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Tonight in Wisconsin, a mineral point artist plays with fire.
A Milwaukee woman uses her life experience to
advocate for the disabled.
And it's one of the hottest tickets around.
Renegade Comedy, Central Wisconsin style.
It's all ahead in Wisconsin.
[Music]
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
A projected $3.2 billion state deficit means something has
to give a lot of something.
The tough fiscal times have people scrambling to
secure dollars for their state funded programs.
Cindy Bentley is a particularly persuasive
advocate for the mentally and physically challenged.
Just how persuasive?
Our packet lets you decide.
It's hard to stand out in a crowd when everyone
in that crowd is wearing identical red shirts.
But when advocates for the disabled want someone whose
story does stand out to speak out on behalf of the disabled,
they call Cindy Bentley.
My name is Cindy Bentley.
I work for people first of Wisconsin and I'm a
South Advocates specialist.
Cindy Bentley's community begins in Glendale.
For 15 years she's lived in
this four-plex apartment.
Hey, yo, sweetie.
Her community spans the city of Milwaukee.
Bentley rides three different buses to make
the 45-minute trip from her home on the north side to her
job on the far south side.
And I don't want anybody driving me around
because I figured this.
I have a job and I got to get myself to work.
You know most people that's work,
they have to get to work and they take the city bus.
I feel very honored to take the bus.
Bentley feels honored to take the bus by herself because
in the past that would not have been an option.
For 21 years Cindy Bentley lived here at the Southern
Wisconsin Center in Union Grove.
When she entered Southern Bentley was one of about
1600 people who lived in cottages like this one.
Today only about 250 people live at Southern.
Was it really the only place for you then?
When I was up five.
Yeah, because you know, yeah.
I mean I was in foster home and foster home
and they didn't work.
Bentley says her disability was due to fetal alcohol syndrome
and other side effects of her mother's substance abuse.
But Bentley says she developed other problems because she
was in a state institution.
I had temper tantrums and it wasn't because
I was mad at them.
It's because people were not listening to me.
They didn't they didn't value
anything I had to say.
They always said the things I couldn't do,
not what I could do.
And so I remember bumping my head and being in a corner and
bumping my head back and forth.
Today people ask for a chance to listen to Bentley.
This is Cindy calling you and returning your call.
Yes, I can speak at your conference.
After leaving Southern, Bentley worked in restaurants
and department stores.
But now she works as an advocate for other
people with disabilities.
The one nonprofit group known as People First.
People first wants to close, not just one, but all of
the state centers for the developmentally disabled.
Bentley has only a handful of cracked polaroid photos
by which to remember her years at Southern.
The other things I remember, they sent me to school.
I learned about church.
What they really didn't value about who I was and
what I was careful of doing.
They had all these psychologists making the decisions
about how I should be, what's the program and
the program I should be on, behavior modification.
And the more I answered up, I guess the more they
put me on these programs.
They're not in placement.
They tried to place me a lot of times.
But I always wanted to come back to Southern Center
because that was my home.
I thought that was my home.
I was scared of the community too.
Now she has to be in the community.
I need to be out in my community helping other people so they
can be in their community.
That's what a soft advocate is about.
Trying to give this one house for a person with a
disability is very hard.
Bentley also serves on the board of an organization hoping
to set up a housing trust.
Being as a person with disability, I would feel glad
about owning something too.
And I think it would make part of people with
disabilities feel like they're contributing to their community.
They're owning something.
There's a saying in the South Bad Advocacy World,
nothing about me without me.
And for many, many years it was assumed that people
with disabilities wouldn't know what they wanted,
wouldn't be able to express dreams, wouldn't
be able to make choices.
And so people just kind of dismissed them and made
those decisions for them.
I say it very much for you.
Bentley also has regular meetings with lawmakers.
In this case, it's a former state senator, Gwen Moore.
We understand what the budget is.
We understand, but if we don't come
here and let people know that people's lives are
in jeopardy, we know you have a budget to balance.
But we also have people's lives we have to worry about.
And we do not want people with disabilities to
be back in institutions like I spent 26 years of
precious life in my life in the institution.
After leaving Senator Moore's office, Bentley
runs into Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark.
Now we're going to see you in Special Olympics?
Yes. Bentley is a national ambassador
for the Special Olympics.
That role has taken her to places like Greece.
It's taken her to the White House twice.
But talking with banking officials, legislators and
presidents isn't the most important part of Bentley's job.
What is important is talking with the disabled themselves.
I have them to believe in themselves and don't let people
tell them what they can do, ask them what they can do
and try to do as much as they can for their self.
While the rally continued in the Capitol, Rotunda Bentley
moved to a hearing room upstairs where she was to introduce
a lineup of speakers.
There she struck up a conversation with
Anne Hager of LaCrosse.
Hager was there to encourage legislators to approve
more funding for special education programs.
Hager's 12-year-old son Tyler is in Special Education classes.
Hager said psychologists told her Tyler would never
learn to read or write, and he had proved them wrong.
Bentley said she had been told the same thing.
When I have problems with psychology, because for us I'm
concerned about psychology.
They are there to test us, but they don't know how
we are and what we can do.
Cindy Bentley then turned to talk with Tyler.
And I want you to remember that I try to tell kids with
disabilities and kids who are not with disabilities.
But is that God made you the way you are?
Okay? God put us on this earth for a reason.
Cindy Bentley and other advocates at the rally
achieved part of their goal.
Under the budget now on the governor's desk, one of
the state's three centers for the disabled will be
significantly downsized.
However, the second goal, using those savings to
increase payments to those who care for the disabled in
the community, did not make it into the budget document.
We'd like to know what you think of our report on
Cindy Bentley and everything you see on In Wisconsin.
Email your comments to inwisconsin@wpt.org or give
us a call at 1-800-253-1158.
This is our pilot season and we'd like to know what you
think of our series so far.
Goofballs, pinkies, willards, what are they?
We'll give you a hint.
A mineral point man creates these objects out of fire
and glass.
For this artist, something traditionally defined
as kid stuff is also art.
In the basement of an old cigar factory in mineral point, Chuck
Pound is playing with fire, several hundred degrees of fire.
The glass, what I'm working with, is between about
1,200 and 1,902,000 degrees.
Safety glasses are almost.
Often referred to as the marble man of mineral point,
Chuck Pound is a hot glass sculptor creating pocket-sized
art in a hazardous medium.
I always like hot things for some reason.
I played with various kinds of
pyro techniques when I was young, not supposed to.
That's part of the attraction, it's part of the danger
of it, but it's once you work with it, it's...
I haven't been burned in a long time, let's put it that
way. But when I started, I was.
Pound forms his playful shapes from hot glass
using a centuries-old method developed in Venice.
A method used by only about 100 other torchwork marble
artists in the United States.
I'm going to call it torchworker or lampworker,
which means I'm working with a torch playing, I work
with natural gas and oxygen.
I was working with my partner and we were doing
a stained glass piece that incorporated hot glass in it.
And a friend of ours was doing the hot glass and we
were doing stained glass.
And he got tired of doing the hot glass part and
said, Chuck, it's time for you to learn something new.
He works with fire, he works with glass, and when he
works, he has to work fast.
Once you start, I have to know what I'm going to do
and complete the whole piece.
If there's any interruptions that marble's ruined, you
have to know each step that you're going to do so
that you can do it quickly, because the glass is not
going to wait for you.
Working quickly, the molten glass seems to become paint
in the hands of Chuck Pound.
I add just a little bit more black glass to here.
Add some green dots on the black.
Now I've got all the colors that are going
to go onto this marble.
A guidebook to marble collecting states, the language
of the marble collector is different and not easily
understood by most other English-speaking people.
Well, that could be set of the marble creator as well.
A goofball is not a mistake.
It's a name that we gave to one of my styles of
marbles. They're goofy.
It's just a solid colored spiral marble, twisted marble.
Comes in all kinds of colors.
Another popular one is this one, which is a woody.
And it's all adventuring and clear, as all
there is to this one.
And then it's made in such a way that it
looks like a wood grain.
Pinky is a solid adventuring ribbon, in case of a
clear colored glass.
My favorite style of marble is an RPM.
And this is one that a marble collector, someone who collects
contemporary marbles, would know exactly who made this marble.
It's a Chuck Pound marble.
As is this one also, which is a willard, is
definitely my marble.
And as far as I know, there's no one else
that's making this marble.
What you see inside this marble is actually a white ribbon.
And it's trimmed in adventuring material, which is a
copper suspended in glass.
So I'll start with a little disc of glass
that is the white ribbon.
Put the colors on that disc and then grab it with two
pieces of glass and twist it to get the spiral in there.
A Chuck Pound marble, whether it's a pinky,
woody, goofball or willard.
Each piece carries with it the individual
stamp of the craftsman.
People's reactions to my work is probably the most fun.
People walk into the shop here and have never heard
of a handmade marble before.
And they look at them and they're just amazed by them
and never realized that they would pay $50 for a marble.
And they walk out with one happy.
And the other part of it is just the magic of working
with the glass and taking rods of glass and making
minda something beautiful.
A centuries old art in the hands of a contemporary
artist and entrepreneur.
Chuck Pound, the marble man of Mineral Point.
We head west now from Mineral Point to the
Mississippi River Valley.
Many endangered species on the brink of extinction
stir strong emotion.
Gorillas, pandas, clams?
Well, well, thoughts of clams may not immediately trigger
warm and fuzzy feelings.
Scientists in Genoa are working hard to preserve
this invertebrate.
20 miles south of LeCrosse near the Mississippi River
is a small laboratory called the Clam Palace.
Inside a team of scientists is trying to save an
endangered four-inch mollusk from extinction.
This is a Higgins Eye Perly Muscle.
And then to the upper Mississippi River, that's
the only place in the world you'll find one.
The Higgins Eye Muscle was named after Frank Higgins who dug
up some from the Mississippi River in the mid-1800s.
But the Higgins Eye Perly Muscle has been on the
Federal and Dangered Species List since 1976.
The mollusk started to die out when the dams were built on
the upper Mississippi River.
The dams slowed the river current and created
stagnant, silt-laden water.
And there are other problems.
Some farm practices, bad land use practices, caused
habitat degradation.
And that was the main threat back in the 70s.
In the early 90s, late 80s, the zebra muscle
made its appearance.
And that's the number one threat to the
Higgins Eye at this time.
Saving the Higgins Eye was taking a cooperative
effort among several state and federal agencies,
led by the Genoa National Fish Atrophy.
The hatchery built the Klam Palace.
Here, scientists and fasts between five and
7,000 fish each year with Higgins Eye Muscle larva.
We started here at the hatchery in 1999.
And this is our fourth year of infestations now.
I think we're finally getting it right.
Tony Brady is a muscle propagation biologist with the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
He cries open a female muscle and holds it open
with a rubber stopper.
He then shoots a stream of water into it.
This rushes out larvae, or glachydia, from
the muscle into a dish.
That's the final results.
It's a cloud of low dust in the water.
Those are the marvel muscles called glachydia.
Several hundred thousand.
Right now, the muscle larvae are only
microscopic thin membranes.
They look like clear clams with their shells open.
And what we want to do is check if they're ready to be used.
We take a little bit of salt, add in water, and you'll see
them start to snap shut as that salt dissolves into the water.
And that lets us know that the glachydia are viable
and they will readily attach to the fish host.
The larvae are put into buckets with small mouth baths.
The water is aerated to make the fish open their mouths.
And the larvae attach themselves to the fish gears.
Roger Gordon is a fishery biologist.
He examines the fish to see if the muscle larvae have attached.
See all those little white dots?
Looks like salt on that.
It's probably about 300 larvae attached to this fish.
The infected bats are put back in the water.
Soon, the host fish, full of muscle larvae, will
be put into cages on the bottom of the Mississippi
and Wisconsin rivers.
Well, today we're placing a lot of well-bearing host
fish for men cell sickens, I think, and I purely
muscle in Wisconsin river.
Yesterday we were here and we placed 23 metal
bases in the stream bed.
And now today we come back with the fish, place them in
these cages, and then they're swam down and buckled into
those pre-existing bases.
25 fish per cage, large mouth baths, fingerlings,
about 5 inches long.
Each are holding approximately 200 pigons a day.
We hope larvae, glachydia, attach to their gills.
[inaudible]
The muscle larvae don't hurt the fish, and after they
grow to a certain size, the muscle larvae simply drop
off and live on their own and search out a good habitat.
Gordon says about 10% of the baby muscles can
be expected to survive.
We release approximately 120,000 juveniles today, you know,
10% of that would be 1200.
That would be a lot of endangered higgin's eye
muscles for this area.
I do like this, it would just fight this.
No date damage, right?
All right.
I do a date damage.
In a few weeks after the muscles have dropped off the fish,
divers will come back and release the fish from the cages.
The state benefits twice, they get to invade your
muscles, and then also hundreds of sport fish.
The cages will then go receive to protect the
muscles that remain.
We found in other areas that we have much higher survival
rates of putty muscles at stay rate, in the cage.
No predators can get out and get out of it for the first year.
Next year we'll come back and do some sampling, put down some
grids and sample downstream of here and see if we can
find any little higgin's eyes.
For such a small creature, the higgin's eye muscle, big
problems for some people, repairs to the I-94 bridge
over the Mississippi River, were delayed until the
endangered clams located there could be moved.
On the St.
Croix River, about 50,000 clams had to be removed
and relocated in 1996 before a bridge could be constructed.
In 1998, the little muscle stopped repairs
to a dam near Hudson.
There are certainly projects that have been delayed because
of what some people would say is an insignificant critter,
but the projects that have been delayed have been able
to continue once we relocated the animal to proper habitat.
So just a small delay to save a critter, I think.
Well, in my point of view it would be worth it.
This is realistically in terms of some of
your other charismatic, high profile things.
This is a pretty low end operation for what you get
out of it.
So we're really happy that we think it's
pretty cost effective.
Good feeling when we actually get to place these fish in
the water because it takes at least a year to grow the
fish, the sufficient size to be able to carry the
infestation load that we put on.
It's a good feeling when it actually happens.
We moved now from endangered muscles to mosquitoes.
Well, they're not exactly endangered.
In fact, they're part of life in central
Wisconsin, along with long cold winters and hordes of
tourists clogging the roadways.
It doesn't sound like there's much to laugh about, but
the sweet lips comedy troupe would say that winters,
mosquitoes and tourists make for great joke material.
Reporter Andy Sulf traveled to Stevens Point last winter
to see if the sweet lips gang could tickle his funny bone.
We welcome you here.
Have a drink or a beer.
Until it becomes clear we will make you laugh.
It's the basement of the Clark Place Nightclub in Stevens
Point and members of the sweet lips comedy theater are
doing a last minute rehearsal.
We're going to make for a laugh.
So I'm with this show which is called as you know we need to
present anything for a laugh.
Anything for a laugh could easily be their motto.
Welcome to us, guys tonight, okay?
Do you really want to hurt me?
Do you really want to make me cry?
Do you really want to hurt me?
Yes, I do.
Over the last two decades the sweet lips comedy theater
has created and performed dozens of comedy shows.
One of our motto is no ego and no ambition and
that's kind of why we're still in center Wisconsin.
The rest of the world other than what pack in Portage County
hasn't seen any of this stuff.
Oops! But in what pack in Portage
County they clearly love it.
I think the humor we do is kind of center Wisconsin based.
We do stuff that is important to people around here and make
fun of it hunting, fishing, you know outdoor stuff.
You had better watch out what the hell you're doing
there, buckets.
You damn there hit that slow children
playing sign back there.
Oh yeah, like those kids would really be broke up about it
if we did for Christ's sake.
How would slow children play?
How would you like to have a sign out in front of your house
that said dumb guy live it?
Recently sweet lips favorite target for fun has been
the county highway crew.
But we do know that they perform a very valuable function.
Yeah, we would have been there.
Really, I'm serious.
I know.
Most of them would beat the crap out of us if they
could get their hands on us.
Because they think we're really making fun of them.
But they can't move fast enough.
We know what we know how to do.
We know how to do when a damn work slow down.
Like those long short ones.
I don't know if we slow down.
If I slow my truck down my car, I'm not sure it's going to run.
No, you can't go back.
But then run it into the shop.
You'll drop in the five horsepower Princess Strat.
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
Get the minute.
You know, if you want any slower this summer, then
you did last summer when the tourists drive through.
They're going to think they're going through a damn wax museum.
Wheatlips started back in 1980 as a group discouraged
by the conservative standards of local community theater.
What the F is wrong with community theater?
What's wrong with them?
You can't say it.
Like, oh, you're so full of S.
[laughs]
Some of the better places do have colorful words and
then community theaters wouldn't do those plays.
But soon realized they could make more money if they
did their own material.
Go against your free grid system.
But they want royalties for that stuff.
They want you to pay them for every, you know,
every presentation you do.
And we're tired.
Of course, Portage and Wapaka counties can't support a
full-time comedy troupe.
And the group jokes that they've taken the audience's
advice and kept their day jobs.
Pat N.
Wright is a Wapaka County social worker.
See, this is what keeps me in balance.
I have a fairly stressful job.
And then being able to come here, this is what
keeps me somewhat sane, relatively sane anyway.
You see, this is what keeps me in balance.
I have kind of a highly stressful job.
[laughs]
Dave Bell, whose main job is hand-making fishing rods,
is renowned for his wild improvisations on stage.
I've been trying to say the same line for about six minutes now
and I haven't gotten it in yet.
I think most of my life is insane.
And the only same part is when I am on a stage.
I feel that sometimes.
So it does give some amount of depth and...
And the amazing thing is that you would never have an
audience member who would say, "That man on stage is sane."
Right? That's all that never.
Never. All the players are
uplifted by the interaction with the audience.
They describe their shows as a contest to see
who will have more fun.
Sweetheart's members or their rockest crowd of Portage
and Wapaka County neighbors.
Tonight it's clear.
Everyone's over.
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As they say, always leave them laughing.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of In Wisconsin.
Please join us again next week.
Good night.
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