Alan Seeger's Blog, page 2

I Still Believe

When I was a kid, I went through a phase where I doubted the reality of Santa Claus. It started when I was six, and my mother took me to see Santa at the department store, along with the requisite photograph. I sat on his lap in my blue corduroy hooded coat, my blue eyes wide, and waited for him to ask me The Questions:
“Have you been a good boy this year?” and “What do you want for Christmas, little boy?”
I assured him I’d been good, and I knew exactly what I wanted: a James Bond game. No, not a game for the XBox or the PS3; there were no such things in those days. This was long, long ago, in the days before Nintendo, or Atari, in the days when a game came in a large, flat box, and had a board and game pieces, and names like Monopoly, or Sorry, or Candy Land. I had seen the commercials for a board game that let you be a super spy like James Bond, who, of course, in those days had Sean Connery’s face and none other.
“A James Bond game,” I repeated.
Assured that if I had been as good as I claimed, Santa would take care of me, I was sent back to my mother and we went on our way.
The days crept by, but Christmas morning finally arrived and I awoke full of plans to be 007. I ran into the living room, discovered a pile of presents with my name on the tags, and tore into them. There was the usual stuff — clothes, coloring books, stocking stuffers… ah! As I ripped the paper off one of the boxes, I was rewarded with the revelation of the 007 logo. Yes!
But something was wrong. As I tore the rest of the paper off, I discovered that Santa, the blithering old fool, hadn’t brought me a James Bond game — he’d brought me a James Bond gun! And it wasn’t even the proper Walther PPK that every Bond fan knew that he carried (although, admittedly, I probably didn’t recognize that until some years later), it was a Luger. Only Nazis carried Lugers, although, admittedly, I’m sure I didn’t recognize that at the time either.
The gun and its accessories were pretty cool, though, I had to admit. It was actually billed as the James Bond 007 Attache Case, and included quite a bit of cool stuff: a hard plastic briefcase containing a “Bullet-Firing Luger Gun & Attachments” that would turn it into a sniper rifle, 12 plastic bullets, a hidden dagger, a ‘Code-A-Matic’ machine and code book, a wallet with a passport, six business cards, and a stack of play money.
It had some neat tricks, too; you could fire a bullet from the attache case without opening it, and there was a secret compartment that held the dagger where you could get to it in case you were attacked suddenly, plus the locks on the case would explode if an enemy spy tried to open it without the correct security code.Overall, not a bad Christmas present, and I soon grew to love playing with it, but it continued to nag me: Why had Santa brought me a different gift than what I’d asked for? Did he think he knew better than me what I’d like (entirely possible), or did he not hear me correctly… or was it possible that the old man in the red suit that I had talked to at the John A. Brown’s department store wasn’t the real Santa — worse yet, was it possible that there was no actual Santa at all?
I had heard rumors.
At any rate, a year passed, and we were at my grandparents’ house, just a few miles from our own, having Christmas dinner. I got a few presents, ate until I was as stuffed as a seven-year-old boy could be, and then we headed home.
We lived in a different house by this time; we’d moved from the rental house we’d lived in the year before to a brand new two-bedroom grey brick house that my parents had bought for the now-seemingly-ridiculously-cheap price of $14,500.
 As we pulled into the driveway, I could see our silvery aluminum Christmas tree in the front window, changing color from red to yellow to green to blue as the revolving light played across it.
As we walked in, I looked over at the plate that I had insisted we leave on the coffee table — no cookies for Santa here, he was probably sick of them! I had insisted that we leave him a bologna sandwich on white bread, just the way I liked mine, cut neatly in half diagonally, plus an ice cold glass of milk.
It was gone. Only crumbs on the plate and an empty glass remained.
I ran toward the tree, excited. Santa had been here! What had he left me? I —
I stopped short, my mouth dropping open in shock.
There, on the gold brocade French Provincial sofa that was my mother’s pride and joy, lay a red fur stocking cap trimmed in white.
Santa’s hat.
I flipped out.
“Santa left his hat!” I cried. “We have to find him! We have to get it back to him! He needs it!”
My parents reassured me that if it was a problem, Santa would return for it.
He never did. Maybe he had a spare.
Whatever the case, my belief in Santa was renewed, and it lasted for several more years. When kids would ridicule me and tell me that there was no such thing as Santa, I would tell them, “Oh, yes there is — he left his hat at my house.”
It was good training for the later abuse and ridicule I took for being a bookworm, and later a band geek, and then a theater geek. (I didn’t get to computer geek status until I was in my mid-20s.)
Now I’m married to a woman who proudly proclaims that she still believes in Santa. Sometimes I see him peeking at me when I look in the mirror.
Merry Christmas, Santa believers.

Thankful

I am thankful.

Thankful for my family. Thankful for my friends. Thankful for my readers.

I'm thankful for my colleagues, the teachers who are helping me reach the long-delayed goal of getting my degree, the authors from the support group I am part of as we cheer each other on, and the medical personnel who help me keep myself together.

I'm thankful to still be here. Tomorrow is not promised to any of us, but hopefully I'll greet you again, right here, a year from now.

FREE Kindle book

Just a note to mention that 13 Bites is FREE for Amazon Kindle through November 2. Get it now! HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

In recent news...

...the "13 Bites" horror/Halloween anthology was published on October 13 and is now available in both paperback and on the Amazon Kindle store. 

I am very pleased with how the collection came out. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the anthology: Lynne Cantwell, Alesha Cary, Jaime & Raechel Faulkner, Daniel Fogg, Shawn Inmon, Joseph Picard, Carla Sarett, Terry Schott, and Catherine L. Vickers. 


Also, REPLAY, the third book of the Gatespace Trilogy, is now available in paperback. 

13

Once upon a Thirteenth, a Sunday,
Not a Saturday nor a Monday,
Came a tasty little confection,
A spooky little short story collection.
Thirteen stories by ten authors,
Shivers up the spine it offers,
Succinctly titled "13 Bites,"
We're pretty sure it'll give you frights.

13 Bites
By Strange People
Coming 10/13/13

Feeling Halloweeny?

Coming soon: An anthology of creepy, spooky, and scary short stories by a group of authors who have become fast friends here on Facebook, tentatively entitled "13 Bites" and edited by yours truly. Should be out sometime prior to Halloween.

Oops!

How could I permit such a major event to pass without making mention of it here?

The second volume of The Gatespace Trilogy, entitled REPLAY, is now available at Amazon's Kindle store. Coming soon in paperback.

Congratulations SGU Graduates!

I'm sitting in the air conditioned coolness of the Sinte Gleska University Wakinyan Wanbli Multipurpose Building, waiting for graduation to begin. 106 grads are waiting to receive their diplomas, including my sister-in-law, Mary Elena Red Owl-Neiss, who is receiving her LPN degree.

In a year or two I will be one of them.

Physics Forums

As a science fiction author, I am finding the discussions at the Physics Forums http://www.physicsforums.com/ extremely helpful and interesting. 

Requiem For A Dream

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I have been reading a book by a prominent actor-slash-blogger-slash-author.
One of the things he talks about quite a bit in this book (which, incidentally, was published in 2004 -- practically the Dark Ages) is the fact that his greatest success as an actor was some fifteen years prior to the writing of the book, when he was just a teenager, and the struggles that he had gone through trying to establish himself as an adult actor (no, I don't mean it like that; I mean making the transition from a "child actor" to a "regular actor").
In the years since the book was published, he's had a fair amount of success at that; he's made repeat appearances on a number of television shows, in several cases having a recurring role, and although I don't think he has ever equaled his early fame, I suspect he feels somewhat better about his career than he did in 2004 when he was writing this book.
At any rate, reading this got me to thinking about my own life and the two things I wanted to do with it, namely play music and act. 
When I was a kid, like most people, I had a fantasy of becoming a rock star. When I was about 11, I got my first guitar and began to learn to play a little bit. I had a lesson book and learned to tune the thing and play things like "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and "Jingle Bells." and getting frustrated.
A few months later, I got another guitar book, which was nothing but a list of all the chords. G, C, D, A minor, E minor... the list went on, and so did a light bulb over my head. This is what those guys were doing that I saw on TV, that were just strumming their guitars. This was what I needed to learn to do. 
And so I did. Within two or three years, I knew enough chords to be dangerous. I spent a summer at my grandparent's house in Missouri playing along with The Ventures, learning the lead guitar parts for "I Feel Fine" and "Love Potion No. 9" and figuring out how to play stuff from "Great Songs of Lennon and McCartney."
When I was 16, I put together my first band, a truly awful (and short-lived) power trio called Chateau in which I played the drums. That was followed by a quartet, the name of which escapes me, that auditioned for the high school talent show and got turned down. 
Following high school, there was Hostage, a quartet that I have likened to KISS without the makeup and cool stage clothes, then Greyhaven, not to be confused with the prog-rock band of the same name; we were Aerosmith without the heroin and cocaine. 
Now, during this period of my life, music was not my only artistic outlet. When I was about fourteen, my best friend invited me to do something that would change my life. He had been a member of a theatre group called The Phoenix Players for a couple of years. (Phoenix as in "risen from the ashes" of a previous theatre troupe, not as in the city.) I was intrigued and went along to check it out.
I wound up playing a role in an old fashioned melodrama called Curse You, Dick Perkins! and found that I enjoyed it very much, so for the next four years  I continued to act in shows put on by the group. I played the Capitano in A Company of Wayward Saints. I played Ebenezer Scrooge's nephew Dick in A Christmas Carol. I played multiple parts in Appleseed, the story of Jonathan "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman. I combined my musical interests with my theatrical ones by playing the drums and singing (along with the director's wife, who played piano) for a production of Story Theater.
When the opportunity came to do theatre at my high school, I did that as well. I was in the chorus of Bye Bye Birdie. I played Stewpot (and sang a solo on "There Is Nothing Like A Dame") in South Pacific. I played Snowboy in West Side Story. I played Samuel Chase in 1776! 
In 1977 I regrouped with some of my friends from The Phoenix Players and recorded a reader's theatre version of The Brick And The Rose in which I played the lead role of Tommy.
In the wheelchair here -- talk about irony! --
in rehearsals for Photo Finish (1980).
Then it was off to college. I played Ross in Macbeth at Central State University in Edmond, OK (now the University of Central Oklahoma). I transferred to South Oklahoma City Junior College (now Oklahoma City Community College -- why do these schools keep changing their names after I leave?) and played Actor 1 in a two-man, two-woman production of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body.  
That was followed by a series of featured or leading roles: Sparger in Kennedy’s Children; Sam 80 in Photo Finish; the boorish television director Alex Alexander in The Two Week One Night Stand; Curtis Appleby, the eccentric neighbor in Night Watch, and multiple roles including writing and recording the music for another production of Story Theater.
In rehearsals for Kennedy's Children.


A few years after leaving SOCJC, much like the situation with The Brick And The Rose several years earlier, I reunited with several of my colleagues and made many new friends at that school when I was asked to perform as Pilate in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, which I still point to as one of my very favorite roles ever. I can remember one performance when i was standing 20 feet in the air atop a painter's scaffold, getting ready to do the song "Pilate's Dream," when I realized that my cordless mic was not working. There was no time for anyone to pass me a substitute mic, so I did the only thing I knew to do: I took the entire song up a full octave and belted it out as loudly as I could. "I dreamed... I met a Galilean; a most amazing man..." Afterwards, people told me that they heard me clearly at the back of the 600-seat auditorium, over the fully electric band. Quite a proud moment.
Onstage as Meat Loaf in Heartbreak Hotel/Hotel Hallelujah. I continued to intermingle music and theatre for the next few years; on the music side, I led worship and played guitar, keyboards and/or bass as a member of worship teams at several different churches; on the theatrical side of things, I wrote a couple of children's musicals, Best Friend and A Man Named Nicholas: The Real Story. I also performed in a revue show called Heartbreak Hotel/Hotel Hallelujah for three years, twice as Meat Loaf and the third time as Jake Blues from The Blues Brothers.  
Just weeks after my performance in The Blues Brothers, everything changed. My previous post on this blog mentions the life changing event that took place on December 4, 2002, when I was in a catastrophic head-on collision on the Interstate. 
Neither music nor theatre have been as large a part of my life since then as they once were, but I still love them dearly. Problems with my hands prevent me from playing guitar like I once did, but I continue to strive to regain that ability. It's been so long since I have memorized a script that I have serious doubts about my ability to do so, and of course, my physical limitations limit the types of roles I could pull off. 
I still would like to direct plays and film; I've had the chance to dabble in both those areas and find it immensely fulfilling. 
For now, however, writing keeps me very satisfied.