Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 12

Strange Weekend. . .

—FROM EF—

It was a strange weekend. Amazing music makers were assembled at the Kate Wolf Music Festival in Laytonville, CA, many many more than usual due to the fact that Covid had cancelled 2020 and 2021, and due to the fact that this was not only the 25th KWF but the final one.

We didn’t get out of the house at 6 AM, we got out at 6:30 and then had to get gas, so it was 8:45 when we got to the gates—45 minutes later than opening. That meant we stood in line in the blazing sun for two hours to get stamped and braceleted, then found that the only places still open for camping were at the complete ass-end of the site, a twenty-minute walk from the music stages.

Every day hit 100 degrees. Those who had come for many years said it wasn’t hotter than usual, but I was three years older than I’d been before, and it sure clobbered me harder. The Supreme Court decisions were an additional blow, and it wasn’t the celebratory high I’d been expecting.

It was a different high. I got into more long lovely conversations than ever before. I was blissed sitting in the dappled shade by the little river watching the clad and unclad people of all ages reveling in the clear cold water. I oozed tears of gratitude when a camp security guy stopped his little putt-putt cart to ask if I could use a ride. I was profoundly moved when an artist I’d been anticipating for the whole festival was wobbly from age and heat and was lovingly (and respectfully) supported by the artist who shared his in-the-round slot. They rocked gospel together to a standing-room crowd.

Kate Wolf is/was a different kind of festival. The volunteers patrolling the roadways to pick up trash could hardly find any. The volunteers keeping the check-in line of standees off the road were saying, “Keep yourself safe, we love you, you’re doing great.” Strangers passing each other on the paths said things like “Great hat!” and “You’re lookin’ good!” Somebody with a lusty lemon tree at home brought a carton of lemons to give away, and a guy on the fire crew asked, “Can I take them all? I can give them to my guys and bribe them to stay hydrated.”

We got home Sunday morning, picked up our regular sushi and hauled ass to the ocean for our ritual picnic. It took a moment to realize that the car’s thermometer said it was 66 outside, not 99. I thought for a moment I was upside down.

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Fathers. . .

—From CB—

This is Father’s Day, when thoughts turn to fathers, so I’ve given a rain check to my pontifications on politics, whoh are currently beyond-depressing, to muse upon fatherhood.

Two thoughts. First, the nature of the role is (a) enormously important, and (b) a total crapshoot. Of course there are utterly horrific fathers who do much more damage than, say, horrific auto mechanics or chess players. But I would guess that most halfway-intelligent dads call up memories of utter incompetence, bafflement, guilt, the whole squad of demons that tweet in your head. And there’s an awe that the kid survived. It starts with the terror that you might drop the baby or let the head fall off, and it never ends. Most of us try to do our best, and “best” is like the shifting floes when Eliza’s crossing the ice.

For myself, I’m grateful to my own dad for deserting the family when I was two. My mom painted an honest, very objective portrait of him as I grew up; she still loved him despite his huge flaws, especially booze, but I think we wouldn’t have gotten along—he wanted no kids, and I was inadvertent.

It’s a roll of the dice whether you acquire someone to model yourself on or model yourself against. For me, he served as the latter: above all, as a role model for responsibility—in his case the self-serving LACK OF.

When I met him at the age of 29—he just showed up—I realized how much we had in common and how differently two folks can play the same bridge hand. He was addicted to alcohol, I to work. He had a travel bug that led him to a lonely trailer in the Arabian desert, I to a career touring across the USA with a mate who liked the itinerant life. He had an artistic instinct with no outlet whateoever; I made a career of writing & performing. He was a loner who found company in bars: I was a loner who found it in theatre.

And the issue of responsibility. He retreated from it so much that when his second wife was diagnosed with cancer, he tried to reconnect with his first, my mom, whom he left because she was pregnant. Reconnection was a real possibility, but she was a very practical lady and saw the old question marks.

By his second wife, he had four daughters. But very little fathering: his work was overseas in construction and oil installations, and he’d come home just long enough to start another baby. According to his sister, he made every one of his daughters swear on a Bible not to have a child. When I met them briefly at his funeral, none of them did.

This wasn’t a wild-haired hippie; this was a guy from the “Heartland.” What I have to thank him for is (a) a negative example of fatherhood that’s made me try harder, (b) a sense of the immense complexity of simple human beings, and (c) for his part in giving me life.

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I-80. . .

—From EF—

Sunday, mid-afternoon, turning onto I-80 East from Highway 37, I saw the great golden hills as loose-skinned furry creatures begging to be petted, and my heart lifted. Not just because in the evening I’d hear John McCutcheon do a solo concert in Grass Valley, although yes, I’ve been looking forward to that since it suffered a Covid-rescheduling in January. No, something about the first sight of those hills tapped an aquifer of memory.

It came from our 2005 co-production with Foothill Theatre: Long Shadow. That collaboration had been years in the making, starting with their presentation of a staged reading of our play Hammers in 2002. That didn’t lead to a full production in their Nevada City season, but it started the ball rolling in a mutual exploration of how we might work together on something. They had an idea, but it was an edgy one.

There had been a murder in Nevada City in 1944. A young man was found in a mining ditch after a hunting trip, a bullet in his back. No suspect, no motive, but suspicion grew around a colorful local “other,” Bill Ebaugh, and all efforts to find him and investigate came up empty. He was a loner, a woodsman, a big man with a full beard and hair down his back when men were clean-shaven and barbered. He did have lady friends, and many in the town thought he was odd but harmless. Others thought he was a dangerous criminal, and the town polarized to the point where some businessmen posted a bounty—$300 dead or alive. Without accusation, arrest, or trial, he was found and shot dead.

It hit home to us, since we ourselves had recently lost a close friend, also a loved/hated renegade, shot in a stairwell in Los Angeles with no motive known and no arrest ever made. We struck a deal with Foothill to collaborate, and that led to a long series of trips on the I-80 to do endless research at the historical society, do scene improvisations with their company of actors, come back and work on script, then do it again next month. Three and a half hours each way for a stay of three or four days in which we grew closer and closer to the artists at this fine theatre, and fell in love with Nevada City.

I loved the place and loved our theatre friends. The process of creating a play from this painful history knit us together for a time, but after Foothill Theatre closed in 2009 we didn’t go often to what had been, for a few years, almost a second home. Later, as we’d set out for our annual long-haul tours of that started on the East Coast and worked our way back, I’d hit the I-80, see those hills and the pine forests that followed and remember those times in Nevada City. One year it was really special: we started by driving straight through a rainbow.

Now we have a link again. When our son married, we inherited his lady’s wonderful parents, and a few years ago they moved from the Midwest to Nevada City. We’ve had some family Thanksgivings and Christmas celebrations, and this is not our first shared John McCutcheon concert. Nevada City is a second home again.

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Love Me. . .

—From CB—

A post on Facebook asked, “Do you say ‘I love you” to yourself?”

My first response would have been something snarky, but I’m trying to lessen that impulse. The second would have been a simple “No” and then getting back to work on something useful. The third, just trying to think it through.

The motive of the question, I think, wasn’t literal. It was a roundabout way of saying that if you don’t value yourself, if you think, “I’m a scumbag,” then you’re likely going to be one.

For me, the question is difficult—apart from the fact that I don’t much talk to myself—because of that sneaky word LOVE. To me, it’s outer-directed. Yes, I can say that I love Elizabeth, meaning that I value her, I’m attracted to her, I’m curious about her, I feel responsible for her and to her, I’m grateful to her, and her times of happiness are essential to mine. Yet she’s the Other. I’m not her, will never be, and it’s that strange interplay between Self and Other that’s for me so much a part of what I mean by love. Love isn’t evaluation; it’s a desire to be together.

So responding to the initial question: no, I don’t love myself, I’m stuck with me, and that’s okay: I think I get better with time.

Contradictions are part of the deal. I think I combine an intrinsic sense of self-worth, instilled by a very loving single mom, and a brutally objective satirist’s eye, perhaps instilled by a very dark view of the world and what I share with that world, though given spin by an impulse to laugh. I’ve described my near-pathological sense of responsibility—knowing from the age of four that my mom needed money and not knowing how to make some—but I can usually tell the difference between self-flogging that serves a purpose and what’s just for the gratuitous pain of it.

So I can’t really pass the “love me” test. I have the same responses to myself as I do to the characters I write for stage or page: they have a million contradictions, self-doubts, grandiose expectations, blind spots, times of sweetness, noble aspirations, embarrassments—and I try to empathize with every one of them, including me.

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One of Many. . .

—From EF—

I invite you to read my book, the first in a series of three memoirs. I’ve been struggling to write this post, because the avalanche of grotesquerie in the recent news made anything else seem not only irrelevant, but repulsive. Then I got this response, not to the book, but to a blog post (with huge thanks to the sender):

Thank you–from deep inside–for this window into your reality. Not knowing you but admiring you and your work and your apparent spirit from afar, I’ve always carried the illusion that you do NOT have moments like these. Very much appreciated. You make life better for the rest of us. So so so often.

I had alluded to having current difficulty with my chronic depression, which has its ups and downs. This response crystallized my thinking about why I am putting my own story out there. I think my early life was pretty bizarre. I’m amazed that I survived it, and I suspect that a lot of people carry similar memories and think, as I did, that they were uniquely defective. It changes things to find that you’re not alone.

I remember having gone alone in New York to a performance of the play “Cloud Nine.” Betty, a mature woman in Caryl Churchill’s play, has a remarkable late monologue in which she confides what power it gave her to reclaim her young habit of self-pleasuring. She claimed her independence, rejected guilt and shame, and her telling was radiant. This was close to the final curtain, and when the house-lights came up I found myself bursting into tears. I couldn’t contain myself, and to my mortification the people around me became concerned. Two couples gentled me out of the row of seats and took me to a coffee-shop to recover. Bless them.

What slammed me was that I wasn’t alone. I have heard this again and again in conversations after performances of our own writing. Writing from the most intimate and specific personal basis seems to strike hidden personal chords in a lot of people. So may it be with my own story.

A story of changes. The laughing two-year-old with curly blonde hair became an introvert with straight brown bangs, braces and coke-bottle glasses. The valedictorian who went to college in an honors program turned blonde again, got a raft of boyfriends, and flunked out. The disgraced dropout forged a transcript to apply to Northwestern, met her lifemate, and proved her mother’s verdict wrong: “You have no looks, no voice, no sense of humor, and you don’t know how to love.” And above all, it’s a story of discovery.

I’d love to share this roller-coaster ride with you. The book, Elizabeth: One of Many, can be ordered for $19.95 through Paypal on our blogsite damnedfool.com or through your local bookstore. We ship the books ourselves, so they can be signed if you like.

Read it, and tell me what you think.

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Cats and Dogs. . .

—From EF—

I once wrote a song called “Black Dog.” No, that’s not quite right, it came rolling out without invitation one day when we were about to leave for a long tour right after having done another long tour. I spent three days cooking and doing laundry and getting new markers, paper, and library books for the kids, and as we were about to head out for Kansas I lost it, just collapsed into a noisy wet heap of bellowing sobs and snot. I was mortified but helpless, unable to pull myself together, and Conrad did the only thing he could: piled the kids and me into the van, gave me a roll of paper towel to sop myself up, and started driving west.

The Black Dog was how Winston Churchill referred to his depressive episodes. I inherited the depression gene from my father and unfortunately passed it on to our kids, and we’ve all dealt with it in our own ways. I haven’t had any over-the-top episodes like that for a long time, but between Covid and MAGA I’m having to pay attention to my baseline. On average, it’s pretty low now, and I sometimes catch myself having a hard time figuring out how to get up and take the next step.

Peace and joy are my allies. By some inner revolutionary magic I have become a morning person and I have the sunrise to myself every morning. I’ve come to recognize the carefully orchestrated layers of dawn bird-song, which ones sound off at the first gray light, who joins in later, and who serenades the first spears of gold. I rejoice in seeing the sun’s procession along the horizon, now always just a smidgen to the left of yesterday’s appearance.

Our Sunday treks to watch the ocean are a tonic for me; those waves wash tangles out of my soul. Touch is essential; CB and I embrace often. And my two cats are my secret weapon. They have taught me to accept the simple comfort of being purred upon. I usually take a short nap after dinner, and am learning to feel no guilt about lying on the couch for another fifteen minutes, accepting their furry warmth and thinking about nothing whatever. If I have to do another life, please let me be a cat.

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Empathy. . .

—From CB—

How do you teach it? You can’t. You can only model it.

It’s easiest to feel empathy with the clown. First off, we know he’s there to entertain us. His cigarettes fall out of the pack, he tries to pick them up and his hat falls off. He makes to fetch his hat and steps on his broom, which whacks him. No moral judgments to be made: the clown is our frustration, purified.

Not so easy to find connection with the ranting demagogue. Yet I feel the need is profound to burrow within both him and his worshippers. Here, understanding is not approval, nor is empathy the same as sympathy. The ART OF WAR emphasizes the need for “empathy” with the enemy as a needed element to defeat him: what does he truly want, what are the weaknesses he knows, what’s it like to be inside his head?

It’s possible to be too empathetic. In high school I went through agonies before calling a girl for a date, and I don’t think it was for fear of rejection: I’ve certainly had bad reviews and hundreds of rejections of my plays and novels, but I still keep on with my mother’s blind faith in my intrinsic worth. It was mainly because I dreaded pulling the girl off the toilet or of forcing her to come up with a polite excuse to say no. That did no one any good.

But I find myself increasingly reluctant to enter into discussions on political issues because—increasingly—I find myself differing with progressive friends not on values but on tactics. Specifically, empathy with the other side.

What does that mean? Certainly it doesn’t mean compromise: the matador doesn’t compromise with the bull. But he has to understand the bull, not to ascribe motives like He doesn’t like Latinos. If the main motive of the anti-abortion movement is To control women, why does a recent survey show 43% of women are anti-abortion? Perhaps because they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy, but how likely is changing any minds by asserting they’ve been brainwashed? The issues on curriculum and book censorship elicit the most outlandish actions of school boards and state legislatures, but I see little empathy expressed from progressives to the deep concerns of parents trying to cope with raising their kids in a culture that’s changing with every tweet. Instead, we expend vast energies castigating the ignorant knuckle-draggers.

The gay rights movement perhaps began with Stonewall, but it would have gone nowhere (IMHO) until the AIDS epidemic forced an enormous coming-out that connected the issue with people that people knew—friends and relatives. We’re tribal creatures, all, and abstract arguments about human rights, denigration of opponents’ intelligence, crowds screaming in the streets, or accusations of guilt don’t go very far in actually changing minds. Not, at least, without the human connection—the story of the Philadelphia mom working fulltime to support her three kids, putting a pot on the dining table to catch the sewage dripping from the pipes upstairs. There’s a billion of those stories, and they need to get told and told and told.

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Book Fair. . .

—From EF—

I’ve been looking forward to the Bay Area Book Fair, an annual spring event where we’ve rented an exhibit table a couple of times in the past. Very few indie folks like us make big bucks, but it’s still a sweet event and I was happy to be going again after a couple of years of Covid layoff. And hey, the first volume of my memoir was in print, and I had the feeling it might see some action.

By an odd coincidence the fair was at exactly the same time our daughter was able to visit from Italy, her home for the past 25 years. That’s a big deal. We figured out how to make it work: Saturday I’d handle the table solo while Conrad and Johanna would have a free day to schmooze and spend quality time with each other in San Francisco, and on Sunday she and I would go visit the Berkeley Arboretum while he book-sat. Nice.

Crowds were sparser than I remembered, and not as many were actually interested in buying books. Money is tight. I had some good conversations but none of the authors were selling much except in the kid-book sections. Maybe Sunday would be better. At the end of the afternoon we packed up everything except our big sign and went back home to enjoy dinner together and get a night’s sleep before heading back down to Berkeley to set up for Sunday. We left most of the display in the car overnight to simplify the turnaround, and had a very detailed list to make sure we wouldn’t forget anything we brought into the house.

I was grumpy about the fact that our reorder of my memoir hadn’t arrived in time: we had exactly one copy left and couldn’t do a sales job on what we didn’t have on hand. The display of novels and play collections looked nifty but it didn’t have a single focus, so we thought we’d simplify, putting a more effective push on our joint fifty-year memoir. There were little stacks of leftover books here and there in the living room and office, but repacking could wait for morning. The cats were peeved about having been left alone all day, so we petted and played a while before flopping into bed.

Come morning the bins got repacked and we checked the list. “Where’s the money envelope?” “I think it’s still in my backpack.” We have a nice little multi-zipper pouch for $100 in change, our inventory and sales list, and the Square that allows us to turn our iPhone into a credit card processor. It wasn’t in my backpack. “Maybe it’s under books in one of the bins. I know we didn’t leave anything in Berkeley.”

We took everything out of the big bin and the little bin. No luck. I went out and searched the car. Nope. The velvet tablecloths were folded into a big package: maybe the envelope got folded into the middle? I brought the pile in and we spread both cloths out. No luck. My heart sank. Time was getting short so I located our old backup Square, ransacked petty cash for enough fives and tens for change, and put everything in a different pouch. Meanwhile, Conrad searched his laptop bag and Johanna searched her own backpack. Rats. We could cope, but we’d just lost more than a hundred dollars and felt pretty grim. It was time to go, but I needed a last-minute pee stop. Through the closed door I heard Conrad make a weird little noise and then say, “It’s here.”

“What? Where?!!!!!” “Under the ottoman.” And there it was, with four or five foam-rubber cat toys and a book of poetry I’d bought from our next-table neighbor. During the night the cats had knocked stuff off the ottoman and shoved it under. Never underestimate peeved cats.

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Fifth Draft. . .

—From CB—

I wrote earlier that I’d started a novel based on the King David story. It’s a few months later, and I’m working on the fifth draft, middle of chapter 6. Once starting rewrites, they tend to go on and on.

Meantime, I’ve read two King David novels. One, by Joseph Heller (he of CATCH-22), was a rambling excuse to write some sexy stuff and mock a supposed hero—which is a ready temptation to anyone who reads I and II SAMUEL and the beginning of I KINGS if you’re not in a hero-worshipping mood. The second, THE KING DAVID REPORT by a German novelist Stefan Heym, is better written but more about the narrator’s challenge of writing truth under an authoritarian regime; he stays at a distance from the main character himself. Both useful, though, in clarifying what I don’t want to do. Also I’ve read some useful Biblical commentaries. And seen two movies, both unmentionable.

I’ve often said that I rarely write what I know but more what I WANT to know. I may have some notion at the outset what attracts me to a subject, but it’s only in the writing that I slowly come to know my stake in it. Here, the heart of it is an old man looking back on his life, critically but with a bit of understanding—strange how that resonates with me right now.

The story itself is compelling, enough incidents for at least a year-long miniseries or a five-hour movie of Russian angst. If you haven’t been turned off by the Sunday School version—the precocious shepherd boy impelled by faith—the original is very much worth a read. Great mythic storytelling, certainly on a par with Homeric saga and a lot shorter.

My version, I guess, is more like a jazz riff on a standard tune: it’s certainly not the original, but it hits the needed notes for recognition, and it’s what the story means to me. It alternates between a straight third-person narrative and the first-person voice of the old man sorting out the meaning of his life. Being an old man sorting out the meaning of my life (not to mention culling photos and figuring what to do with my puppets) I empathize—even though I haven’t achieved a kingship or slain a single Philistine.

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Neither of our cats care anything for what we write. They parade across the keyboard and sniff the hand that makes the typos. It matters not that our story is deathless, that anyone wants to read it, or sinks slowly into the muck like the monsters of Beowulf. The trick is to adopt the cats’ objective attitude while continuing my tatter on the keys.

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Rant Advisory. . .

—From EF—

I was bullied pretty consistently all through elementary school and junior high, then by high school kids had other things to think about and so did I. Nowadays that old feeling is creeping back. I was amazed at how hard I cringed at seeing multiple versions of Musk’s smirk all over the web today. I recovered a little when I had the thought that he must have dodged into a photo booth and mugged as fast as he could.

It was bad enough with 45 everywhere you looked, then it piled on with McTurtle and Ted Cruz, and now there’s a beauty pageant’s worth of identical women with identical blonde hairdo’s carefully scrolling over their shoulders. Every goddam blog and news feed has to have a big picture of one of this gang with everything they post, and it gives me the creeps—sends me right back to the days of the lunch line.

The teacher’s back is turned, there’s no referee, and the principal’s just waiting to retire. WTF? WT actual F?

People opposing the sexual exploitation of children condemn “grooming.” I’d add that we’ve also experienced grooming for tribal divisions and violence. It’s been going on for a long time. Now that there are role models it’s out in the open, but it was always simmering on the back burner. Remember when advertising whipped up divisions between those who favored McD and those who ate Burger King? Or Ford and Chevy? I remember being struck by these silly hostile billboards in the Philly subway, so that would put it back into the 90’s. Real seventh-grade gems like “Friends don’t let friends drive Ford.”

Generations have been groomed by ads and hopped up on breakfasts of Pop Tarts and Coke in front of the TV, with supermarket tabloids giving them the inside story. I know, trash journalism is nothing new. When we were doing research on Marie Antoinette I was stunned at their versions of the National Enquirer—talk about pornographic fake news, wow.

I may finally be goaded into cutting way down on screen time. Always look for the silver lining.

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