Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 25

December 29, 2019

Rash Acts . . .

—From CB—


Having moved from maniacal lifelong focus in theatre—63 years that art form being the center of my life—to prose fiction, it takes multiple stimuli to get me back into the old familiar harness. But it’s happened.


At a local party, someone from an arts center asked us if we might do a show, something, next year. That put the bee in the bonnet, though the bee was a bit stupefied. And then last night we went to see Freddie’s show.


We’d first seen it 30-odd years ago, when he was touring it internationally. Subsequently, we saw it several more times. Now he decided to revive it. A challenge physically for someone 30-odd years older, and a different time, different tastes. Yet quite beautiful. Some things were exactly like old times, some things changed, and some ad libs about “Why the fuck am I doing this?” But overall, a gorgeous evening of performance. What I set out to do at age 15, though I didn’t know it yet: Living theatre.


Fred and I have never really talked much, except about the excellent soups he’s cooked. But he liked our shows, I’ve seen many of his, and when I was preparing King Lear I found myself using him as—not a role model, exactly, more a performance model, imagining how he’d perform it. Subsequently, he did perform Lear in Dallas—no idea whether it was anything like my imagination. Strange artistic interchange.


But Fred’s performance was the second stimulus that pushed us over the edge.


We’re planning the Bishop & Fuller Farewell Tour. I’m 78, Elizabeth will be 80 in February, and we’ve earned the right to sit on our asses in California till they wither away. But we want to take that risk—and remember how we started.


It’ll be RASH ACTS, an evening of short sketches, some with puppets, most with our meaty selves. Over the years, starting in 1969, we’ve written & performed over 250 “ten-minute plays,” besides our full-lengths, so we have a fair repertoire to draw upon. Honing down from 250 to 8 will be a task, though invigorating if we think of all that work we DON’T have to do.


It’ll be this summer or fall and will cover as much of the USA as we can: theatres, house concerts, whatever. Benign curses upon you, Fred! (Trust your friends to cause you trouble.)


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Published on December 29, 2019 17:47

December 22, 2019

Risk and Courage . . .

—From EF—


        On May 24, 2014, our son Eli and his lady Meg had a beautiful wedding for which they did their own planning: Quaker-style in the redwood circle at Stern Grove, and the attending throng were a testament to the many spheres in which their lives move. Radiant people, all of them, and all of them handsomely different. We felt blessed to welcome our new daughter.


         Today, Dec. 22, 2019, the Circus Center did the second of their twin benefit performances for the Coalition on Homelessness, and Meg Bishop was not only in the cast of nine but did her doubles trapeze debut with Mel Chang. Meg is a seasoned performer, but usually in a distinct persona with both feet on the ground. Today she was herself, often upside down high on a rope and bar, responsible for the safety of her partner as well as herself. It was breathtaking.


         Today’s company of nine have been rehearsing this for six months. Six months of doing full-time jobs and then doing demanding and dangerous work, putting their bodies on the line. Nobody was paying them big bucks to do this, they were all students at the Circus Center. They did it because they wanted to, and they could, and we in the audience felt their power. There are those who deride art as irrelevant, a frill, and I cry bull$%#t on that. This was an experience of seeing what risk and courage and skill can do, and how it can jolt our tired sad souls into remembering what is possible, how we can make something together that is far more than the sum of our individual selves. Thank you, Circus Center, and thank you, Meg.


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Published on December 22, 2019 19:51

December 15, 2019

Losing My Shirt . . .

—From CB


How do you lose your shirt? Playing blackjack, obviously, or just being me.


My heavy brown plaid shirt, which I wear on chilly California days like a jacket over a regular shirt, is almost an acquired racial characteristic—not a card-carrying person of color, of course, more like a person of plaid. I do take it off at the gym, at bedtime, in the shower, and on those days when the California sun decides to get to working. Otherwise, it’s my epidermis.


This week I skinned myself.


It’s been a long custom with us, Elizabeth and I, each to take a more-or-less monthly overnight solo jaunt away from normal life. For me, that’s usually to some hostel in San Francisco or along the coast. Sometimes I hit a museum or just walk around, sometimes hang with my iPad at a coffee shop or the hostel commons, listen to dorm mates snoring in German or French, and drink a bit too much wine. For me, a needed retreat into loneliness.


This time to Santa Cruz, where I hadn’t been since the earthquake flattened it in 1989. Pleasant, uneventful, and there I lost my shirt.


I looked under, around, behind and between my bunk. I checked at the diner where I’d had yesterday’s lunch. I searched the car and the commons room at the hostel—couldn’t ask at the desk, as it was shut at check-out. It was not to be found.


 


Until I got home. Elizabeth called the hostel, and yes, it was there. I must have shed it while writing, and it fell to the floor. Much longer to work out how to ship it back, being a three-hour drive each way. Simple: pay UPS for a label they can stick on a box for the driver who stops regularly. Not so simple: UPS Customer Service had never heard of such a thing, though we’d used it in the past.


But Elizabeth is persistent with corporate dullards on the phone, and at last she took a page from our first novel REALISTS: “It’s a corporation. Call the same number, you’ll get someone else.” So on Tuesday my brown plaid shirt will be wending its way northward and onto my chilly torso.


So what’s it all mean?


In youth, losing things is a mark of Insouciant irresponsibility, a plus on an upscale resume. In age, it’s a sign of incipient incompetence if not incontinence. It’s hard to brush off, or even pluck off like the long gray hairs I pluck from my brown plaid shirt. I can only wait for the mail to restore me my warm epidermis, perhaps the same day as three boxes of our new novel AKEDAH are delivered. Not sure which I’ll open first.


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Published on December 15, 2019 15:52

December 9, 2019

Long Strong Shirt-tails . . .

—From EF—


         In my family searching, I have already found plenty of roots of my own life in art. My brother plays orchestral tuba. My dad and mom both had music as a strong part of their lives. My sister is a quilting artist of great repute. But where does my theatre life come from? It’s a long reach, but there’s evidently a strong connection.


         A young woman born in 1915, a year before my mother (Elizabeth Day), is a clear link. Her mother and my grandmother were cousins. I look at their high school yearbook pictures, and the resemblance is uncanny; even though the blood link isn’t close, the kinship is there, and it’s her father whose spirit runs in my veins.


         His own father was a grocer in Luzerne, Pennsylvania, and he had five brothers and sisters. Two brothers became farmers in Montana, two brothers migrated to Chicago, as did his parents and his sister. None of them had anything to do with the arts. But he wanted to, and he did.


         He moved to St. Louis, rejoined his parents when they moved to Chicago, then returned to St. Louis until the time came when he took up a wager to get himself professional training for the musical stage. The conditions were that he should make the journey to New York within 65 days, that he should not beg, and the entire journey should be on foot. He did it, 1200 miles, 51 days, starting with five cents in his pocket for the bridge toll. And he exhibited superb talents as a promoter, because newspapers all across the country printed stories of his challenge.


         I have no idea whether the “wager” was fact or fiction, but the media bought the story and it became real enough to get him the scholarship he wanted. He earned it with shoe-leather, hardship, and media savvy, and he used it to get himself work on the musical stage. The best part for me is that he sang his way across half the country, walking along the rail lines through the towns along the way—Pieron, Smithboro, Vandalia, Altamont, Montrose, Casey, then Carnegie, Pittsburgh, Blairsville, Altoona, Petersburg, McVeytown, Patterson, Newport, Harrisburg, Elizabethtown, Lancaster, Coatesville, Wayne, Philadelphia, and finally Jersey City, giving an impromptu concert at every stop. It sounds like my old tour journals.


         Looking at the family tree, there isn’t any direct connection with this theatrical entrepreneur and me, just a link through his wife. But their antecedents are my antecedents, and I believe that somewhere in the mix we share something. We had an itch and did what we needed to do to scratch it. Thanks, Karl Becca!


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Published on December 09, 2019 07:29

December 1, 2019

Certainty . . .

—From CB—


I hate, loathe, despise making decisions. Whether it’s a major life event or the choice of using an Oxford comma, the moment has all the appeal of the electric chair. In creative work, all is relative, yet there are countless decisions before lights go up on opening night or I ship the book to the printer or I speak the first line. Always, there’s that dwarf troll who sits on my left shoulder and at every scribble on my director’s notepad or flurry of typing or thumb-wiggle in the modeling clay, he’s muttering, “Well, consider . . .”


That may be why, in realms outside my expertise, I bridle at others’ expressions of absolute certainty. Most notably now in politics, where the fur will fly for another eleven months till we’re all as bald as billiard balls. Of course I have my own preferences and loathings, but my greatest irritation is with those whom I’m in basic agreement. I want to ask them, “Where’s your dwarf troll? Have you locked him in the basement? Listen to him!”


My Facebook feed is almost entirely comprised of fellow progressives, so my posts tend to be “Let’s make our case more effectively,” which translates, for some, into “gradualism,” “fogeyism,” or “treason.” The dilemma: to be an activist, i.e., to get people off their asses and into action, you have to sound Dead Certain, utterly convinced of your own rhetoric, and consequently you’re enormously vulnerable to self-deception. You’re acutely observant of the other guy’s flaws, but your own immune system is on hold.


So I’m hereby running through a catalog of what to me are false shibboleths wherewith progressives seem to delight in carving up one another like Thanksgiving turkeys. Then I’ll shut up. Just need to get it out of my system.



The DNC: These are people who want to elect Democrats. They’ll do whatever they can to do that. If they’re not gung-ho for your candidate, it doesn’t mean they’re corrupt. It means, right or wrong, that they want to win.
Medicare for All: It’s an unfortunate phrase. If designed on the present Medicare system, it doesn’t involve dissolving the insurance industry. In any case, the President won’t decree it: it’ll be a huge fight even in a Democratic Congress, and predicating a vote on whose proposal is ideal is like trying to drive a hard bargain with the Tooth Fairy.
Socialism: Why do I read tirades against “capitalism” in posts about the election, when all the candidates, including Bernie, are assuming a capitalist—though regulated—economy?
Youth: To what extent does Youth equal fresh ideas, health, idealism, commitment, purity and wisdom, and to what extent does Age equal corruption and senility? The most radical seem to be given a pass on ageism—which, IMHO, holds the same pitfalls as racism and sexism.
* Change: Barring cataclysmic events (World War II, 9/11, Trump’s election), change comes slowly. We may be primed for radical change, or the right-wing earthquake of the past two years may have engendered an intense desire for stability. My only point is that no one knows, and whoever professes certainty is just blowing out gas from both ends.
Money out of politics: A great idea, which will only happen via a progressive Congress and Supreme Court appointments. Which will only happen by people getting elected. Which will only happen with tons of money. Sanders managed the primaries with small-donor money, but could he have won the election that way? Candidates who accept big money aren’t necessarily corrupt: they want to finance the staffing, the ads, the events, the voter bussing that will get them elected. They’re serious, in the current atmosphere, about getting elected, and they’re not all “bought and paid for.”
Stupidity: One gets a certain satisfaction in calling Trump voters stupid, and there’s some reason to do so. But you don’t change anyone’s vote that way. Imagine you’re the new kid on the playground and you want to make friends: don’t start out by shouting, “Hey, assholes!”
Certainty: I’ve always been chary of people claiming that “God says to . . .” But now we have millions of folks on the Web claiming the wide-angle vision of Yahweh and his claims of omniscience, day in, day out. So we come back to the conundrum, how to be effective if you’re constantly questioning yourself? I’d say the same way I write a play or a novel: throw yourself into the first draft, read it critically, do the second draft, etc. etc. etc., at least to the eighth.

Feel free to call me naive or Old White Man or to post screeds in rebuttal. I’ll probably agree.


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Published on December 01, 2019 16:08

November 25, 2019

Boundaries & Horizons . . .

—From EF—


Recently I read an essay by Barry Lopez in The Sun that impacted me deeply. Barry Lopez is a writer perhaps best known for Arctic Dreams, which won the National Book award in 1986; his most recent work is Horizon, relating his epic travels from the Pacific Northwest to Antarctica, his thoughts on what we have done to our beautiful Earth, and what we can do now.


He floats the concept of contemporary mankind having lost the eternal Bride: the Earth and all parts of it, not just the pretty bits. Lopez has traveled the world, more than 70 countries, and has listened deeply to communities that respect their elders. He counsels the importance of taking the time and focus to listen.


Epics and political campaigns lead us to look for a single powerful hero who can solve everything—if only we find the right one. But Lopez finds more hope in the concept “Leave no one behind.” He uses the example of how starlings accomplish the feats of flight involved in a murmuration. If you’ve never seen one, search on YouTube for murmuration and prepare to be amazed. No single bird is the leader; each one watches the four or five who are closest, and they in turn are watching a different four or five. The whole flock becomes a living organism capable of instant response, and they leave no one behind.


Are we about to leave our natural world behind? Lopez: “However it might be viewed, the throttled Earth—the scalped, the mined, the industrially farmed, the drilled, polluted, and suctioned land, endlessly manipulated for further development and profit—is now our home.” Must it be a broken home, the aftermath of divorce? “Why accept a separation from all the rest of creation? Everybody I spoke with in villages across the Arctic in the seventies and eighties, when I asked them to offer me adjectives for people in my culture, the one word I heard repeatedly was lonely.”


Listening to the land can make a difference, even if it’s wounded. But most of all, leaving no one behind, evolving a culture where no one has to be either among the elect or among the leftovers, where we’re all part of the murmuration. We’re all in the flight together, but only if we watch and listen.


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Published on November 25, 2019 15:41

November 17, 2019

Anniversary . . .

—From CB—


Last Thursday we celebrated our 59th anniversary. Cornish hens, a good Chardonnay, a fire in the fireplace, and Elizabeth suggested a challenge: that we each speak of times—make it seven, as something to aim for—when we recall the other being especially vivid . . . something like that.


For me, speech is a challenge. I’m a terrible writer, a great rewriter, but you don’t get to rewrite the spoken word. It’s just out there kicking and flailing. But I gave it a try. I came up with seven gerunds, picked them out of my old leather hat, and hoped for the best.


***


LOVING – Difficult to speak of, as the hundreds of embraces over the years blend into one embrace whose sweetness amazes. What separates itself in memory is the first. November ‘60 in the back seat of a decrepit Chrysler, Evanston IL, heavy frost on the windows. Done in a minute and lasting a lifetime.


FEEDING – 21,535 dinners on the table or over the cowling of the touring van or in a bowl around the campfire. Well, subtract some where we’re fed by a host or the very few times we eat a restaurant meal. (I do the dishes, at least.) The most vivid memories: in our undergrad days, when she cooks daily for eight fellow students in a summer rooming house. And in our teaching days, laying out a sumptuous after-show meal for our student cast on a South Carolina beach. And conjuring up a delicious soup out of scraps our first night in Poland.


SPEAKING – At Quaker meetings, pagan circles, other gatherings, she would rise to her feet, often with great reluctance, and speak words that flowed from a depth and touched the depth in others. Reluctantly, as afterward she berated herself for “showing off”—a persistence of childhood trauma. Offering gifts is often at a cost, but she offers them.


NURSING – The years I would see my wife giving breast to our infants. Sensing both the pleasure she took in it and the challenge of finding place and time amid rehearsals, travel, performance, and the deadly office work that supported the craft.


MAKING – She’s been the composer, electrician, carpenter, accountant, and general jill-of-all-trades for our complex existence. What I recall mostly are the impossibilities. At the top of a 10-foot ladder, threading electrical conduit among rafters to its fixture. The all-nighter laying out transfer type on a verbose show poster, only to see it peeling up in the dawn. Composing music for 70 songs in three weeks for our 1966 staging of THE BEGGAR’S OPERA. Drilling bolt-holes for a wildly-asymmetrical pipe set for our MEDEA/SACRAMENT. Rebuilding the interiors of our touring vans—well, no, those were pretty straightforward challenges compared with the complexity of a sales-tax form.


DANCING – A rarity, but the memories are vivid. Dragged by another woman into a dance, the two of them circling a candle with madcap ferocity, driving the drummers on and on and on. And a month ago, at a concert by a friend, moving onto the dance floor like the waves we watch in our weekly lunch at the ocean.


ACTING – Dessie, Medea, Liddie, Miss Bleep, Jenny Diver, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Lear’s Fool, Mary Tyrone, the Flounder, dozens of others, all offering vital parts of herself to strangers. And with skills you don’t learn in an acting class: surviving a 12-week tour; coping with a thunderstorm leaking into the center of the auditorium midway through the show; the four-hour setup and two-hour strike sandwiching the 90-minute show; playing a dozen characters in one ten-minute sketch; holding an audience at 9 a.m. in a high school gym; making the five hundredth performance of a piece as fresh as the first.


***


And she had beautiful things to say to me. A good time was had by all.


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Published on November 17, 2019 11:56

November 10, 2019

Father . . .

—From EF—


I am doing my best to assemble the halves of who I am.


Eighteen months ago I met my mother’s son for the first time, thanks to Ancestry DNA. For forty years I had worked to discover my blood-root, the woman whose womb carried me, and though she had died in 1994 I found her present, mirrored in my brother as she was mirrored in me. After the first dizzying rush of discovery, I learned more about her own family, and it all began to feel like a comfortable glove, something my fingers could fit into and feel a special warmth.


That same revelation in the spring of 2018 opened the window to my other half. After all, like everyone else, I had a father; he had children of his own, and I learned in abstract terms who they all were and are. Now, a year and a half later, it is no longer abstract. I have met my father’s daughter, my sister. We spent a very intense twenty-four hours downloading a pair of lifetimes, finding who we were, who we are now, and how we mirror each other. It’s only the beginning.


Now I am finding myself, working hard on putting myself together. It was easy to feel the rush of mother-blood; after all, I am female. Finding the same core in the father-blood is taking more work, so it is a blessing that I have had this time with a sister. I do find a powerful lineage and inheritance (music, electronics, depression), but this is all so new, and there’s a difference between the associations of womb and sperm. I’m groping my way in the dark to come to know him, but he’s in my blood and my bones and my soul.


I stayed overnight in my sister’s house, and as I turned out the light and entered the pathway to sleep, I was becalmed in a swirl of confused perception. I knew a great deal about a mother and a father, and all their ancestors and descendants, but I myself was the only thing they had in common. So who am I? How do I bring this great web of connection into a common focus? I’m working on it.


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Published on November 10, 2019 17:56

November 3, 2019

The Compulsion of Stories . . .

 


—From CB—


With Elizabeth and others, I’ve written 50 produced plays (ye gods, I just counted!), over 200 sketches, 40+ short stories, and now working on the seventh novel—not to mention countless press releases and grant applications (another form of story-telling) and five years of a biweekly blog. I remember that when I wrote my first poem at the age of fifteen, I feared I’d never write anything so good again. Mayhap—dread thought—I haven’t?


Many reasons for writing, intermingled. Produce a best-seller and get invited to parties. Live forever. Reside in a quaint New England village where poets live and take morning walks with your dog. Become attractive. Express yourself and get accepted as such. Avenge yourself. Take your place among the immortals who get dessert. Have fun with words. Transform all the shit you’ve endured into rich fertility. Write what you’d like to read—though by the 8th draft you might be sick of it.


Few of us are likely to admit to any of these. Better that we’re trying to save the world, establish justice, delve into the human condition, interrogate the dominant culture, even make people think. We talk about that stuff a lot, and we try very hard to believe it.


But I’m one of those coots who shave daily with Occam’s razor. At this late stage of development, I’ve come to realize that my chief impetus for telling stories is simply the need to tell stories. I have no idea why. Or wherefore, which means the same as why. Before high school, I was a happy consumer of sports stories and cowboy movies. In high school, it was acting; in college, stage directing. I backed into writing like backing into an exhaust fan, and my backside has been in rotation ever since. My only real fear of death is leaving something unfinished, and since I start a new project before the last one is done, I’m not sure how that interfaces with mortality. It’ll be one of those great books that no one’s ever read, though I’ve written a few of those already.


The narrator of our current novel, set in the early Middle Ages, writes in an aside: “ At times I shy from this story as our donkey shied from a rickety bridge. Yet storytelling is our heartbeat, and stories our breath. We ask not, Why should I breathe?—we simply feel our lungs cry out like a babe demanding suck. So I string out these words like a merchant caravan, trusting they come to safe harbor before the mules go lame. Our priest scowls on my progenitors, the minstrels and mimes. Yet could Our Savior have endured the dusty roads of Palestine without the rude jokes of the fisherfolk who followed Him?”


Some stories are sacred, some are godawful. With luck, they might offer us what we need for survival: a clue to reality. On the other hand, they can con us out of our undies. But somehow we’re compelled to sail between the Scylla of Truth and the Charybdis of Pleasure, and come home warm and toasty.


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Published on November 03, 2019 12:17

November 1, 2019

Fires Again . . .

 —From EF—


Friday, people were already wearing masks downtown; I saw one young woman in a stylish paisley model. The fire was thirty miles north, but the air was already dense. Sebastopol is south and west of the last two years’ infernos, and we have a cooler, damper microclimate that has kept us safe. That was then, this is now.


Saturday we got an evacuation warning, like a weather alert—it means get ready, but don’t panic. So we pulled out a master list and started packing, pulling vital documents, assembling all our backup hard disks, putting together a week’s worth of stuff like vitamins and underwear. We brought the cat carriers into the house, left them open, and sure enough the cats checked out the accommodations.


Come seven p.m., bam, the power went out. We have a short-term battery backup for the computers, so we had time enough to transfer some files and shut everything down safely. Then it was flashlight time. Looking at the list, we were in pretty good shape, and figured we’d finish when we had daylight again. We have a fireplace in our bedroom, so we lit a nice fire and enjoyed some warm quiet time before trying to sleep.


 I put my iPhone beside the bed instead of leaving it downstairs, a wise choice. The first emergency alert came around midnight; the phone lit up and let out three donkey brays. No map, and the text wasn’t very clear, but I understood that the town of Healdsburg was under mandatory evacuation. (That’s half an hour’s drive north.) Then there were two more alerts, adding nearer areas. At 4 a.m. we got the alert that might or might not mean that Sebastopol was on the list, so I put on my clothes and went down to the office. The backup battery had about fifteen minutes left, just time enough to boot the computer and search for a map of the fire emergency areas. Yes. We had to get out.


Conrad started the trips to the car, I got some remaining things from the list, then grabbed a nearby cat and got him into a carrier with surprising ease. At last we were just about out of time and had everything we were going to be able to be able to take. Shadow was calm in his carrier, and all we needed was Garfunkel.


Garfy? Nowhere to be seen. That was odd, because these cats are good buddies and stay close together. I know, because a few times one has sneaked past me into a closet and my alert to let him out was a brother-cat standing watch outside the door. We went from room to room with our flashlights, then went around again looking in all the unlikely places, trying to think where we might have missed. No luck. With a growing sense of dread, I agreed with Conrad that we had to set a hard deadline of fifteen minutes. He took Shadow out to the car.


I’d been avoiding tears but was about to lose it—and suddenly had a thought. Our back room has a guest bed I’d built long ago, two modular twin platforms that can stack to make a day-bed. I got down on my knees with the flashlight, lifted up the bedspread, and sure enough, there were bright green eyes back in the far corner. Now what? The outer frame sits low to the floor; the bed itself has space for a cat but is too low for a human to reach in. Push came to shove, we took the beds apart, hugged the large uncooperative cat and put him into his carrier.


6 a.m., pitch dark, we were trying to get out of town to head south, but even our back county roads were bumper to bumper and not moving at all. We reversed and tried a different back-road route. The cats started crying, doubly agitated by being separated and being subjected to a bumpy ride and the low-frequency rumble of tires. Every time traffic came to a total halt I twisted myself around and got my face close to them, trying to soothe their distress with my cat version of baby-talk. It helped a little.


But where to go? Our son in San Francisco was willing, but their apartment is very small and they have two cats of their own. Friends in Vallejo were out of town, and to complicate matters, there was a new fire in that area. We found a little independent coffee shop on the north side of Petaluma, a tiny area that still had power. While Conrad went in for carry-out coffee, I arranged food, water, and litter-pan in the back of the Prius, then freed the cats. We sipped our coffee, comforted invisible cats huddled under the seats, and tried to be rational.


I got out my phone and started scanning the contacts list for any folks this side of San Francisco. It didn’t take long. I called Beth Craven, who said yes, of course, cats and all, and gave me directions. Their part of Santa Rosa didn’t have power, but there was no threat of evacuation. Beth and John are two of the absolute best theatre professionals in the whole North Bay, and we’ve known them off and on for decades. Friends, colleagues, and best of all, only a half-hour from our own home.


I’m writing this on Monday. The wind will get wild again tonight so predictions are impossible. The good thing is that the valiant firefighters have made progress establishing perimeters to keep it more or less contained. Bless you, Beth and John, and the firefighters, and the shelter volunteers, and all those whose prayers have been pouring out.


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Published on November 01, 2019 12:58