Eugene weekly., July 16, 2015, Page 8, Image 8

NEWS
• Eugene 350’s Summer Meetup will be from 7 to 8:30
pm Thursday, July 16, at First United Methodist Church,
1376 Olive Street. On the agenda is campaign organizing
and arts projects, including giant banners and “Puppets for
Climate Change.” Actions are being planned leading up to
the U.N. climate talks in Paris. Email 350eugene@riseup.
net or call 343-5091.
• A report from the 2015 Legislature is the topic at City
Club of Eugene at noon Friday, July 17, at the Downtown
Athletic Club, 999 Willamette Street. Speakers will be Rep.
Val Hoyle, Oregon state House majority leader, and Sen. Lee
Beyer. $5 for non-members.
• The Emerald Empire Hempfest is back and will run 11
am to 10 pm Friday and Saturday, July 17-18, and 11 am to
9 pm Sunday, July 19, at Maurie Jacobs Park off River Road
north of the viaduct. Access is also available across the
footbridge from Valley River Center. Free admission, but
donations are appreciated, says organizer Dan Koozer. His
number is 517-0957 or see emeraldhempfest.com.
• A concert with musical activists Anne Feeney & Dana
Lyons will be from 8 to 11 pm Saturday, July 18, at Sprout!,
418 A Street. in Springfield. Feeney is known nationally as
a “notorious labor hellraiser” and Lyons is a longtime
environmental activist through his music. The two are billed
as Teamsters and Turtles. Sliding scale donations requested
of $8 to $50. The event is a fundraiser for the Civil Liberties
Defense Center’s Next Generation Climate Justice Action
Camp coming up Aug. 4-8.
• Kari Norgaard, Ph.D., will speak on “Living in Denial:
Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life” at 4 pm
Sunday, July 26, at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 1685
W. 13th Ave. Norgaard is an associate professor of sociology
and environmental studies at UO. She is widely published
and her lecture title is also the name of her book published
by MIT Press in 2011. Free.
• New and reduced logging setbacks for riparian areas
were on the agenda of the Northwest and Southwest
Oregon Regional Forest Practice Committees that met July
15 in Salem. Recommendations will be presented to the
Board of Forestry on July 23. By law the majority of
members of these committees must be timber industry
people. Directions on how to submit public testimony in
this regard are hard to find on the ODF website, but an email
listed is information@odf.state.or.us.
LANE COUNTY
AREA SPRAY SCHEDULE
• ODOT is currently spraying roadsides. Call Tony Kilmer
at ODOT District 5 at 744-8080 or call (888) 996-8080 for
often inaccurate herbicide application information.
Highways recently sprayed include I-5, 36, 99 and Beltline.
• Weyerhaeuser, 744-4600, plans to helicopter and
backpack spray 326.3 acres, some north of Highway 36
west of Cheshire and some east, south and west of Lorane
with glyphosate, imazapyr, metsulfuron methyl,
sulfometuron methyl, aminopyralid, Insist 90, MSO
Concentrate, Grounded, Crosshair, Conquer, No Foam and/or
Foam Buster. See ODF notification 2015-781-10150, call
Robin Biesecker or Dan Menk at 935-2283 with questions.
• Swanson Brothers Lumber Company, 935-2231,
plans to hire Nick’s Timber Services, (503) 876-8220, to
spray two miles along Sturtevant Road with triclopyr,
glyphosate and/or Forest Crop Oil. See ODF notification
2015-781-10067, call Dan Menk or Brian Peterson at 935-
2283 with questions.
• Giustina, 345-2301, plans to hire Northwest
Reforestation Services, 344-4991, to spray 110.9 acres
south of Fox Hollow Road near Boardtree Creek, Hamm
Road, Doak Creek and Round Mountain with aminopyralid,
sulfometuron methyl, metsulfuron methyl, glyphosate,
imazapyr and/or Dyne-Amic. See ODF notification 2015-
781-10114, call Brian Peterson at 935-2283 with questions.
Compiled by Jan Wroncy and Gary Hale, ForestlandDwellers.org, 342-
8332.
8
July 16, 2015 • eugeneweekly.com
FUNNY MEDICINE HELPS
MENTAL HEALTH
Comedian Frank King came very close to com-
mitting suicide five years ago.
“I had an itch on the roof of my mouth that I could
only scratch with the front sight on my nickel-plated
.38,” King says, his voice a warm North Carolina
drawl.
It almost sounds like King is cracking a joke.
Starting Sunday, July 26, at the Wildish Theater in
downtown Springfield, King will coach up to a doz-
en participants as they turn their mental health issues
into short stand-up routines, which they will perform
for audiences in November.
By 2010, the Great Recession had tanked King’s
motivational speaking business and drained his bank
accounts. Depressed, the only thing keeping him
from firing the gun, he says, was the “suicide clause”
in the million-dollar life insurance policy King had
recently taken out; more powerful than his desire to
kill himself was the horror King felt imagining his
wife left with nothing.
So he muscled through the despair one day at a
time, but King is never safe from feelings of hope-
lessness and suicidal thoughts. Comedy staves off his
depression.
“Nobody dies laughing,” King says. “It’s hard to
imagine someone pulling the trigger in the middle of
a belly laugh.”
That’s why the 58-year-old comic teamed up with
the National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI)
Lane County to establish a local chapter of Stand Up
for Mental Health (SMH).
Launched in 2004, SMH partners with mental
health services around the world to help those strug-
gling with depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disor-
der, OCD and PTSD by teaching them to write and
perform comedy about their troubles.
“Comedy is amazingly therapeutic,” King says.
Open to everyone, the weekly class is aimed at
supporting people who struggle with mental illness
by providing them a safe, therapeutic outlet. The per-
formance is meant to spark conversations about men-
tal health in the broader public.
That’s important, King says, because despite how
prevalent suicide and mental illness are, they are
widely ignored and misunderstood.
NAMI estimates that, in the U.S. alone, one out of
every four adults experiences some form of mental
illness. Despite its prevalence, a stigma persists.
NAMI Lane County executive director Jose Soto-
Gates says most people with mental health issues
aren’t getting help.
“Most will never receive a diagnosis. Most will
never get treatment. Most will never get the care they
need. Most don’t even realize there are mental health
issues involved,” Soto-Gates says.
By the time a person finds their way to NAMI,
Soto-Gates says, they’re usually in crisis. “We want
to get in front of the problem. We want to get people
talking before it’s a crisis.”
Soto-Gates says SMH is one way of doing that.
“It will help us have candid conversations that bring
humor to the issue.” He says we need to be having
these conversations, “and this is an awesome way to
do it in settings where we wouldn’t normally be hav-
ing them.”
When King heard about SMH last year, he began
working right away to set up a local chapter. Accord-
ing to King, one of the rules of comedy is to never
poke fun at a group to which you don’t belong.
“You need someone teaching this class,”
King adds, “who knows the taste of gunmetal.”
— Ben Ricker
LOCAL MIDDLE SCHOOLER
DESIGNS NIKE SHOE TO
BENEFIT DOERNBECHER
If Jacob Burris, an eighth grader at Shasta Middle
School, and his parents hadn’t followed up on a high
blood pressure reading at a routine checkup, doctors
may never have detected the life-threatening heart
condition that sent the 13-year-old to OHSU Do-
ernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland last year.
Now, because of his time at Doernbecher, Jacob
is designing his own shoe at Nike as part of a fund-
raiser for the children’s hospital.
The Doernbecher Freestyle program started in
2004 as a way for young patients to create a shoe of
their own design — Nike donates all proceeds from
the shoes to Doernbecher. This year, Doernbecher
chose six patients to work with Nike, and Jacob was
the only Eugenean selected.
“It’s such an honor to make money for the hospi-
tal that helped him out so much,” says Janice Burris,
Jacob’s mother.
The design has
‘a lot of heart.’
— JACOB BURRIS
When a local pediatrician detected Jacob’s high
blood pressure in May of last year, Janice Burris
says she wasn’t too worried. But when the same
result came up a few weeks later, she says doctors
decided to run tests on Jacob’s kidneys and heart.
Jacob’s heart test results were sent to Doern-
becher. “That’s when we got a call that we should
stop whatever we’re doing and come right up to Do-
ernbecher,” Janice Burris says. “We drove up and
within a couple of hours they had specialists there
ready to do preliminary tests.”
Doctors at Doernbecher diagnosed Jacob with a
coarctation of the aorta, a congenital heart defect
that until then had gone undetected. The condition
required a seven-and-a-half hour surgery last Sep-
tember, in which surgeons replaced a portion of Ja-
cob’s heart with a piece of carbon tube.
“So, Jacob is now bionic,” Janice Burris says,
laughing. “He’s doing a lot better now, and his
blood pressure has gone down, but we still need to
watch it. It’s likely his blood pressure will stay high
for life.”
Earlier this year, a physician’s assistant nomi-
nated Jacob for the Doernbecher Freestyle program,
and Jacob says he’s visited Portland several times
this summer to share designs and sketches with the
designers at Nike.
And what design does he have in mind? “That’s
classified,” he says, but adds that his design has “a
lot of heart.”
Doernbecher will reveal Jacob’s designs and
those of the other patients at an Oct. 23 auction in
Portland. In November, his shoes will be available
to the public at retail locations not yet determined.
Here in Eugene, Jacob passes out buttons and
fliers at Saturday Market to help remind people to
check their blood pressure. “I was outside running
and playing baseball and didn’t know I had high
blood pressure,” he says. “Check your blood pres-
sure, because you can’t really feel it sometimes, but
if you get it checked, it can help you be safe later
on.” — Amy Schneider