Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 16

Into the Wind…

—From CB—

I’ve made a resolution I might actually honor: to post on FB nothing relating to political or sociological debate. Those in agreement don’t need it; those who aren’t, don’t listen. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be entirely faithful to my resolution, and I retain the privilege of (a) scribbling on the wall of my own timeline, (b) posting comic one-liners if they come steaming into my head, or of (c) honest questions that might deepen the conversation without provoking outrage.

We once did a performance at a community college for a large class who sat in dead silence for the 50 minutes of mainly comic material. It was only after the debacle that we understood: they spoke only the equivalent of grocery-store English. Mostly Vietnamese refugees, they were being exposed to us as a learning experience. You have to be listened to by folks who speak the language.

It’s not the fault of FB. It’s a familiar habit of life, in controversial dialogue, to spend more brain-strain preparing your own response than listening to what’s being said. But FB is a conduit for what I’d call “Facebook activism”—an illusion that something in the real world will actually change if you’re sufficiently vehement on FB. To me, there’s a radical difference between dialectic and primal scream.

It’s complicated by the fact that I rarely respond to stuff I think is radically wrong—they don’t convince me, I won’t convince them, so best to appreciate the photos of their cats, as there’s lots to life besides the issue at hand. I’m much more critical of my fellow travelers, those making a case I agree with but making it badly or with disastrous results for a cause we both support. Invariably, the response is that at best I’m ignorant of reality, at worst I’m an unenlightened old white male.

I recall my first childhood experience that male privilege doesn’t always work to my advantage. When I was quite little, on my mom’s vacation, she drove us across the wilds of Nebraska to Denver. That afternoon, en route, I told Mama I needed to stop and pee. She was always in a hurry and said, “Open the window and pee out it.” Normally, she was a very practical soul, but in this case there’d been no way for her to learn from experience. I did as she said and quickly learned what happens when you piss against the wind.

And I’ll see what’s possible in finding more active activism. I just don’t want to spend my remaining hours on Earth splattered with my own liqueur.

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Home. . .

—From EF—

I wrote this in Facebook today: “A heartfelt plea to all my friends: if you haven’t voted, please. Please do it tomorrow. Please ask your friends if they have voted, and if they haven’t, then beg them. No question this will be contested, and if the turnout isn’t a tsunami, there are dirty tricks beyond our imagination waiting in the wings.”

Now I’m writing the rest of this. By the time y’all read it, the election results may have already come in. Yes or no, who knows what comes next?

I don’t want to live out what should be my golden elder years in a Republican kleptocracy, not here, not in California, the home for which I had to wait through thirty-three years of Elsewhere. I am here to stay. I was so grateful when 1999 turned the wheel and we got in the big Dodge van and the rentosaurus and headed west. We’d loved the Philly we’d lived in for seven years (magic number), and we left behind things that would keep drawing us back for visits. But California had always been the dream, and after we arrived it took me months before I’d have to stop whatever I was doing to absorb the heart-lurch of realization: I live here now.

The multiverse smiled. We found the perfect little place in Sebastopol, after nearly six months of house-hunting in which we gradually made peace with the fact that we’d made a mistake of epic dimensions: no way could we afford most of Sonoma County. But we didn’t give up, and the miracle happened, and we’re here to stay.

Then came the awful realization that the touring market we’d assumed we would re-enter was dead. And given the nature of local theatre in the North Bay, we were not remotely going to be able to start a new theatre here. OK, we stayed home and sent our stories out over the radio with a three-year series, and that got us through the first rough patch. Then we started to do live performances more or less locally with repertory from past years and started mounting new work. Things were looking up.

I’d planted a garden and was enjoying my new partnership with dirt. We are not accomplished social animals, but we found a good circle of friends. It felt like we’d have a sweetly-sloping path to the eventual Summerland, and then the fires came. And returned, and fastened their grip on the future. Now we also have an unprecented political schism and the plague. I think our future plates will be very full of challenge, and the image of my sun-blessed elder years is a sweet joke.

But I’m here. Right here. This is home. And I do own a very sharp pitchfork.  

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A Visit. . .

—From CB—

Our daughter is visiting from Italy, where she’s lived for 20+ years. Because of the plague, it’s been a long time. Her brother in San Francisco picked her up from the airport, she stayed there a few days, then yesterday he brought her up to our place. Last night, before he drove back, we all sat to dinner to a monstrous, magnificent salade nicoise and a bottle of prosecco.

All the usual catchups: airplane irritants, current news, word of the mates, recent movies seen, cat tales, not to mention our own cats sniffing each of the family’s feet. Sitting down to the long, opulent dinner on the patio. Then Eli took off and Johanna settled in.

It’s always a joy to see the kids, especially the family together again. We’re thankful they’re healthy & creative, have good mates, are self-supporting, and above all that they like each other. Growing up in the back seat of our VW or our touring van over thousands of miles of travel in our touring days, in a childhood anything but placid, they seem to have developed the friendship of Army buddies who’ve been through tough scrapes together.

That’s only surmise, of course. I think it must be universal for parents, when grown kids visit, to be extra alert for anything in their kids’ being that might suggest their own failure as parents. The first time I came home with a mustache, my mother worried about what she’d done to make me a drug addict. I’m somewhat more New Age than that, having left Iowa, but there’s still the impulse to worry.

How do I feel about their presence? Good, but I’m not really in touch with my feelings. I shield myself from the bad stuff, and that tends to block lots of the good stuff. Maybe that’s why I mostly write comedy, or the tragic with a tongue-in-cheek edge. So I guess what I mostly feel is, “This is right.”

Which is maybe the best thing to feel. It’s what I feel in finishing the final draft of anything. It’s what I feel cursing lovingly at the cats. It’s what I feel in eating supper, especially soup. It’s what I feel first thing in the morning embracing Elizabeth and just holding each other there. There’s a rightness to it, a gracious acceptance of what’s there, and, to a perpetually discontented soul, that’s heaven.

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Code. . .

—From EF—

At the simplest level, I think of it in kid terms: a secret way to say something. Or maybe Morse code, a way to say something in a weird formal language that can travel great distances and unbleep and unblip its way back into common speech. Or what about the criminal code? The big bag of laws that are in force in your neighborhood? Code of ethics, now there’s one that often vanishes from view. Computer code bends my brain, but I love how something assembled from the bare minimum of parts can make a machine do our bidding.

How about the genetic code, or what is sometimes referred to as DNA? Wow. You get a sperm and an ovum together and give the cell a map, and eventually it gets a driver’s license and a diploma and a mortgage and social security, and maybe it survives the flood or the wildfire.

Snark mode off. I think music is a code, one that resides deep in the bone. Today I heard a trio play an afternoon of Hungarian folk music as filtered through their unique musical sensibilities. Their vocalist has traveled regularly to small villages in Hungary, sometimes collecting a song from the last living human who remembers that particular one. If Zina didn’t hear it and memorize it and teach it to others, would it still exist? If Matthew couldn’t play the fiddle with a speed and intricacy that rivals a classical Pakistani singer’s voice, could he mirror and tease Zina’s singing? If Misha didn’t play his cello with the deep tones of a skilled lover, would their music have a rock-solid foundation?

Together the trio, Vadalma, is speaking in code. They are reaching back through generations of music sung around kitchen tables, sung while wooing, sung while coping with keen grief, sung while bringing the animals home, and they are recreating it with their own contemporary musical instincts. It isn’t ancient, it isn’t contemporary, it is a new code.

There are people who make music in the same necessary and ordinary way that they breathe, for hours every day—not for someone else to hear, but because it’s like breathing, and it’s from deep in the bone. There are those who collect others with whom they can make music for mutual pleasure, and that collective energy is a different code. One more level is those who make music for an audience, another level of experience. At the far end of the spectrum is listening alone to recorded music, but it’s all code.

Find a way to sing, and then listen.

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Surrealisms. . .

—From CB—

I’ve always appreciated surrealism, as long as it knows its place. Nailed to the wall or stamped into print, it’s fine. It’s like salsa on the burrito. It’s refreshing, an expression of the world sifted through a single quirky human—the way a face is distended in a funhouse mirror or a raindrop.

These thoughts pop up as we’re driving into San Francisco to attend an art exhibit, visit our favorite North Beach coffee house, and see our son. Coming into the city, starting and stopping, changing lanes, tuned to the classical station, I see a billboard. It proclaims, “Wake up your sandwich, America!” This unsettles me.

Well, yes, I know the goal of advertising is to get your attention, and a popular mode today is indirect confusion, inducing you to work out the meaning. This might be a sandwich shop, it might be for alarm clocks, or it might be recruiting for the U.S. Marines. Or none of those. It might simply be telling us to get our shots.

Soon after, we pass a cafe called “Enter the Cafe.” It seems to want us to enter the Enter the Cafe. Soon after, walking, we encounter “Urban Curr”—most likely their Y is mssing, but they might be serving baked dog. At lunch at Caffe Trieste, we’re given little packets of hot sauce; mine says, “When I grow up I want to be a bottle.”

A couple next to us has a large dog; his leash is tangled behind his two front legs. This seems to reflect my psychological condition, but is it a simile, a metaphor, or a personification? Or a plot by the military-industrial complex, the corporate elite, or Antifa to drive us nuts? The dog succeeds in his struggle to untangle, but he’s still firmly leashed.

The news, of course, is a prime purveyor of the surreal, second only to old Roadrunner cartoons. Yet the news rarely touches us directly—it hovers on the flat-screen, much as a Max Ernst painting stays plastered to the wall. When it does come looming at us, screeching like an onrushing taxicab, we’re not likely to be assigning it an artistic genre—we’re just trying to out-screech it.

The surreal in daily life appears like a flash mob, a sudden twister, or a terrorist bomb, though with luck it’s only a billboard or tangled dog. But no one prepares us for it by announcing Magritte or Breton or Dali—it’s just suddenly confronting us on a billboard, interrupting our droning daily brain-wave of “I wonder what’s next?” by screaming, “Me!”

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Hola, Travelers. . .

—From EF—

I parked in the library lot on Saturday just as a KPFA program ws kicking off an hour devoted to Nanci Griffith, and they began with “Across the Great Divide,” her cover of Kate Wolf’s signature song for those who listen to KPFA on Sundays. We are always en route to our weekly visit to the ocean, and I swear I cannot listen to the beginning of the 11-1 program without (1) singing harmony and (2) shedding tears. I was not prepared to feel receptive to a cover, but it was an instant heart-meld. I had come for an errand, and I didn’t open the car door until the song had completed. Weeping, I thought about the odd experience of hearing two magnificent women at the same time through their music, knowing that both of them had crossed the great divide.

I think about the magical women I have lost. Camilla, who was our theatrical partner for many years as we built our theatre in Lancaster, PA. We went our way, she went hers, spreading joy wherever she went. When I learned that cancer was about to take her, I made a long journey to her home in upper NY state, knowing that I might only have fifteen minutes — her stamina was fast waning. We had four hours. Laughing, weeping, hugging, telling dirty jokes, all the time knowing it was the Last Time. I felt so blessed.

I think about Erica in Zurich, who had fought off cancer before and seemed home free the last time I saw her—trim, vigorous, energetic. That was September, and by Christmas, she and Peter knew it was time to marry and forbid the bureaucracy to part them the way it had happened to Erica and her late partner Zbigniew in the years ago. I found out the time of their ceremony, and lit an altar on our table to join in. She left us at midnight of New Year’s.

I think about Conrad’s mom, the most loving exuberant person ever to grace my life. She always loved going out dancing, way into her elder years, and in those years she had a man who loved to please her. When her health began to fail, the doctors all told her no, it wasn’t leukemia, but it sure acted like it. Transfusions would give her a couple of weeks of rebound, and then the fog rolled in again. After intermittent hospitalizations she began to sense that the docs were selling her a bill of goods and she would never go dancing again. The family had one hospital visit near the end, and she did her dying in three days.

I’m startled to realize that yes, indeed, I too am a magical woman who will be lost.

I remember from long ago a science-fiction story telling of major cities that no longer used vehicles. Instead, there were multi-tracked conveyor belts at graduated speeds and people got on at the slow track, made their way across to high speed ones until it was time to go back to a track from which they could descend to their destination. I’m beginning to scan across the tracks to wave at fellow travelers, knowing that none of us know who will descend first.

Hola, travelers.

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Realities. . .

—From CB—

It’s no secret that we live in a culture of multiple realities. That’s been part of life on Earth for at least a couple thousand years, and it’s almost impossible not to be multiple people oneself, depending on whom you’re talking to and why.

And there are times when you frolic in the world of cat-lovers and it instantly changes to gladiatorial combat when politics rears its dragon head. Or those moments when there are two realities in the same instant, and you happened to stumble into the one on the right? The one on the left, who knows? For some, prayer may be a way of trying to land in the preferred reality; for others, wishful thinking spurred by weed.

Maybe we walk out a different door hundreds of times in a day, and if our realities aren’t part of a connected harmonious whole, we really are in a different world, and we may get very disturbed. But if the connections are there, however far down in the mix, we’ll get by.

Right now I’m working on nine poems about experiences of this eight-year-old in Rapid City, South Dakota. I’m nowhere near Rapid City; I’m seventy-nine; my mom is dead and my memory dim—and yet they’re me. The fight with Denny; the matchbook covers; the frozen cat; Lester dying; the mountain of diamonds; the great plaster brontosaurus—they’re all still me, though filtered through the years.

The world of Facebook is very diverse. My feed is heavily focused on politics, pandemic, and cats—all of which are valid topics, though I often feel that we wave our t-shirt slogans to avoid going deeper into the skin and into the heart.

Not that folks don’t share their joys and sorrows, and those are welcome. But I’m an actor and writer, and I’m most interested in motive: What got you to that? What’s your personal stake? What are your doubts? What does it do for you, saying that?

I once interviewed an ex-cop for our radio series. He described the one time he thought he might have to shoot someone: a domestic quarrel where the guy was holding a gun on his wife, and the cop thought, “I might have to kill this guy in front of his kids.” It worked itself out, but he said that during this time The Lone Ranger was on TV, and he could never stand to hear that theme again.

That hardly gives me ultimate authority on current police issues, but it’s a tiny part of making it real. It occurs to me that we rarely share those fragments of reality unless we feel it proves the absolute truth of our t-shirt slogan. Reality has many, many freckles and warts, and we need to get a sharper view of its face.

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Night Sounds. . .

—From EF—

We treated ourselves to a night at Salt Point State Park, one of our favorite retreats, and I planned far enough ahead to get a reservation at Site #7. (It’s the best one and is usually booked at least three months in advance.) Set way back in the trees, it feels private and secluded, and it’s also the site closest to the ocean. Sound travels differently over water, and the seal chorus sounded really close from inside the tent, closer than when actually down at the rocky water-line.

The wildlife orchestra is amazing, and this time my ears were unusually tuned in. (Maybe it’s a factor of having a piano again and listening closely to what I’m practicing.) Every time I return to Salt Point, I hear more critters. This was my first time hearing a cuckoo. The ravens caucus wildly in late evening and early morning. The aggressive blue jays read you the riot act if they think you might forget to offer them some scraps. Squirrels natter and bark. Humans vary, but this time voices were scarce, partly because of our location.

We’d finished dinner and converted the cooking coals to a regular bonfire in the sturdy big fire ring and were enjoying the sound of the pine branches and cones we’d brought from home, popping and crackling. Then, softly, a djembe, joined soon by a flute. Back in the days when we went to Starwood every summer, I loved hearing the drums all night long, and this was nice to hear. (I’ve never heard a drum at Salt Point before.)

Shortly the djembe stopped and a cello joined the flute. This is not normally native territory for a cello and I couldn’t repress my curiosity. The sound was coming from the nearest site, which was down-slope across a wide meadow about the size of a city block. “I’ll be back.”

Framed in the open side door of a camper van was a teal-blue five-string cello, being bowed softly with a gorgeous tone. I couldn’t help it, I walked closer: “I don’t want to be rude but I’d really like to know . . . who are you?” A young man, maybe early thirties, peered out and smiled. His flutist friend poked his head out from the other side of the door and smiled. So began a rather extensive animated conversation. They’re in the Bay Area and I hope to stay in touch. Good musicians. Really good.

Back to the tent, snuggling down to share a couple of nips of Jameson, wishing the guys would play some more. They didn’t. The seals seemed to sense an invitation and struck up a lively chorus of barks and whoops and grunts—and it went on all night. At one point, about 2:30, the seal-sounds briefly changed to a prolonged version of yodeling. When they started sounding like a large lady bellowing evacuation instructions through a bull-horn I couldn’t help laughing, even though I would have liked to get some sleep. It was a long night, but eventually the raven rally signaled the approach of light.

This camping trip was a keeper.

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Editing. . .

—From CB—

For me, a new experience of the printed page. I’ve spent the last two weeks editing. The first volume of Elizabeth’s three-part memoir will appear after the first of the year. It’ll cover the time from her first howl in 1940 to our forming The Independent Eye in 1974—maybe the two most challenging years of her life, so far at least. Birth into new worlds, both.

In 2010 we collaborated on a joint memoir, Co-creation: Fifty Years in the Making. This is a bit different. All our work since we met has been in collaboration, but here I’m more the midwife, not the dad, helping the baby get born with all its fingers and toes in good order.

In some ways it’s a familiar process. Rewrites are a natural process of writing, like digestion: the food hasn’t done its job by just being chewed. Our most recent novel has been through ten drafts, and some of our plays have had major changes after years of production. As a director, more than a few times, I’ve interrupted rehearsal to move a chair three inches.

In any story, you look first to see that the needed parts are there: the background, the incidents, and the motivations. Is the order right, and the “voice”—the style and mind of the narrator: Does it mumble? Does it shout? Does it have a wry grin or a somber hangdog air? Then you get down to the rhythms and choices of words.

I’m grateful for a lifetime of writing comedy, among many other styles. The discipline of the set-up, the development, and the punch is applicable whether you want to produce a laugh or a stab. It involves word order, sentence length, tempo, and word choice. But you face the challenge of the radical difference between speech and page. In the spoken line, you control—by inflection and tempo—what the spectator takes in; on the page, you try to get the reader attuned to an inner voice that does the same, but you can’t control it completely. Readers have their own speed, acuity of perception, and distractions. In the theatre, they’re aided by the presence of others, impulses to perceive through a laugh or a breath what they might otherwise miss; but the sole reader has no such tribe, and the writer gropes in the dark.

So it does help to have an editor to grope along with. Now it’s chapter by chapter, mostly line edits, though sometimes I bring forth a larger issue: does this have enough weight? should we suggest more of the outcome? will younger readers understand the rules of female dorms in 1958? Otherwise, it’s all about readability. Does it flow? Does this phrase get in the way? What if the paragraph starts this way and ends with more of a punch?

Computers are Satan’s work, but sometimes Satan’s a friend. Being able to switch the Markup function on and off, seeing every proposed change or deletion in a document, is a huge assist. Once I finish a chapter, Elizabeth reviews the changes, and we sit down to talk about those she questions. It’s her decision, but I’ll explain my reason for the change if I think it’s significant, and we may agree on a new way to handle it. More than one way to skin a cat—though we don’t say that in the presence of our cats.

There are many in the realm of prose who advise against “family” as editors. The argument goes that readers don’t have the same perspective as friends or spouse, and often that’s true, except…

If the two of you have very different temperaments; if you’ve clocked sixty years of sometimes gnarly collaboration (and survived it); if you’ve had thousands of audiences telling you, by their reactions, what’s boring, redundant, utterly incomprehensible, and what works; if together you’ve found the eighth or tenth way of doing it more effectively—then you’re probably better off than with an editor who sees their job as making you sound like everyone else. This, to be sure, coming from a writer who’s never sold more than 400 copies of prose.

Meantime, I’m enjoying the work. And reveling in the multiple beings of the woman I love.

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Openings. . .

—From EF—

I think something is starting to jiggle loose in my mind. Maybe it’s because of the piano. I took a solo day (as each of us does about once a month) to Salt Point State Park and stayed overnight. On the way back, I stopped at Portuguese Beach, put on my Teva hiking sandals, and went down to the shore level to check out my magic cave at low tide. I was overwhelmed by how powerful it felt to stand in the mouth of the cave and let wave after wave wash over my feet and legs, feel how the sand caressed me on the way out, and just be there in that place of power.

And then words jumped into my head. “Feeling good about where I’ve been.” OK, that was true. I’d had an exceptional time at Salt Point, visited the seals and had a magnificent camp-cooked dinner. But this didn’t feel like a random brain-bubble, it felt like the beginning of a song. It’s been years since a song has come calling. Very soon a second line joined it: “I didn’t always know where I was going.” Aha. I realized this was bubbling up from the memoir, which was nearing the end of a first draft. (Finished that today, first draft of Volume I of three.)

This is a strangely big deal for me, the possibility of a new song. It means my creative mind is waking up after a long Covid nap. Today while we were having our Sunday ocean picnic at a new site (a keeper), a wig-bubble splatted me. Yesterday, at our regular Oral Tradition poetry gathering, I recited a short poem by Jo Carson from her book Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet. I’d recited a couple of her poems over the years, and the response has always been warm. Years ago I played the role of Jo Carson in her play Daytrips and came deeply into her writer’s heart, and suddenly I had a thought. What if I made a solo piece from these poems and called it “Diner?”

Jo had a serious hearing disability and had a pretty high-powered hearing aid. She loved sitting in a booth at the end of a diner, cranking that puppy up, and listening to everybody talk. That’s the feeling of all these poems: listening to real people talk in their own voices. Back when we were in Lancaster PA, I did a massive solo piece based on the poems of Pamela White Hadas, Beside Herself: Pocahontas to Patty Hearst, so I’ve been there before. I’d love to do this.

I have no idea whether we can start touring live performance again, but I surely want to do it if it wouldn’t mean a death sentence. House concerts are good. I don’t know whether we’d do book readings or perform or both. Jo left this plane in 2011, but I think her spirit just came to say she’d be willing to come along. Howdy, partner.        

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