Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 32

Misery . . .

—CB—

I have a cold and I’m miserable.

We’re in the first stage of our month-long tour, having made a hard cross-country drive, 2,800 miles in five days, and now much shorter hops, but I have a cold and I’m miserable.

Sunday, an excellent performance of SURVIVAL in a gallery in Waynesboro VA, lots of hearty laughter, but I have a cold and I’m miserable.

And last night, at The Venue on 35th, a sweet little space in Norfolk VA, we attended an open mike—a tightly-packed audience of 60+, all colors and genders and genres and ages and levels of talent—that sustained a wondrous energy of celebration, and we’ll do SURVIVAL there this evening, though I have a cold and I’m miserable. 

Outdoors it’s hot and muggy and one expects the dog to grow moss, but that doesn’t really bother me, as I already—you get the picture. 

Fortunately, in this show I don’t really do much except off-loading the props, doing a comic intro and running a few light cues: Elizabeth is the workhorse. In a couple of days, when we start doing our readings of GALAHAD’S FOOL, I’ll have to come alive and do my best not to fall into a bronchitic coughing fit midway. But I found in performing KING LEAR that the obligation of running a huge jolt of energy through the frame is highly therapeutic: the germs find themselves on the freeway at rush hour and split pretty fast. 

Meantime, I have my own personal authorization to sit around, bitch and moan, and avoid doing any serious writing, except for a blog about being miserable.

On the Road Again . . .

—From EF—

I’m thinking turtle or snail, writ large. We’re in the final heave-ho of putting our personal and professional necessities into our Prius, providing ourselves with everything we will need for an entire month’s span on the road, away from our bed, fridge, stove, garden, cats, and our increasingly creaky and surly computers.

We’re so damn used to assuming that everything will be within reach, be it fresh garden garlic and veggies for mealtime, or vast digital files of writings and correspondence, or cats to cuddle in times of stress. We’re not neophytes to this process of yanking ourselves out of our nest, but every time is the first time as far as anxiety goes.

Back in the late ‘70s it was vastly more complicated, but it’s like childbirth—time smooths the edges of memory. Way back in the day we set out with toddlers Eli and Johanna and never came home for twelve weeks straight, so you’d assume we’d think this is a piece of cake now. Not.

We have the comfort of a beloved friend who is willing to change her habitation and care for our home and cats, and that’s an amazing grace. And over the years we’ve developed the kind of To-Do Lists and Packing Lists that just require updating, but life is always changing the rules of the game. The ultimate terror is the “what-haven’t-we-thought-of” meme.

But Tuesday morning will come before daybreak, and we will roll out to our beloved HardCore Espresso for a farewell to Sebastopol, and the die will be cast. Whatever we’ve forgotten, we will survive it. On that first day we’ll head east to the magic carpet that is US 50, a simple two-lane blacktop highway of stunning austerity and lonely beauty that gets us just past Salt lake City, where we’ll spring for a motel. At our age, we’re finally abandoning our norm of sleeping in the Prius in truck-stop parking lots.

And then we start counting the rosary of beloveds, too many to enumerate. On this trip we will greet again a friend from our Stanford days, 1963-66. We will spend extended time with a beloved artist and essential friend whom we’ve known from South Carolina in 1966. And we’ll embrace the amazing networker in whose theatre space our daughter took her first baby steps in 1975.

There will be time with a couple whose bond is as strange and enduring as our own, people we knew at a distance when we were all in Lancaster, but have come close to now. We’ll perform and spend the night in the house of a couple who met and ignited during our periodic workshop/playtimes in Philadelphia. There will be a few precious hours with a poet who always stuns us to the core, with whom we’ve been close since our Lancaster days of the 80’s.

Then there’s a couple we worked with in our year-and-a-half immersion in the history of Nevada City, researching, improvising, writing, and producing a play about a searing event in that city’s history. We became bonded members of a sweaty team who brought this story before the citizens who were still disturbed by their history, and created a path toward resolution.

And there are the heroic members of our tribe who have created long-lived and potent theatrical enterprises in such diverse places as Portsmouth, NH, Bloomsburg PA, and West Liberty, IA. Most beloved of all are our ensemble colleagues of Milwaukee’s Theatre X; we had five years together, then they made it shine for thirty more years after we branched off with The Independent Eye. In these days when we sometimes feel we’re sinking beneath the waves, they are an inspiration.

And now I have new family. Turns out I’ve been a Wisconsin girl all along.

These people, these places are our grounding, our connection to family and tribe. We are given the grace, hard-earned, of traveling the bardic road to keep the spark alive. As long as we have the ability to haul our bones out on the road again, we will do it.

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Go, Team!

—From CB—

Team spirit. It has a long, well-endowed history in our national consciousness. The team’s down thirty points in the championship game, the coach makes a stirring half-time speech, and the downtrodden losers come roaring back. The Marine squad faces certain death at the hands of the yellow fanatics, the squad leader makes a speech, and— You get the picture.

The same dynamic unites disparate tribes. The faith-prosperity evangelist and the best-selling New Age guru share the philosophy that we create our own reality: think it hard enough and it comes true. What’s needed, first, is a sense of the team, the tribe, the collective identity, and secondly the charismatic leader. Sounds a bit fatuous if not fascistic, but that’s who we are. Including, I hasten to add, we progressives.

I can’t adduce evidence to prove this point beyond my own gut feeling. The need for tribe, for team, for community is at the core of our human existence. We’ve always been tribal folk, for better and often for worse. It may not have always been US vs. THEM, but at least it’s always been US. As we’re divided by the economy, by the deification of competition, by family dispersal, by individualist ideology, by a diversity wider than Imperial Rome, the hunger is greater and greater.

An appeal of theatre to its practitioners, apart from aesthetics or career, is that each cast forms a temporary tribe with a clear objective: survival through opening night. And oddly, the senior class play doesn’t rely, as does the football team, on competition or victory. Still, the football team boasts the stadium full of fans, the cheerleaders doing ecstatic backflips, and write-ups in the local paper. It’s the sports team that extends “team spirit” to the masses—even though a win or a loss carries no material impact whatsoever to the lives of the fans.

The implications? In the political realm, my proposition is that, to a large degree, we vote for our team. Issues matter strongly to a few, but the red baseball cap matters more, and you’ll readily forego your own interests for the sake of wearing the baseball cap. All that’s required is a well-crafted rationalization, supplied by the think-tank, to be repeated three times a day and just before bedtime. Plus, an opponent who insists on talking about wonky stuff like race and class and income gaps and the spotted owl.

But I’m not talking about dimwit drop-outs in battered ‘82 pickups. I’m talking too about well-educated friends—and myself—who are fully aware of the issues and appalled at the Great Orange Lord of the Death Star. We need our tribe too. My fear is that we don’t know that we need it, and so we don’t understand that others do.

Somehow we feel that the issues will unite us, and if Democrats trumpet the most progressive agenda, we’ll answer the call and surge back to win the game despite the current 96-point deficit. Sanders, Warren, Booker—anyone who bats .999 on the issues. I’d like that too. But it won’t be enough. We also need our distinctive cheers and slogans and baseball caps.

Not that I mean this literally. I’m not going to wear a fucking baseball cap, not at my age. I’m only stating the challenge. Rage is a great short-term launch fuel, but it only lasts so long, and it can easily turn against your own allies. Right now I see the team of Abe Lincoln Senior High, my alma mater, running all over the field, tackling each other, not knowing where the ball is, and the cheerleaders debating the fine points of the issues instead of yelling, “Go, team!”

I’m not optimistic, though I’d really like to be. In high school we always had a “pep rally” in the auditorium before a game. The dippiest thing I ever sat thru. But now I’d welcome an upsurge of pep.

I don’t have the faintest idea how it comes about. I only know that we have to kick our addition cold turkey. The addiction is to the sense of “Messiah.” We have elevated the Presidency to godhood. It’s kingship, it’s Big Daddy (a handicap to females), it’s the Second Coming. It’s a fatal addiction. Yet again, as I said, it’s ours and we have to own it. Maybe we need our Messiah figure, though we’ll surely fight to the death over who will occupy that impossible post. I would much rather that all prospective candidates might come together, resolve that whoever prevailed they would meet weekly over beer and pizza, and listen to one another. That might be the starting point of pep.

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A Passage . . .

 

—From EF—

I’ve crossed over. New experience, again.

When we’re writing for the stage, or writing a novel, I participate in the creation, sometimes by co-creating structure, sometimes by providing verbal improvisation to develop character or story, and always in the developmental and line-editing process. With short stories, however, I come into the room after the party is in progress. CB invites the people, sets the scene, opens the door, and then I join the crowd.

Right now, probably as an aftermath of having been at the Kate Wolf Festival, I suddenly had a story march into my brain, set up camp, and demand to be heard. I’m not used to being a primary originator, but I obediently created a new Word document, sat down, and listened.

Back when we were first writing our memoir (Co-Creation: Fifty Years in the Making), I had to get over myself a lot, ditch the creepy-crawlies I’d get when reading what I’d written, and learn to take personally what we’d been telling improvising actors for decades: fire the editor on your shoulder, assume that five valuable minutes out of an hour’s work is a titanic success, and learn to be shameless. Eventually I began to find my own voice.

Now I find myself accidentally pregnant, and I’m not at all sure how to react. But there is precedent.

In 1962, Conrad needed a musical score for his student production of Prometheus Bound and innocently asked me to do one. I freaked and said, “You’re nuts.” I’d been a keyboard performing seal for all my life until I left home for college, but I’d taken a required composition course that, to my relief, proved I had no creative ability whatever.  He was implacable, so we did an end-run by getting an instrument I’d never used before, a Japanese koto, and I found at rehearsals I could put my fingers on these thirteen strings and music just poured out.

In 1972, after twelve years of our strong partnership with him as director and me as actor and often composer, I suddenly proposed to our new performing ensemble, Theatre X, that I should direct a production of Beckett’s Endgame. In the early Sixties, as early-marrieds, I found the myth of Sisyphus to be something that could help me survive my massive depressions. My next hero was Beckett, and I found myself obsessed with the sly ironic blackness of Endgame. I had to do it, and I did. Conrad was a memorable Clov.

That was a one-off: I’m a helluva good actor-coach and dramaturg, but I never again had the itch to direct. We continued creating new works regularly, but I never initiated one myself, until I did, in 1984. We’d scheduled a production of Waiting for Godot, which took the cream of our male actor crop, and we wondered what to do with our wonderful core of actresses.

I have no idea what planted the idea for Summer Sisters in my head, but it sprouted, thrived, and flowered. Three women whose only connection was summer work at a pizza parlor on Cape Cod met annually to reconnect, and this play was the occasion of a new marriage. The fourth character was a young daughter whose meddling with a forbidden light switch (Hands off, we don’t know what it does!) flips the three women into past scenes that only the audience sees. As the young girl, our own daughter Johanna became the toast of Lancaster PA theatre in 1984.

This virgin short story is a new challenge. I was apprehensive about how I’d react to our normal collaborative editing process, but we have sailed smoothly ahead. I haven’t raised hackles or gone into a defensive snarling crouch yet, a situation that’s as amazing to me as the seamless way in which the first draft rolled out. So I mean it when I say, with a grin, “I’ve crossed over.” By the way, I love this story.

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—From CB—Two experiences this week bring forth thoughts ...

—From CB—

Two experiences this week bring forth thoughts of how we perceive so-called reality. The first, starting prep for work on the 3rd draft of a new novel MASKS; the second, taking our cats to the vet.

The second first: just a routine trip for a standard round of inoculations. But we have only one carrier, barely large enough for a single cat, so we make one trip in the morning, another in the afternoon. Garfunkel first, and he’s freaked: the most substantial meowing we’ve heard from the one who’s normally a rickety squeaker. But he settles once we’re there. And Shadow, usually a bundle of twitches, weathers it with ultimate cool.

And yet, with both, I’m drawn into seeing—or trying to see—reality as they do. What is it to be squeezed into a cage, carried out to the car, bounced along the back roads of west county, brought into an office of myriad beastly odors, poked with a needle, brought home? And separate from your brother, your snuggle-partner, your fight-mate? And then I read news of families in a foreign land, large men in uniform, hallways, holding tanks, ripped apart, caged—what are the cat’s-eye nightmares of these moments?

Back home, our cats seemed not to mind. A consequence of their enlightenment or their lesser intelligence?

And then the new novel. It’s been through two drafts, but it’s time to take it in to the vet. Among other things, we’re making a chapter-by-chapter log of what needs description. Having written plays all our lives, where the description of a setting can be “a tawdry working-class living room” or “a blasted heath,” it’s a challenge, at ages 76 and 78, to goose up your skills in the many facets of the fiction-writing decathlon for an event you’ve never trained for. How do I begin to describe the crummy 8th century inn they sleep in or the wispy old innkeeper who offers them figs?

My cats give me counsel. If they were writing the story of their trip to the vet, they’d write their point-of-view—not the way God or their master saw it, but the images, the smells, the sound of a confused and lonesome cat in a cage. The reader doesn’t care about the issues of Modern Dog on the wall rack. The vital thing is how Garfy, from his perspective, sees it.

At any rate, that’s the theory that guides us in our presumptuous lunge into this storytelling mode. And it possibly has implications in the political realm. How do our antagonists see the world? What compels them to see it that way? What cat-carrier cage are they in? What are they getting stuck with? Will a bombing campaign really work? Empathy does not imply agreement: it’s only the first step in crafting action.

Our cats did survive, and we’ll start revisions on Chapter 1 this Monday.

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A Weekend of Music . . .

—From EF—

This was quite a weekend. I’m conflicted about it. My heart was out on the squares and streets where people were risking (or inviting) arrest to show their support for basic decency in a flagrantly indecent administration, to do their best to protect actual families from those who trumpet family values. I wasn’t there with them.

We were at the Kate Wolf Festival at Black Oak Ranch north of Laytonville, CA, Mendocino County, where the temperature was fizzing at 105 degrees and shade was rare, even from the black oaks. We were among about 3500 people who crave contact with the whole folk music spectrum, who are willing to forego internet and wi-fi in favor of dancing with strangers and exchanging sweaty hugs and listening to storytellers who use voice and wood and steel to keep our hearts alive.

It was not free from political expression, though. From John McCutcheon to the Indigo Girls, from Nina Gerber to Los Lobos, from Wavy Gravy to Tom Paxton, and even from those no longer dancing in the dust (Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Utah Phillips, and Kate Wolf herself), there was mention.

Look up the lyrics to Indigo Girls’ “Go Go Go” and then imagine it with their huge voices and full-throated backup.

Let John McCutcheon bring you to tears with his story about an Australian electrician.

The heat’s brutal, there’s no AC, the ground is shaped by gophers and the PortaPotties are a long walk, but still all generations are there, especially the elders. Lotta white hair on both audience and artists. And nobody, nobody gets that vibe going stronger than Wavy Gravy, unless it’s Baby Gramps, and when you get them both going, riffing together, maybe everybody should be wearing Depends.

So we were just our own big/little demonstration, turning the love and courage up to eleven, waiting to get home and Go Go Go.

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Cuts . . .

—From CB—

No way to write anything coherent this week, as we’re immersed in a great vat of prose. Heading out to a four-day music festival on Thursday, but before that trying to finish another edit on a new novel Blind Walls to enter in several contests—deadline June 30. We’d thought we were finished with it, but every revisiting reveals more that wants to happen and more that wants to get junked.

So this week, the blog consists of out-takes. It’s always hard to excise passages that feel like genius but just don’t fit, but hey, what’s a blog for if not to publish stuff that makes no sense. So I’ve put together a very brief collage (brief at least by comparison to the full scrap-heap) of stuff that we’ve cut in the last three days. So enjoy it now, as it’ll never see the light of day.

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*** Her wages were more than generous, and the working conditions—rest breaks, overtime, sick leave—couldn’t be matched anywhere he knew of. For his money, the upper classes could use more of her eccentricities.

***   How could I know this? Simple: it was in my head. The truth is what’s in your head.

 *** He saw her lips flatten, her eyes widen and cross slightly, the signal that she was about to give an order. One of the carpenters did a hilarious imitation, though Marty as foreman warned him about it.

*** A half hour into the tour and my fancies were playing hopscotch. My neighbor’s dog would have those moments, barking and barking when nothing was there. At least I refrained from barking at these phantoms.

*** Why I ever plunked down good money for those paintings when one could ride out any day and look at the ocean itself and smell it and hear the gulls, all for free!

*** I fled from the playground asphalt, cheeks wet with shame, kids’ laughter burning my ears. Mother would look at the rip in the “nice-looking slacks” she insisted I wear to school and shake her head sadly.

*** “I’m one of those Impressionist painters who paint all sorts of colors side by side to create the vision of air and sunlight, though I myself finger-paint in oily murk.”

*** And then I might have told her, and told my fellow travelers, that tears were bullshit, that they never worked, that nothing would wash away. Yet—

*** “I’m told I’m obsessed with spying on servants. I have special windows, they say. But then why should I not? Ladies should always have a hobby.”

*** There were rogue scenes I remembered that I had never seen—flakes of dandruff from my harried scalp or vague mumbles of light on my dry dust retinas. I never saw them because they never happened: Sophia hearing the outbreak of war and spilling her tea; a reporter knocking at the door, drenched by a chamber pot; Isabella announcing her engagement to a dwarf; Chuck finding the ominous gardener dead; the old lady slamming the door on Teddy Roosevelt, his mustache drooping, his nose blooming red; an astrologer urging that she remove the roof to access the stars.

*** only an arid prairie yearning for rain

*** take some leftover ribs from the fridge

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There are about 10,000 words of debris like that for every novel or play we’ve ever written. I tell myself that I keep them because they might fit somewhere, sometime: Flying Dutchman blurbs that never come into port. I would guess that every writer has them, though I don’t know that many writers.

And now I’ve just cut two different final sentences for this blog post, speculating on why I do it at all. Fact is, I have no idea. I’d better just leave it there.

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My Fathers . . .

—From EF—

It’s Father’s Day. I’m thinking of two fathers: the Known Father and the Imagined Father. I honor them both, and love them both, in different ways. Those who follow our blog know that just before Mother’s Day, I learned about my birth-mother, and since then I have met her son, my brother. (“Half-brother” is technically correct, but “brother” is closer to the heart.) The decisive Ancestry test is still in process on my father’s side, but given the DNA match with a half-nephew, I can already be sure where I came from, and I am learning to know my Imagined Father.

I was obsessive about finding my Imagined Mother and spent forty years in the search. For me, it was always about my mother, about finding that link to the past that I could only see reflected in my own daughter. Of course I knew a father had to be involved, but that was a fact, not a feeling. It was as if cells in my body remembered being held warm in a womb, and that after the tumult of childbirth, my mother had given me my name, Elizabeth, and then had said good-bye. A mother is nine months; a father is perhaps only a few minutes.

My Known Father was a beautiful man, and he did his best for me, but his total heart-felt bond was with the woman who became his wife. He gave me precious gifts. I was allowed and encouraged to learn to use all the tools in his wood-working hobby shop. I was allowed, even as a small child, to roam free and explore all the rural countryside around our Indiana house. When my musical precocity suggested that I should be allowed, in my early teens, to take the train by myself to Chicago to continue piano lessons, he overruled my mother’s instinct to say no. Those were amazing gifts.

But he couldn’t allow himself to see the damage wrought by alcohol and abuse. They just didn’t fit the portrait of the woman he loved with all his heart, and in the long run, he stood with her, and not with me. He couldn’t do both. I wish it hadn’t been so, but I can’t blame him. I loved him, and I love his memory.

And my Imagined Father? I have no idea if he ever knew I existed, but for sure I knew he didn’t continue a relationship with his lover. He found another mate, as my mother did, and had three children, all of whom are still living. If fate is kind, I will meet them in August when I return to Milwaukee. I have already been corresponding with his grandson, my nephew.

From my mother I inherited good looks, a lively spirit, a musical ability, and a gift for languages. I have yet to find my dark side reflected in her, and I may find it in my father. It has been a difficult gift to carry, but that darkness has made me what I am. I look forward to discovering his other gifts. Thank you, Imagined Father, and thank you, Known Father, I love you both.

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Galahad’s Quest . . .

—From CB—

Sunday was our official book launch for our novel Galahad’s Fool. Perfect venue: Main Stage West, the small theatre in downtown Sebastopol where we produced The Tempest, Drake’s Drum and King Lear. We read from the book, performed a couple of puppet sketches (since the book is about a puppeteer), answered questions, and then laid on salmon cups and prosecco. Enormously satisfying.

And now there’s the huge tsunami of anxiety: what now?

I’ve never been subject to genuine depression. I’ve seen it at close hand, and I’ve known the tweets of it, but for me, it’s been more like a condiment spread over daily reality, imparting a flavor to my work, but never of sufficient thickness to blunt my neurotic obsession with the next project and the next and the next. We both believe intensely in our projects—or if we lose faith we explore it till we find the right channel—but the actual getting it out to the public arena, gaining the audience for the play or the readership of the book, that’s in itself an art that we have yet to master. I can write a slam-dunk press release, but I’m about twenty years behind finding what sells here & now. To date we’ve had four superlative pre-pub reviews of the book and wonderful personal responses—and sold 41 copies.

Launching into a new art form at age 76 & 78—well, there’s the craft itself, and then there’s the peer subculture, the marketing methods, the genre identities, the smell factor—everything that influences the moment when someone sees our blurb and decides to spend fifteen bucks for a print version or $2.99 for the e-book and, most important, to sacrifice the time to enter our collective head.

Thus far, the promotion has involved a vast amount of work, and it may pay off, though I feel at times that I’d have to commit a major felony to attract interest. And work continues on edits of two more novels, Chemo and Blind Walls, and the start of the third draft of Masks, so the decision’s been made to run this marathon many times, till we have to do it on walkers. I guess the lesson-in-life that we keep learning over and over is this: it never gets easier, never ever. My mom thought maybe I could be a barber, and Elizabeth started pre-med, but we wound up choosing this.

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Truth . . .

—From EF—

Truth. Why does it matter? Maybe part of it is that when we communicate with each other, we need a level playing field. What you say and what I hear should be at least approximately the same thing. We all fib sometimes, and probably everyone has told a whopper at least once. But when you look things up in official records, you expect that what you find will be factual. Nowadays there’s reason to suspect that what’s bandied and blared by pundits and spokespersons might be less than grounded, but a marriage license or birth record or death certificate is assumed to be factual.

Ha.

This is yet another shoe dropping in my search saga. I searched for decades for a mama named Mary Fuller, because the Brooklyn birth index for 1940 listed me as Elizabeth Fuller, and my mother’s name on the adoption decree was Mary Fuller.

There never was a Mary Fuller. My mother’s name was Elizabeth Day. Coincidentally, the New York attorney who arranged the adoption was named Joseph Day Lee.

Once an adoption is finalized, the original birth certificate is sealed (in most states), and is forever hidden unless a court order is obtained. But in my case, somebody went the extra mile of filing false information, and had the power to do that in official governmental records.

I’m way less concerned about who bent the truth than I am that it was possible and accepted. They say we’re now in a post-truth world. I say it’s been a long time coming.

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