Mifflin Day Miracle?

And almost 365 turns of the world later, we're here again -- poised on the eve of another Mifflin Street Block Party with no accord reached between police and partiers.

Yet.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love this event. When I was a student, I laid plans for the day weeks in advance. I had to make sure I had room to sleep however many guests I was expecting, there had to be a guaranteed source of meat to grill and beer to drink, and, if there was time, it helped to have a destination in mind on the street itself.

But that, to me, has always been the glorious part of the block party. Sure, it's nice to know someone and have a porch or balcony to stand on. But if not, there's always the option of wandering up and down the block seeing the sights, pausing to take in a good band and sparking random friendships with people you'll never see again.

I honestly think Mifflin Day is more magical than Christmas.

Unfortunately, those good vibes have been on the decline in recent years because of rising arrests, increasing noise citations and the resulting decline in the number of bands. If somebody doesn't do something, one of the most unique traditions in Madison is going to become what outsiders have always said it was anyway. Take away the music and the high spirits, and you're left with a bunch of people standing around drinking in front yards, eyeing the police suspiciously.

It would be a "drunkfest," to quote a wise man I worked with once.

The Wisconsin Union Directorate tried, heroically, to step up to the plate and organize the event. And by organize, I don't mean "suck the fun out of," which some argue is what happened to Halloween. They wanted to work with the city to get a street use permit and noise permits, thus cutting down on arrests and citations, and set up a music stage with a line-up.

I'm told the chancellor's office pulled the plug on that pretty quickly, wanting no association with the block party. Never mind that it takes place only a few blocks from campus. Never mind that 80 percent of the revelers are UW students or alumni. Never mind that some of my favorite college memories will be forever rooted in that scrubbly excuse for grass that grows between the houses and the street on Mifflin.

This is the new, re-imagined University of Wisconsin, damnit! IF there's drinking that takes place, we certainly didn't sanction it!

So since Bascom Hall has torpedoed WUD's effort to work with the city, now the students themselves are pulling together to get the permits needed to make it a "legitimate event" in the eyes of police and city officials. They face an uphill battle with less than three weeks until the event takes place May 2, but they've got neighborhood Alder Mike Verveer backing them up.

Verveer is a Mifflin lifer, like I hope to be one day, having never missed a block party since his freshman year in college. His streak's considerably longer than mine (this will be number six for me). He understands what the block party can be, and what it's become. I think he would move heaven and earth to bring the music back to Mifflin.

I applaud Verveer and the students both for their efforts, and now the onus is on city officials. It's certainly an unusual notion to give a group of people with no organizational affiliation street and noise permits, but it's not without precedent.

It's certainly late in the game to get a process like this started, but nobody counted on WUD getting the rug ripped out from under them. The very fact that a group has coalesced to take up WUD's fight is proof they have the capability and the resolve to make this work.

The City of Madison needs to recognize this and do everything to expedite the permitting process. What we need now is a Mifflin Day Miracle.

This week's BAMFs

It's been one of those weeks that runs high on inspiration and low on free time.

However, I couldn't stay away from one piece of information I got for long. It was actually funny, because I was sitting at the Mifflin Street Block Party informational meeting when I heard about it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, when confronted with the choice between sitting at a table with strangers and plopping down with a couple of competing reporters, I will often plop down with the other newshounds. We delight in taunting each other with tantalizing leads we're working on and swapping stories of our favorite and least favoite public officials.

Anyway, the meeting was getting long, a student asked a particularly asinine question of an already badgered Madison cop and I was sharing a knowing glance with State Journal writer Brittany Schoepp and WIBA reporter Jason Fischer. Mike Verveer, in the midst of a sentence that likely defused the eighth potential police / student clash of the evening, mentioned this noteble tidbit. Immediately, the three of us siezed notebooks and began shorthanding furiously.

Apparently, Brittany Zimmermann's family will be at the Mifflin Street Block Party this weekend operating a food stand. That's right, the people whose daughter was stabbed by some psycho who's nowhere near being brought to justice will be selling hot dogs to drunk college kids a few short blocks from where the body was found in order to raise money to establish a college scholarship in their daughter's name. I hope you'll pause just a moment to reflect on the colossal hearts beating in these people's chests...

...because I, quite frankly, am in awe. And don't for a moment think that it's numbness or insensitivity at play in her parents. This is love. It's bravery, it's philanthropy, it's every good and decent thing most of us don't even have the gall to imagine we would be capable of in their position. Instead of wallowing in self pity and hiding from the cold reality of the situation, they're immersing themselves in it. Saturday will, in all likelihood, be the second most painful day of their lives, as they watch kids their dead daughter's age enjoying everything Madison has to offer. Every reveler they see will be a reminder that Brittany should be there, among them.

They know this, yet they'll be there Saturday, tears streaming down their faces, lips pressed tight in brave smiles, hearts broken. They will come because it's a chance, they think, to raise a few hundred bucks to keep their daughter's memory alive.

I spoke to Brittany's father, Kevin Zimmermann, a couple of weeks after the killing. He told me he never went to college, but his family loved the Univerity of Wisconsin. They went to football games for years, and it was his daughter's goal to attend school here. She made it in, and even though they were a family barely scraping by, they worked hard, together, and raised the money for her to attend. He told me he and his wife agreed founding a scholarship in her name is something Brittany would have liked a lot.

On Saturday, I hope our students show the Zimmermanns not only that we know how to party at the UW. Everyone knows that. I hope we show them how we take care of our own, and how the block party is more than just a "drunk fest." It's a celebration of life in general, and foremost this year, one life in particular.

In the worst years, through sleet and rain, I've seen 10,000 people turn out to the block party. In good years, authorities have estimated the number between 25,000 and 30,000. At any rate, if half those people visit the Zimmermanns' food stand and buy something for five bucks, they'll have enough money to start a fund that will guarantee their daughter's name will outlive them both, which Kevin told me was his goal. I will personally be disappointed if they leave Miffland with less than $100,000, and long after the last hot dog has been sold, I expect to see Badgers lined up to pay their respects and drop a tenner in the bucket.

After all, it's how we roll.

In closing, I just caught wind there was a shooting on West Washington Avenue, and crews are going to begin setting up to shoot scenes for the new Depp movie at the state capitol tomorrow. There's a whole lot of shooting going on. May 1st is indeed going to be a damn long day.

Mifflin... another year already?

I have a new goal in life, one that should make my parents proud. I hereby vow never to miss a Mifflin Street Block Party so long as I live.

I know it seems like a bold vow, but I was speaking with Madison City Council veteran Mike Verveer this evening, and he told me that he has been to every single block party since he was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. Now, not that Verveer's a dinosaur or anything -- he's consistently stood up for student rights and lobbied for a student agenda, and the UW community reveres him for it -- but that's a damn impressive streak. I figure as long as I'm living in Madison, I don't really have any excuse NOT to go.

So I have four Mifflins in a row under my belt, and I'm well on my way to a streak every bit as impressive as Verveer's... that is, if the Madison Police don't find a way to put the party out of commission, which I'm beginning to suspect they're intent on doing.

In the course of my duties today, I spoke with Lt. Joe Balles at the Madison Police Department. It seems they're going to be putting up more cameras at this year's block party. Before I go on with the post, I must directly address the kindly webwriters at WKOW. First of all, gentle writer, YOU DON'T NEED FREAKIN' APOSTROPHES IN THE PLURAL FORM OF "cameras." YOU MAKE THAT MISTAKE THREE TIMES. I WORK IN RADIO, AND I CAN GET IT RIGHT! SO IF YOU CAN'T LEARN TO USE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CORRECTLY, PICK UP A FIFTH GRADE ENGLISH TEXTBOOK AND GET BACK TO BASICS BEFORE YOU GO AROUND POLLUTING MY INTERNET.

And on a less rant-inducing note, the Mifflin Street Block Party is NOT "notorious for getting out of hand." Since the riot that occurred in 1996, contrary to the way this story is written, the block party has been a bastion of goodwill between police and students. People show up at eight, they get drunk, a few get out of hand and are promptly, deservedly carted away by the cops, and after twelve hours of drinking, the need for a nap sets in and everybody goes home with a smile and some sunburn. As a student, in fact, the block party was the only time I wouldn't drop what I was holding or run the other way when I saw the UW or City Blues arrive on the scene. Poor reporting by the folks at 27.

But back to the cameras. I didn't know that there had previously been video surveillance, but Balles tells me they've had a single camera up on top of a tall apartment building in the area for years. Fine. Great. But now, they're adding two cameras to be mounted twenty feet above the ground at the busiest points on the street. According to Balles, these will be wired live into the police "Command Center," and they'll dispatch police to trouble hot spots via radio.

This begs the question, why do they need these new eyes? And what will they use them to do? It's well known, for instance, that the block party was a generally acceptable place for people so-inclined to "pass around a joint," so long as it wasn't blatantly in view of the police. But everything is blatantly in view of cameras mounted twenty feet from the ground.

Another thing that Balles the Buzzkill told me: "More people are starting to post their property down there for no trespassing, and we will be enforcing trespassing. So if (revelers) see pink trespassing signs, and if they're trespassing on private property, they can expect to be arrested." And he sounded like he meant it too, which makes me sad. It sounds like Balles, at least, wants nothing more than to swing a nightclub into a couple undergrad skulls come the first weekend in May. Maybe he's just mad because no one asked him to play Flip-Cup last year.

I just hope these new developments don't mean the police are out to kill the block party, now that they've neutered Halloween on State (I refuse to ever call it "Freak Fest"). And if they are, they're armed with a few more reasons to drag kids off in plastic wrist-ties.

There's a meeting, led by Mike Verveer, slated for next Tuesday night to tell students exactly what the changes mean for the beloved block party. I'll be on assignment there, and then of course, I've volunteered myself for "on-the-street coverage" of the event itself. Whatever happens, I'll be there, notepad in pocket, microphone in one hand and a beer in the other. I even got Verveer to half-promise a "City vs. Media Showdown" over the beer pong table, so it promises to be epic.