On The Eve of Destruction: Food, Liberty, and Civil Rights

Hurricane Irene is supposed to pay Boston a visit come tomorrow. It seems there's a lot of hullabaloo about destruction. News reports always add an adjective before the characteristics of the storm: Irene begins its "destructive run." It "lashed" the North Carolina coast. It "pounded" shorelines. The Boston Herald today said, "The storm stands to bring a treacherous trifecta of nature’s forces: punishing winds, torrential rains and pounding waves along the coast." Not to mention some really bad alliteration.

It's going to be a big blow, no doubt. There's always the danger of the wind blowing down trees onto cars and houses, and knocking down power lines that could leave us without electricity for days. That means food spoils--you can lose hundreds of dollars that way--and things like showers become luxuries for some if their heating system depends on an electrical water pump.

I didn't want to buy into the whole hurricane fever. I looked around the house and it seemed we had pretty much whatever we needed. Worse comes to worse we'll either fire up the grill or a camp stove and live on pasta until things settle down. Still, I felt the pull to head to Stop 'n Shop. I grabbed my two bags and walked there. I like to generally walk. It's a way I can think about all the characters I have milling around in my head--both fictional and real. And think how they intersect and I think of interesting and evil things to put them through, the fictional ones at least.

And walking is the only way to really learn a city or a neighborhood. When I travel I love to wander the neighborhoods. And doing it in your own can be so illuminating. The Chinese here in Wollaston are doing a great job settling in. Every other house has some sort of garden in the yard. They don't grow something as useless as grass. Instead they grown their melons and vegetables. Their yards and gardens are so efficient. They're a combination of the practical and the decorative. Little paths wind through the vegetables. I saw a pipe sticking through a fence to drain the garden onto the sidewalk. Bamboo and other exotic plants are there for decoration. I think I saw more than a couple of dahlias taller than me. I looked down one driveway and saw an old woman sitting in her garage with a full kitchen at work. The shipyard and the quarries are long gone from Quincy. I know from talking to a few townies that they long for those days. They're like characters in a Tennessee Williams' play, longing for the days of the Old South, when things were genteel and there were Gentleman Callers.

I was expecting pandemonium at Stop 'n Shop, but the only signs that there was trouble were no carts inside the store and one of the scanner stands was out of order. It was crowded, but people were polite. It didn't seem any different than what could be any other Saturday. But the lack of carts, the crowd, the technology breakdown, and the sale on so many of the perishables told me that cracks were showing in the system, but it was still holding up. The world we live in, the way we have it set up, is so fragile. Just our food supply is in jeopardy every day, influenced by the price of gas and natural disasters. We've been watching the price of food go up in the past year. Just the other day Sue called me from the store, astonished that a red onion costs two dollars. An onion! The price of a gallon of milk is about four dollars now. We usually go to BJs for milk, eggs, and orange juice now, though today I bit the bullet and bought a dozen small eggs and a half-gallon of milk. We used to squeeze our own orange juice until the price of even juice oranges made that prohibitive. Last night I read a tweet from a reporter in Libya who said they were boiling eggs in the water from a flower vase. Imagine things getting to that point around here. Oh, that would never happen in the United States, people say. But the cracks are showing there, too. Being an insomniac gives me the opportunity to have a lot of waking hours to read, and last night I came upon this story on Al Jazeera. It's an opinion piece entitled, New York Becomes the Occupied Territories, and the writer explains how the NYPD is now working with the CIA to infiltrate the Muslim community in New York. "Simply put, if the intelligence that the NYPD intelligence unit is gathering is not useful to the judicial process, then it's not police work, it's spying. If Americans think being spied on by their government isn't such a big deal, they can talk to the millions of Arabs who've rebelled in good measures because of decades of such practices, or the citizens of former Communist countries in Eastern Europe. All of these governments also justified spying with the need to "protect" the state and citizens from potentially dangerous people. But it always ends the same way."

Anyway, it looks like we're on the eve of destruction on a few fronts, doesn't it.

From The Witty Fool...

My friend, Jessie, a.k.a. The Witty Fool wrote something good today.

Check her blog out.

"...well, I just want to know… when will my opinion and hopes for this country matter? To you. Enough to say to the Republicans WHO WILL NEVER EVER VOTE FOR YOU that you aren’t going to compromise."

Here's where I've been blogging of late--if you're interested...

My hope was to blog all through the school year and record and share my experiences as the oldest living grad student at BU. What's the saying about alligators in a flooded swamp. If you follow me on Twitter (@johngf) you'll see that a lot of times I feel lucky to get to bed before midnight when I've been up since 6:30 and have to be up the next morning at 5:30. Broke and sleep-deprived pretty much describe my world.

And when I do blog, I've been blogging for our Contemporary Drama class, taught by the incomparable Professor Ilana Brownstein. Friday (today) at 8:00. Winter mornings were tough. But every class I leave with my head swirling with ideas, my fingertips tingling to hit the keyboard.

So, anyway, here's a taste. Check out the blog, too, for the other students' postings. Some really cool, talented, dedicated people are blogging there. 

easy

it is so much easier when the temperatures aren't punching you in the nose and you're not wearing boots so heavy kind of like the kind the astronauts wear but instead your favorite pair of cowboy boots and an old pair of jeans and you're not wearing so many layers not even a second layer under your old leather bomber that you can't move even on days when the fresh bottle of milk is spoiled and it's 5:30 a.m. and still dark and you need that coffee and sue god love her doesn't think twice about jumping into her car and heading for the 24-hour cvs to pick up a bottle so you can push out the door semi conscious and not have to pick your way through the ice and around piles of snow over your head and on the subway people are normal size again not like when they're wearing coats the size of sleeping bags and take up two seats and sit with a look on their face like try me just try me and the switches don't freeze and the conductor doesn't lie over the crackling loudspeaker that there's a train ahead because there's always a train ahead and it never stops us only when it's biting cold so we get to park on time and your feet aren't crying because the damp has swollen them and the train just rumbles on through the tunnels and pops up in the light that's pink and empty still and the earnest are jogging and bobbing and walking with a purpose to somewhere and i get off and enter the building and the student who signs in the applicants for their music auditions is already nervously tapping his pencil and a young asian is dragging her cello to the elevator and i get on because i'm here and you're not and that's just the way it is which makes it so easy.

Plans and the inevitable

What do they say about draining the swamp filled with alligators? It's the southern version of the best-laid plans of mice and men.

It's the end of the fourth week of classes, and if it weren't for me having some free time as I hold office hours for my English 202 class here in Blue State Coffee, I wouldn't have had the time to open up the laptop and ramble here like I am. Nobody's showed up but me who is required to. I imagine a few emails are forthcoming this week, and we'll deal with last-minute problems that way.

Last semester, the second week, my back went ka-plooey and so did my leg. And I worked hours and hours and more hours backstage in the theater. Even though I have a bigger load this semester, I figured I'd still have plenty of time to get my work done if I didn't waste time and still have time for a life. Ha!

But this semester no one told me I was going to get sick with a cold/flu/plague that I'm still recovering from. No one told me Sue would get sick, too. No one told me what teaching was like, or the amount of work it takes. (What was I thinking?--it is a job, after all.) I planned on getting in shape for cycling in the spring with a spin class every Saturday. I hoped to have at least one meal a week at home with the kids, to talk and catch up and just feel like family if only for a few hours. I planned on sending my plays out and getting some relationships going with theaters so when (what an optimistic statement!) I graduate. Hell, I even thought I'd have the time to play some music with friends maybe every week or so. The amount of work that has to get done is monstrous, and the self-induced pressure to excel seems to triple the workload.

So, the best thing to do, as always, is scrap the plans. Plans and rules were made for breaking, right? If things don't work out the way you plan them, just go with it and see where it takes you. So you don't end up where you plan. You always end up somewhere.

Why I Write for the Theater

At BU, every one of my writing professors inevitably ask why we/I want to write plays. What's our passion? When were we first "touched" by the theater? What's our earliest memory of the theater?

I've been a playwright for two years, one month, and nine days. I can actually count the time. I was laid off from my last gig on December 11, 2008, working on car accounts at a large ad agency. Talk about a low point in your career. On December 12 I put my feet up on the coffee table with a laptop in my lap and started writing my first play, Red Dog, one that had been rattling around in my head for a few years, about broken hearts, adultery, dogs, writing, whiskey, guns, and redemption--all of my favorite topics. I finished that play five months later in May, and kept writing plays. That I am an actor and I've also read countless plays helped me in the writing. I understood what happens on stage, what actors need, what's possible and what's not.

But I wasn't drawn to the theater the way some are. At least, not on the surface. I've heard so many stories about people who were putting on plays for their parents when they were five or eight or ten, dressing up in their mother's clothes and performing for their relatives. And these are the guys, and I'm only being slightly facetious when I write that. The theater is an inevitable destination for many people. It's a safe haven for so many intelligent, creative people.

But the question, like the subject matter of an essay or play, kept eating at me, because I, unlike so many others, didn't seem to have a clear line, an epiphany on the road to Damascus. Or was there?

I tell this story often to anyone who wonders why I write. I always knew deep down that I wanted to be a writer. I was the kid, from little on, whose essay was read aloud in the class by the teacher as an example of good writing (and if she didn't read it I'd get mad and work so my next one was read.) I guess hearing someone in authority read aloud my words to an audience was the thing I needed to get from childhood to the next phase of life.

Do I have to connect the dots? Not everyone lives his or her life in a straight line. Writing for the theater is no different than being eight years old and handing your essay over to a reader and feeling that jolt of acknowledgment that what you have to say matters. And to take it one step further, that you matter.

The first time I heard one of my plays read aloud I was scared and nervous. For some reason I felt more vulnerable and confessional than I've ever felt before in my life, even though, as you can see from this blog, I'm not averse to baring my soul. And you know what?--as much as I'd like to say it was a terrific, life-affirming experience, it wasn't. The production was horrible, one of the actresses simply was bad, miscast, whatever, and one other actress flubbed her lines. I also had been asked to tailor the play for the festival, in other words, change my play. I never should have done that.

But the second time I saw one of my plays performed, Oh my. Playwriting is a collaborative endeavor. Only songwriters and composers (well, screenwriters, but they're second cousins to playwrights) create with the knowledge that their work is going to be handed off to someone else, or a bunch of someone elses. When I sat in the audience and saw the production of Love on the Rocks at the Provincetown Theater, I actually had a moment where forgot it was my play. I didn't remember writing it, and I didn't have any affiliation to the words or the work. I was stunned. And hooked.

I've always been one to follow my nose. Writing to acting to playwriting. It makes perfect sense to me, and if I wasn't dressing up in my mother's clothes, I was playing with my sister's dolls at a much later age than most boys my age. Does that count?

The Birth of a New Idea

So you take a piece of writing you've been working on for, oh say seven or eight months. Rewriting and rewriting. Let's say you're on 24th draft. And then, at around 2:30 this afternoon you get an email from your professor saying she needs a bunch of questions answered about your work class tomorrow (10:30 a.m.), and oh, yeah, this too:

Rewrite the first utterance/action of the play (one word, one line, one brief exchange or one image) so that it sums up what the play is about. Use sleight of hand, use magic, use trickery to tell us everything and draw us into the story in an instant. Be subtle, be obvious, be direct; be crafty; be brave. I want to know WHO it's about, WHAT KIND OF PLAY this is, and SOMETHING IMPORTANT ABOUT THE WORLD.

And when you think the play is just where you want it, because that's what we're talking about here--a play--at least the first half, which includes the "first utterance" because you slaved and slaved over it and rethought it and rethought it again and again last semester, what do you do when you get this message. Do your freak out? Or do you rethink it again?

Survey says: rethink it. And before even being in the class I don't even know where I came up with what I came up with, but I like it. And it is going to affect the rest of the play, how I visualize it, how I'd write the staging.

I only worked on Highland Center, Indiana on a couple of days during the break, and that was only on the second half, cleaning it up, moving things around. So, I hadn't even thought about the opening since maybe the end of November when I last worked on it in class.

Our minds are incredible, how they work, how they work without us even knowing what they're working on. When this happens, doesn't it almost prove that the universe and other worlds exist simply because there's no proof that they do? Our conscious minds are so limited, knowledge is like the dark matter of the universe: ninety-nine percent of it we can't see. This is why a person can believe that anything is possible, because a new idea is just there, just out of reach, just out of eyesight, waiting.

Coming to the End of a Dog's Life

Something I tell new writers not to do is write about their pets. I know they think they're cute and adorable and there's nothing else like them (just like parents think that stuff about their kids: She stood up in her crib and clapped her hands!) but you have to understand that feeling is only in your inner circle. And what I try to get new writers to do is push to their outer circles and what's in them.

But Al took such a great picture of Bob over the holidays, and frankly Bob's been taking up more than a small portion of my attention lately, I can't not write about him. Besides, I've almost gone so full circle that I can write about my dog if I want. And if you don't like it, just click off.

He gave us a bad scare a couple of weeks ago, and I can't help but look at him so differently now, knowing what he must be going through. He's coming to the end of the line, and that means I'm coming to the end of the line with him. I don't know if this post is about him or me, frankly.

A few weeks ago, it was a Friday, Sue was getting ready for work and I was up and about. I remember we were talking about Christmas; Christmas took up a lot of energy this year, and while we were trying to sort things out, suddenly Sue said, Where's Bob? He's no longer always underfoot, but he usually is somewhere in one of his spots, and he usually gets up with Sue, knowing she'll be a sucker and feed him before me.

We found him lying on the bedroom floor, in his own shit and piss, and he couldn't move his hindquarters. We called the vet, and tried to figure out how to clean him up and get him out of the apartment. We got some towels under him, and a tarp, figuring we could carry him down in a litter, but once we started to hoist him, he didn't want any part of it. He found his legs, and lumbered down the stairs.

The short story is he's just slowly easing toward the end of the line. He's just about blind now. The vet said it's like he has maybe three pair of sunglasses on. So he's slow going just about anywhere except when it's bright sunlight. Down the stairs at night and into the backyard so he can relieve himself is a long process as he feels his way along. I tried putting him on a leash and leading him, but he didn't seem to like that. Bob is smart, and lets you know what's up.

He's pretty much deaf and responds only to the loudest, sharpest noises. He has arthritis in his hips, and nerve damage in his hindquarters, so he doesn't always feel it when he has to go to the bathroom. He'll just walk along the sidewalk and things drop out of him like goose eggs.

All this so far might seem funny or endearing, but at times at can be pretty tough, like when it's pouring rain in the middle of the night and he wasn't responding to commands like he had been taught. Or when he'd relieve himself at the bottom of the stairs before we got out of the house, or right on the porch as soon as we got outside. Yeah, I was short with him. I got mad. I yelled. I said he was bad. And, like I said, he's smart. He had a vocabulary of maybe twenty words or more. We had to spell things sometimes because he knew words like walk, truck, kibble, Rocky (a cat), Toby (a dog). What am I saying; he knew more than twenty words. So when I yelled he took it hard. And I hate myself now for making him feel like that. He was trying. He's always been so good and he was still being good, just not in the way he always had been before. He was old and even he knew it. He hated it when he messed on the porch more than I did.

I knew he was getting old, but I didn't quite absorb it all. Or I didn't want to. I'm not trying to make myself look better than I am (ever hear the saying, I want to be the person my dog thinks I am?) but I questioned if I was getting mad at him because I was scared of the inevitable decision I was going to have to make. Or I was more angry at what seems like desertion. How dare you leave me. He and I have been together since he was twelve weeks old, and now he's thirteen and a half. We went everywhere together, and I mean everywhere. If I had to drive somewhere, he came along. Most times he came into whatever building I had to go into, too. And now he can barely make it back up the stairs.

On December 26 the girls came over and Al brought her dog, Ella Mae. It was snowing like crazy that night, and after dinner we all went out in the snow with the dogs. A neighbor came along with her Lab pup, and that pup and Ella Mae just tore through the snow. And while my girls laughed and clapped at Bob horsing around too, I saw something else. I saw a very old dog who couldn't keep up any more, but who wanted to. I saw a dog who used to be a big strong alpha, get run over by a runty little Lab pup that before would have been nothing more than a chew toy.

We've pretty much come to terms with Bob and what he can and can't do. We don't get guilty when we don't take him places anymore, because we know it will just tire him out. We're patient when he takes his time, knowing he's still the good boy he's always been, still doing things better any other dog. And we've decided that the inevitable day is coming for not only Bob, but us too, and before he goes we're just going to do our best (but not as good as Bob could do it) to make his last days here on earth as good an comfortable as they can be for him.

Back in the Saddle

And it feels so good. Spent almost the entire day working on Highland Center, Indiana, a full-length play and the one that I'll probably use for my thesis. Classes start next week, and my playwriting prof wrote to and wants to see some of our work by Friday. She wanted to know where we stood with it, if it was almost finished, if we were sick of it, or what. After working intently on it since around last May, I love going back into that world and dealing with those characters.

And she wants to see something else we're working on, and I'm thinking of showing her Red Dog. I haven't really touched that since the reading last March with Whistler in the Dark, and I know kind of what I want to do with it (based on some really good feedback from the audience that night) but also, just when you think something is easy, that's when you'll get snagged every time. 

I'm so lucky right now to be enjoying what I'm doing. I've written my entire life, professionally for thirty years, and there were times when I was simply writing for a paycheck, which should never happen. And now, I can't wait to get up and get working.

Tomorrow I'll be fixing up details for the writing class I'll be teaching, and again, I can't wait.

And yeah, it's all so familiar. Starting a couple of days ago I've been waking up at around 2:30, I think from the sheer weight of everything I have to accomplish. I just lie there with details swirling in my head. How to line up all the ducks for the class? What can I do about this particular sticky part of Highland Center? (Hint: if it's not character-driven, it's not the answer.)

So welcome back to my world.

Gabbie Giffords Shooting Makes Me Think of this Explanation of Gun Control

Every time something like this shooting in Tuscon comes around in the United States--and it happens a lot--I'm reminded what how a visitor from Switzerland once explained gun control to me in her country.

She was visiting, and kept talking about her husband, Eddie, who was away in France hunting boar. It actually started getting funny hearing our friend speak in a French/Swiss accent about "Eddie" and "hunting boars."

Anyway, I started asking her questions, and it turns out not only Eddie but a whole lot of Swiss people have high-powered rifles that they keep in their homes and carry across international borders. "Really?" I said, amazed. "And what keeps you from all shooting one another?" I asked.

"I don't know," she replied. "Maybe we're more civilized."

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is a pretty good explanation of gun control.

Gabbie Giffords: Let's Just Put Out the Fire and Walk Away

The system is broke. Busted. Kaput. Get it? Government. Banking. Business. News Journalism Telecommunications Education Sports All Our Institutions (now say this in your best Yyl  Brynner accent) etcetera, etcetera, etcetera are all ineffectually flapping like an arhythmic heart if they're not  like some disgusting multiheaded mutant that crawled out of the local lake slobbering in your picnic basket at your family's summer picnic.

Now suddenly, all the people who caused the problems are saying, Whoa, enough is enough. All the pundits, commentators, journalists, talking heads are now giving their spin, opinions, their yakkedy-yak and filling the 24/7 talk-news-what's my agenda programs with the same useless, pointless, knee-jerk blather.

News is now agenda. News is business, not reporting or informing. And yes, there are some who are making sense on both sides of the aisle, but for the most part, all the hate and attitude and snarky personas we see and hear on the airwaves are going to stay there because, simply, they make money for those big corporations NBC CNN FOX ABC MTV etcetera, etcetera, etcetera and you think Rush or Bill or even Sarah are going to stop talking? Do you? That's how they make money, too. Say it for me: Muuuuunnneee. That's right. Money. And it's a Pandora's Box: Once they're out, they're not going to shut up and their going to keep defending themselves. I mean, excepting for Imus and Helen Thomas, both of whom pissed off advertisers. It's 24/7 baby, and the sponsors are eating this up.

Last month a man opened fired on a school board in Florida. Here's a parents' blog from January 5th: Three school shootings in as many months. Remember the rash of gay kids committing suicide from bullying? People going berserk, people who simply don't know how to treat others with kindness because all they hear and see is a pop culture of narcissism and greed and nastiness.  I think it's about time we start to realize that pop culture does indeed affect people's behavior, and I'm not advocating  censorship, I'm talking about abuses of the First Amendment where people who should know better--the journalist and the members of the media whose shoes cost more than the some people's average weekly paycheck--who hide behind the constitution and have either a political or business agenda to push.

Now some crazy person (and from all reports he's as crazy as a loon) shoots someone in Congress and kills a few bystanders including a little kid and this story becomes THE BIG ONE. Oh, it's because finally you can really pin this one on Sarah and Rush and Bill (and let's not forget the lesser voices you can hear every day on talk radio, all the wannabes.) Omigod, am I really this jaded that I think it's still all politics and business as usual?

Dreams can come true: I'm going to grad school

I got some great news yesterday. I was accepted at Boston University in its graduate program in creative writing, with an emphasis on playwrighting. Starting this summer, I'll start taking literature classes and come September I'll be taking a full load at the Boston campus.

I was standing on the Park Street T platform when I got the message on voice mail, and I think for a moment I was overwhelmed. This is something I've wanted to do for a very long time, something I thought perhaps had gone by the wayside, like the sailboat I had once dreamed about owning and living aboard, and then suddenly, it seemed, it was handed to me that simply. I'll guarantee I'll be the oldest grad student in the English department. My daughter said I need a new backpack for school. The idea seemed slightly silly to me. Can't I just use my leather satchel?

I was quiet about it. I didn't tell a whole lot of people that I was applying. I tend to do things quietly anyway. I've learned the less attention you draw to yourself the less hassle you have in your life. People--certain people, certain kinds of people--like to cause ruckuses--and the less they know, the less bother you have in your life.

When I was about 17, I decided that I was going to travel. I was enrolled to attend Ohio State, but dropped out before I sat one day in a class, got a job, unloading trucks of all things, working my ass off on a loading dock throughout the winter, saved all my money, and my parents never knew a thing about it until about a week before I took off alone for Europe. I knew they wouldn't understand why anyone would want to travel the world like a hobo, so I just hid everything from them.

I had my first meeting at BU last summer, talking over the program and the possibilities with the program's head, Kate Snodgrass. This fall term was the first I could apply for, and I had to fill out forms, take the GRE, write and edit samples, write a personal statement, and find three references. It gave me time to think about what I really wanted to do.

I want to write, of course.

And I want to teach, hopefully at the university level.

And I want to continue working with the small theaters I've been working with in the Boston area for the past few years. I feel there's a movement afloat right now, akin to the energy one felt in the early eighties when Boston's comedy scene was just starting and Jay Leno, Steven Wright, Bob Goldwaithe and a host of other young comics were just gaining a voice. And just like students come from all over the world to study at schools like MIT and Harvard then stay and start high tech and bio tech companies, people are also coming to Boston to study theater at BU, Brandeis, and Emerson, falling in love with city, and staying and starting new theater companies. That's what's happening on Boston now, and I want to be a part of it.

It's something that I've always wanted to do, and with the economy the way it is, it seemed the right thing to do. Start something new. Work hard for something you've always wanted.