Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 9

Honey. . .

—From EF—

I’m in the process of writing the second book of my memoir, and getting closer to the beginning of our second Great Heave — having our own theatre building again. The first one was in Milwaukee with the newborn Theatre X, and that was an epic change. The night we opened our space to the public, I got pregnant—after many years of trying in vain.

The second theatre was in Lancaster PA, a gorgeous candy-box of a space. It was the wig-bubble of an interior decorating firm that wanted a tasteful setting for their wares. They bought two adjoining two-story buildings, combined them and then removed ceilings to make it a two-story space. Adding a curved staircase to an upper balustraded walkway halfway was overkill, but now it was ours: it felt as if we should be performing Mozart. We renovated it into a beautiful little theatre, and I remember the great lustful surge toward our opening as I slogged through day after day and week after week of meeting with officials who all needed to be groomed. You have no idea how many impediments there can be to using something for a theatre.

And how many contributions it takes to pay the bills. I’ve always been our company’s chief accountant, and I remember with great fondness writing those contributions in the ledger—scads of tens and twenty-fives, sometimes fifty, and the astonishing thousand. I hand-wrote every name, remembered every face, and warmed with gratitude.

Then we moved to Philadelphia, renovated a third theatre with an apartment in the back, reveled in being part of an active theatre community, and kept our art and our bank account alive by jumping in the van and hauling ass around the country. So many miles, so many people—memories that formed a heart-scrapbook. And then we moved west, to my beloved California.

In writing the memoir all these images come flooding in, and sometimes waking at dawn I find myself struggling to swim to the surface of my present world. So many layers, all of them flowing into each other. In the real world I’m in the final stages of the California Sales Tax report. That’s the heart of our work now, what we write and publish. Live performance sank with Covid, though we have dreams…

I’m logging the names of people who bought books in 2022. It’s like the building contributions from 1982, I know every name, I can see every face. I guess that’s the opposite of mass marketing, but so be it. I love the warm hit I get from seeing those names and places. These are my people, my colleagues, my co-conspirators, my friends. They’re our tribe. We made a journey last fall to visit as many as we could, and we hope to do it again this coming year. Love is sticky as honey, and just as sweet.        

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Grunting Along. . .

—From CB—

This morning, making coffee, we got into a spat—a trivial thing but one of those moments that happen over the course of sixty-two years, when you just can’t let go, when words elicit a reply that elicits more words, and on and on, like a hot potato you can’t let drop. Sometimes its very triviality makes it all the more toxic: what fools we, to be stuck on this merry-go-round.

It ground to a halt, both a bit pissed and wanting to drink our coffee, and then Elizabeth said, “Could we dis-gruntle now?”

Then followed a dialogue on the oddity of disgruntlement as an active verb: to disgruntle. During the course of which, we dis-gruntled.

I’m not one to believe that to believe that conscious changes in language change anything—that’s a disgruntlement for another time. But in the case of disgruntlement/disgruntle I could make an exception, at least on a personal level. The former is a static state, anchored in a solid, two-ton -MENT. The latter is active, implying though not stating a direct object: ourselves or me. It suggests change.

What would our marriages or our politics be without disgruntlement as a fixed entity? Both sides of the growing fence: we vote for the cat who appeals to it: he/she best channels my anger—no, not anger, that implies being out of control, and most of us want to sit down to dinner. We call it outrage, fervor, commitment to a righteous cause, but most of us don’t go out on the street with guns.

Call it whatever, rage is a great first stage as a booster rocket, but it won’t get you all the way to the Moon.

A more accurate term would be disgruntlement, and I feel it would be an improvement—whether on the national scene or in the kitchen—for more of us to dis-gruntle. Though granted, this might prove a formidable sacrifice for those of us who like to grunt.

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It’s All in the Timing

—From EF—

Watching the endless but ever-changing procession of waves at the ocean today, I realized that I was seeing a lesson on how to deliver comedy. I love the muscular foamy wham-bam of a breaking wave almost as much as a good belly-laugh, so I watch closely as they develop. Sometimes the ones that look promising as they come in peter out with a small snort, and others develop last-minute burly shoulders and rock the cliff walls.

I think good comedy, whether it’s solo stand-up or Mike Nichols directing Neil Simon, has a constant undercurrent of unlimited energy. The ocean is doling itself out to you wave by wave, but what’s out there is immense, unlimited, and unpredictable. I’ve done a lot of classic and tragic roles—Lady Macbeth, Hedda Gabler, Medea, Inanna—but probably in terms of percentage of stage hours most of my work has been comedy, much of it our own creation.

Building a satisfying belly-laugh for an audience is not unlike surfing. For starters, it’s a helluva lot of fun. It takes a keen sense of tempo and balance, and if you fall off, you don’t feel so hot. It starts way back in what feels like relatively calm waters, but you can feel the molecules itching and you try to sense their path. You work moment by moment with what you feel from the audience and how you can nurture and shape that. In my experience a lot comes from building a sense that the performer is intensely alive to the audience in small ways and responds to everything. It could be as silly and simple as mirroring an audience sneeze by scratching your ear, in time and on the beat.

Let’s say you’re watching a promising swell coming in. There are two small rocks in its path and then a big one. If it lets its peak get sharp the moment before it starts to curl, out at the first small rock, it will break to foam at that point and by the time it gets to the big rock it’s lost its oomph. The swell that resists the little rock’s giggle and keeps barreling on will crest just as it hits the big time, and it’s boffo.

And then there’s the follow-through. One big swell will hit the big rock, fire off a huge spray, and then deflate. Another one that might look just the same hits the big rock, goes boom, and seems to inspire the rest of the swell that continues to the south to keep a crest of foam unfurling all along the line in a long white ruffle. No two of them do the same thing, because they’re all reacting to a dynamic that never repeats.

It’s ticklish doing this on stage. You bring your own energy, you tease out the tendrils of what the audience has brought to the moment, and you know you’re building a swell. You’ve got a laugh line, but it’s not the major one. If your timing allows the immediate laugh to get big, you’re going to have to start the next laugh from scratch. But if you respond to the first audience snorts by speeding up a little and riding over them, teasing with more of your own energy, you get more snorts. It’s up to you how long to do that—too long, and it all falls flat. Catch the exact right moment, and you release three surges at the same time, and there’s not a dry seat in the house.

I know this in my bones from all my years on stage. It’s a grand feeling seeing how well the ocean does it.

 

Purpose. . .

—From CB—

Why do you write? Not a stupid question—one that comes up endlessly in online writers’ groups—but generally one to be dodged. You can contemplate it for hours, turn it over and around and about, or you can write.

I’ve always found my own answers flippant or bloated, sometimes bits of both. But I guess my reluctance to face the question stems from not wanting to be limited by my answer. I don’t only want to entertain or to change the world or to get famous—from time to time I may want any of those, but in the words of that esteemed Western Cole Porter song, “Don’t fence me in.”

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about it more. Into my 80’s, I don’t want to accumulate more clutter for my survivors, and words are pretty lightweight. And something more. If you vowed to post on Facebook every cat photo on the face of Earth, people might intuit a purpose (to amuse, to assert cats’ rights, etc.), but your focus would be on your task. For me, writing is like that vow.

I’m returning from an overnight trip to see a John McCutcheon concert. He’s a prolific songwriter and superb performer, well worth the three-hour drive each way. Now in his 70’s, it’s an extremely fertile time for him, he said. And I wondered—whether it’s cat photos or songs or stories—if we simply share a need to proclaim that we’re still alive.

Maybe it’s not much different from the kid who gouges his initials into the school desk or the guy who writes his stories and songs with bullets. Our method cause less damage in asserting our existence, though we garner fewer headlines.

But hearing McCutcheon, I also felt a connection of purpose. His best work creates an empathy with others; I have a chronic urge to understand, from the inside, characters I don’t know, don’t want to know, but at least to empathize. I could not personally, as St. Francis is said to have done, kiss the leper, might not even give him a buck. But at least I want to try to see him.

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New Year…

—FROM EF—

Well, hello, New Year! We’ve just had a week of glorious rain, and then today is golden sun and blue skies—for just this day. Tomorrow we will return to blessed rain. I am profoundly grateful that this year’s fire season was a dud up here. In other places, not, and that is a grief, but I’ll take the blessing here at full value.

No, we didn’t earn a hangover. CB had been recovering from a mild Covid episode, but may be experiencing the “Pavloxid bounce” since he’s suddenly engulfed in profound fatigue. I have no idea how long this will last, but it’s a regression to the onset of his illness. What is, is. I am holding to the thought that this, too, will pass.

I always have a span of difficult dreams at this time of year, and am always glad when the rising of the light lifts me out. Last week I had a corker, beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. When I jolted awake, I was still immersed in what felt like a neural fireworks, streaks of light and webs of sticky electricity. I’ve only once before had to do this kind of battle to come back to grounding, and it was epic.

I had to talk myself in and down, talking out loud—your name is Elizabeth Fuller, you’re 82 years old, you live in Sebastopol, you’re in your upstairs bedroom. Conrad was still positive for Covid and was sleeping downstairs, so I was alone. It took a while for me to flail myself out of the electric web and be able to see the dim light of the early dawn, and my heart rate was slow to slow.

The only other time I had to talk myself down like this was after CB had his open-heart surgery, and I had invited all our beloveds to send healing energy. I crouched in a corner of the family waiting room of the hospital, used all the magical skills I knew to open myself as a node, and waited. I felt the rush of energy, and when the surgeon came to tell us it had gone well, I embraced our kids, who had come for the vigil, and we went downstairs to celebrate with a breakfast. I didn’t close the gate; bad magical practice. That night, every demon from the west side of hell clamored in my brain, and all I could do was keep chanting: help me. Help me. I can’t come through this, help me. I came through it, and understood it later.

So this is a new year, and my mind and my brain are ready for a reset. What’s to come? I want to be ready, tuned in, able to face whatever comes. I’m attuned to the possibility that it is likely to be hairy, but I take comfort from an old movie we watched last night, “Holiday.” In an amazing final shot, Cary Grant (who was a child acrobat) sees the woman who has captured his heart coming around a corner toward him. He has just done a handstand, for reasons unknown, and embarks on a back-flip as she comes into view. He vaults into the back-flip, sees her coming, and doesn’t complete the flip into standing up. Instead, he sees her, reacts, and falls flat on his face on the floor. It’s the perfect comic completion.

I hope to enter this new year in the spirit of Cary Grant’s back-flip. Make yourself vulnerable, see the path into your best life, and fall flat on your face in tribute.      

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Covid and Christmas. . .

—FROM CB—

So at last, despite five vaccinations, assiduous masking, etc. I join the Covid statistics. I’ve tested positive three days now, Elizabeth still negative, despite our living in each other’s pockets.

Symptoms are very mild. Fatigue, spans of coughing, that’s it, plus a little red line on the test kit. I’ve been prescribed pavloxid, which seems to help. In fact the whole testing and diagnosis has been a relief. I’d been lying down for short naps more and more, but just assumed that was simply old age rushing in as a king tide. Feeling the fatigue drain out of my limbs—with the pills but also with the excuse of the positive test—has actually raised my spirits.

Of course it’s hampered our social life, such as it is. For the moment we’ve canceled our daily trips to the gym, also a small neighborhood celebration of the Solstice. I’ve had to reschedule an eye appointment. But one advantage of having very little social life is that there’s not much to disrupt.

Christmas really isn’t a factor for us. We haven’t had a tree since being a pet-prone household—a rampant dog in Philly and now two cats. Our celebration of holidays—including our own birthdays—has always been irregular. Some ritual celebrations, certainly, but unconnected to religious belief.

I should say that I have deep respect for people’s religious devotion, insofar as it promotes human happiness and love. For me, religions are all based on myth, and their depth and beauty tend to be betrayed when, as often happens, people insist on their literal reality.

Christmas, for me, is about the celebration of birth. The story told by the anonymous author of the Gospel of Luke, who certainly wasn’t an eyewitness, is extraordinary. The humble birth of a babe who will redeem humankind—to me, every birth has that potential, every birth is a miracle. And part of that story is the slaughter that follows: the unending killing of human potential on the altar of power. The escape, the flight, the return, the very long trek from Galilee to Jerusalem and up to Golgotha. And a resurrection in our hearts.

That’s what it is for me. For others, it’s a memory of oppression in hideous Sunday School. Or the stench of religiou that’s corrupted millions of lives. Or an occasion for chortle. So be it. I’m only speculating as the virus surges in me, as the antibodies form, as I wait out the word.

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Solo. . .

—From EF—

My mind let slip the fact that I was overdue for my “solo day.” This is a very nice practice CB and I have done for quite a while, to take a monthly break from living and working in each others’ pockets 24/7 to refresh our knowledge of who each of us is, at the core. I’d looked forward to going to the SFMOMA to see the Icelandic installation “Visitors” again, for maybe the 8th or 9th time; it had just begun a repeat run after its 2016-17 conquest of the entire upper floor. Covid has made visits to San Francisco more problematic, since hostels are not a current option for us. I immediately checked out the availability website for the sweetest close-by campground I know, Bicentennial.

I love that place. It’s only three tent sites, a little pocket gem nestled behind the Marin foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. No bells and whistles, one porta-potty and three picnic tables, very cheap, and most of the times I’ve been there I’m the only one. No traffic, no tourists, no noise, snuggled on a wooded hillside, it’s like a meditation center; it’s so wonderful it feels illegal. I was very surprised to find that during my target week it was almost fully-booked. I had not looked carefully at the dates for “Visitors” and thought it was closing in January of 2023, so my time was limited. I immediately booked for Friday night.

Thursday night my camping preparations were complete and I had a nice late-night schmooze with Conrad by the bedroom fireplace. As usual, I snuggled in his direction once we were in sleep-mode, then turned over to my usual right-side sleep-pose, facing the big eastern glass doors. Wham. The moon was past full but still mighty, and the white vertical blinds were blazing with woodcut-sharp outlines of the pine boughs.

I was so startled by this sudden display that sleep fled for quite a while. That was OK. I found myself revisiting my many late-night walks with the moon, usually at festivals, barefoot on soft sandy paths in the woods, happy, safe, and moon-struck. For most of the first part of my life I was terrified of the dark, and once I got past that, the dark became one of my sweetest friends. I avoided flashlights and developed what I called night-vision. I must have drifted for an hour from Starwood in upper New York to Stones Rising in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania to Firedance in the Santa Cruz mountains, walking the night barefoot in their woods. It was an ecstatic journey.

The next day, yes, a joyous reunion with the The Visitors, an hour-long multi-screen video created by Icelandic musicians in a huge rural New York mansion. There’s a wonderful article from the Washington Times that gives a clear and loving glimpse into what they did.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2021/the-visitors-ragnar-kjartansson-oral-history/

(Later, I found I hadn’t read the SFMOMA flyer dates carefully. It will be there for a whole year. Think about going to see it.)

Then I more or less slept at Bicentennial, waking at one point to a blazing clear view of the constellation Orion. I still think of it as the Irish constellation, because when I was I kid I thought it was called O’Brien.

The next day, Saturday, we had the first in-person meeting of our Oral Tradition Poetry Salon in three years. It was two hours of intense reconnection.

I was so overstimulated that I don’t think I slept Saturday night, and I don’t regret it at all. Now I’m looking forward to a small Solstice circle with our across-the-street neighbors. For a dark season in a dark time, the light is surely rising.

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Art and Age. . .

—From CB—

On Facebook, a friend posted an article, but the link didn’t work for me. Very much wanted to read it for personal reasons, but instead I’ll have to write it. Or at least what comes floating to the top. The topic: what makes aged artists keep doing it? Clearly, it concerns me, as I’m one of those people behaving in a most irrational way.

Or maybe not. My grandfather was a farmer and continued active work into his 90s. So maybe it’s artists and farmers. True, we both grow things that are subject to varying tastes: some people don’t like my plays, others don’t like Grandpa’s beef. And I’ve never ventured to stage a Brussels sprout.

I’m treading water here. It’s hard to face this question. My work has been for the stage, lesser for radio, now pretty much prose fiction. I’ve done good work in all, have received awards and praise, have a resume ten miles long, and am utterly unknown. I doubt I could be hired to stage a dog-and-pony show.

And I’m 81. I spent the morning writing on the second draft of a novel (our tenth) and will start tomorrow on the layout of my third chapbook. Last night I dreamt of designing a set (I know not for what) and setting up chairs for an outdoor clown show. The urge persists.

The subhead of the article I couldn’t read maybe says it all: it’s the work. You don’t have money or fame to propel you, you’ve fallen off the list of people-who-matter, your friends and colleagues are preceding you out the door—but you have a craft, so you do it.

It’s probably spurred by survival instinct. You won’t live forever, of course, and expecting the work to survive is a bit like the guy we met once—custodian in a college dorm—whose numerologist told him he’d soon write a best-seller. He’d never written a thing, had no intention even of making the effort, but the numbers never lied. Sure, it could happen. I might win the Lottery tomorrow, even without playing it.

But there’s a deep joy in the sweat of the brain. I don’t mean pleasure: I love a good meal or a romp in bed—that’s pleasure—but struggling over a second draft when you know there’s going to be a third or a fourth… Better just pet the cat. Joy can be pleasure, and pleasure joy, but they’re not the same. Joy for me is doing what I feel I’m meant to do. For me, that’s giving birth.

Giving birth to MICA. Giving birth to DESSIE. Giving birth to MATCHBOOKS. Manifesting whatever’s next in line. Those who achieve fame or fortune or immortality, those who find a vast audience—well, more power to you. I do what I do, and I’ll do it as long as I can.

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Going Deep. . .

—From EF—

Yes, Virginia, Conrad and I do sometimes have energetic arguments, bolstered by the knowledge that for more than sixty years we have always worked them out. The recent one was on the way home from the ocean last Sunday where I remarked that I didn’t understand how I could’ve taken honors in debate competitions in high school when I couldn’t remotely sustain a conversation about the (IMHO) devastating mindset of a large segment of our body politic. I retreated by pulling the “I’ve got to quit here, I can’t avoid talking from my gut.”  

I’ve been thinking about that. My entire adult life has been bipolar, in a way. From the get-go I’ve been the penny-pincher, the bookkeeper, then the accountant combing the trial balance for possible errors before the audit. It’s been a huge relief to have folded the tents of The Independent Eye, no longer making payroll reports because there has not been a payroll for a long time. The old habits hang on, though, and I still am aware of things like cash flow and I quail at the thought of MAGA’s lust for the mutilation of Social Security and Medicare.  

But the core of my life as an actress and composer has been immersing myself in going deep and finding the flow that comes from the heart and the gut, not the brain. I think that’s one reason that I find poetry to be an essential part of my diet. I find the photos of dried riverbeds and sunken lakes to be tragic and true metaphors: our world has forgotten about the value of the deep sources, the ones we can neither see nor sell.

The two of us are currently in good health and working steadily on writing. We live on a beautiful piece of land and regularly celebrate the outlandish perk of having a fireplace in our bedroom. But we are both in our eighties, and the road that beckons has inevitable mileposts. How will we deal with the losses and indignities? How long can we live in a big house by ourselves? One step at a time. However, the map is clear.

I take comfort in my habits of going deep, going dark. At 4 a.m. I may wake in a panic sweat, but then later I find the core of what I’d told myself. After all, we will all go deep, go dark. Best to find the stories along the way.

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Workshop. . .

—From CB—

 

After a two-week absence, seeing old friends, I logged onto my online writers’ circle, the San Francisco Writers Workshop. It has a long history, it’s free, and since Covid, it meets live on Tuesdays in SF and Wednesdays nationwide thru Zoom. I miss live talk and drinking afterwards, but I don’t miss the drive to the city.

A very wide range of styles & talents, mostly all narrative prose—memoir, short story, novel, essay—ranging from a vampire tale to sci-fi to romance to me at my weirdest. While I’m in the second draft of a novel, i’ve found that presenting very short stuff is most useful right now. Is the voice right? Is the character real? Does it flow sentence-to-sentence? Does it hit any glitches? I don’t ask these questions directly, but I listen.

Very rarely does anyone show-boat or fall into abuse. If you have nothing to say, you don’t say it. If you think your comment might be helpful, you do. As a reader you may not get the praise you want, and a comment may be far off the mark, but that’s for you to decide the next time you hunch over your keyboard.

Oddly, one rule to me seems responsible for the absence of horror tales I’ve heard from other writers staggering away, blood dripping down, from critique groups. When you present your pages, you’re not allowed to reply to comments. You come into the circle unarmed: you can’t shoot back.

Pacifism may not stop a Hitler, but it seems to work here. It puts full responsibility on the writer: take it or leave it. If nothing flows from a comment, no one will ever know, as you’re not allowed to present revisions. For me, the comment is only like a symptom, perhaps requiring surgery, perhaps an ignoring, perhaps a slight chiropractic adjustment to bring it into alignment. It’s not about whether I get into Heaven.

That may not be the main cause: there’s a wide age range, so it may be that there’s less of an impulse to strike a blow to purge literature of all folly. But I just want to note that we can come together, driven by the urge to help one another—which is mildly revolutionary.

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