Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 10

A Visit. . .

—From EF—

We did our trip. It was a revisiting of beloved people from start to finish, and it was the best and smartest gift we could give ourselves. We saw friends we hadn’t hugged since 2019, without any excuse of performance or book sales: it was just to be with these people. And it was magnificent. Oh, the waves of memories.

The memories of people were updated with the lovely presences of their current living selves, mental snapshots of who they are now, of an age with who we are now. All of us had war stories and epiphanies to share from these years of Covid, and we’re up to date with each other.

The memories of place were sometimes different. Michele and Mary’s home in the farm country south of Millersville was as lush and gorgeous as ever, enhanced by their careful caretaking. Bill and Bridget’s home outside Bethlehem had kept all the beauty we remembered, and had added a new guest cottage, straw-bale built and old-barn-timbered. We shared it overnight with Bloomsburg’s Laurie McCants and demolished half a black box of wine catching outselves up to the present. But when we went back to Philadelphia, I walked to where our home and theatre had been from 1992 to 1999, and it was a different story.

When we’d found it in 1992, knowing that we needed to relocate from Lancaster, it was a comic first meeting. Conrad had been pounding the streets following up any possible rentals, finding only spaces too grimy and small or too pricey. Then came the day we somehow turned onto the first block of Arch Street and saw a “for lease” sign plastered on a storefront. He pulled to the curb and I got out to peer into the window.

I was looking through dusty glass into 132 feet of 23-foot-wide space with 12-foot ceilings, a huge pristine ex-warehouse, half a block long. After I started breathing again, I went back to the car, took out my cell phone, and did the dumbest thing a prospective tenant could possibly do: “I’m in front of 115 Arch Street and I’m in love.” Dumb or not, it worked, and we got the space.

When we shoved our stuff into the van and a U-Haul and arrived at our new home, we only had the energy to drag our sleeping bag and floor mats and a few big set-flats to screen ourselves from the big storefront windows. We spent our first night in the middle of an empty huge space with only one little votive candle for light. In 1999, after we’d packed to leave for California, it was exactly the same way we’d spent our first night there, a little bed in the middle of a huge empty space, lit by one votive candle.

In those seven years, we’d built our theatre, our apartment, and our office. We had a braided ficus tree given to us by a friend who’d had it outgrow her law office, and it graced our front window by the bin that housed the many many umbrellas forgotten by audience members, next to the fireplug we’d gotten in Lancaster to make the set for American Splendor.

We built platforms to support the 49 seats of our theatre, seats that included a rocking chair, a throne, the back seat from our van, and a little front-row couch that guaranteed us front-row audience. I climbed a twelve-foot ladder to hang lighting pipes from the ceiling and drilled big holes in the red-cedar flooring to wire our dimmers into the basement’s 220 volts. I helped build the massive firewall that made it legal for us to live in the back, and after more than a year of freaking about building a stair, I got rid of the ladder we’d had to use to get us up to our bedroom loft. I’d built that loft so strong you could have done Irish dancing on it, but I had nightmares about building a stair.

Our four nine-foot north windows were the glory of our apartment, and I got very attached to the squirrel who showed up regularly to beg for peanuts. When I didn’t appear on time, she’d rap on the window with her little paw. The day we left for California I cried about that squirrel: who was going to give her peanuts?

Now it’s a condominium, with one place left for 3 million dollars. The ground floor, our apartment, office, and theatre space, is a parking garage. But in my mind, the secure space of my memory, there is still a place where we made our living, made our home, and made love.

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A Hair-Breadth. . .

—From CB—

We were on a trip, back in the town where we spent about fifteen years. I was driving a rental car, and Liz was in the passenger seat. We were trying to find our way out of town and on to our next destination. She was following the GPS on the cellphone and telling me the turns.

We ambled through the streets toward the north end of town, stopped at the light before the turn onto the freeway. We had a full tank of gas and plenty of time. Liz said to turn left. The light turned green. I turned left.

Immediately a truck lunged at me. I sped up. Another vehicle, black and big, came whipping around the truck to the right. We would be destroyed. I jammed down the accelerator—contrary to my usual predilection for caution—and escaped a collision by a hair.

This might well have meant death. Both vehicles were coming fast and I wasn’t driving a tank. I swore at myself and merged onto the freeway.

I was at fault, of course. I had heard “Turn left” and had only been thinking Turn left. Which canceled a lifetime of preparing to turn left by waiting for the green arrow or waiting for traffic to clear. I knew not what heart attacks I left in my wake, only that we went on with our trip.

Why did I do that? Was it a gas bubble rising out of the swamp of eighty-one years? Was it a sudden urge to audition for a James Bond flick? Did it portend the inevitable jump off Planet Earth? I’ve spent the past week drinking wine with old friends and thinking about death.

It hasn’t gone into my dreams as yet. My only anxiety dreams are trying to assemble the cast—frisking around like chickens—for a show we’ve never rehearsed; or packing the van for a tour with a stage set that won’t fit; or finding that the van will only drive in reverse, so I have to strain around to steer backwards. Nothing fatal.

I don’t think I fear death; I only fear irresponsibility. I don’t want to leave a mess for other campers to clear. I don’t want to leave things undone—a neat trick, as I’m always working on something undone. I’d like to slip quietly out the door without letting the cats escape, but while I’ve played roles involving dementia, murder, or Lear’s heart bursting, I’d definitely be miscast as a suicide.

So as regards the near-accident, I’ll give the PTSD time to settle in and meantime write it up. I’ve often said that one perk of a career in the arts is that whatever shit happens, it’s raw material for my work.

 

 

Tribe. . .

—From CB—

Whatever our politics, we can respond to the “other side” of the spectrum in different ways. We can find new, clever phrases to mock or damn them, focusing on the stupidest comments of the stupidest among them. Lots of creative effort went into jokes about Trump’s hair, and Marjorie Greene has plucked the baton from Sarah Palin and is grabbing headlines by the bucketful.

Or we can indulge in long, reasoned commentary on issues that only concern enlightened souls, namely us, branding all who oppose our views as knuckle-dragging sexist/racist fascists, or as irretrievably-woke radical socialist pedophiles.

Or we can post photos of cats.

All sides assume that dialogue is a total waste of energy. Even suggesting dialogue marks one as a traitor to the cause or—just as bad—insufficiently committed. Of course I have my own candidates for dolt-of-the-week, and some are hopelessly gone to the Dark Side of money, power, or idee fixe. Sometimes words are wasted, though at times verbal laxative serves a purpose, invigorating the choir, sweeping you to power, or selling your best-seller. There are reasons why Bloviating is raised to a high art, while Listening is a starved foster child.

Our activists pride themselves on speaking Truth to Power, as if Power were listening. Meantime, the progressive tradition of the circular firing squad holds sway. We troll the Web for evidence of racism, sexism, white privilege; allies turn against one another and go in for the kill.

Granted, my “activism” is hardly boots-on-the-ground, but here’s a thought: No one will listen unless you convince them that you hear them. No words will get through. I had a five-year teaching career, thought myself good, but I was wrong: I was more focused on my inspired pontificating than on their learning. Only when I found my theatre audiences and engaged with them, did I reach the point of occasional communication.

Somewhat. I’ve always been focused on the stories I want to tell, not on stories that people want to hear. That’s a choice that’s limited my “entertainment” career and is disastrous for politicians. Listening is vital to military strategy: know your enemy. No frontal attack will succeed if the other army’s behind you. What’s their appeal? What need are they answering? In my view, for example, white supremacy isn’t a need, it’s an assumed nostrum to a much deeper need.

To me, TRIBE is the strongest driver in politics today: the need to belong. Whether it’s a pussy hat or MAGA cap or just a t-shirt saying Eat Shit and Die, we want to belong to something that gives us an identity. A lifelong Mormon or Catholic may cling to the ingrown identity of belonging, no matter what disagreements they have with ideology. Similarly, a person of any political persuasion will be hard to convince on the issues if it causes ruptures with their friends and colleagues: easier to change your mind than your tribe.

Or perhaps the answer was best stated by someone from our old neopagan group: Throw a better party! Do you really want to spend your time with depressing angry people or with people having fun? Rage is a great fuel for the first stage of the rocket, getting it off the ground, but probably not for the Starship Enterprise, which has farther to go.

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Big-Assed Leap. . .

—From EF—

I was thinking about the upcoming election today, but no. Shit. I don’t want to write about that.

I’m writing about something personal, but in my bones I feel it’s related. The two of us are chasing joy, taking a deep breath, putting on double masks, and getting on a plane for Philadelphia. Back in the day, we did what I called a Long-Haul Tour every fall, taking ourselves and our performances and our books all the way across and around the country. In that process we also got to see the myriad of beloveds who are part of our tribe: creators, performers, troublemakers, and it was a love-feast. However, doing it in the car meant five days of bone-crunching driving just to get across the country and start the tour. The last time we did that was 2019, and I miss the hell out of our friends, but we can’t do that kind of trip now.

We can’t perform, but we’ll just go anyway. We’ll fly to Philly, rent a car for a week, and see our folks in Millersville, Bloomsburg, Bethlehem, Philadelphia and New York, then fly to Milwaukee to see our beloved Flora Coker and my brother Dan, newly-discovered four years ago. Thanks, DNA. Then back home, re-filled with joy. There are many we’re not going to be able to see this time, but I’m holding hope for a return.

How is this related to the elections, I ask myself? I know in my bones that keeping my life going requires joy. And I know that I am “wired funny,” and that whatever I most want gets impediments put in its way—by me. It takes a big-assed leap, like when I jumped into CB’s arms in 1960, to bypass the blockage.

So yeah, and there are no guarantees. But no leap, no joy. We have beloveds who have crossed the bridge, who will not be within a hug’s reach, but we loved them when we could, and we still reach out. Now we get on the plane. Now we vote. Now we stay present for whatever will come. And we hold the joy close wherever we still find it. I will go upstairs tonight with my love to sit by the fireplace and then fall into an embrace. I will not allow my funny wiring to block my joy. Onward.

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One Size Fits All. . .

—From CB—

On Facebook, a friend who has recently lost a long-term mate posted a lament. She had attended a grief-counseling group, wherein she was criticized for sponsoring a series of memorials for him. “You must give yourself time to cry,” she was told.

Responses to her post boiled down to: Screw them, do what you need to do. I agreed, but it set me to thinking how much we subscribe to the slogan, “One size fits all.”

In the face of grief, some people cry their eyes out for days, some sit in stone silence, some busy themselves in particulars, some hire professional mourners. All are particular to the individual, as is grief itself.

I recall flying back to Iowa to my mother’s funeral. I had seen her shortly before she died and scheduled an immediate return to be with her at the end. But it happened too fast. So I changed my reservation, went back to the funeral. I sat there, listened to the preacher drone, viewed the corpse, no tears, little feeling that I could touch—this for the woman who gave me life, who taught me, with her own single-mom grit, to survive, who blessed me with the essence of unconditional love…

Perhaps I felt her character so much a part of me, even though we couldn’t have been more different in many ways. So my grief was different. Or perhaps a part of my inheritance from her was simply to survive, and that meant closing off parts of yourself, so you couldn’t feel. I have always felt more grief for my fictional characters than for those near me. Curious.

On the night of her death 2,000 miles away, I had a vision: she grew progressively younger, from mid-80’s to little girl, and then she smiled, and then she vanished. I personally don’t subscribe to the “looking down from Heaven” idea, but you feel their collaboration in your cellular structure.

I don’t in the least feel that we all know ourselves so well that advice is always unneeded. I personally didn’t know how to perform open heart surgery on myself a few years back—it took some expertise. But the wise doctor is one who’s read the literature, who knows the most likely cure, but who doesn’t insist that the patient die if it doesn’t work.

I once was part of a men’s retreat that featured a “grief” ceremony, allowing men to come forward and express suppressed grief. Very meaningful for some, but as I just stood watching—respectful, I thought—someone approached me and said, in effect, “Let it out.” His intentions, I’m sure, were good, but the tactic was “One size fits all”—good advice for turtles, perhaps, but not for our own mad species.

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Birth. . .

—From EF—

I celebrate the birth, eighty-one years ago today, of the man with whom my life has been entwined. I celebrate his mother, the woman whose husband said he wanted no children, the woman who was left alone to call a cab to get to the hospital, who labored and tore and embraced and nursed the man-child she took home and named—first name for his father, middle name for what he was to her—Joy.

I celebrate their survival, enduring grim poverty as she drove a dynamite truck and worked in the slaughterhouse and kept books for the kind auto salesman who sometimes came with bags of groceries.

I celebrate what it took to finally get a little house with a white picket fence, to fight to get her son to a better high school, to see him go off to college, to suddenly learn that at the age of nineteen he wanted to marry and to keep panic at bay until she could see what he found.

I celebrate that she took me in as a daughter, that our children got to experience her profound love, that until nearly the end she went dancing on Saturday nights. She gave me the birthday I celebrate now, eighty-one years later.

I celebrate Joy.

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Cats. . .

—From CB—

Our cats love the smell of my feet. Also the smell of my sandals when I’ve been walking along the beachfront, coming home from the coffee shop, or having gone to the supermarket.

Our cats love the smell of the old rotten wood I’ve brought in for the fireplace.

Our cats love the smell of each other’s butts.

Our cats love to smell lettuce leaves and then chew them.

Our cats love to lounge around the computer till they decide to eat their kibble.

Our cats love to lie on our legs pointed at the screen as we watch an old Chaplin or Bergman film.

Our cats love to chase houseflies but rarely catch them.

Our cats love to try to dodge through the gate and get upstairs to the bedroom.

Our cats love to shred our sofa.

Our cats love to have us say “Sit! Stay!” as we try to get through the gate, and they love to hear the “Good cat” that follows their eventual capitulation.

One cat loves a head-scratch; the other loves a belly-rub (as he’s called “Wool-worm!”)

One cat loves lying on Elizabeth—I know how he feels. The other lies on me.

The cats love fighting each other, then suddenly freezing, then fight, then freeze, fight/freeze—claws retracted and nothing personal.

Our cats go nuts on catnip. They hate the vacuum cleaner and anyone working on the roof. They hate bluejays and the neighbor’s cat named Dinah.

Our cats do not follow Facebook; they’ve never performed a play or written a novel; and they show no interest in learning to touch-type, though they’ll lie on the keyboard.They seem to have learned their names as well as to sit and to stay if there’s nothing better to do. Yet they’re much beloved, they normally use their catpan, and they serve the function of a court fool, while much cheaper to feed.

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Storytellers. . .

—From EF—

As the years pass, the bones show clearer, the faces more distinct. This year I look at my family and see a tribe of storytellers. All four of us. We have done so many things all at once that I hadn’t seen it that way until now.

Our daughter, who has lived in Tuscany since 1998, is a professional translator from Italian to English, having worked at everything from catalogues of bar equipment to the glossy booklets at huge art events like the Venice Biennale. Now her output includes poetry, novels and nonfiction, and this month is the official publication date of her first book for a major publisher: A Brief History of Pasta, by Luca Cesari. Her website, johannabishop.net, opens with an image of a woman wielding a heavy pole to get her barge across a river, and her words make it more specific: “You sit on the bank and you think. Then start rowing back and forth, back and forth for as long as it takes.” Her cargo, in one form or another, is all stories.

Our son has added another form of storytelling to his years of work as a graphic artist (errorbar.net) and is now part of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists ensemble. Each ensemble member does high-octane work as writer, performer, and director, creating a dizzying array of short performance pieces that are presented in such a way that no two evenings are alike. The program is a “menu” with thirty numbered titles, and the order in which they are performed is determined by the audience. When a sketch ends the entire audience yells a number and whatever is understood first becomes the next sketch—instantly. The work runs the gamut from personal monologue to chaotic caricature, and all of it is intensely present. Fireworks.

Conrad has interrupted the long string of novels with a burst of very short stories, an idiom called Flash Fiction, and now has two chapbooks of them in print. For all the years of our crazy life since leaving academia in 1971 we have created and performed short theatre sketches, first with Theatre X (Milwaukee) and then with The Independent Eye, so he knows in his bones how to get there, be there, and get out, but now it’s little black footprints on a white page. And the voice is uniquely his, not a collaboration. The novels (one is currently in first draft) are still teamwork, but I love this new bonfire with solo sparks. Flashes.

I am digging the garden of my middle years, 1974 to 1999, having put the first volume of my memoir into print a while ago. This also is solo work, with my mate as first responder. I am more than a little startled to think of myself as a writer. It snuck up on me, and it’s a jolt to realize that this blog has been in existence for eight years. The process of my collaborative creation on the plays and novels has been more akin to the oral tradition—verbal improvisation captured on tape. Now it’s my story, told by me to me.

Four tellers around the campfire. It’s a virtual fire, but a warm one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another Goddamn Novel. . .

—From CB—

This is absurd, to say the least. Some background is required. There has probably not been a day in my life, since the age of fifteen, that I haven’t felt the urge to write. And I’ve done so: forty produced plays, hundreds of sketches, nine novels, three radio series, dozens of short stories, not to mention grant applications and press releases by the score. The plays have made us a living, the fiction not remotely.

Finishing the last novel, I resolved not to do this again. Millions of novels flow daily from the Earth’s population, and few ever make it through the Pearly Gates. I’ve had well over a thousand rejections of my hard-wrung words.

I resolved to fill my day with writing flash fiction, stories under a thousand words, bonsai stories—two volumes of these to date. I’ve often said that most full-length plays should be one-acts, most one-acts ten minutes, and the same goes for serious novels—anything readers don’t want to lose themselves in—an overnight trip, not a cruise.

So now, in collaboration with Elizabeth, I’m writing a new novel. God help me—or a shot of vodka. I’m 80, and I don’t need another goddamn novel, but so it goes.

In 1974, in the first show of our new two-person theatre ensemble, we presented a four-minute monolog, based on some interviews I’d heard on TV with women who’d had children removed for physical abuse. Coming near the end of what was otherwise a comedy revue, the piece was a lightning bolt.

Next season, we expanded it into a one-act play. Its premiere was a disaster: surely the most depressing thing we’ve ever written. But miraculously we sensed what was needed: a structured discussion to follow directly on its heels.

Over the next nine years, we presented DESSIE well over four hundred times throughout the USA and for a memorable showing in Jerusalem, for social workers, cops, prison inmates, society women, conferences, churches, for theatre audiences and for those who asked at the door, “Is this where the movie is?”

Finally we put it to bed when we were too old to play it. In 1984, we wrote a sequel, Smitty’s News, that picked up the central character fifteen years later. It was staged at a major festival in Louisville KY and it died, perhaps deservedly.

Taking my afternoon nap, I asked myself, What if the double suicide at the end of the sequel doesn’t happen? What if a woman with no desire to live still lives? What if the first play gets novelized, and then the second, and then a third where Dessie in her sixties faces something new—something that’s been lying there since we conceived it in 1975?  

So that’s the start. At age 80, my partner in crime 82, it’s absurd. How do we bring alive on the page something we brought to life on the stage nearly fifty years ago? I suppose it’s only possible if we cling to a theme that was nowhere in the first manifestation but came clear as we aged: survival.

Or maybe it was there and we didn’t know it. At the end of the first play, Dessie goes berserk, pounding her pregnant belly to induce an abortion. She checks herself: “No. She’s okay. She’s too little.” And then, “See what there is for supper.”

It’s taken us many years to see the hope in “See what there is for supper.” Now we have to find 80,000 words to do it.

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Balance. . .

—From EF—

I’m hearing the call of the Equinox and wonder what I’ll do this year to let that amazing balance-point echo in my core. I feel it, but don’t yet know what it is. All my life I have been a night-person, but now I see each dawn, taste it, revel in it. I am entranced with the proof of time, the slow clear movement from left to right of the point where the sun makes its entrance on my stage. Our trees mask the clear sight of the horizon, so I don’t get the full picture until I see the daily dawn-photo of a friend who posts his view of the Laguna each morning, but I can guess where the orb is emerging. At summer’s height it’s over by the corner of the garage, and at mid-winter it will be behind the utility pole that impaired drivers whack if they lose control on a Saturday night.

So I’m halfway between the garage and the utility pole. I find myself sensing the beginning of the great letting-go. It’s been painful releasing the lifeline of live stage performance, that voltage that connects performer and audience. Its electricity powered me for sixty years or so, and as I have been doing my memoir-writing I’ve gradually seen the long view, amazed at the shit-load of things I’ve slogged through and survived. The first twenty years were a hard climb to solid ground, the next sixty have been making the equivalent of a logger’s road, and if I live to be a hundred these last twenty will either be the soft sandy ascent to the final vantage-point or the rock-climber’s impossible cliff. When we finally got ourselves back to my beloved California in 2000 and I turned 60, I thought, “Oh yes, now I’m back where I want to be, and the rest will be very sweet.” The Trickster had other plans.

I have allies. My beloved lifemate. Our children, who are making their own logger’s roads. My collard greens and the worms in the dirt. I’m doing better at sensing the exact moment of Now and letting it go deep and long. I still have the company of my lifelong antagonist, the weird wrinkle in my soul that periodically grabs the steering wheel and heads for the ditch, but maybe my task in the time to come is finding how to thank her for what she did to keep me alive in the early years, and suggest that she’s earned her retirement.

That moment of balance is powerful, whether it’s the moment before a sneeze, an orgasm, or the baby’s crowning. Whatever’s next, it will come.

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