Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 22

R.I.P. . . .

—From CB—

As of two weeks ago, we’re laying our theatre to rest. This is our curtain call.

Simple reasons: For 46 years, The Independent Eye has been the center of our lives (apart from kids & one another), but it’s no longer functional. We’ll continue to do some performance, but we don’t need the corporate structure to do it; it’ll save Elizabeth a bit of bookkeeping and some kerfuffle when we pass.

Intention is to do some local performing and to undertake a “Bishop & Fuller Final Tour” back East when the plague lifts.

We’ll continue the website, as a rich archive, and the sale of our DVDs. We’ll keep the records worth keeping and try to figure what to do with 20 bins of large puppets. Our lives will be devoted to writing fiction & memoir.

The long chronicle can be skimmed at http://www.independenteye.org/chronicle, along with countless photos, scripts, audio, etc.

Yes, it’s long. We hived off from our first ensemble, Milwaukee’s Theatre X (having migrated from college teaching), in 1974, moved to Chicago, focused heavily on touring. Then to Lancaster PA in 1977, grew roots; uprooted in 1992 to Philadelphia and California in 1999. From Song Stories, Sunshine Blues and Dessie (1974-76) to King Lear and Survival (2017-19), touring has always been our heart (wearing out three Dodge vans, now a Prius), along with collaborations, residencies, running multiple “seasons,” a small bit of freelance work, brief sojourns into the mainstream, and a bunch of public radio. Always doomed or blest to fly under the radar.

Nearly 4,000 performances in 38 states. 104 productions, countless workshops, two children. And the dedication of dozens, hundreds, thousands of actors & artists, trustees & donors, tour hosts & collaborators & media workers, and above all, audiences who must’ve said, “This sounds weird but let’s risk it,” and came to the show.

How do I (we) feel? All sorts of ways. Of course there’s the same grief you’d feel at the passing of a beloved, even though you’ve known from an early age that people die. There’s retroactive pride in the work, and also in living a life so counter to my cautious, guarded temperament. And there’s a sense of “Enough, already!” A completion. We’ve done everything possible to avoid becoming an institution (though I have enormous respect for those who do), and we’ve surely succeeded in that.

I miss directing intensely, and an audience. I miss haggling with Elizabeth over an audio edit at 2 a.m. I have scant hope of our novels gaining traction, though I believe they’re worthy of notice. And I believe in the ocean, its gulls, its smell, its quadraphonic voices, and its endurance.

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Sheba . . .

—From EF—

Let’s talk about Sheba.

Actually, her full name is Sheba Bigbutt. She’s a wine-red 1999 Dodge Maxivan and she brought 1/3 of our worldly possessions out to California when she was a brand-new sparkling baby; the rest of it came in what we called the Rent-O-Saurus. At that time she was the newest incarnation of a line of maxivans that had carried us all over the country from 1972 to the present. Those vans carried actors and kids and lighting equipment and sets and props and coloring books and midnight dreams all over the country. Sheba is the last of the line. In the early 2000’s she carried Conrad and me to the gigs back east that paid our bills; we loved California but couldn’t make a living here.

Eventually we got too embarassed at taking this lady whale to the Safeway and found a cheap little used red Honda CRX we named Rover, and Sheba only hit the road for long-haul gigs. Then, little by little, the long-haul gigs got sparse, and Sheba sat in the driveway, loved but lonely. I’d walk by her and pat her on the nose, but she didn’t get out much. I still have the wine-red curtains we’d put up inside for privacy, but the plywood platform we’d sleep on, elevated above the theatrical gear, is long gone. She’s a big empty shell we stuff with palm fronds and other junk to go to the dump. I still love her and pat her nose.

Well, now she’s got a starring role again. Fire evacuations are a different gig in the era of Covid, and we can’t repeat last year’s luck of finding friends to stay with, cats and all. And there’s always the question of the inevitable but unpredictable earthquake. We thought, after some late-night brainstorms, of equipping Sheba as a refuge. Not to go out on the interstates, heaven forbid, but as a traveling homestead wherever we need to go in an emergency. She’s getting petted and groomed again.

We’re assembling an emergency stash as we did last year, but this time with the goal of taking Sheba and the Prius to somewhere on the coast where we can park and live for maybe two weeks, cats and all. So far we have assembled essentials: our tent camping stuff, an ample supply of water, a big Rubbermaid tub of non-perishable food, and a suitcase with a change of clothes, money, documents, a hand-crank radio, and a pouch waiting for our backup hard disks. The cats have their own suite: two crates, a litter pan, and boxes of food and litter. I’m about to check out shoulder harnesses and leashes, and I’m sure they’ll have their own opinions about those as we try them out in advance.

The new big cooler is waiting for two weeks’ worth of pre-cooked frozen dinners; I’m cooking each night’s meal double or triple and freezing the portions. If we don’t have to evacuate, I’ll have treated myself to a big library of cook-free dinners.

Oddly, this doesn’t feel dire. We’ve always loved our camping trips, the feeling that we can provide for ourselves outside the common norm. Sheba is our beloved companion again, and I swear that when I walk past and pat her nose I can hear her purr.

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Express Bus . . .

—From CB—

Here’s a flash-fiction we wrote some time ago. It’s topical, so posting it here. Feel free to share it.

EXPRESS BUS

by Bishop & Fuller

I sometimes take the bus to and from my work in the city—San Francisco to Santa Rosa, GGT 101—which stops in San Rafael to change drivers. It’s a two-hour trip, but I like the chance to read: I watch the digital crawler as it repeats upcoming stops—San Pedro Rd., Ignacio Blvd.—or the warning signs along the way—Work Zone, Road May Flood, Lane Blocked. There are always little incidents: a dump truck blazing past on the shoulder or traffic cones careening across the freeway. Always something.

Coming home late Thursday, early fall, Bus #1514 pulled into the San Rafael Bus Pad, disgorged its passengers and the driver, a short brownish man who looked very tired. He had reason to. Just past San Anselmo, a stringy young guy had come down the aisle to complain the bus was going the wrong way. “I’m heading to San Jose,” he said.

“Wrong bus. We go to Santa Rosa.”

“Lemme off!”

The driver explained that he couldn’t leave off passengers on the freeway. “Black shitfucker!” the young man screamed, and variants of that sentiment. The driver pulled onto the shoulder, opened the door, pointed. The young man descended into an unscheduled future.

It broke the boredom of the trip, but I wouldn’t tell my wife about it. The kid might have had a gun. I wondered how many passengers would go out and arm themselves. I wondered if I would. When the bus pulled into San Rafael, the driver was quickly gone. We all sat waiting.

Ten minutes later, an eight- or nine-year-old boy climbed the steps of the bus and wedged himself in at the wheel. I empathized with his mom or dad: how embarrassing to lose track of your kid and undergo the accusing stares. And the little boy, frankly, was obese. Had they allowed him to overindulge, or did they grieve at his glandular state? And would my own two kids ever sit in a bus driver’s seat? I’d never told them not to. So many things to tell them not to do.

I noticed then that the boy was dressed in brown and carried a bus driver’s cap. He was not an attractive child. His deathly pale skin was sunburnt. His tiny black eyes bulged out of his face like a roly-poly rat. His fingers were little pig sausages. When he put on his hat, his face bore infinite sadness.

New passengers came up the steps, flashed their cards or slotted their cash in the cash machine. I looked out the window for the parents. I looked for the actual driver. Yet this boy wore the brown uniform and billed hat. He appeared to be fully authorized. I looked to the other passengers.

The door swung shut. The child had pushed a lever and was starting the bus. The engine growled. No way could his feet reach the pedals, yet they reached the vital one. No one seemed concerned. A grayed lady touched the screen of her smart phone. A young Asian man in red tennis shoes blasted music through his head. An old hook-beaked man read a prescription bottle. A perk-nosed brunette shut her eyes, waiting for life to pass. The bus coughed, grumbled, juddered, and heaved its massive buttocks into the twilight.

No problem on the freeway at first. We passed shopping centers without incident, dealerships, rolling hills, a billboard urging us to Unite for a Drug-free World. And then we picked up speed. The child was standing upright behind the wheel. At the exits we ran stop signs, crashed through a Lane Blocked barrier. We swerved into the Petaluma Bus Pad and swerved out again. And then somehow we crossed into the oncoming lanes, headlights looming at us, veering off to the right or the left. Our hurtling bulk claimed right-of-way. The fat boy giggled.

Redwood Boulevard and Olive Avenue, Detour, Shoulder Work, Graton Resort & Casino, Bella Cox for Congress. Other drivers saw our madness a mile away and skidded into a ditch. A wheelchair broke loose from Wheelchair Securement, a spindly black woman spinning down the aisle emitting shrill parrot shrieks. A burly man flopped into her lap to stop her, but a wiry young woman pummeled his head. We roared over an underpass, under an overpass. The dotted lines blended, multiplied. There were dozens of lanes, and we were in them all. The boy steered one-handed and blew a bubble.

There comes a point in utter terror when the shuddering stops, when you know you’re in as deep as there is to go. It’s that pioneer tale I hated: the family caught in the blizzard. They kill their horse, cut it open, crawl into its warm guts and blood. The heart’s warmth fails against the ice wind, but they cling together.



We’re not heading to Santa Rosa. A streak of incidents—careening off a guardrail, side-swipes, two cyclists taken out, other near-misses—make me wonder if the cops are on the way, or why not? I pray that someone might stop him, hold him, take him home. He’d been flashing the headlights on and off, but now, near midnight, he must be gunning us up past ninety in total dark. At times a passenger screams but to no effect. I begin to wonder where I am. My wife must be calling friends. I wait for the bus to run out of gas or crash into a culvert, but it only howls faster and faster into the night.

 

(From DamnedFool.com)

Wellspring . . .

—From EF—

Like many others this week, we popped for a month’s subscription to the Disney Channel and watched Hamilton. Sheesh, what a wild ride. I never thought I’d have a chance to see it, and I’m glad I did. My fervor for the first half didn’t quite hold for the second, but all in all I was amazed. Other than reverence for their creativity and stamina, what moved me most was the passion, the on-fire-ness. I couldn’t help, after it was done, comparing this to the oozing fetid rot we’re battling now. At least King George, nuts and vile as he was, could stand up straight and put words together. None of these founding dudes were without problematic aspects, but, well, you know what I mean.

Our political peril is being drowned out by our pandemic peril, and both are wiping out the fact that Siberia is melting and our wildfire season here is about to start. And it’s predicted to be a doozy. We’re been busy with our evacuation preparations, having learned some lessons from the last one, and Conrad has been doing daily battle with stray brush and tall weeds. Last year’s blessing can’t repeat: we were sheltered by friends in an unevacuated zone, and they even accepted our cats. This year, we’ve cleaned out our ancient maxivan to be a shelter, hopefully parked in somebody’s field. It’s no longer a dependable long-haul vehicle, but it would very likely be OK for something like Petaluma, and there’s space enough in it for the cats and us. We’ve had a blue ton of camping experience, just not with cats, so I think we can adapt.

But that’s just the immediate disaster prep. I don’t feel wonderful about what’s down the road. And it’s even harder to stay above water when the art you’ve based your whole life on is suspended. Theatrical production? Book publishing? When you can’t gather and nobody has money?

I inherited my depression and have spent my life surviving, but this is wicked. And yet something Conrad said today, on our way back from the ever-generous ocean, reminded me of an attitude adjustment. Our first experience with the Society of Friends, or, if you will, Quakers, was long ago when we were in Manhattan for a while and the kids were young. Leaflets were being handed out somewhere around Murray Hill, and Conrad said, “This sounds interesting.” And indeed we tested the waters at our meeting in Lancaster, and spent years as faithful attenders.

This is the core of one precept. Turn your attention to what is closest to you, and do no harm. First, your own self. If you are not treating yourself with nurturing love and care, change that as best you are able. After you have given that your best shot, consider the next ring outward: your immediate family or closest relationships, look honestly, and adjust what you can. Stay with what is nearest to you and what is actually possible to change for the better. Only then move your focus outward, to your friends and community.

Do you see how many steps there are on the way to addressing the entire society whose dysfunction is drowning us? I am not good material for demonstrations. I have no illusions that having my eye put out by a rubber bullet or having my body broken by a rage-driven car would make enough of a ripple to change anything, although I have enormous respect for those who can risk that. But I can speak softly to an unhappy friend. I can deal sympathetically with a frazzled company rep on the phone, even though I would really love to melt the wires with profanity. I can cuddle my cats and water my garden. I can let three breaths go by before responding sharply to something that nettled my butt.

And I can take every chance that comes along to let gratitude well up, to fill and spill over with love. The gold of sunrise. That first long hug of the morning. The wild wind and whitecaps of the exuberant ocean. The awakening of “yes” by those who have cared to memorize and share poetry. My own stubborn trust that somehow I can intuit structure and then let touch guide me to fix the motorized side mirror on the Prius that got yanked loose by the whap of a branch. If the Multiverse is sentient, surely it appreciates praise. No matter what you believe, you can imagine that Gaia’s food is joy.     

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Empathy . . .

—From CB—

On our afternoon walk today, I asked Elizabeth a moderately unanswerable question. I’m ready to begin the third draft of our new novel, a very surreal dystopian thing with a cast of dysfunctional characters, and I asked her regarding one character, “What does it need for us to connect with him? To empathize?”

The question has roots in a personal failing: I empathize too readily. Except for a few people over the years who’ve either hurt someone close to me or cost me money, my judgmental self is supplanted by my actor’s instinct to empathize, to see people from inside themselves. Had I the power, I still might give them 20 years in the slammer, but it would be like sentencing myself. I have to admit that would include Shakespeare’s Lear or a murderous cop or our pathetic, hideous President.

Why is this a potential failing? Artistically, because I might be too far separate from my audience. What to me might be a character vital to understand might be to someone else a soul to write off as irredeemably vile. So I might tout myself as more humane, but my story won’t work for them. I can’t ignore that issue: all my attempts in a life of art have been to build empathy.

Sometimes empathy as generosity, empathy as love, but also empathy as knowing your enemy: empathy as forcing ideology to face reality. I’m a highly judgmental creature when I face the mirror, so perhaps I’m wanting to answer that question in relation to myself.

But the more immediate question is, What makes us empathize? And with anyone outside our self-defined tribe? Collectively, we’re not in a very generous mood these days. A character you identify with? A character whom you’d invite to dinner? A character who feels your pain? A character who’s a victim? A character struggling against some inner demon? A character who’s at least trying? A character who screams? A character who entertains?

Elizabeth and I talked a long while. Useful, but the story will decide. Getting home, we packaged up the week’s bagful of cat extrusions to submit to the garbage collectors. It’s harder with publishers.

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Retrieval . . .

—From EF—

I am up to my eyeballs in 1960-1963, my years at Northwestern wherein I (a) met Conrad Bishop, (b) sank to what was unquestionably the most disturbed mental condition of my life, and (c) started the long, long trek upward to actually having a life. My memory of those years is understandably a Swiss cheese, and I’ve been reaching out to the few hardy souls we knew then who are still alive, getting some bits and pieces from their own recall to help mine tune in.

The memories have been all over the map. “Oh yeah, I remember, we were in the same dorm.” “Yes, that apartment was at 809 Foster Street.” “And omigod, this is incredible, let’s figure out how to do something together again.”

My gates are unlocking, the blocked streams are starting to trickle, and the overall effect is that I am overwhelmed with love for so many different things. Love for this person who instantly became almost part of my DNA: this weekend we used Criterion to watch Ingman Bergman’s A Lesson in Love, the movie we saw on our first date in 1960, and here we are, sixty years later, sheltered in place amid cats and stacks of paper and the keen beauty of afternoon light through the leaves.

And love for those who were part of our life then. It’s good to know that my dorm-mate has had an international high-profile career as actress and teacher, that the co-tenant of our love nest has a string of acting credits longer than the Brooklyn bridge, and that our actor-collaborator in the edgiest thing we did there (Brecht’s Baal), has combined serious theatre work with developing therapies that nurture endangered kids. Sixty years later we’re all still swimming in the same stream.

So it’s Father’s Day, and it’s the Summer Solstice, and I think of the ritual we were part of at Starwood so many years ago. Conrad was the Sun God, I was Mother Earth, and what played out was an affirmation that the pain of distancing sharpens the joy of return and the connection will never be broken. Sixty years ago, we were part of a ferment that still bubbles, where we were all the pistil and the stamen, the bee and the nectar, and after we are all gone, it will go on.

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A Letter . . .

—From CB—

Early summer of June 1961, I called my mother to tell her I wanted to get married. I knew it would be a shock. I was 19, it was the end of my freshman year at Northwestern, she hadn’t met Elizabeth, and as a single, working-class mom she knew the trials of survival. We had a difficult phone call (500 miles apart), I wrote her a long letter, and she replied. That summer she came up to visit (I took summer classes), she met my lifemate, was totally smitten and sold. We officially married that August, though we celebrate the previous Nov. 13th as our true bonding.

  In researching her own memoir, Elizabeth found those letters. I read them partly with chuckles, partly with tears. Margaret Lucille Pitzer Bishop Sagan Leuck died in the 90’s and stands before me now. Portions of her letter to me, 6/7/61:

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Dear Conrad,

You know I have always stood behind you in all your undertakings and always will. From your first baby steps across the floor to your fights on 6th St., your work and struggles for certain merit badges, your school plays (I was your worst critic)—your scholarships, awards and badges. My enjoyment was giving you encouragement and love because that was about all I had to offer you—the dollars were few and they were for necessities. Your many honors repaid me for my efforts.

Secretly, I have feared that you might meet and fall in love with someone who might not understand your make-up. Being raised in a little shack across the tracks on 6th St. makes one different. The outdoor plumbing, the pot bellied stove with the wood pile beside it—the little black Buzz Fly with her puppies in the kitchen, the snow blowing in the windows and the sound of the rats gnawing when the lights were turned out. These were not the highest standards of living. But this was our home and there was love in it. You would bring your book and climb up on my lap, and I would kiss you and love you and tell you that you were the only thing in the world that I really loved. Then I would kiss you and hug you and your little eyes would just smile. Then there were the bad days—when I had to punish you and tell you “no” to things that you really wanted to do. This hurt me, too. I bring all these things up because it was only yesterday…

Then suddenly, when you called out of a deep sleep to tell me you planned to be married, you were grown up all at once—I nearly folded up. All at once you had grown up— Yes, I expected it eventually but to believe you were planning your own home seemed strange. Soon another woman would take over. Will she understand his ways? Will she think I did a lousy job raising him? Will he understand his responsibilities in a home? Will he be thoughtful of little things that bring a wife much happiness? Remember kind words are easily spoken and mean a lot.

I feel, after reading your letter, you may have found the little lady who may understand you. I have every confidence in your choice. Marriage certainly is a business—not only from a monetary angle, but must be worked at faithfully and as a team to make for happiness. … I have no advice now or ever—do not plan to give any. Suggestions, yes and encouragement, yes. … But any decisions to be made are yours, the two of you.

There are very few girls nowadays that would want to sacrifice to this extent. Your plans sound workable except for the unforeseen things which might arise before your graduation. But there are always ways to work things out if there is love and understanding. As I told you I would feel that I was gaining a daughter, which I never had, and will be to her the same as to you. I certainly would want her to feel that I would be the same as a mother and not a mother-in-law.

Naturally, there will be a big adjustment—you may have a little “rough sledding” at times but if you do I have every faith in you that you won’t be a quitter. It’s getting late so will drop you a line Sunday.

This letter sounds rambling, but knew you would want an answer to your letter, so I am sure you can get the meaning if it isn’t worded in the best style. So here it is.

Love,

Moth

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That was 59 years ago. It worked out okay.

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Hello, Mama!

—From EF—

Today, at last, we could visit Mama Ocean again, up close and personal. Back at the end of March all of the parking along Sonoma County’s gorgeous ocean access sites was blocked off—too many people, many of them coming from distances, crammed the sand and made virus transmission easy, so all of us paid for that for these last two months.

It’s been years now that we have come on Sundays to these shores, at first every other week, and now for a long time it’s been every week. We bring a picnic basket with our ritual food and drink, set up our little tin folding table (I have no idea why we call it the Polish Table, because we did visit Poland but couldn’t have crammed that table into our duffel bags) and our black canvas folding chairs on a bluff facing a stern array of jagged black rocks. Cormorants gather on those rocks; we call their silhouettes the Supreme Court. And then we sit for a couple of hours, nibbling and sipping and throwing scraps to the gulls and hoping to see pelicans. But mostly we’re admiring and appreciating the Mama, who decks herself in different colors every week. She knows all the secrets, and allows us to wonder what they are. Today was very windy, and she was covered with white lace ruffles for miles and miles toward the horizon.

In this interim time we had gone to the high ridge on Coleman Valley Road and pulled off to the side, a wide place in the road just after the cattle guard, and at least we could see Mama and picnic in the car. Heck, we have often had our picnic in the car down at the shore when the wind would have blown our sushi to the Farallon Islands, so the ridge was just a long-shot wide-screen Mama. But today we were back home.

Why is this so important to us? To begin with, it was me. In the twenty-plus years I had been visiting the rough coast of Bretagne in France, I let the ocean into my bone marrow. One gray drizzly day I sat far back under a rock overhang and listened to the sea I could not see, listening for two hours with a musician’s ear to the way that no wave sounded like another. The Sonoma Coast is a close kissing cousin, and once we made our home out here I dragged us to the water as often as possible. And Conrad got it. The times are many when the power and beauty have brought us both to tears.

There’s a power spot here on the coast, perhaps an intersection of ley-lines, and it feels exactly like the one at Carnac and the one in Ireland at Newgrange. I feel the buzz in the palms of my hands. In these times, if Mama is going to give milk, you’d be a fool not to drink it, and let your bones stay strong.

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An Irrelevancy . . .

—From CB—

It’s my week to write our blog (which we alternate with) and I knocked it off by Wednesday. Then the week started happening. Along with the usual madness, there was Chapter Nineteen of the pandemic, there was the killing and the riots, and to finish it off, we watched two Sixties films by the Mayslees brothers, SALESMAN and GIMME SHELTER, both moving and enormously unsettling. Come today, what I wrote on Wednesday seemed, beyond words, irrelevant.

But I’m putting it out there, perhaps because anything *relevant* that I’d write has already been written a hundred times over. The best thing I can do regarding that subject matter is to give it more thought: if it’s taken a hundred fifty years to grapple with some of these issues, I can give it another two weeks. If an asteroid hits us in the meantime, problem solved.

So for those who’d like something refreshingly irrelevant, read on.

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Being of sound mind and quite a ways over twenty-one, I recently spent the first $180 of our yet-to-be-seen “stimulus check” on, arguably, an absurdity: a year’s subscription to MasterClass.

For any who haven’t seen the ad blitz, it’s series of about 80 accomplished folks giving talks, lectures, meanderings on their chosen fields. My first six choices: Neil Gaiman, Judy Blume, Steve Martin, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Annie Leibovitz. Three writers, two directors, a photographer. They’re all interesting in radically different ways.

Why do I call my subscription an absurdity? Only because that’s what many people would call it. I’m 78, I’ve had a decent career in under-the-radar playwriting, directing and acting, now engaged in the truly jaw-dropping task of writing novels. Any brush with “lectures” has a kind of poison-ivy effect: reminds me of 19 impatient years of schooling (up thru the Ph.D.); my own problematic teaching years; my age; and how much I don’t know and never will.

Nevertheless . . .

For me, the objective is only incidentally to take a chance on learning something useful. That may happen, and I’ve made my first choices among artists of one sort or another. But I’m equally eager to hear from experts in cooking, gardening, interior design, or poker—endeavors in which I have no skill, scant interest.

Why? A number of reasons beyond gathering useful tips. Above all, I recall my most prized teachers, long past: Leon, Gerry, Charlie, and well, sorta, Alvina. Yes, from them I learned some facts, some techniques, but mainly, from each I assimilated a mind, a way of thinking that intersected with but wasn’t entirely my own. Sometimes, in fact, utterly contradictory minds, but all invaluable in forming that multifarious stew that I call my head.

I’ve never done a piece of work without all four, and sometimes others, making their presence known over my mystical shoulder. Not hero worship—I was hypercritical in those days, still am—but assimilating elements of soul, of thinking and doing, of their ways of seeing reality and making it into story. I get the same from my mate Elizabeth: we couldn’t be more different in temperament or skill set, yet apart from our direct acts of collaboration, she’s inside me whenever I work.

And so this subscription thing? In part, it’s a people-watching fling. In part, it’s hearing the keynote speaker at the conference going on much longer than scheduled. In part, it’s a stimulus to view the work I’m doing right now through other eyes. In part, it’s an avoidance of facing my challenges in Chapter 26. In part, it’s a race against the Reaper. Above all, I guess, it’s simply adding more garlic to the stew.

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The Memoir . . .

—From EF—

I started this week’s blog, wrote a lot of it, and realized, hell no, that’s not right. I don’t want to say that. So I’m starting again.

Lots of people say they’re suffering from Quarantine Brain. Hard to focus, distractable, depressed. I’ve got a different problem: Memoir Brain. I’m working on a hairy chapter, the time between being kicked out of the University of Michigan in 1959 and getting into Northwestern in 1960. I’ve got sources: memories, letters, transcripts, newspaper clippings and class notebooks, but they don’t all add up to the same reality. From early childhood onward I was a really talented liar; it’s how I survived. Two years into my relationship with Conrad my most elaborate academic Ponzi scheme collapsed in flames, and from those ashes emerged the concept of Truth; grimy, wobbly, but on its feet. I never lied again.

This year and a half of the memoir, though, is like seeing an old 3-D movie without the glasses: the images won’t come together. A prime example is a yellowed transcript from my year of penance at Valparaiso University. That was certainly part of my application packet to Northwestern, and I did get admitted. Looking at enlarged photocopies, I honestly can’t tell if it’s authentic or forged. How can I possibly not know whether I finished those incompletes and got decent grades, or if I repeated the old sick pattern, failed, altered the evidence, and went on living a lie? Talk about an unreliable witness . . .

Abuse plays nasty tricks with memory. Writing this memoir is helping me bring some things back, but I always question whether what I’m remembering is true or not. Little by little, though, enough is coming clear. A butterfly was once a caterpillar, but you have to admit, they’re different critters. I was an impressive straight-A valedictorian Merit Scholar caterpillar, headed for a career in medicine. Eventually I became an actor and composer. 1959-60 was my time in the cocoon, when my imaginal cells broke me down into soup.

My first year at Ann Arbor ended in a nightmare of incompletes that became flunks. My parents didn’t know, because I intercepted and forged the year’s-end grade reports. I got very good at this. In my second year I started to become a performer: theatre, radio, and Gilbert & Sullivan touring, and the fall semester’s grades were a dog’s breakfast. I couldn’t intercept that grade report. The axe fell, and all hell broke loose, I groveled and cried and swore I’d seen the light: I’d go back to being a serious student again. I didn’t. I kept on performing and got the department’s annual award for acting. I should have said I didn’t want to stay with medicine, I wanted the life of theatre that was beginning to give me power. I didn’t have the guts.

I made a deal for 1959-60. I would carry on with my plans for the summer, two lead roles at Interlochen National Music Camp, and I would pay my way by waitressing. Then I would live at home for a year, become a good academic at VU, and hope to get into Northwestern. I still didn’t understand that, yes, my whole life could be in theatre, and it might be a good one; I just focused on one more goddamn college.

I did get into Northwestern, I met Conrad and we became the theatre team we still are. But the thing that’s bending my brain into pretzels is the possibility that Northwestern accepted a fraud, and I still don’t know. I’ve sent for an official transcript; that will sooner or later clear it up. What’s hardest to write about clearly is what it’s like to lie so well that you don’t know what is true.

And that’s why Memoir Brain is extra hard right now. Our entire society is spinning and flailing in a vile stew of lies. It looks as if they’re all having a great time doing it, yanking our chain and putting it over. But I’ve been there, done that, and it wasn’t a great time. I’m just one person. I fell apart and put myself back together, and it didn’t make waves. This time, though, if it ever sorts out, it’s gonna be a tsunami.

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