemorating the 125th anniversary of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees throughout the United States and Canada.

The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees is a North American labor union representing over 150,000 technicians, artisans, and craftspersons in the entertainment industry, including live theatre, motion picture and television production, and trade shows in the United States and Canada. It was awarded the Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 1993.

IATSE was founded in 1893 when representatives of stagehands working in eleven cities met in New York and pledged to support each other’s efforts to establish fair wages and working conditions for their members. IATSE has since evolved to embrace the development of new entertainment media, craft expansion, technological innovation and geographic growth.

Today, IATSE members work in all forms of live theater, motion picture and television production, trade shows and exhibitions, television broadcasting, and concerts as well as the equipment and construction shops that support all these areas of the entertainment industry. IATSE represents virtually all the behind the scenes workers in crafts ranging from motion picture animator to theater usher.

During a period when private sector union membership has been in sharp decline, IATSE has continued to grow. Since 1993, IATSE’s membership has increased from 74,344 to 150,000 which it attributes to its willingness to adapt its structure to protect traditional jurisdiction and accommodate new crafts.

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The School of Life (2016)

I’m proud to say that Ralph Waldo Emerson is an ancestor of mine on my mom’s side of the family. Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us about the presence of nature and something a little divine inside all of us. He was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

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Rusty Mills, Ron Fleischer, Randy Rogel, & Tom Ruegger (1993)

Discover America with Wakko Warner from Animaniacs.

As I’ve said before, learning should be fun!

Wakko’s America is a song from Episode 21 of Animaniacs. Like Yakko’s World, it is a geographical patter song, this one listing each of the United States of America and their respective capitals. The song is framed as Wakko’s answer to a Jeopardy! Daily Double question asked in a lesson taught by Miss Flamiel, which Wakko ultimately gets wrong because he does not phrase his answer in the form of a question. The music is Turkey in the Straw, with lyrics written by Randy Rogel. The song is the eighth track on the album Yakko’s World.