Eugene weekly., April 14, 2011, Page 12, Image 12

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BY ALAN PITTMAN
Laughter Medicine
Comic speaks to City Club
O
n one of the fi rst sunny spring
days after six months of rain,
the atmosphere at City Club of
Eugene was positively giddy as local
comic Leigh Anne Jasheway explored the
human gag refl ex.
“The biggest joke is it’s 64 degrees and
sunny and you are all in here,” Jasheway
told the seasonally affected crowd gathered
atop the Eugene Hilton on April Fool’s Day.
With a fake fl ower wrapped around her
head, Jasheway launched right into the jokes.
“This is the only place in the world where tie
dye is considered a neutral color,” she said.
Jasheway, an old Eugene Celebration
Slug Queen, said in Eugene you can get
gussied up as the royal gastropod and
“nobody even notices.”
Jasheway said she tried the hormone
therapy patch to control hot fl ashes but it
didn’t work. “I wore it over my left eye for
a week.”
Jasheway said people are peppered
daily by angry talk radio and news media
reminding us to be “angry or to panic.”
People need a humor antidote, she said,
noting “levity is the opposite of gravity.”
“There is too much going on in the world
that it’s too hard to process without an
element of comedy to it,” she said, pointing
to the success of comedy news shows.
Jasheway said she appreciates a good
joke. Once, she said she commanded her
wiener dog to “stay” while getting out of
her car in a parking lot. “You know, I just
usually put my car in park,” a bystander
commented.
Five-year-olds laugh 400 to 500 times
a day while grownups laugh only 15 times
a day on average, Jasheway said, citing
research. About 40 percent of adults laugh
only once a day, while another 40 percent
push the average up by laughing 90 times a
day, she said. “Why is it 5-year-olds are so
much smarter than we are?”
“We need to engage more frequently
with our sense of humor,” Jasheway said.
She said other research had shown that
laughter helps with tension headaches,
diabetes and colds. “It’s better than a fl u
shot,” she said.
Laughter also helps with fertility
between the sheets, according to Jasheway.
“If you are trying not to conceive, do not
watch funny things at night.”
“It’s simply about opening yourself up
to fi nding more things funny,” Jasheway
said. “When we type LOL, we are not
actually LOLing.”
12 APRIL 14, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
Jasheway said that research has shown
that laughter produces basic mammalian
benefi ts of reducing tension and fear, and
bonding within groups. “Go on YouTube
and type rats laughing,” she said of one
experiment with a grinning researcher
tickling rodents.
Inspired, Jasheway said she got down
at ground level with her wiener dog to try
and make him laugh — heh, heh, heh —
when a delivery man walked to the door. “I
guarantee you, that is a good way to make
a UPS man laugh.”
Jasheway said she doesn’t know how to
make your cat laugh. “Nobody owns a cat.”
Jasheway said adults carry too much
“negative baggage around” to enjoy laughter
like kids. She said a server once apologized
to her obese friend for the long line at Burger
King. “Sorry for the wait,” she said. “Honey,
I have weighed this much for so long it really
doesn’t bother me anymore,” he replied.
City Club members rose to the occasion
with humorous questions. “I have been a
City Club member since before the City
Club was a joke,” quipped Arnold Ismach,
former UO journalism dean.
The City Club video cameraman pulled
his sweatshirt over his head and Nancy
Willard, another former Slug Queen, sang
a few lines of what sounded like opera.
“You catch the mood of the people you
spend the most time with,” Jasheway said.
“You might consider dumping a depressing
friend,” she recommended.
Or, Jasheway, said, fi nd laughing chil-
dren to spend more time with. “Do not
stalk children, make sure it is children you
know.”
Jasheway said, like many women, she
prefers the self-deprecating humor over
the sarcastic “rant comic” humor. She said
she was once in a bathroom stall when she
exchanged banter with a woman in the next
stall. “How are you?” the woman asked.
Then the stall neighbor asked, “What are
you doing?” Then, “Can I come over?”
Finally, the woman said, “I have to
hang up now, there’s a moron in the stall
next to me.”
EWEB Commissioner Bob Cassidy
asked Jasheway for a joke to make a
certain dispassionate reporter, who shall go
unnamed, laugh. It was something about a
squirrel in her underwear.
ew
Toxic World
From cancer to kids to fossil fuels
A
cancer survivor, a mother, a biologist and a poet,
Sandra Steingraber brings her unique perspective
on the environment, toxics, fossil fuels and children
to Eugene April 28 in an event, “Human Rights and The
Environment: An Evening with Dr. Sandra Steingraber,” hosted
by Oregon Toxics Alliance.
Steingraber is the author of Living Downstream: An
Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the
Environment. She says at age 20, as a high achieving pre-med
undergrad, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. “I changed
my career plan,” she says, “I no longer wanted the hospital to
be my workplace.”
But her scientifi c urge to investigate was not changed. She was not the only family member to be diagnosed with cancer, she
says. Her aunt died of the same bladder cancer and her mother had breast cancer. But Steingraber herself was not biologically
related to either woman; she was adopted. “I became really interested in the presumption that cancer must be hereditary.” She
began to research environmental exposures and write Living Downstream.
Her later-in-life pregnancies also become fodder for books. “I loved being pregnant and I was really good at it,” she says. And as
someone who had lived through cancer, she says it was eye-opening to lie on the same ultrasound table at the same hospital where
she had been scanned for signs of tumor and to have her baby scanned, and see “signs of growth as a good thing, not a bad thing.”
In her books Having Faith and most recently Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis,
Steingraber explores issues such as the effects of exposure to chemicals early in life, chemicals that interfere with cell growth and
“can enter the placenta of a developing baby and alter signaling pathways of the way the body gets itself assembled.”
Of concern to Oregonians, as the proposed ban on Bisphenol-A (BPA) from baby bottles and sippy cups is debated in the
Legislature, is Steingraber’s research on “a number of chemicals that at very low levels have the ability to alter hormonal signals.”
She compares them to a very tiny baton directing a huge orchestra in their “really disproportionate effects on our body.”
In the case of BPA she says, there are “really troubling animal studies. In early life BPA can alter the development of a
mammary gland so that an animal is more sensitive and vulnerable to cancer.”
In her books Steingraber investigates raising children in a toxic, unstable world. Raising Elijah, which is due to be released on
Earth Day, ranges in topics from pesticides, which Steingraber points out are “poisons by design,” to hydraulic fracking.
Fracking, she says, is a process that injects toxic chemicals into the ground, potentially mixing with groundwater. As industries
drill for natural gas, fracking uses many of the chemicals she is concerned about. “I am a fracking abolitionist,” Steingraber says,
“I am not interested in helping the gas industry to do this in a better way.”
Oregon is not a hotbed of fracking, but there are current fi ghts to block natural gas pipelines and liquefi ed natural gas terminals
connected to the natural gas mining industry.
Fracking, she says, is like “an abusive drunk who lives in a family and who is almost about to go to Alcoholics Anonymous,”
but discovers a cache of alcohol in the basement. The drunk plans to blow up the basement to get to it. “What is the right response
of the family?” she asks. “To help regulate the detonation of the basement?” or to get the drunk to AA?
“Obviously I’m for rehab,” she says.
When it comes to the toxics in the environment that groups like OTA seek to prevent, she says, “Parents have the most at stake
as it’s our children that are being poisoned.”
One of Oregon Toxics Alliance’s strengths, she says, is in “making people understand that behind every data point is a human
life. Issues of toxics affect our communities and affect our health.”
Families, Steingraber says, can’t be “little bubbles in toxic world. You can’t protect your children that way; you have to
transform your whole community.”
Sandra Steingraber, who has been lauded by the Sierra Club as a new Rachel Carson, speaks at 7 pm Thursday, April 28, at the
UO’s Robinson Theatre, $11, $9 students or free to the fi rst 20 people who join or renew their OTA membership. Leading up to
the talk, the Bijou will be showing the movie Living Downstream based on Steingraber’s book of the same name on April 17, 22,
23 and 24. — Camilla Mortensen
For more info go to www.oregontoxics.org/SandraS.html
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