There's a trick to celebrating Cleveland while also delivering trademark self-deprecating Cleveland humor.

Too little and it's clear you don't get out of Westlake much. Too much and you turn into one of those Cleveland curmudgeons, always hoping that in five minutes, the weather will worsen and a plague of locusts – or mayflies, as it was this week – will descend from the heavens.

Last year, during a public forum titled "Who We Are: Comedy, Tragedy & Cleveland," part of the Cleveland Public Library's annual Lockwood Thompson dialogue, the guests walked that fine line. I served as the moderator. Ex-pats Dan O'Shannon, a Hollywood TV producer formerly of ABC's "Modern Family," Yvette Nicole Brown, who shone in the ensemble cast of NBC's "Community," and comedy raconteur Dave Hill all spoke eloquently and hilariously about their love of Cleveland.

When the time came for the library to develop the traditional follow-up to the Lockwood Thompson dialogue,  a publication,  their words kept resonating.

Originally conceived as a Cleveland "scrapbook," by the library in partnership with LAND studio, which manages the Lockwood Thompson projects, and Agnes Studio, which did the design, the publication ultimately became a slim package of postcards with punch. They're on sale for $10 each at the Friends of Cleveland Public Library gift shop in the Louis Stokes Wing of the library in Downtown Cleveland. Proceeds benefit Friends of the Cleveland Public Library.

I wrote the introduction to the publication, prompted by my own Cleveland "postcard," a picture of my mom – who'd obviously gotten off work early -- walking me down West Third Street sometime in the mid 1970s to go see some horrible yet fantastic baseball at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. It was a big crowd. It must have been the home opener:

"I often find myself wishing mom was still here. And then I look at pictures like these, and relive moments like these, and I realize that she is. She died before we won a World Series. Hell, I might, too. But Cleveland memories like this, like mine and yours, live forever."

Inside the cleverly designed jacket is a trove of 17 postcards – photographs and some quotes submitted by the public, supplemented with quotes from the panelists – that seek to deliver on the title: "Who We Are: Comedy, Tragedy & Cleveland."

Aaron Mason, who as assistant director of outreach and programming services was the quarterback of the project for the library, was thrilled with the result.

"The publication started off one way, with the scrapbook, but it wasn't as funny as we wanted it to be. In fact, it was a little depressing," he said.

One of the postcards is a photograph of him, as a child, trying (and failing miserably) to hit a Wiffle ball with a Fred Flintstone-style plastic bat. Mason grew up in Shaker Heights and it screams suburban Cleveland.

The caption? "I come from a family of musicians."

"That one really puts a smile on people's faces," Mason said. "And we really are musicians. I played violin in the youth orchestra and my one sister played cello and the other played piano." His parents play instruments, too.

O'Shannon's postcard moment came when he said during the forum that he loved Cleveland because "It's not ****ing Hollywood." That phrase made the cut, as did Hill's "It's the Paris of the Midwest" and Brown's "The sun will come out for 30 seconds on a Tuesday."

Perhaps the most timely one, as Sunday is the 45th Anniversary of the last Cuyahoga River fire in 1969, was the one submitted by Clevelander Katie O'Keefe, who loves the town so much she has the Terminal Tower tattooed on her arm.

Her words are stark against billowing black smoke arising from one of the fires on the filthy Cuyahoga:

"We'll keep the river on for you."

Original Article