Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 17

Kindness. . .

—From CB—

I would like to be kind.

I don’t think I’m cruel, not often hurtful, sometimes sardonic or cutting, rarely ad hominem. But kindness is much more than absence of cruelty. It involves reaching out, sensing what’s felt and trying to ease it or at least acknowledge it—at least let it be known that you hear it.

My instinct is that of a repairman: see something wrong and fix it. That was my shortcoming the few years I was teaching: you build from the positive, not from knocking down the negative. I could get caught in that trap as a director, but the best times were when I was able to evoke something in the actors and the actors in me. My best times have been when doing interviews for public radio series we produced: just being able to promote the flow of people’s stories. Not to cure them or promote them: simply to midwife the voice.

I’m a very shy person, and it’s worse with age. I see few people, talk to few beyond “Sixteen ounce Americano, room for milk.” Facebook is a snare. Good that I connect with people I wouldn’t otherwise have an excuse for connecting with—being hyper-reclusive—but difficult in that it evokes my dentist’s instinct for going after cavities.

I perpetually get into hassles with people whose politics I agree with totally but whose language or tactics I feel are counterproductive. They seem to have no tolerance for anything less than violence: if you don’t counter hate with enlightened hate, you’re part of the problem.

That’s another conversation entirely, but I state it here because it traps me into a tone I don’t want. In the long run, I think it’s greater service to say “Happy birthday,” and when you can, to commiserate with someone, to say, “My heart is with you.” Even (very sparingly) to risk advice. To share yourself.

I don’t disparage Facebook activists, though I sometimes wonder whether their activism is confined to posts on Facebook. But far be it from me, whose service to humankind involves writing novels that few people read, to criticize ANY means of improving the human condition, or even that of rabbits.

My focus is simply this: how can I be kind?

One interviewee on our last radio series had founded a hyper-grassroots charity, finding ways he could make a difference in people’s lives (in other countries) with gifts of $100 or $50 or $5. He spoke of a frequent criticism (from friends) of his efforts: it’s a Band-Aid, it’s one family, it does nothing to address a world of suffering. Yes, he said, true, but for that one family, it’s goddamned meaningful. Words can do the same.

And a friend wrote a play that we produced. ACTS OF KINDNESS. And at our last horned-moon ritual, I praised my mate Elizabeth for her kindness to many—not something that came naturally to her but evolved over the years. Those words were themselves a kindness. I hope for more.

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Conception. . .

—From EF—

  I’m close to the end of my current first draft of the memoir, which appears to have declared itself to be a three-part opus. Too many events have happened in eighty-one years to be crammed into one volume. This first section climaxes with the discovery that our dream of parenthood, after years of learning to accept that it would never happen, happened. Two years later came our painful recognition that the theatre company we’d left our planned academic career to embrace was not, could not be the core of the rest of our theatrical life. In the process of being rocked by that grief of separation, another baby began, born into the cold Chicago winter of our first year as a solo duo, and the rest of our life’s pattern was set.

 In 1971 we’d learned that Conrad’s faculty position would not be renewed, and quickly decided not to look for another academic post. The theatre collective we’d helped bring into being showed promise of finding a life, and indeed Theatre X had a thirty-five year run. March 4, 1972 was the grand opening of the building that became our theatrical home, the very public declaration that this was our committed path. That same night, fertility blessed our choice.

What followed was a local season of new work and an ever-growing roster of touring performances. Our creative work was the company’s core, but in order to be able to put full-time work into that very demanding process, salaries were essential. Salaries meant money. Money meant touring. We worked on self-promotion, and some college-circuit showcases turbocharged our efforts. At the beginning of 1974, we cashed in with a ten-week tour of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and made a lot of money. But it was seven people and a toddler in a van for two and a half months. You can’t make new work under those conditions.

With one exception. In West Virginia, we made another baby.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about conception. What opens the gates? Our first time, it was in-your-face obvious. Our whole life together, up until then, had been single-mindedly focused on going as fast as possible toward the Ph.D. and the faculty jobs to follow. It was damned hard work but it was right—until it wasn’t. Being part of a collective that made significant new theatre cast a harsh light on the reality of academia: cranking out productions that lived for five nights and vanished, cranking out students with degrees and no work. We found ourselves willing to set sail into a life for which no Ph.D. prepared us, and once there was no going back, life said, “OK. You’re ready now.”

I was astonished. I’m still astonished. Remembering the doctor saying, “You’re probably about six weeks.” Remembering the quickening, bored silly on a ferryboat ride across Lake Michigan and suddenly feeling that tiny flutter. Remembering how it feels to have the milk come in.

And most of all, marveling at these two miracles, offering themselves just as we were caught in our lives’ most turbulent white water. Conceiving as we were reconceiving ourselves.

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Unique Contradictions…

—From CB—

I have a friend who’s an artist. He does wonderful abstract drawings and paintings, but also some monumentally brilliant funny stuff. Some years ago, he did a very wise thing: he split his identity. The abstracts are billed under his own name. The nutty-monkey work is the creation of an artist named Unique Fredrique.

The reason is obvious. Like our hamburgers, we need our artists, our singers, or our writers “branded”—i.e. constituting an unique brand. We want to know what we’re getting, and more: we want an image of the artist. If he/she changes, it needs to be in gradual increments or, like a comedian in a serious role, something that recognizes the norm through the contrast.  

Certainly artists go through phases: one decade of Picasso isn’t like the last, ditto Dylan, even ditto Andy Warhol. But they tend to be consistent within that phase. If not, they adopt a pseudonym for the “inconsistent” work, e.g. Unique Fredrique.

To our disadvantage, we’ve never done that in our writing or staging. A transparent comedy sketch is followed by opaque myth or kitchen-sink realism. When we ran “subscription seasons” at our theatres in Philadelphia or Lancaster PA, they were perhaps the most unbalanced seasons in American theatre history. It was a standing joke in the office about the guy who was so enamored of a lightweight dance piece we staged that he’d call up regularly for a reservation, inquiring if there were any barefoot women in Waiting for Godot. To his credit, he came anyway.

We’ve added the further complication, since 1982, of claiming dual authorship. That has different forms depending on the piece, but above all it means that we both sign off on the result, acknowledging joint parenthood. But while joint authorship is commonplace with filmscripts or TV comedy, plays and novels (unless pure genre) lose value in the public mind unless we can see them as the unsullied emanations of solo genius.

It struck me as odd, though predictable, that the revelation that John LeCarre’s novels were written in heavy collaboration with his wife was headline news. It contradicts the tradition of the genius working solo, as friends and family offer, at most, a grim patience. Bertolt Brecht at least had the virtue of publishing his plays listing all his collaborators, but the gears grind and we only know his name and certainly not that of Elisabeth Hauptmann. That doesn’t affect the quality of the plays; it only reflects the nature of the fame machine.

We need our heroes, and the corollary is that their fall can be mighty swift. If a politician’s views change over the span of 30 years, he’s labeled either a “waffler” or a hypocrite. If popular novelists’ political views don’t match ours, they’re seen not only as traitors but retroactively as bad writers. The baby and the bathwater are one and the same.

For myself, I don’t feel contaminated by reading Knut Hamsun’s novels despite his Nazi sympathies or by appreciating the virtues of a friend despite his despicable flaws or idiotic moments. I don’t reject Michelangelo’s Pieta or Bach’s music because of the millennia of perverse crimes of the Christianity that inspired them. But that’s just me: your mileage may vary.

What does concern me is the realization that my friend is following the only practical path in separating his “serious artist” name from his Unique Fredrique persona. But personally I see his great value in having those seemingly contradictory dimensions.

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Piano. . .

 —From EF—

  I grew up with a baby grand piano. When I was little, my mother took lessons and practiced sometimes, but I have no memory at all of ever hearing her just play the piano. When I was about five, the piano teacher was giving her a home lesson, and I chirped in when I heard a wrong note. The teacher perked up, played some notes and asked me what they were. Turns out I had absolute pitch and musical ability. That was the beginning.

 All through high school I chose showy, flashy pieces to play at the state contests and always came home a nervous wreck with a little gold medal. Then, my second summer at Interlochen National Music Camp, something changed. I played my flashy Ravel and Debussy pieces for the man who would be my teacher for eight weeks, and he said, “Very good. You have learned Jello very well, Now it’s time for meat and potatoes.” He assigned me a bunch of Bach and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I dutifully started practicing the Bach and thought it was awful. It was full of empty space and open architecture, and it was anything but flashy. I hated it.

Unlike practicing at home, I was alone, nobody heard me. We all had little chilly stone cabins in the woods and signed up for our hours. After a while, I started listening to what I was doing, really hearing the music, and something happened. It wasn’t about flashy or not flashy, it was about the sound, that starkly beautiful architecture. The E-minor three-part Sinfonia was the one that not only turned my head around, it took me to a space of grace and peace that was astonishing. I’d sit down to play it and I couldn’t stop. It took me into altered space and left me shiny.

 When I married, the baby grand came with me, and when we moved to California in 1963, it came along. In 1966 when we were moving to South Carolina, I sold it and wept. I bought an upright when we got there, then brought a better one when we moved to Milwaukee. After seven years, when we had left UWM and Theatre X, I bought a Fender-Rhodes electronic piano for our new duo touring, and when we moved to a Chicago basement apartment the upright piano became history. No space, no money, no real piano, and that was the way of it for three years.

When we moved to Pennsylvania we’d been doing OK supporting ourselves with tour gigs, and our first little house had a living-room big enough for an upright. I could play with my whole body again. It wasn’t until 1999 when we moved to California that I became totally piano-less, for twenty-one years. I continued composing, but now it was on synths and computer multi-tracking. No body involved.

Now, magic has happened. A Steinway baby grand was a gift to my cross-street neighbor, and he gave his Apollo to me. It’s in our studio, which we thoughtfully sound-proofed shortly after we moved to our Sebastopol house. Some years ago I gave away most of my piano music, but I kept a few things. Yes, Bach. And now I can turn the lights out except for the one over the piano, open the book to the E-minor Sinfonia, and come back to the space that’s been waiting for me.

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The Fool Comes Knocking…

—From the Fool—

Fool here. Long time I haven’t posted here, being as I had the urge to better myself. You’re never as much of a fool as you could be. So I took some time off and hung out on Facebook a lot. Which is where you get the really expert fools. Learn from the masters, they say.

That’s where I met my friend Moondog.

Of course this wasn’t the Moondog famous for standing in a Viking suit and doing music and being blind. My friend Moondog calls himself that as a tribute to the famous Moondog, “And maybe I’ll get famous,” he says.

He doesn’t wear a horned helmet. “They never did that,” he says. He wears a baseball cap that says ACE, like the hardware store. It hides his bald spot, which covers pretty much all of his head. “All the facts in there,” he says, “they push out the hair.”

And wisdom, which he says he’s got a lot of. Which you can tell: he calls lots of people asshole. Which is part of “thinking outside the box,” he says, meaning that he calls lots of people asshole.

But for example, he’s pissed at the news calling everything “disproportionate.” Racism, poverty, disease, convicted felons, the cops shoot a black guy, it’s disproportionate. So his idea is, make it proportionate: let the cops shoot more white guys, so it evens out. Plus, it lowers unemployment. That’s a thought.

I asked him about UFOs. Opinions are like roaches: if there’s one, there’s gotta be more.

“You notice one thing about those?” he asked.

“I never saw one.”

“Lotsa people haven’t. They hide. But which way do they go when they’re spotted? North. They’re all coming up from Mexico.”

“How do we know?”

“It’s a known fact. You hear the government saying it?”

“No.”

“That proves the cover-up.”

I think I’m entering a whole new dimension of fooldom. It opens out before me.

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Hidden Branches. . .

—From EF—

I was a hidden branch of my family tree until three years ago, and my joy at finding the sunlight was immense. I was greeted in the open by both sides of my original family and I know what that feels like. This week, I was able to return the favor.

My adoptive father was a big honest sweet man who never forgave his father for being a serial philanderer. I got an email this last week that said, “The purpose of this letter is to let you know your father has a half sister, making her your aunt. We hope you can help us fill a few gaps in mom’s story.”

She had been his legal secretary, married to a WW I vet who returned alive, but mentally damaged, and it was her responsibility to earn their living. Since he was confined to a hospital, she had to conceal her pregnancy. The baby was offered up for immediate adoption, the PTSD vet died four years later, and the mother died the next year. A sad story, and not an unusual one.

That daughter, adopted into a good family, will soon turn 94. When her son told her he was doing an Ancestry DNA test, she wept and sat him down. She felt shamed by her adoption, not knowing what her origins were or why she was given up, and her son set out to find her story. They are making her a genealogy book, and needed whatever I could provide about her brother.

I searched old boxes, found photos and scanned them. The toddler at 11 months, the proud little boy at six, the beautiful young man, the father welcoming his adopted daughter, the contented executive at sixty. I told them how he’d had to court his beloved for a long, long time to overcome her old history of an abrasive destructive father and the image of men as either gay or cheating. (She’d been a vaudville comedienne.) I told them about a long life of love.

They have been profuse in their gratitude. I look forward to knowing how their mother feels about the book. And I am heart-deep grateful to have taken this journey back through my dad’s childhood, youth, and loving adulthood.

 And this other long-hidden branch of the family tree? It is beautiful.

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Truth…

—From CB—

I pride myself on living a somewhat truthful life. It’s easier at a certain age. You have less to lose. Your kids have flown off into Reality. And the remainder of life is a bit more predictable, though truth is still an issue throughout the Solar System.

20 years ago or so, we produced a radio series called FAMILY SNAPSHOTS: 65 90-second micro-dramas. Here’s one that still has resonance.

[STOPLIGHT]

DAD:       Okay, now before we cross. Here. Look. Okay, can you read that?
CHILD:   “Walk.”
DAD:       Great. Okay, now wait just a second, till it changes, and you can try that. You ready? Okay?
CHILD:   “Don’t Walk.”
DAD:       That’s great. Wow. You’re a reader! That’s terrific. And okay, now when it says that, then you don’t walk. It says Walk and you walk, and Don’t Walk, and then you stay here and let the cars go. Okay? That’s great. Okay, let’s cross now. Hold onto my hand.
CHILD:   Daddy—
DAD:      Huh?
CHILD:   It says Don’t Walk.
DAD:       Right, fine, that’s true, but I mean right now we’re in a hurry now, it’s okay if you’re with Daddy and you hold onto my hand…
(Pause.)
I mean it’s not something you ought to do, but we’re okay, there aren’t any cars coming, but you shouldn’t ordinarily cross, I mean, although people do, even when they’re not supposed to, and that’s called jaywalking, but I’m not saying to do that, but right now we need to or else we’re gonna be late, and we want to tell Mommy how well you’re learning to read!
(Shift. Sudden burst of simultaneous talk, confused responses from Child.)
MAN:      Okay, cross now. No, stay. Okay, go. No. Stop. Hurry. Wait. Go. Don’t just stand there. Do what I tell you. Obey the law.
(Music. Child, to herself.)
CHILD:   I read okay. But I don’t understand the words.

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Lies…

—From EF—

         This has been a beautiful day. We had our usual coffee at Hardcore Espresso, and since I don’t drink coffee on a daily basis I get a pretty nifty lift. I had the pleasure of giving somebody a good laugh at the grocery checkout stand as she was looking up an unfamiliar code for the little orange fruit: “No, it starts with a K. You don’t get the Q until you come to the Quat.” The ocean was sporting stripes, blue and grey and green, and although the wind was sharper than a breeze, it didn’t blow our sushi off the table. I managed to put most of my little plants in the ground: mint, basil, Armenian cukes, lettuce. The big haul of new peppers can wait until tomorrow, and the Polish Linguisa tomatoes are safely in their bigger pots, waiting for the garlic to be harvested and give them the raised bed. The bucatini soaked up the clam sauce wonderfully. None of these things lied to me. Part of my pleasure lay in their absolute truth.

         Tomorrow, Sabbath is over and the regular week begins. I’ve tried to minimize my exposure to the news, but it’s hard to miss how the vomitorium of lies is building up its spew. No, I don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio stations, but every news outlet is reporting on the increasingly large percentage of the population that celebrates the lies, because they do watch Fox and listen to Sinclair. It’s all they trust. I’m not even sure they all believe what they’re hearing. It’s enough that it’s owning the libs, and that’s fun. Andrew Clyde is hilarious saying it was normal tourists, and the fact that he’s shown on tape screaming in terror on 1/6 just shows that his lies come from genuine brass balls.

         I was a liar for a long time, and it took me years to find how to crawl out of that painful muck. I have a different appreciation for truthfulness because I have lived on the other side. What is happening here? I think my lies came from a fear that if truth were known, I could not survive. The fear that nourishes solid group lying is growing, fed by an astonishing propaganda network. The same thing swallowed Hungary. The last time I was there I was dazzled by the open energy of the theatre world, the vitality of sharing stories openly, and the next year they got Orban. Last week we watched a film made in Poland the year that martial law swallowed Solidarity, 1981. This is not new. The difference is that the playbook is being used here, now.  

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Michael…

—From CB—

I’m writing a novel, fourth draft now, and one of the characters is based a lot on me. Great thing about writing, you can rewrite. Revisions are rarely allowed in life, but in fiction, it’s fiction.

I don’t find myself the most interesting character, but I’m convenient. On the page, I tend to talk very strangely, coming up with lots of stuff that gets cut by the second draft. In reality, I tend to cut it on the first draft. In reality, I think myself worth listening to, but I’m pretty convinced that no one else does, with the exception of Elizabeth most of the time.

Michael, my newest incarnation, is a technical writer, a born cynic who’s been dragged kicking and screaming into a non-traditional lifestyle—but he’s found that these are the people he’d like to kick and scream with. Somewhat to his chagrin, he’s not the main focus of the novel—the characters are like a pizza that’s divided pretty evenly around the table, and only the cat fails to get its own chapter.

In fact, I’d like to get away from this tight-assed type, who’s appeared in past incarnations as a substitute teacher, a tap-dancing investment broker, an ER physician, an aged farmer, and probably in a dozen comedy sketches, including a weatherman and a recent retiree who’s presented himself with his own retirement plaque. Still, he keeps crawling out from under a rock and into the scenario. I’m not sure why. He’d surely be more comfortable out of the limelight. He’s pretty shy.

But perhaps it’s because of his yearning. Just as the cats meow at their cat gate at dawn, he wants to be seen, and there’s both comedy and drama in his howl. I guess it’s more the comedy that attracts me. I’ve done a lot of sad, grim, obsessive stories because in this world I can’t help it, but I’ve come to realize that comedy is a survival tool. Escapist, maybe, but it gives you a sharper sight of the onrushing ogre and better vision to read the map for an escape route.

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ABC…

—From EF—

I’ve had a very sweet Mother’s Day. A long lazy conversation with daughter and then with son, which covers all the bases available in real time. In my mind, a sweet hug with the mother who birthed me and said good-bye, and another to the beautiful woman who birthed Conrad. And a bittersweet salutation of respect and forgiveness for the mother who did her best to raise me. And a phone-machine message of love and distanced hugs to the lady who mothered the lovely young woman who has chosen to spend her life with our son, and if I were fluent in Italian, I’d have done likewise with the mother of our daughter’s excellent mate.

We did our usual Sunday picnic foray to the ocean, the mother of us all. Having seen “Octopus Teacher” has forever changed the way I look at that water. And on Saturday evening, I had an excellent preview to the coming day. Our poetry salon has continued in safe and distanced form, meeting ourdoors in the lovely gathering-place behind the local Episcopal church. We gather to share poetry from memory, and as of Thursday evening I had no clue what I could do that matched the suggested theme: Let’s Remake the World. Then inspiration struck. I sang the “ABC Song.”

Back in 1974 the two of us had made the decision to launch ourselves as a solo duo, so to speak, hiving off from the ensemble that had been our new life-blood since 1969. The time had come when there was a new world we needed to make. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was right, and it led to who we became and who we are now. Our first show as a duo opened that fall, a hectic event. The scheduled theatre had burned the night before opening, and we premiered a week later with our first touring gig. It was called “Song Stories,” being a mix of short sketches and original songs, something I could do without freaking an audience out, being seven months pregnant.

From today’s vantage point, these lyrics were pretty much on point about remaking the world. The best way to “get it” is to read it aloud to yourself.

ABC, Dada
EFG, House
IJKL, Mama, Mama, Mamamama
NOPQ, RSTUV
Wee-wee — XYZ

Apple, bacon, corn-dog, eat
Food, good, hot ice juice
Keep lettuce, more, no oatmeal
Pickles quick raisins soup
Tickles up vegetables what      
Which where when who
Why why why? Water — XYZ

ABCD elephant FGHI junk
KLMN octopus PQRS thunk
(the elephant stepping on the junk)
UVW XY zoo

Angry bad clean dirty
Easy funny good
Hard idea, joking, killing
Love me, love me
Naughty old pity quiet
Real sad truth
Understanding vitamins, war — XYZ

Abstruse banal comatose dog
Enervated flatulent gratuitous hug
Interim jettison kickapoo leak
Manumitted nepotistic ossified punk
Quiddity reify salubrious tart
Undulating ululating varicose wart
Xebec yacal zygophyte

ABC, Dada
EFG, House
IJKL, Mama, Mama, Mamamama
NOPQ, RSTUV
Wee-wee — XYZ

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