Caitlin Hicks's Blog: Book Reviews, page 16

Some Kinda Woman, Stories of Us

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a #podcast

Wherever you get your podcasts!

https://www.caitlinhicks.com/wordpress/everything-is-in-motion/

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Everything is in motion

She knows her husband is having an affair, but Roberta McKibbon is unable to say anything to anyone. They live in rural Gibsons, a small town on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. It’s 1963; with three children, she feels like the housekeeper. The gossip is a chorus around her.

She considers suicide.

 

Under the care of a psychiatrist, Roberta becomes part of a shocking experiment in psychedelics that changes her point of view, her mind and her heart, for the rest of her life.

 

Everything is in Motion is the story of a preacher’s daughter, born in 1935 in Saskatchewan, who gets a new lease on life in 1963, just as The Sixties begin to unfurl.

Photos by Helen McCall

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A Knock on the Door

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, written & edited by Caitlin Hicks

This is the story of a knock on the door. A January morning. A child who vanishes into thin air, many years ago. It is a true story.

Told to me by Lise Langlois, who just died –  between December 27th and yesterday. Lise inspired me to listen to and to take down, to organize, to edit and tell this story. A generous woman, a shining light. I am so sorry she is not with us!

I had begun gathering stories from ‘old timers’ for a show I later called The Life We Lived. As we were producing a lot of theatre in those days, we knew many musicians. And we really liked this crackerjack musician named Len, who got around quite handily on crutches, had wispy red hair and a robust personality. He could sing and play guitar and was often part of a rotating ‘band’ of musicians who played at The Roberts Creek Hall in the Nineties. He had been in a car accident and told us he was paralyzed ‘from the tits down’. It was the day his life changed irrevocably, as his car tottered over a cliff for and he was trapped, suspended in pain between life and oblivion. Miraculously, the car balanced there until hours later, he was rescued. Instead of living in a wheelchair, Len got around on crutches.

Len said his tale of woe might be interesting, but he knew of this really amazing story with unexpected and weird elements, and it belonged to his partner, Lise. He wouldn’t say anything about it, I could only get it directly from her. We met, and I worked with her to hear her story, edit it, get the continuity, make it understandable and presentable so that it could be told out loud. Lise was distant enough from the story – in years – to have worked her way through it. She was excited to hear it told.

As part of an early show called STORIES FOR A WINTER SOLSTICE, I performed A Knock on the Door at The Gumboot Café in a Christmas show. Lise is French Canadian, and so I exaggerated her ‘accent’ to put the character of Eva into that persona. It allowed me freedom to express what was required to tell the story as well as I could.

I was thrilled to be the medium for expressing this story. Lise had invited her other daughter, who was born after Rachel went missing; she invited Jackie and Steven (mentioned early in the story) almost as witnesses; they were the two people who had seen Lise’s small daughter the night before she disappeared. It seemed to me that the story had come full circle.

But there was more.

I had been in the audience at The Sunshine Coast Arts Centre when Susan Crean read the prologue to her book, In the Name of the Fathers. Here, Crean described the scene of a woman stealing her child from a pram in a park in Toronto, a scene she had personally witnessed. The author began her discussion of her book with this incident to show the irony of a mother being accused of stealing her own child. The woman who kidnapped her own daughter was Lise; the child, Rachel in this story.

Lise had heard of Susan Crean, and her book, but neither of them had met. Someone put me in touch with Susan and I arranged for them to ride up to Pender Harbor together prior to the performance of Lise’s story at a show I was performing at The Sundowner Inn that night. After the performance, we posed for a photograph together. I still have the photograph my refrigerator.

In the photo: Maggie Guzzi, me, Lise Langlois, Susan Crean.

Here is the story. Remembering Lise Langlois.

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Christmas is a refugee looking for a place to stay

Something about Christmas always hurts. It’s often so painful, we can barely think about it. Do I cry? Do I laugh? But Christmas rolls in with the winter. It’s dark and we want to be comforted. And little by little the red & green lights appear around us, the glitter and shortbread. We hear snippets of songs that go right into our psyche, and squeeze.

Toronto Star photo

The story, My First Christmas with Rachel, was inspired by the cold and relentless quality of winter, the injustice of life and how it can be magnified at Christmas time. I celebrate people who are homeless on Christmas with this story, especially people who have others depending on them, but who, themselves have little say about their own circumstances. Today it has resonance for the hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees around the world, and the mothers of these families who have created the next generation, but have little power of their own destiny.

Here’s an uplifting tale of a transcendent moment at a difficult time.

 

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How to light the room

At this time of year, when the darkness cuts the day in half, I wonder: what are we yearning for, what holds itself up in our hearts only to land in our stomachs after Christmas dinner like a piece of poorly digested meat? When I hear the music, sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown: tricked into kicking the football, only to have it taken away at the last moment.

I still say ‘Christmas’. It’s the tradition I was raised in. I still expect to see a child in a manger, I look for the decorated tree. I love the wrapped gifts, the fattening shortbread cookies, the turkey coupons, the worn sweaters in red and green. I used to love holiday dress-up parties and then I became a mother. Now I look forward to whatever is going on anywhere – the carols, the choirs and especially the lights.

 

I remember a long-ago Christmas (before the Sunshine Coast was ‘discovered’) – when I made all my Christmas gifts. Out of necessity. People in my life have been pretty good sports: what did my ten-year-old niece think of the paper mache box full of scented potpourri? Did my brother-in-law like the photograph of his children laughing with my own, in a hand-glued, home-made wood picture frame? I do notice that in keeping with the kind of gift I give, that the gifts given back to me are less ambitious: I’m relieved; it’s difficult to compete with money when you don’t have much. But what I’ve found when making the gift is: I spend more time thinking about the person I’m giving it to.

My own sister is ruthless. If she’s given anything she doesn’t like or can’t use, she immediately and obviously gives it away to someone else, like good riddance to that awful clutter. Once I was present: she and her husband looked at a gift and grunted. She’s wrestled with Christmas, the relentlessness of it, the promise, the nostalgia, the brutality.

So, after all is bought and wrapped, after all is sung and eaten, what is Christmas all about? For me, it is a cultural and family ritual, one of the few I have left in my life. I came from a family whose everyday life was laced with repetitive, religious rituals. We gathered every night to say the rosary, we went to mass every Sunday to be reminded of our obligations, were dragged to extracurricular ceremonies every time there was another excuse to insert reminder doctrine into our lives. And during the time before Christmas, (Advent) we used to light a little wreath, accented with one pink and three purple candles. And then, every night as we recited the rosary, which was unbearably boring, our gaze kept coming back to those flickering flames brightening the darkness. Now I’m critical of the underlying intentions: conformity, especially mental conformity. Still, I light candles almost every day at this time of year.

For me, Christmas is a celebration of birth. We can all participate because we’ve all been born. As a mother, I feel that Christmas celebrates me as a woman who has given birth and all women who have given birth. It celebrates my son as someone who has been born.  It celebrates my husband, a caring and supportive parent who helped me bring that child into the world.

For me, Christmas is a time to look back on the year and settle things I’ve been too busy for. I used to organize the year’s photos into a book, but the years kept stacking up. I reach out to friends I haven’t heard from in a while. I look at what I’ve achieved and what I’m still hoping to do. It’s also a time of letting go.

It’s a time to make peace with others, to work through that misunderstanding and come out better friends. It’s a time to be generous and to receive the generosity of others.

 

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New podcast features women’s voices

Some Kinda Woman, Stories of Us

features dramatic & comedic work of international playwright/ performer Caitlin Hicks
Sharp, humorous and emotional

A new series of episodes and stories called Some Kinda Woman: Stories of Us, has debuted on iTunes, LibSyn, Stitcher and other podcast hosts, for international audiences. The podcast features Sunshine Coast playwright/performer Caitlin Hicks, and the many quirky characters from her standing ovation tours of one-person theatrical performances in England, Ireland, the United States, Canada and Sweden.

The series features a variety of characters from Hicks’ original theatrical work: Mother Love, Next of Kin, Stories for a Winter Solstice, The Life We Lived, Singing the Bones, Six Palm Trees and Just a Little Fever. Each story is a character-based short tale of a moment in a life and celebrates unique challenges and triumphs that women experience, from their own point of view.

Every Thursday listeners to iTunes can download a new voice, a different story, another woman at a pivotal point in her life, as she shares a moment that changes her. Through this podcast, Some Kinda Woman: Stories of Us, as Hicks embodies different characters, she celebrates women and gives them a voice.

The podcast is new, but the work has toured internationally in towns and cities to robust audiences, excellent reviews and standing ovations. The work is sharp, humorous and emotional, the characters outspoken, the issues and events in women’s lives from lighthearted Christmas nostalgia to the exhilaration of a powerful birth, to difficult memories of losing a child to divorce, to unexpected death, to abortion. Some stories of old timers tell of physical, emotional and financial hardship as settlers of a harsh land (The Life We Lived). Other stories are spoken through hilarious characters who speak their mind (drama/comedy: Six Palm Trees, novel: A Theory of Expanded Love).

Some Kinda Woman: Stories of Us is divided up into different banners. The first is ‘Christmas in Cornucopia’ (or, The Trouble of Christmas). Then there will be a series of stories called Mother Love. Under this banner are included birth stories. Birth is such an elemental experience in all our lives as human beings who have been born. It’s also our first experience of the story of our own ives. Do you know the story of your birth? For all the birthdays we celebrate, it’s strange how we forget to ask. Every story in these episodes includes the voice of a woman in her role as a mother. You know there’s grief in that, but also only the love a mother can give.

Another group of podcasts in this series is called The Life We Lived. The series began with stories of old timers who formed the early communities up and down The Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. All woman, all characters, all stories, true, and stranger than fiction. This series will also include stories from my life – and if you choose to get involved – from your life too.

There will be a group of stories around Remembrance Day, beginning with Next of Kin, a personal story remembering the man who married my mother and went off to war. If you have relatives whose stories you may want to explore and ultimately, tell, contact me here at caitlin@caitlinhicks dot com and get the conversation started.

For more information about the host search this website

Or, go directly to the Podcast page on Caitlin’s website: https://www.caitlinhicks.com/wordpress/podcasts-some-kinda-woman/

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Never Have I Ever

by Joshilyn Jackson

William Morrow. Published: July 30, 2019

Reviewer: Caitlin Hicks

“Twists and turns abound in this suspenseful story, like the layers of an onion, peeled away one by one as the story progresses.”

New York Times bestselling writer Joshilyn Jackson has crafted an engaging and superbly written social thriller in Never Have I Ever. Jackson delights in imaginative use of language and interior monologue but never overdoes it in this thriller that plays on the nature of secrets.

She takes the reader on a journey constantly upended by hidden stories, as she weighs the protagonist’s agony against her self-discovery in revisiting her former secret-filled life. As Amy defends herself against Angelica Roux, a blackmailing protagonist, she uncovers her own strengths and a wellspring of gratitude for her current upscale, ordinary life.

Set in a modern suburb, inside a familiar book club with trusted friends, Jackson begins the journey of one woman who fiercely guards her otherworldly secrets, while being pursued by an intelligent, clever adversary in the person of popular girl Angelica Roux.

A well-etched aging beauty who preserves her carefully crafted identity with daily visits to the gym and expensive Botox treatments, Roux is desperate and ruthless. Her impromptu crashing of the women’s private book club is part of her plan to divest every woman of a secret so private it has to be worth money to keep it under wraps.

Jackson creates a believable antagonist who seems to love her teenaged son and unexpectedly admits to admiring Amy as an equal adversary, even as she pins her against a wall with threats to unravel Amy’s life.

Amy has her surprises, too. While other neighbors fall for Roux’s charms and open their hearts to her, Amy revisits the night in her youth when a catastrophic event toppled her young life, took the life of a neighbor, and sent her teenage crush to jail. And Amy used to be fat, with a capital F.

Years later, when Roux threatens disaster, Amy is thin and confident enough to have a devoted husband, a 15-year-old stepdaughter, and an infant son, all who reside in a Stepford-like suburbia within driving distance of the horrible night Amy has all but pushed into oblivion. Now, in order to defend herself against Roux’s blackmail, she meets the boy who in their youth, kissed the fat girl because he really liked her.

Because the writer is so skilled at the interior journey, the reader understands the importance of this reunion, and the temptation for Amy to succumb to the memory of her initial attraction. But it’s a tightrope that Roux has set Amy to walk on, protecting her beloved teenage stepdaughter, keeping the big story away from her husband, never revealing how vulnerable she is toward her predator.

Jackson uses the activity of diving to help calm Amy, and it’s so well woven into who she is that the time the reader spends under the water feels so natural and quiet and serene, a welcome break from the back-to-back intrigue.

But water can be full of danger as Jackson leads the reader to grapple with.  It is in a life-or-death incident while diving that Amy truly finds what she is made of and as readers, we strip away any ambiguity about Roux. Twists and turns abound in this suspenseful story, like the layers of an onion, peeled away one by one as the story progresses.

Entertaining, well etched and written by the hand of an artist, this tale of cat and mouse is a very worthy read.

This review was originally posted at New York Journal of Books

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Me & Ted Hughes at the Festival of Authors in Toronto

October 21, 1983. Toronto. At 644 Church Street, just off Bloor.

Fall settles in. A crisp, chilly, windy day. Leaves whirl, scatter in circles. I am  living in a tiny two bedroom apartment on Church Street in Toronto, just off Bloor, with my lover, Gord Halloran, for whom I have left my first marriage, my friends, my family and my country. I am so full with pregnancy, so ready to give birth to our love child. No  work permit here in Canada where I’m still becoming more aware of myopic American-ness. In the meantime, I am a fitness instructor at a trendy workout studio in Yorkville.

Here I am introduced to Canadian legend, Karen Kain, who becomes an occassional student in my classes while she recoveres from an injury. I teach daily, waiting for legal status and the freedom to work and get paid. My lover’s divorce — from a fourteen year marriage in Canada — has yet to come through from California. That’s where we met and fell in love – San Francisco.

And he’s working on an oil painting of the Toronto Stock Exchange and directing a show we are producing at the Adelaide Court Theatre: the Canadian premiere of “Letters Home”. It’s a two-hander which chronicles, in letters, the relationships between American poet Sylvia Plath,and her mother, Aurelia. The playwright is Rose Leiman Goldemberg.

We had decided to do the show as my Toronto debut. Since we were producers, I didn’t need a work permit to be hired, and I’d be quite pregnant when the show opened. I wasn’t very big, maybe I could pull it off: Sylvia Plath is pregnant in some parts of the play.

Letters Home enjoyed a three week run, healthy audiences and reviews in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star,  Now Magazine,

U of Ts’ The Newspaper and York University’s Excalibur. The Newspaper’s headline: Letters Home offers more than a biography, The Excalibur: Plath’s Letters Read Well.

 

 

Unfortunately, Gina Mallet, of The Toronto Star saw the opening. We did an exhausting rehearsal that day. Due to lack of experience, I didn’t estimate how my pregnancy would affect my energy requirements. By the evening’s performance, I had hit the wall, and walked through opening night without an ounce of emotion. My co-star, Patty Carole Brown, had trouble remembering her lines. This was a major frustration throughout the run of the show because in her mistaking one line for another, it was difficult to know how to salvage the scene. Gina Mallet put it in writing, it hurt to agree with her. The most basic of an actor’s responsibilities is to learn your lines! I felt empathy for Patty as her verbal hesitation was probably due to her age; and we will all be there soon enough. But I was so humiliated by her review that I clipped out the headline, and only saved the good parts.

We had another chance the second night: Ray Conologue reviewed for The Globe and Mail. My energy rallied but we weren’t to be blessed:  Ray Conologue spent more time scribbling clever notes to himself than watching the show. The headline to his review,  complete with several photos, was published across the entire country: Tribute to Plath Too Reverential to be Credible. He used the word feminist anthem in the first paragraph, then  proceeded to throw stones at it. I still recall one paragraph from his review: “Hicks’ Plath was quite offputting at first, both because of the gushy preppy tone of her college letters and because of Hicks’ rather gratutitous bopping around, as if the budding poet combined aerobics with iambics. .  .”  Apparently Conologue hadn’t noticed my very obvious physical condition. Well, maybe it was the aerobics classes I was still teaching!

My fascination with the Plath/Hughes legend  was by this time, huge. I had every poem Sylvia Plath wrote, and many editions of Ted’s work.

I owned Sylvia Plath by the play’s closing performance, and her tragic suicide weighed heavily on me. I felt her angst upon learning that her husband was having an affair with another woman. At the time of her death in February 1963, Ted Hughes’ career was firmly established, Sylvia’s was just beginning to take off.

What could she have seen in the world before THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE was published? What happened to make this intelligent, passionate woman with a child under 3 and another just a year old,  during one of England’s coldest winters on record, put a towel in the space under her kitchen door, put her head in the oven and turn the gas on?

In my journal, it says that on October 21st, Gord went down to City Hall to get our marriage license as his divorce papers had finally arrived the day before.

On October 22nd, 1983, just a week after Letters Home closed, The Fifth Annual International Festival of Authors hosted 25 writers from all over the world at Toronto’s Harbourfront. On Sunday, the last day of the festival. Ted Hughes, England’s Poet Laureate, Sylvia’s ex-husband and lover, was the featured guest.

We were down to our last pennies. Gord’s savings had been seriously depleted with the production of this play. Reluctantly, his red Mustang convertible and a clunky old blue truck were put up for sale in the want ads, and Gord arranged to sell his cherished Kathe Kollewitz print to a dealer in San Francisco. But, on October 22nd, there had been no sales, no income from our sacrifices. We were going to be parents, and we had no money for diapers.

I weighed the cost of the tickets. But I had just spent five months of my life studying both Ted and Sylvia, gazing at photos of them in love, reading their poetry, Sylvia’s novel, The Bell Jar, wondering. Speaking to an Author’s Festival organizer, I heard that Hughes had been dogged by overeager Plath fans, who blamed Ted for Sylvia’s suicide. Sometimes they showed up at the airport with placards, shouting at him. Everyone was hoping for all of us in Canada to recognize his legend-ness and behave appropriately.  How could I miss this?

There would be people in the audience who had seen me in Letters Home, but I just wanted to be a fly on the wall, free to gape and wonder.  I wanted to know the answers I could only discover by meeting him: what could possibly have been so charming about him? Sylvia was a smart, creative woman. How could he have won her heart, then tossed it aside so carelessly?

Sitting at the back of the stuffed-to-capacity auditorium, I listened with show-me arms folded to the accented, apologetic voice of this man reading absolutely spellbinding poems about a sheep farmer! Astonished and thoroughly charmed, I was also cautious: the room was breathing with his every pause and I was vehemently Anti-Idol, in spite of my obsession. Afterwards, queues wound around the room for his autograph. I  immediately attracted and repelled. I lingered — as a voyeur.

In one of my American moments,  I went right up to the front of autograph the line, and asked him if he wanted a beer. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that? He looked at me gratefully. Of course he wanted a beer! Gord made his way through the absolutely stuffed bar to buy it, and when we delivered it, I pulled up a chair and sat next to Ted Hughes, as he signed books into the night.

A photographer from the Kingston Standard, who knew I had played the part of Sylvia in Letters Home, snapped our photograph together and it was published the next day. We talked. Ted Hughes wrote a poem to me on the back of my ticket.

Then, we all went home. Gord and I got married the following Saturday.

Later, I wrote the poem below, which I sent to Ted Hughes  with a copy of the newspaper article which bore our photograph, in care of his publisher.

I also sent the poem to Rose Leiman Goldemberg, the playwright who had written LETTERS HOME, and who had a close relationship with Sylvia’s mother. I never heard from Ted Hughes, but Rose later told me that Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia had read the poem and quite liked it. The poem:

So,

this is

Ted Hughes

“A large, hulking, healthy Adam”

she said

Ha!

A stoop-shouldered shuffler

a baggy panted Down-looker:

chin crooked in his neck

pointed nose cocked sideways.

That hair! Straight grey, greasy fronds

spring from his forehead

into those wide eyes

softly laughing at the wrinkled edges;

set against a wiskery grey-bearded

chin.

He’s not that Big,

Hulking, Huge Whatever

She described:

he’s in his Fifties!

“With a voice like the thunder of God,”

she said

I hear Soft, apologizing

warm-accented timbre

rumbling, rising and bellowing

in the passionate heat

of his Wild Word poems

A singer, story-teller

Weaving magnets

before gullible,

gaping faces

We sit on seat’s edge

In the crowded stillness

a pin drop

We, gasping for air

forget to clap

His head hangs

like Christ on the cross

He ends the rushing, bleeding images

Tricks us,

starts again!

Like a prayer!

So this

is Mellowed

This

Ted Hughes.

Humble, clumsy-gaited

embarassed and amused

by the adulating bodies

A sea washes Him

to a table to sit.

Dry, condemned man

up-glances sideways

Mischief darts

under the ferns

He’s a  rascal!

He taunts his captors

gleefully signing his punishment

His name, Ted Hughes.

Big, black

sloppy fountain of ink

eagerly spoils

white parchment

virgin book

He hardly sees their faces

but smiles

seductive, shy

sly

charming

disarming

Ted Hughes.

My rabbit heartbeat

Adrenalin drugged

insane!

I plot, full of courage

Book toting, ticket-toting,

program-toting ants

inch line behind him

I blurt forward

squashing a knat-sychopant

at His side

“Do you want a drink?”

I gasp, hoping

He nods,”Yes!”

Triumphant! I paw the crowd

Tingling thrilled

The squirming insects

clutch forward

a mass of thirsty limbs

Gord! co-conspirator

lover, director, psst!

“He wants a beer!”

A wink, and tumbling

fumbling for the sparkling fizzy

my lover pays and gets.

Cunning spiders, we

tiptoe, web and circle our prey

Beer. Here!

Jailbird smiles, grateful.

And we, full-cheeked

Cheshire cats

share the mouse

we chew

A buzzing bumblee bee

spies me

the pretend Sylvia

as Prisoner spoils another book

“You, bzzzzzz! Your last production . . .

bzzzzz! wonderful!”

Big bellied arachnid Recoils.

“Don’t! I’m not her!”

I scramble away safely

lest he discover me for the fraud

I am

Ted Ted scribble scribbles

more play comments

from a tall grasshopper

and someone is pointing at me

from across the room

my stomach knots

I spin the web

Mingle in the milling crowd

“Please?” I ask, “ A photograph?”

“Me and He? Forgot my flash!

Photographer frowns, I beg

Me The actress, He The Legend . . .

Camera bearer scoots

to smug fat Event Official beetle.

Barrel belly Panic here!

remembering our phone chat

to him I was a Plath-fly

“Don’t!  I’m not!”

Finally!

WE: Me and He

exactly

are a picture

The Legend leans to me

those crinkling conspirators

lurking impishly at the edges

of His eyes,  His mouth

Kingston photo-man poises

his lens

and in that moment

HE, the famous English poet

my fantasy husband

shrinks away from Me

the pretend the secret Sylvia

He stiffens, somber:

carefully protecting

His Offspring Image

Ted Hughes.

Flash! It’s over.

The hulking Adam glows again.

Night thins, crowd wearys

A full-mouth fat lipped blonde

thrusts a well-worn lipstick pen

into His hand

We Bask in embarassment as

The Captured rapes

another creamy page

drawing a heart

above undying words to her

She waves, twitters,

breathes on Him, touches his hand

totters

Listening, uncomfortable

we all laugh.

So finally it’s tired, we’re late,

The witching hour

I shrink, Becoming ant

Empty handed

I fumble pleas

ardent Catholics pray to Jesus

Prisoner smiles at me

yet another insect

his broad wedding-ringed hand

scribbling quick in wet ink

on my tickets

a poem  to me:

For Caitlin who brought

me a beer when everybody

else only wanted

a signature here

We (1) Ted Hughes (2) Ted Hughes

(3) Ted Hughes

(4) His other

self Ted Hughes

(5) His subsidiary

Ted Hughes

(6) Id, Ego, Superego

Ted, Ed Edward

Hughes.

I am an actress

too young, at age nine

to have saved her

and I left my husband

for another lover

so I am like Him, too

I Became her

these last three weeks

I learned two, lived two

hours of their lives

and one-sided at that

but my fantasy

makes me feel

I hold them in my hand

as all no doubt do

who read His words

Her life

and wonder:

Who suffered most?

________________________________________________________________

In 1998, Gord and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. We had just finished a tour of my play SINGING THE BONES to England and Sweden. We’d received many standing ovations from audiences in five countries. Our last production took place in the southwest of England, the beautiful county of Devon, where Ted Hughes made his home. While we were there, just down the road in North Tawton, unknown to us, England’s poet laureate was fighting his last against cancer. He had recently published a tribute to Sylvia Plath.  On October 28th, 1998 almost 15 years to the day after I met him, and a little more than week after our show closed in Devon, we read the news of Ted Hughes’ death in the Herald Tribune.

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Me and Ted Hughes

October 21, 1983. Toronto. At 644 Church Street, just off Bloor.

Fall settles in. A crisp, chilly, windy day. Leaves whirl, scatter in circles. I am  living in a tiny two bedroom apartment on Church Street in Toronto, just off Bloor, with my lover, Gord Halloran, for whom I have left my first marriage, my friends, my family and my country. I am so full with pregnancy, so ready to give birth to our love child. No  work permit here in Canada where I’m still becoming more aware of myopic American-ness. In the meantime, I am a fitness instructor at a trendy workout studio in Yorkville.

Here I am introduced to Canadian legend, Karen Kain, who becomes an occassional student in my classes while she recoveres from an injury. I teach daily, waiting for legal status and the freedom to work and get paid. My lover’s divorce — from a fourteen year marriage in Canada — has yet to come through from California. That’s where we met and fell in love – San Francisco.

And he’s working on an oil painting of the Toronto Stock Exchange and directing a show we are producing at the Adelaide Court Theatre: the Canadian premiere of “Letters Home”. It’s a two-hander which chronicles, in letters, the relationships between American poet Sylvia Plath,and her mother, Aurelia. The playwright is Rose Leiman Goldemberg.

We had decided to do the show as my Toronto debut. Since we were producers, I didn’t need a work permit to be hired, and I’d be quite pregnant when the show opened. I wasn’t very big, maybe I could pull it off: Sylvia Plath is pregnant in some parts of the play.

Letters Home enjoyed a three week run, healthy audiences and reviews in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star,  Now Magazine,

U of Ts’ The Newspaper and York University’s Excalibur. The Newspaper’s headline: Letters Home offers more than a biography, The Excalibur: Plath’s Letters Read Well.

 

 

Unfortunately, Gina Mallet, of The Toronto Star saw the opening. We did an exhausting rehearsal that day. Due to lack of experience, I didn’t estimate how my pregnancy would affect my energy requirements. By the evening’s performance, I hadhit the wall, and walked through opening night without an ounce o emotion. My co-star, Patty Carole Brown, had trouble remembering her lines. This wasa major frustration throughout the run of the show because in her mistaking one line for another, it was difficult to know how to salvage the scene. Gina Mallet put it in writing, it hurt to agree with her. The most basic of an actor’s responsibilities is to learn your lines!  By association, I  looked inept. I was so humiliated by her review that I clipped out the headline, and only saved the good parts.

We had another chance the second night: Ray Conologue reviewed for The Globe and Mail. My energy rallied but we weren’t to be blessed:  Ray Conologue spent more time scribbling clever notes to himself than watching the show. The headline to his review,  complete with several photos, was published across the entire country: Tribute to Plath Too Reverential to be Credible. He used the word feminist anthem in the first paragraph, then  proceeded to throw stones at it. I still recall one paragraph from his review: “Hicks’ Plath was quite offputting at first, both because of the gushy preppy tone of her college letters and because of Hicks’ rather gratutitous bopping around, as if the budding poet combined aerobics with iambics. .  .”  Apparently Conologue hadn’t noticed my very obvious physical condition. Well, maybe it was the aerobics classes I was still teaching!

My fascination with the Plath/Hughes legend  was by this time, huge. I had every poem Sylvia Plath wrote, and many editions of Ted’s work.

I owned Sylvia Plath by the play’s closing performance, and her tragic suicide weighed heavily on me. I felt her angst upon learning that her husband was having an affair with another woman. At the time of her death in February 1963, Ted Hughes’ career was firmly established, Sylvia’s was just beginning to take off.

What could she have seen in the world before THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE was published? What happened to make this intelligent, passionate woman with a child under 3 and another just a year old,  during one of England’s coldest winters on record, put a towel in the space under her kitchen door, put her head in the oven and turn the gas on?

In my journal, it says that on October 21st, Gord went down to City Hall to get our marriage license as his divorce papers had finally arrived the day before.

On October 22nd, 1983, just a week after Letters Home closed, The Fifth Annual International Festival of Authors hosted 25 writers from all over the world at Toronto’s Harbourfront. On Sunday, the last day of the festival. Ted Hughes, England’s Poet Laureate, Sylvia’s ex-husband and lover, was the featured guest.

We were down to our last pennies. Gord’s savings had been seriously depleted with the production of this play. Reluctantly, his red Mustang convertible and a clunky old blue truck were put up for sale in the want ads, and Gord arranged to sell his cherished Kathe Kollewitz print to a dealer in San Francisco. But, on October 22nd, there had been no sales, no income from our sacrifices. We were going to be parents, and we had no money for diapers.

I weighed the cost of the tickets. But I had just spent five months of my life studying both Ted and Sylvia, gazing at photos of them in love, reading their poetry, Sylvia’s novel, The Bell Jar, wondering. Speaking to an Author’s Festival organizer, I heard that Hughes had been dogged by overeager Plath fans, who blamed Ted for Sylvia’s suicide. Sometimes they showed up at the airport with placards, shouting at him. Everyone was hoping for all of us in Canada to recognize his legend-ness and behave appropriately.  How could I miss this?

There would be people in the audience who had seen me in Letters Home, but I just wanted to be a fly on the wall, free to gape and wonder.  I wanted to know the answers I could only discover by meeting him: what could possibly have been so charming about him? Sylvia was a smart, creative woman. How could he have won her heart, then tossed it aside so carelessly?

Sitting at the back of the stuffed-to-capacity auditorium, I listened with show-me arms folded to the accented, apologetic voice of this man reading absolutely spellbinding poems about a sheep farmer! Astonished and thoroughly charmed, I was also cautious: the room was breathing with his every pause and I was vehemently Anti-Idol, in spite of my obsession. Afterwards, queues wound around the room for his autograph. I  immediately attracted and repelled. I lingered — as a voyeur.

In one of my American moments,  I went right up to the front of autograph the line, and asked him if he wanted a beer. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that? He looked at me gratefully. Of course he wanted a beer! Gord made his way through the absolutely stuffed bar to buy it, and when we delivered it, I pulled up a chair and sat next to Ted Hughes, as he signed books into the night.

A photographer from the Kingston Standard, who knew I had played the part of Sylvia in Letters Home, snapped our photograph together and it was published the next day. We talked. Ted Hughes wrote a poem to me on the back of my ticket.

Then, we all went home. Gord and I got married the following Saturday.

Later, I wrote the poem below, which I sent to Ted Hughes  with a copy of the newspaper article which bore our photograph, in care of his publisher.

I also sent the poem to Rose Leiman Goldemberg, the playwright who had written LETTERS HOME, and who had a close relationship with Sylvia’s mother. I never heard from Ted Hughes, but Rose later told me that Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia had read the poem and quite liked it. The poem:

So,

this is

Ted Hughes

“A large, hulking, healthy Adam”

she said

Ha!

A stoop-shouldered shuffler

a baggy panted Down-looker:

chin crooked in his neck

pointed nose cocked sideways.

That hair! Straight grey, greasy fronds

spring from his forehead

into those wide eyes

softly laughing at the wrinkled edges;

set against a wiskery grey-bearded

chin.

He’s not that Big,

Hulking, Huge Whatever

She described:

he’s in his Fifties!

“With a voice like the thunder of God,”

she said

I hear Soft, apologizing

warm-accented timbre

rumbling, rising and bellowing

in the passionate heat

of his Wild Word poems

A singer, story-teller

Weaving magnets

before gullible,

gaping faces

We sit on seat’s edge

In the crowded stillness

a pin drop

We, gasping for air

forget to clap

His head hangs

like Christ on the cross

He ends the rushing, bleeding images

Tricks us,

starts again!

Like a prayer!

So this

is Mellowed

This

Ted Hughes.

Humble, clumsy-gaited

embarassed and amused

by the adulating bodies

A sea washes Him

to a table to sit.

Dry, condemned man

up-glances sideways

Mischief darts

under the ferns

He’s a  rascal!

He taunts his captors

gleefully signing his punishment

His name, Ted Hughes.

Big, black

sloppy fountain of ink

eagerly spoils

white parchment

virgin book

He hardly sees their faces

but smiles

seductive, shy

sly

charming

disarming

Ted Hughes.

My rabbit heartbeat

Adrenalin drugged

insane!

I plot, full of courage

Book toting, ticket-toting,

program-toting ants

inch line behind him

I blurt forward

squashing a knat-sychopant

at His side

“Do you want a drink?”

I gasp, hoping

He nods,”Yes!”

Triumphant! I paw the crowd

Tingling thrilled

The squirming insects

clutch forward

a mass of thirsty limbs

Gord! co-conspirator

lover, director, psst!

“He wants a beer!”

A wink, and tumbling

fumbling for the sparkling fizzy

my lover pays and gets.

Cunning spiders, we

tiptoe, web and circle our prey

Beer. Here!

Jailbird smiles, grateful.

And we, full-cheeked

Cheshire cats

share the mouse

we chew

A buzzing bumblee bee

spies me

the pretend Sylvia

as Prisoner spoils another book

“You, bzzzzzz! Your last production . . .

bzzzzz! wonderful!”

Big bellied arachnid Recoils.

“Don’t! I’m not her!”

I scramble away safely

lest he discover me for the fraud

I am

Ted Ted scribble scribbles

more play comments

from a tall grasshopper

and someone is pointing at me

from across the room

my stomach knots

I spin the web

Mingle in the milling crowd

“Please?” I ask, “ A photograph?”

“Me and He? Forgot my flash!

Photographer frowns, I beg

Me The actress, He The Legend . . .

Camera bearer scoots

to smug fat Event Official beetle.

Barrel belly Panic here!

remembering our phone chat

to him I was a Plath-fly

“Don’t!  I’m not!”

Finally!

WE: Me and He

exactly

are a picture

The Legend leans to me

those crinkling conspirators

lurking impishly at the edges

of His eyes,  His mouth

Kingston photo-man poises

his lens

and in that moment

HE, the famous English poet

my fantasy husband

shrinks away from Me

the pretend the secret Sylvia

He stiffens, somber:

carefully protecting

His Offspring Image

Ted Hughes.

Flash! It’s over.

The hulking Adam glows again.

Night thins, crowd wearys

A full-mouth fat lipped blonde

thrusts a well-worn lipstick pen

into His hand

We Bask in embarassment as

The Captured rapes

another creamy page

drawing a heart

above undying words to her

She waves, twitters,

breathes on Him, touches his hand

totters

Listening, uncomfortable

we all laugh.

So finally it’s tired, we’re late,

The witching hour

I shrink, Becoming ant

Empty handed

I fumble pleas

ardent Catholics pray to Jesus

Prisoner smiles at me

yet another insect

his broad wedding-ringed hand

scribbling quick in wet ink

on my tickets

a poem  to me:

For Caitlin who brought

me a beer when everybody

else only wanted

a signature here

We (1) Ted Hughes (2) Ted Hughes

(3) Ted Hughes

(4) His other

self Ted Hughes

(5) His subsidiary

Ted Hughes

(6) Id, Ego, Superego

Ted, Ed Edward

Hughes.

I am an actress

too young, at age nine

to have saved her

and I left my husband

for another lover

so I am like Him, too

I Became her

these last three weeks

I learned two, lived two

hours of their lives

and one-sided at that

but my fantasy

makes me feel

I hold them in my hand

as all no doubt do

who read His words

Her life

and wonder:

Who suffered most?

________________________________________________________________

In 1998, Gord and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. We had just finished a tour of my play SINGING THE BONES to England and Sweden. We’d received many standing ovations from audiences in five countries. Our last production took place in the southwest of England, the beautiful county of Devon, where Ted Hughes made his home. While we were there, just down the road in North Tawton, unknown to us, England’s poet laureate was fighting his last against cancer. He had recently published a tribute to Sylvia Plath.  On October 28th, 1998 almost 15 years to the day after I met him, and a little more than week after our show closed in Devon, we read the news of Ted Hughes’ death in the Herald Tribune.

The post Me and Ted Hughes appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.

Mother Love, 2018

With Anna Lumiere on piano and Gord Halloran vocals

The post Mother Love, 2018 appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.