By Hank Rosenfeld
Special to the daily Press

“In increasingly commercial Santa Monica, arts and artists are in danger of becoming a scenic coast’s next endangered species. But cultural environmentalists are working to prevent that from happening.”

Mark Swed

Los Angeles Times, Nov. 6, 2006

Some of those cultural grounds are being stirred at the Ruskin Group Theatre, a 65-seat Santa Monica secret across from the airport, where director/writer/actor/guru Paul Linke presides over new productions, such as this Sunday’s performance of “Diabetes: My Struggle with Jim Turner.”

Jim Turner doesn’t really “perform” the show. Turner’s clownish characters include Tellis Wondersweet, his goof on Hugh Hefner hosting “The Girly Magazine Party”; Choam Underhill, the “bio-natura-neutra-tetnonic” new-ager in “Two-Headed Dog” (viewable at YouTube); Grudge Hansen Poet, of Fortune; and Mr. Tremendous (and others) with the Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater. He’s best known, perhaps, for playing Kirby Carlisle, the hapless burned-out agent on the former HBO comedy “Arli$$.”

But this time, inspired by his director Linke’s solo show, “Time Flies When You’re Still Alive,” Turner reveals his own character.

“At first, it was very difficult to be myself on stage,” said Turner. “But after years of hiding behind a mountain of costumes, I am now starting to like it a lot.“

The audience may like how Turner takes them from “Arli$$” in the 1990s, to rock ‘n’ roll in San Francisco in the ’80s, back to Iowa in the ’70s — his life an odyssey of harrowing adventures with the illness.

Today, diabetes is the leading cause of blindness and non-traumatic amputations in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of diabetics die of heart disease. But in 1970 Midwestern America, nobody noticed as Jim, a teenager at Herbert Hoover High in Des Moines, grew pasty white and dropped 30 pounds.

Finally, he saw a specialist. On his grandmother’s birthday at “Baker’s Cafeteria in the Sherwood Forest Shopping Center, where we always went for festive family meals,” the Turners learned about his disease.

“We don’t know where this came from,” the doctor said, telling Jim’s parents, “Just put three meals a day in front of him and stay out of the way.”

His way began with six days in a Des Moines hospital “training to be a diabetic.” After “sweating like Patrick Ewing,” he came out a changed man. At the Dairy Queen, when his pals gobbled down burgers, fries and Cokes, Jim began to order up “a glass of water. And if I felt frisky, a Tab — that can of dirty brown chemicals.” Following a hallucinating freakout in an amusement park when he’d forgotten to eat, Turner realized he’d “never have the luxury of being irresponsible.”

Still a wannabe bohemian, Turner wandered Europe by bicycle, with a banjo and a box of books. The banjo he left in Düsseldorf. His trip ended in an Italian clinic with life-threatening insulin shock. Returning to Iowa, he worked at Baskin-Robbins before joining the Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater, a seminal American comedy group of the 1970s, and began a “rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, lite” onstage and on the road.

This time, he ended up in the Mayo Clinic, where they seriously told him he seriously had to change his life. He eventually got off the road, married and fathered a son, Otto. A diabetic for 32 years at that point, Turner felt “proud” and in control, until the night he woke up with five paramedics at his bed and a fire truck outside.

An estimated 41 million people in the U.S. are viewed as “prediabetic” — in danger of getting the disease. Turner’s goal with his one-man show is to spread that awareness.

“Within the diabetes community,” says Turner, “there has always been the discussion: Am I a person with diabetes or a diabetic?”

He wanted to be the first. A regular on the CNBC show “dLife TV,” Turner says he’s now “probably worse than a diabetic. I’ve become a professional diabetic.”

On The Net

- For more information on Jim Turner’s shows:
http://www.ruskingrouptheatre.com

news@smdp.com