A beautiful force of nature named Pamela walked into my life forty years ago and changed everything. I was hosting a meeting at my flat on the Brouwersgracht in late spring, finalizing plans to teach a week-long theater workshop out in the countryside a half hour outside of Amsterdam. Ms. Koevoets was nowhere to be seen.
I'd served tea and we'd decided to get started without the other prospective teacher, when, like a fairy or a witch, Pamela suddenly appeared. Her inner gyroscope was already spinning in top gear, so we simply proceeded with the meeting. That is, right after I made her a cup of coffee, as she was "off the whole tea thing" that week. Light blue eyes and dark hair, ten inches shorter than I, Pamela was direct, forceful and energetic. Topics that could have taken another forty minutes to cover were dispatched with in short order. The group organizers looked a bit shell-shocked by the time, minutes later, Pamela announced that we were all done and that she was late for another date. Daaag. Tot ziens. Whoosh. Then, when June rolled around, there we were out in the verdant countryside with 45 participants for a week of co-teaching/facilitating what became one of the more remarkable teaching weeks in my life thus far. Instead of splitting up the big group, we simply decided to do everything together. That first evening, with everyone gathered in the big space, we plunged in with vigor and never looked back. While near opposites in personality, we immediately were grooving together. The workshop participants, at evening's end, remarked on what a dynamic duo we were. As if we'd been at it together for years already. As we were mostly improvising, it was quite fortunate that we were able to read each other's minds. It was uncanny. Pamela had a background in dance and film (she had been featured in a couple of avant-garde Dutch movies), while I was just finishing up my conservatory training at the Theaterschool. It was thus, through seven days of nonstop, wildly creative actions with our forty-five wide-eyed students, that I got to become bosom buddies with this remarkable woman. The next year I was invited to help create an original theater piece with a group of six women. One of whom was Pamela. A piece about women. This was my first, but by a long shot not my last, opportunity to be the sole man amongst a group of amazingly creative women. Six weeks of "workshopping" in a studio created Vrouwen Variété, a show all about women on women's terms, critical, funny, lively... and a success! From this show, the Bamsisters were born. We started out with a 40-minute act that we performed at the Shaffy at midnight on weekends, and followed with 12 more years of creating theatrical pieces together. Soon after Vrouwen Variété closed and my boyfriend Isaac and I needed a place to live, we were invited to move into Pamela's house on the Koninginneweg. There Isaac and I lived on the ground floor and Pamela and her four-year-old daughter Tara lived on the first floor (or second floor, if you are from the USA). We got along well. Granted, Pamela had and has more than her fair share of eccentricities. But what others might call living with a crazy lady, I call living with a good witch of unfathomable brilliance. We helped raise Tara, she and I kept getting grants to create new shows, and we all made it work, with kittycats Fred and Stanley as our rudders. In addition to being a truly amazing performer without borders, Pamela is a writer. As I gathered myself up to return to California, Pamela carried on brilliantly on the page rather than the stage. Already a gifted writer, Pamela went on to create and publish a number of noteworthy stories and short novels. For between the two of us, words were corporal even as every physical gesture was a story incarnate. Collaboration in creation, as fruitful as it is mysterious, was our big, billowing sail. We traveled far and wide as comrades. And who knows what our old age will bring? We're on a great big round-trip journey and anywhere we glue on our eyelashes is home.
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Here we are, on earth, at this very moment. You are reading. I am writing. My future then is being your current now. Our imaginations are at work as I recollect and you picture my memory and associate onwards with your own. One resource that continues to reveal itself to me is my vivid remembrance of times up in the High Sierras with my family. The air, so bright and clear, making everything around me so sharp and vivid. Cooking with fire, drinking the delicious water from the mountain streams, going for long walks called "hikes," seeing my Dad's beard grow each day, jumping in and out of a clear-as-glass freezing cold lake all naked, watching the stars appear as bright as could be, the night sky overwhelming in its majesty and beauty. It was my one and only fishing or hunting experience when I caught a rainbow trout in the freshet tumbling down the mountainside next to our camping spot. Holding its sparkling body in my hands, then being persuaded to donate it to our dinner, and then deciding I wasn't going to do that again. Everything became so clear up in the mountains. All of the above and so much more is always here with me, not only in crystal clear memories, but also in my living spirit that animates my fingers right now as I write to you. You. You have special places, treasured moments, whether you be sixteen or forty-six or sixty-four. As your imagination opens and stretches out, that you may recall or create images of those special places and treasured moments, you experience a subtle or perhaps even marked change in how you're feeling inside. I ask you now to let the images that have just arisen and the feelings you are feeling lift up and move with you when you next stand up and go about your day. Awareness of the strength and resourcefulness and beauty that is yours and is ever at your beck and call, from sleeping to waking to stretching to moving and living your day always is right here, though we often forget to look up. Here we are, on earth, at this very moment. Teaching Drama to sixth graders is one of my favorite things in the world. They are still children, yet they're standing on the cusp of adolescence. Especially at the 6th through 12th grade school where I taught for so long, the sixth graders were starting their climb through Middle and High School with the road stretched out before them. There are a lot of forces at work to encourage good habits at school, being diligent, sensible and even serious, going from classroom to classroom with their color-coded weekly schedules, learning to act grown up. I'm one of those strange teachers who actually enjoys working with middle-schoolers. And I see as one of my prime missions to offer experiences that will empower the children to take their innate playfulness and wild imaginations along with them. A ten-year-old's ability to step right into a "what if?" situation is a precious skill. And I'll be darned if I'll let them toss their creativity aside because of peer pressure. The one-semester course I designed (and then constantly worked to improve upon) had both individual work (as in preparing and performing a monologue), lots of improvisation and theater games, and culminated in staging an original play. The first year we had a sixth grade, I picked an agreeable version of Alice in Wonderland. We had fun both in rehearsing and in performance. But I noticed something strange. The children playing these known and loved characters often seemed uncharacteristically tense and a bit unhappy. After several attempts to find out what was up, the White Rabbit told me that she just couldn't get the voice right. Right? What do you mean, Jenny? Like the real White Rabbit, Uncle Bear! Ah-ha. I'd been hijacked by Disney! But even knowing what was going on, it still took a lot of precious class time to show all the actors that our play would have our own versions of the characters, not the cartoon's. I tried the following year with a dramatization of the beloved children's story, Charlotte's Web. Here the challenge was more in the area of kids counting lines and feeling dejected and even "worthless" with a smaller part. Don't get me wrong, we had a great time and the end result was touching and very cooperative by all. I just didn't see these tender ten- and eleven-year-olds as quite ready to dig my theatrical credo about "no small parts, just small actors." So I took action. At the beginning of each semester, as I began to get to know the students, both individually and as a group, I'd write a play for them! All the parts were good, everyone was busy most of the time, and they really knew they were to create their own version of the characters, as most times, I had written the characters for the actors. So as the years rolled by, I wrote a whole bunch of ±16- to 18-character, 20- to 30-minute one-acts for my sixth graders. I explored lots of themes in these little plays, almost always in a light-hearted manner and of course always with a satisfying (if not always "happy") ending. I loved working with the dance teacher and the choral teacher to include dances and songs. Today I'd like to share one here with you, dear reader. My professional friends are always trying to get me to publish these so that other teachers can use them as class projects or the like. Maybe this foray will further encourage me to do just that! [To be read aloud, as one family loves rhyming couplets, while another always sings, and the third speaks in iambic pentameter. Enjoy!] Verse Us by Bear Capron for Drama 6 This play takes place in a public park on an early day in summer. The opening scenes introduce us to the three families on their way to the park, each family separate from the others and unaware that they will have to share the space for their family picnics. As we are introduced to each family, we hear the musical theme associated with that group. The Hobnobs: Papa, the dad, Dover Mama, the mom Lana, the teenager Gigi, younger sis Fayray, even younger sis Nini, the grandma The DeLong family: Marie, loves fun, 26 Denise, slightly younger sister Tyrone, third born, a bit of a worrier Louise, Tyrone’s fiancee The Melodias: Mo, actually Maureen, Mama Melodia Jay, younger son, 14 Lee, older son, 16 Saul, the grandpa Bea, the grandma Joe, Mo’s uncle, Saul’s brother, cranky MAMA: Slow down kids. Is this the way? PAPA: Come help me with this bag, Fayray! GIGI: Come on, you guys, we’re almost there! LANA: (looking in hand mirror) Wait up, I’ve got to fix my hair. FAYRAY: Papa, what’s in this bag? It’s heavy! NINI: We left my boombox in the Chevy! MAMA: Oh no we didn’t, Mom, it’s here. Gigi, slow down... GIGI: (to her sister, Fayray, as she passes the baby carriage to her) You push, I’ll steer. FAYRAY: I’ll put the bag in here.. NINI: But maybe... PAPA: Fayray, watch out! You’ll squish the baby! FAYRAY: Come on, you guys, there’s lots of room. GIGI: I’ll help you push! FAYRAY & GIGI: Vrrooom, vrrrooom! NINI: (to the Mama, her daughter) What’s the deal with these bratty girls? LANA: Oh, gee, just look at these awful curls! (The Hobnobs have now crossed the stage and their musical theme fades. In a moment or two we hear a second musical theme, that of the DeLong family, also on their way to a prime picnic spot.) MARIE: I think we’re almost there. Is this the path? DENISE: It doesn’t look the way it used to look. LOUISE: The last time that we came it was July. DENISE: Last year? LOUISE: We threw a party for Marie. DENISE: Oh, I remember now... MARIE: That was so cool! And everyone had ice cream and balloons. TYRONE: Denise embarrassed everyone that day. MARIE: It didn’t matter. DENISE: No one else was there! I tried to teach you losers how to dance. TYRONE: Don’t call us losers! MARIE: Yeah, we’ve got our pride. Besides, we learned your dance... TYRONE: What was it called? LOUISE & DENISE: “The Winnebago”... TYRONE: I remember now. LOUISE: It goes like this...(she starts to demonstrate along with Denise)...and one, and two, and three... DENISE: And then you go like this... TYRONE: Come on you guys! We’ll never get there if we stop to dance. DENISE: Tyrone, don’t be a partypooper, please! MARIE: It’s fun! Join in! DENISE: Marie, you know it still? MARIE: The Winnebago? How could I forget? TYRONE: But don’t we have to hurry for a spot? You guys, our secret picnic spot... DENISE: Okay. But first let’s dance. MARIE: It’s early yet. Let’s dance! All right, Tyrone, let’s show our pals here how we know the dance at least as well as they. The Winnebago! LOUISE: Take positions please. TYRONE: Gee willekers. You win. But hurry up. DENISE: What better way to start a picnic day! (The DeLong family does their Winnebago dance and then exit. We hear singing from off stage. The Melodia family approaches. They sing everything they say.) JAY: Gramma! Grampa! I’ve found the trail. LEE: I’ll bet we’re nearly there. BEA: Ah, Saul, it smells like summertime. SAUL: There’s pollen in the air! JOE: Ah-choo! Ah-choo! I feel it, too. It tickles in my nose. MO: Now Uncle Joe, please don’t complain. This is the place we chose for our annual family retreat, far from humanity... JOE: I think I hear some other folks up there beyond the trees. LEE: Oh, no, what will we do if our prime picnic spot is gone? MO: Now kids, don’t fret, I know there’s lots of space out on the lawn. BEA: (to her daughter, called Mo, short for “Maureen”) Maureen, my dear, I love to see my grandchildren run wild. SAUL: Ah, Bea, do you remember when Maureen was just a child? She’d run ahead to scout a spot, tell us to “Hurry up!” Remember, Joe? JOE: Oh yeah, that Mo was such a spunky pup! JAY: Gee, Mom, it’s hard for me to picture you so young and free. MO: It wasn’t very long ago! LEE: In 1963! BEA: To your ol’ granny dear it seems like it was yesterday. JAY: Hey, Lee! Come on, I know a shortcut... JOE: Slow down, Lee and Jay. MO: Great Uncle Joe is moving slow. SAUL: You sure you know the way? LEE: I know the route... JAY: It’s right down here... BEA: We’ll get there by midday. (The older folks, Saul, Bea and Joe, set their stuff down as they sing and dance a jig, with Mo clapping the rhythm and the kids, Lee and Jay, hopping around, eager to proceed. After their dance, the Melodias pick up their gear and, still singing, exit on their way to the picnic spot. The lights go down and then come up again, this time lighting up the whole stage area, the actual “secret picnic spot.” The Hobnobs are the first to enter.) LANA: The starlet makes an entrance on the scene. The carpet spread before her, velvet green. She seeks a spot where she can rest her weary feet. PAPA: Thank goodness. NINI: We’re alone! MAMA: Oh, what a treat! Where are the girls? Fayray! Gigi! We’re over here! PAPA: Come on out girls! The coast is clear. (The younger sisters, Gigi and Fayray, enter playing a game pretending to be secret agents, practically glued to the scenery to “avoid apprehension.”) GIGI: Agent 008, you’re late. Watch out! They’ve got us in their scopes. FAYRAY: I’ve got the x-ray shields. You got the ropes? LANA: Oh please, Fayray. Come on, Gigi. Grow up! Now don’t embarrass me! MAMA: Oh, Lana, no one else is here. Put down your things and help me, dear. NINI: And help your grandma. I’m not used to such long walks. You can put the ice chest over here by my boombox. (to Papa, her son-in-law) Now ain’t this grand, a picnic on our secret field of clover? PAPA: Just what you wanted, privacy! MAMA: Uh-oh, you hear that, Dover? Another family’s voices from down yonder in the woods.. LANA: Oh, no... FAYRAY: Oh, gee.. GIGI: We’re not alone! Dad, keep them out... PAPA: I’d do it if I could. NINI: Now, kids, don’t be so fussy. This here park’s a public place. With all this grass and trees and sky, you know there’s lots of space. FAYRAY: But grandma, we’re the first ones here... LANA: Come on, help spread our stuff. MAMA: Help with this blanket, Gigi, dear. GIGI: If they don’t like it, tough! (The Hobnobs are busy spreading out their possessions as the DeLong family enters.) LOUISE: Aw, phooey.. TYRONE: Darn! MARIE: Oh, rats! LOUISE: Doggone! DENISE: Boo-hoo.... MARIE: Our “secret picnic spot” is occupied! TYRONE: Okay, Louise, so what do we do now? While we were dancing, they were setting up. Hey, we have rights as well... LOUISE: Come, let’s spread out. Marie, our basket, if you please... MARIE: Of course. DENISE: (to Lana) If you don’t mind, we’d like a little space. LANA: Why, naturally, though we were first... LOUISE: Some lemonade? MARIE: I’ve such a thirst! (taking a cup from Louise) Oh, yum! NINI: Come, girls, get sunblock... PAPA: (to Tyrone) Excuse me, chum, but this one spot’s reserved for us. TYRONE: I didn’t see a sign that said “Reserved”! MAMA: Now, Dover, please don’t make a fuss... FAYRAY: Of all the nerve! (Here follows the Territorial Dance, with both family groups winning and losing space as the tide moves back and forth between the groups. They are trying, with varying degrees of success, at acting civil to one another, and are indirect rather than confrontational in claiming and re-claiming space. Nonetheless, the dance culminates in a tense stand-off between the two family groups. Just then, the music changes and the Melodias enter, oblivious in their joy. The first two groups are temporarily speechless on either side of the stage as the Melodias blithely take over the center area for their picnic. As the dance music comes to an end, the Melodias sing their words, as usual.) MO: (sung as an ascending scale) Yo, Jay and Lee, help Gramps and Joe. SAUL: (these two lines sung in descending scale) Mo, you help Bea. BEA: Don’t move so slow. LEE: Hey, Jay, look out there on the water. I see swans. JAY: Yeah, Lee, I see, but check out the “chicks” here on the lawn. (He is pointing out the Hobnob girls. Lana, especially, has taken notice of the two teenaged boys and is trying to act nonchalant.) JOE: So much for that “shortcut” of yours, Jay... LEE: I think we’re in for quite a lovely day. The scenery is great, don’t you think so? JAY: Come on, just lighten up, Great Uncle Joe! MO: (to the other astonished families) Hello, you all, and how are you today? PAPA: Ah-hem... TYRONE: Well, we... MAMA: I mean... GIGI: We’re here to play. But if you folks all spread out in this way... DENISE: And disregard the areas we’ve chosen... FAYRAY: Why then, I don’t know if my folks will stay... MO: Would you all like Italian ice? SAUL: It’s frozen! BEA: We made it up ourselves before we came. JOE: With lots of lemons, and some berries, too. DENISE: Italian ice!? LANA: (to Jay) I’m Lana, what’s your name? NINI: (to Joe) I’m Nini. JAY: Jay. JOE: I’m Joe. Unmarried, too! PAPA: My goodness, that ol’ guy is moving fast! MAMA: He’s showing his young friends there how to pass. TYRONE: (to Saul) Excuse me, sir, but don’t you think that we could have some peace and quiet to relax? SAUL: I say, young fella, cool it. Try some ice. MARIE: I guess we could chill out, Tyrone, come on. BEA: Try this. Say “yes,” ’cause we won’t offer twice! FAYRAY: (to Gigi, peering through binoculars) Agent 005, call out the spies! We are surrounded by a group of guys. GIGI: I think they may be agents in disguise. Agent, check ‘em out. What do you see? FAYRAY: One says his name is Jay. LEE: Hi, girls, I’m Lee. LANA: Oh, please ignore these brats, they’re such a pain. DENISE: With our luck now, you’ll see, it’s bound to rain. MARIE: Chin up, Denise, the skies are clear and blue. MO: (to Denise & Marie) Young ladies, I’m Maureen. And who are you? MARIE: Marie. DENISE: Denise, it’s nice to meet you, too. MARIE: And that’s Louise. She’s Tyrone’s fianceé. PAPA: What a jolly group we’ve got assembled here today. LEE: Hello there, Lana, I’m Jay’s brother, Lee. I wondered if you’d like to come and see the carp I saw there swimming in the lake? LANA: The carp? I think you’re making a mistake. Those fish are koi, I know, because they’re orange... JAY: Yeah, Lee, you dork, they’re koi... GIGI: (to Fayray) Look how she’s flirting with that boy. FAYRAY: But when she finishes with “orange” what does she expect from him? GIGI: I guess something like “door hinge,” but her chance is getting slim. MAMA: (to her daughters) Lana, Fayray, Gigi, now don’t get too close to the water! (now to Mo) It looks like they are having fun, your sons there with my daughters! MO: My lads are just beginning to get interested in girls. MAMA: When Lana sees a teenaged boy, her head, it fairly whirls! PAPA: They say that girls grow faster, that they’re quicker to mature. MO: Before we know it, they’ll be dating! MAMA: Scary! MO: That’s for sure! NINI: Well, Joe, I’m pleased to know you. JOE: The pleasure’s mine. You like to dance? NINI: I’ve got some steps I’d like to show you... SAUL: (to Bea) Now just watch the old guy prance! BEA: Hush, Saul, don’t spoil their fun. I haven’t see Joe smile in weeks. SAUL: If he starts dancing in the sun, he sure will get some rosy cheeks! JOE: (to Nini) I’m not as spry as I once was. NINI: Oh, I don’t give a fig. BEA: My bro-in-law is quite a guy... SAUL: He’ll show you how to jig! LOUISE: If you folks like to dance, then ask Denise to show you how to do our favorite one... DENISE: The Winnebago! MARIE: Show them now! LOUISE: We made it up, when was it ‘Nise? DENISE: In 1993. When we were on vacation. It was in Yosemite. MARIE: Tyrone was all upset because we lost our camping spot. TYRONE: Kind of like today, except the weather’s not so hot. PAPA: When you say “not so hot” do you mean you don’t like it here? Or do you mean Yosemite was too hot? It’s not clear. TYRONE: It’s clear as it can be! PAPA: You mean the sky? TYRONE: No, what I said! DENISE: You’re getting me confused. MARIE: Yes, please... TYRONE: You’re messing with my head! MAMA: My, my, you guys, let’s take a break, and please don’t fight again. MO: Been there, done that, now let’s have fun. BEA: Hey, we could have a swim! JAY: Oh, Gramma Bea, the water’s yucky. BEA: Yucky? JAY: Can’t you see? FAYRAY: It must be full of fish poo.. LEE: Carp crap... GIGI: Don’t forget, swan pee! LANA: Like oh my gosh, you guys are gross. Don’t talk about the water. MAMA: Spoken like my one and only sixteen-year-old daughter. SAUL: Now kids, in my day... JAY: Please, Grandpa, don’t tell us about “your day.” NINI: Us old folks know a lot! JOE: That’s right! NINI: (to Saul) What were you going to say? SAUL: Oh, never mind, it doesn’t really matter anyway. MO: If it’s too hot to dance, then we could sing. Music melts our differences, makes light of everything. (to Tyrone) Tyrone, is it? You start us off. LOUISE: Tyrone, come on. You dare it? TYRONE: I wanna sing a song you know, the song that’s called “We Share It”! We Share It (tune= Be Our Guest) ALL: Make no fuss. Bear with us. Only just give us your trust. If you care to You can share who You would like to be with us. Come, let’s play! Anyway, this is such a splendid day! We’re aware it’s fun to share it, So toss all your cares away. In our race for this place We forget our sense of grace. If you love it, you won’t shove and push for space. So step right out and share This water, land and air! Make no fuss! Bear with us! Bear with us! Being mean In this green Wonderland of field and stream Makes no sense. You must be dense if you Don’t know just what we mean. Summertime’s So sublime! Sing along now with our rhyme. You can share it, Come and bare it, Far from city’s grit and grime. In our race for this place We forget our sense of grace. If you love it, you won’t shove and push for space. So step right out and share This water, land and air! Make no fuss! Bear with us! Bear with us! THE END Copyright Bear Capron Revised April, 2001 He was sixteen. I was eighteen. We met because of Rachel. We got to kiss a whole lot because of Deborah. In the mild California winter of my freshman year at Stanford, I answered an ad in the Daily. A grad student in Sociology was writing her thesis on gay male behavior during the late '60's. I met Rachel at a particular bench on the Quad and liked her immediately. While she had some written material for me to look at and a list of some questions, most of the material she was gathering came by way of an extended interview. She was ready to listen, and was I ever ready to talk! Not a tortured conversation about whether and how to come out to my family. Not even a "gay rights" oriented set of queries. Rachel wanted to know about how I was negotiating within and outside the closet. Two hours flew by. I felt so grateful to be able to share my story, not as a set of problems but as an adventure! Before we parted, making sure we had all of each other's contact info, Rachel gave me a quizzical look and then burst forth with a question. She'd just the day before interviewed a local high school Junior named Tom and --- her yenta eyes sparkling --- would it be okay for her to give Tom my number? She was sure we'd like each other! What fun! Those who have perused past posts here will know that, though I'd had a lot of experience during the previous three years making out with men, I'd yet to meet, let alone get it on with, any gay guys my age. So I had my fingers crossed. Three days later Tom called. Cute voice. Yes, let's meet. No, I don't have wheels, either. His friend was egging him on in the background. Tom conferred with his friend, Deborah, who did have a car, so it was settled: they'd come pick me up the next day, Saturday, at the top of the Oval. Ah, the glory of one, big front seat! Deborah's car was a big convertible. Tom smiled and open the passenger door. He was a bit shy and so was I. Deborah made that better right away. With a great sense of fun and a major dose of 'Why not?' Deborah knew she'd done good. Tom looked to me like the prototypical cute high school boy, a bit of Brylcreem in his combed dark blond hair and a full set of shiny braces on his teeth. We drove into town, headed to Peninsula Creamery. Our manly pheromones seemed to pull us into spontaneous kissing in no time. I mean, we had just started to chat as we drove down Palm Drive, Deborah merrily keeping up a happy patter when, before Tom or I knew what was up, we were kissing like neither of us had before. We didn't even come up for air until Deborah was parking the car. I don't think it was until we were sitting in the diner, still wanting to kiss but willing to briefly sublimate with milkshakes, that I even had a thought about the happy spectacle we'd been making, gliding down the avenue in a gold convertible with the top down, making out like bandits. Both Tom and Deborah were good conversationalists. And as we got down to the slurpy part of our shakes, Deborah could read on our happy faces that the siren song of testosterone was calling to Tom's and my eager mouths. And so, as winter blossomed into spring, the three of us went lots of places and Tom and I did lots of kissing. I learned to work around the braces. As Deborah's convertible was our one and only place to date, several months of driving all over the place meant miles of smooches, neck nibbles, tongue tips in ears, and deep, long longed-for, unabashed kisses. One of my fondest memories with dear, eager Tom is crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on a top-down kind of afternoon TWICE, passionately kissing a boy named Tom all the way. The Book of Faces just told me that one of my former students, a bright, creative, funny, lovely young woman named Caitlin who's become a teacher (hooray!!) will be moving back to the Bay Area (hooray!!) after teaching English to some lucky high schoolers in Virginia. I was especially glad to hear that, in addition to several sections of English, she's scored a section of Drama, too! I have dozens of vivid memories of Caitlin, on stage and off.
Receiving this good news also shook up the carbonation in my noggin that's always on at least a low fizz when it comes to the topic of teaching and learning. First, I clearly do not think that there's one right way to teach a subject. Au contraire. Good teachers are always learning, every single day that they teach. We learn about how many ways there are to come at a theme or topic, how many ways our students make our teaching their own, and what a delightful challenge it will always be to create an atmosphere of inquiry and dialogue, challenge and safety, each and every day one gets together with students. In the first month of my conservatory training at the Amsterdam Theaterschool, the twelve students in my newly admitted class were offered a roadmap for the coming years. Each of us chose to embark on a four- or five-year program, depending on which diploma one was seeking. The eleven others all chose a degree in performance in four years. I chose a dual degree in performance and theater education in five. (I suddenly recall the gratified looks I then got from my wonderful teachers. Probably not too different from the happy face I no doubt make when I hear that yet another of my former students has decided to become a teacher!) Getting into that school was one of the great blessings in my life. First, it was, as are most conservatories, an intensive 5- or 6-day-a-week full-time experience. My teachers were all masters in their fields: acting, mime, voice, ballet, modern dance, martial arts, gymnastics, circus arts, and even one who specialized in Space. In addition, in my 4th and 5th years I got to experience three amazing mentored internships where I learned so much about applying my hard-won skills. Each internship started out as a six-week experience and each one grew into a six- or eight-month experience. The third was at the huge state psychiatric hospital where they offered me a full-time job as I received my MFA. In one way, returning to California was a letdown. The system here, as in most states, has it that there is no teaching credential in Theatre Arts. Drama teachers are, by and large, English teachers who decide to take on teaching theater. Those who are gifted (like my Caitlin) will do just fine. But I don't think that our education system should play roulette when it comes to giving children and teens formative exposure to theater arts. I remember that at my top-notch high school in the '60's our Drama teacher spent 70% of the time with history and the reading of plays. And because he was the de facto director of the school plays and musicals, though I always had fun, we never touched on the physical and vocal possibilities that make creating theater so exciting and vital for young people. I want to see some respect for my profession. I like teaching English and do it well, but I'm NOT an English teacher. Performing arts education is sensory and right-brained, calls for constantly dipping into one's imagination, and demands a clear understanding not only of the physical and vocal aspects of all performing arts, but also of the pedagogy of teaching all kinds of students. Planning a course and then the day-to-day manner of bringing that course to life requires its own kind of artfulness. (By the way, there are teaching credentials in Art and Music, although I cannot testify to how high the bar is set for those aspiring to teach these two vital subjects.) three cheers for all teachers and their three best friends: knowledge skills understanding The English language was born for play. Today's post is inspired on the simple expression or term: make believe. You might want to take a moment before reading a few of my associations with these two words to bounce them around in your mind first and see how many varying pictures arise. I don't think I realized how enamored I was with make believe until my kid brother, Seth, "outgrew" the desire to play pretend with me when I was 11 and he was 9. We'd had quite a good run, inventing and becoming multiple characters with extended improvisations over the years, easily picking up where we left off, moving freely from one reality into another. He just lost interest. I never did. So I continued to organize little plays and skits and enrolled my siblings and the children of family friends over for a visit to play them out with me. When performance time came, I seemed to have a sixth sense for when we were getting stuck, or elaborating too long, and usually could bring the action to a conclusion, punchline or no punchline. From there it was a natural step to start creating and producing plays starting at age 13. By constantly being in at least one play (and sometimes two or three!) throughout my teen years, I got to collectively make believe a whole lot and doing so proved to be my rudder through adolescence. Taking on roles and playing each to the hilt, I can now see, proved a counterbalance to all the time I felt I had to make believe I was a straight boy. In both developing a performance in a play as well as in improvisation, the willing suspension of disbelief -- in other words, the ability to just say Yes to the play and to the improvisation -- are key. Being able to shift gears with ease, from what one considers Reality into what one calls Pretend, happens all the time. Where this shift becomes perilous is when great swathes of our society suspend disbelief without acknowledging that they are doing so. If you meet a friend on the street while you are on your way, running late, and your friend says "Fine" when you ask how he is, although he looks quite miserable, you're on your way without much trouble when you suspend disbelief and pretend you believe his answer. But if Congress suspends disbelief when the likes of Dick Chaney and Donald Rumsfeld are claiming evidence of an imaginary weapons program in Iraq as justification for starting a war, we're stepping with eyes open and blinders firmly in place into another nightmare of greed over human values. When "people of faith" gather in worship, there's a good deal of Make Believe going on. When this communal believing knits a community together, gives hope and courage to carry on, and provides guidelines for good behavior passed down from the Most Reliable Source, belief is a powerful tool. But when one makes believe while denying that this is being accomplished by suspending disbelief, there's a danger that one gathering's set of beliefs becomes The Sacred Truth and everyone living with a different set of beliefs becomes an outsider or, even worse, an enemy of your faith, why then we're in trouble.
What does the reality of man-induced climate change have to do with belief these days? When moneyed interests enroll huge numbers of people as "climate change deniers," and paint the scientific community as a bunch of Godless panic queens, we're in trouble. When we Americans make believe that we can "conquer" and "wipe out" groups of believers who find our invasions and destruction in their homelands to be reasons to hate us and to try to hurt us back, we're in trouble. And when Christian missionaries feel holy when shaming a people out of their own 4000- or 9000-year-old cultures and belief systems, we're in trouble. Each of us must be both willing and conscious of our own responsibility to decide before suspending our disbelief. Children at play discover hidden powers and strength in vulnerability. Adults making believe that the leaders of their religion or political party or corporation will speak the truth in a straightforward manner, are suspending disbelief just because it's easier than stepping back and questioning. They no longer look before they leap. Come! Let's make believe you're the wizard and I'm the prince who needs help figuring out this riddle.... what powers do you have, dear Wizard? Last night we attended a very special concert entitled The Holy City: A festival of English Choral Music. The setting was the breathtaking Memorial Church at Stanford and the place was full, not only the audience, but also surrounding us in front, on the sides and behind us, three outstanding choruses and an orchestra. Our friend Sharmon had recommended the concert as she was singing in one of the choruses and knew we'd be in for something special. The main event was a full performance of Vaughan Williams' Sancta Civitas. I was utterly transported. Although the libretto was printed in the program, I was so captivated by the gorgeous sound of voices gathering and coming to meet in the large, airy space of the church that I was content just to listen. Out of my contentment, during and long after the performance, I became very sad. Vaughan Williams had, in the years just before writing this magnificent massed choral piece, been serving as a medic on the bloody battlefields of World War I. The slaughter of innocents and the degradation of human worth that this terrible war exposed him to was to alter Williams' whole life. The Sancta Civitas is rarely performed because of its need of so many skilled singers and a space capacious enough to hold such magnitude. It was Williams' favorite. Rising and falling in intensity, in grief and solace, in innocence forever snuffed out, the music had me held hovering over the battlefield. Even as I mourn the great suffering of war, my hands drawn to cradle my aching heart, I feel the righteous indignation growing in my belly, a voice rising from deep inside me calling out, NO MORE WAR. Back in January, I wrote about my getting drafted to fight in Vietnam. My story has both suspense and humor. [http://tinyurl.com/kxnzbag & http://tinyurl.com/m5kl3o3] But I never found anything humorous about that war. Young men who weren't fortunate enough to get a deferment for college were drafted in great numbers to go fight and kill and get maimed and die for what? Does one's birth into this affluent country come with a price tag that one is then asked to unquestioningly step up to get trained to fight and kill, if not because of getting drafted, then because it's the one job that a young person can find that will give them a sense of purpose, of dignity, of patriotism? Together with a lot of my schoolmates (at Stanford) and certainly my family, I have always spoken and acted out against these horrible wars of choice. How can I be "patriotic" when we're not fighting for our values and our freedom, but for the Military-Industrial Complex? Although many of us knew from the start that we were invading Iraq so that fat cats could control more oil fields, we all must look this straight in the eye and respond from our consciences. Goofy Warmonger Bush was a willing puppet to the Chaneys and the Roves. They lied to Congress and to the American people, and once again fortunes were made and blood was spilled. The sad and beautiful Sancta Civitas still resounds in my soul. I look at the children and my heart cries, they were not born to be brutalized by violence and weaponry. We must disarm and turn toward the light. We must walk together and talk together, break bread together and sing, everyone, sing. Namasté, dear reader. Every moment of life the forces of expansion and contraction ebb and flow. Life is ceaseless change. In the spacious silence of sitting still, the rush and cacophony of being alive become passing clouds, silent and ever reshaping overhead.
Caring for and protecting those whom and that which we love, we sentient, big-brained beings are doing what comes naturally. Yet as I look around me, beyond the sublime comfort of my tender life, I see that neither luxury nor hardship in themselves provide either inner peace or a life without violent exchanges. Dancing as I do, straddling the masculine/feminine teeter-totter, I try over and again to understand and find some peace with the constant tug between knowing the One and experiencing the toll of dualism. We humans have great powers of abstract thought and the ability to objectify. Our ways of coming to understand and even control our physical universe through science are astounding. What a piece of work is man! In order to build our kingdoms and corporations, to gather power for one country over another, one religion against the neighboring faith, we have all decided to pretend to believe that numbers on a balance sheet and printed rectangles with assigned values shall be our organizing principle. Money as power. The cost to each of us of this grand game of pretend too often goes unremarked upon. Makes sense. It would be distressing and, ultimately, at least irritating to have some young voice calling out about the Emperor's nakedness all the time. But still ... It may well be that my coming of age in the 1960's gave me the illusion of some seismic changes coming down. Perhaps every young person's coming of age feels like this --- that we come to herald our elders with songs of peace and equal rights, our cheers of "Make love, not war!" just our colorful way of decorating the downward path to adulthood. But be that so, can we not rally the wisdom of our youth, be we 14 or 44 or 84? All youth requires is education, where the wonder of our minds meets history and ethics and poetry. Though I may come to understand why African warriors fear the changes that are coming as the children, and most especially the girls, are getting educated, my understanding does not bring peace to my troubled mind. The men of Boko Harem were once baby boys. Robert Oppenheimer and all the workers on the Manhattan Project once were baby boys as well. All grew to learn to think abstractly, even to the point of seeing their fellow humans as property to be sold and enemies to destroy. These realities I cannot meditate away. What I can do is to Evoke the One in word and deed, to celebrate connection, to affirm unity, and to question my own thinking and speaking, even as I challenge others to raise their own questions, their own assumptions and hold these up to the light where we can find the strength to challenge dominant ways of thinking, and move closer to peace. In the late 60's, striving for peace, I joined others on the Stanford campus and through peaceful sit-ins and ongoing peer education, we succeeded at getting the University to divest itself of SRI, for the Institute was actively developing weapons for the Vietnam War. The recent movement to get Stanford to further divest, this time to rid their huge portfolios of investments supporting the fossil fuel industry, matter, especially as we are further educated. The pundits who declaim that these are meaningless gestures because the system is built to follow the money, Stanford be damned, are the people who can drop their plastic water bottle along the trail because "What's one bottle, anyway?" How we look at our world, from moment to moment, creates our world. We with our gift of abstract thought are all held by an infinitely more powerful force, for we are All and all we have. Today I rededicate myself to peace through understanding. Namasté, dear reader. I hope to always be appreciative of the opportunity I got when I was hired to teach at the outstanding 6th through 12th grade college prep school for girls where I landed after fifteen years of teaching in Holland. I don't believe I ever took for granted the many advantages afforded all who studied there and all who worked there. The quality of the faculty, the beautifully tended grounds, the abundance of cutting edge technology to aid with teaching and learning, the healthy and delicious food served each day at lunch, and the array of distinguished speakers who came to address the students --- all of this made for a photogenic school ready for the next year's viewbook. At the same time, when self-congratulatory comments were flying around about how special the place was, I've always thought and often said, "Having good teachers and a clean, well-lighted space in which to learn shouldn't be something special. ALL children deserve this." Surely this is self-evident. Yes, I got a crash course in the corrupt underbelly of private school management when, from one day to the next, without warning, I was tossed away after twenty years of tireless service. But I learned much more. The swift, relentless decision to get rid of me was followed by a kind of mindless panic that led me to question the good sense of these administrators and their understanding of how teachers work. Though administrators held to the party line that I was on "administrative leave," the powers that be commanded my presence on the first no-school Monday to come in and clear out my office, under the baleful gaze of two lackies. Two decades of teaching and advising and producing scores of plays and musicals meant that there was a lot to sort and a lot to pack. I was pretty miserable throughout. My misery became first disbelief, then white-hot anger, and finally deep sorrow when I inquired about the four file drawers and the shelves of CDs and the multiple hard drives full of course descriptions, lesson plans, worksheets, examples of student work, departmental plans and history, and much more. As I'd chaired the Arts Dept for fourteen of my twenty years at the school, I was the custodian for a wide array of documents that had taken all of us in the department years to create and then improve. And because almost half this documentation was from the 1990's, it was indeed on paper rather than all contained on a hard drive. But then, even the terabytes of digital files I had stored for future generations were to meet the same fate. In addition, I had (entirely voluntarily) served as the school's video archivist all those years. I'd stood behind the camcorder and then created DVDs of all the major events -- distinguished speakers, annual Founder's Day speeches by Seniors, plays and musicals and special days out around The Circle. History is important and providing the school with these rich archives had been my pleasure and honor. So I inquired of the Powers that Be what they would like me to do with these archives, the many curricula I'd designed and documented and with the scores of discs I had created. The answer, dear reader, made my jaw drop. Hadn't the school paid me all these years to craft and re-craft courses, to develop strategies for all the arts at the school, to add new pieces to the mosaic of our shared history? And wouldn't my successor in the job need to know at very least what all these original courses looked like, even if he or she wanted to do them differently? "Take what you want. Anything you leave behind is going to be shredded." PS The teachers (yes, multiple) they hired to take my place were given their keys and told to go teach. Nothing passed on. For me the saddest of all this is how little respect for the students the decadence this flushing away of all this work, created especially and specifically for these students, this ruthless erasure of everything associated with me, so clearly demonstrated. The Administration continued for weeks to say that I was on leave, while my office was stripped bare. No Bear, nowhere. Bye now. Sweet harmony to be heard here chez Alva and Bear, a/k/a Liefje. We're reading Moss Hart's ACT ONE aloud to each other. Peace and joy reign.
Soon after this autobiography was published in 1959, Alva bought the book in hardback. It was the first book he had ever purchased. Four years later, I bought ACT ONE in paperback. Years and many miles apart, we both devoured this delicious book. When you're born to live your life as theater and the theater is your life, hearing the tales of another similarly afflicted/blessed person is See's chocolates for the soul. Especially when you know you're an oddball. You've been called "over-sensitive" and "over-dramatic" all your life. And then a real hero of the American stage tells you his story and you resonate with every word ... it's big. I've heard similar stories from my dancer friends, telling about seeing and bonding with the film, The Red Shoes. How much our identities are inherent in our unique DNA combinations, and how much they are formed in early childhood (as Alva and I are both third-born children, thus presumably inclined to learn to entertain others to gain attention), I will leave for my friends the scientists to determine. My experience tells me that when a child is seen and made to feel appreciated in his or her uniqueness, even when family needs time to learn how to love and accept the child's true nature, that child has a much better chance of growing up feeling worthwhile. And those who have learned self-respect are so much more likely to embrace diversity in those they in turn will interact with. When the subtext of your learning as you grow up and in your first love relationships is stuck in "If only you..." and "You're too this..." and "We wish you'd be more that..." .... well, you grow more inclined to see others' expressed identities as fodder for your turn on the Judge's platform. We discern that we may enjoy food and avoid poison. We judge that we may feel better than, safer from, further evolved than "the other" --thereby keeping the world at arm's distance and steering clear of intimacy. Moms trying to grocery shop with small children in tow, and teachers trying to get certain behavior from their students tend to use phrases these days like "You need to...." It's clear and it probably works. But what happened to, "Lucy, please put that back on the shelf," or "Children, it's story time. Please all come sit on the carpet."?? Kids are sensible enough to know that they need to pee, but don't need to put back the sugary cereal or sit on the carpet. When I see children painting pictures, making up stories, and playing pretend with their friends, I see nascent identities being explored, tried on for size, put on backwards just for fun, traded with another, flexing in the expanding and contracting of the human heart. Listen to their growing nomenclature. Hear the ever-changing music of their imaginations. Nurture your own rare sense of timelessness. Both our children and our childhoods are ever ready to call out appealingly, "Jump in! The water's just fine!" The cozy, protective nook a pigeon may choose for temporary shelter is one thing. Our human, fear-based tendency to lump people together while we divide them up is entirely different. When a child, over and again, gets lumped, the child soon starts pre-sorting his- or herself. When a mother or father or trusted teacher or coach repeats what was done to them when they were growing up, this way of thinking and treating one another becomes so engrained that we stop seeing it happen.
Children are extremely sensitive throughout their growing up to others' expectations. I'm talking not only about noticing what reading group they get assigned to, or where in the pecking order they are when teams are being formed, I'm talking about children's ability to read our minds. I've seen fascinating studies about the seemingly supernatural abilities of dogs and even houseplants to sense our intentions and our needs. How could our children not be constantly picking up on the subtlest of signals? For the over forty years that I have been teaching young people, one of the most common reactions I've heard from parents and other teachers comes down to, "Wow. How did you do this? I never thought my daughter, my son, my pupil had that in them!" At first, when I heard this question being posed, I was puzzled. First off, it wasn't I who did the doing, it was the child. That much I could say directly in response. But underneath, I was thinking (and as I gained understanding, saying out loud), "How could I NOT see this potential for this kind of growth in this child?" I often characterize myself as a rose-colored glasses kind of guy. But right now, I'm talking about being present with a student, with each and every child, so that we can together stretch and reach with our imaginations, leaving behind yesterday's transcript and this morning's squabble. Because our imaginations have wings and endow us with the freedom to soar above all the dummies' desires to stuff us in a pigeonhole, we must nurture and cherish each flight. It is my prime purpose to encourage positive imagining, to validate in word and deed the individual and collective flights of all with whom I interact. In the classroom and on the stage, something absolutely wonderful happens when one take-off encourages another and another, until the breeze can become the wind under even the most timid of wings. Every time we categorize another according to the previously perceived limitations or shortcomings of the other, we are clipping their wings. And, as I've said, after awhile the other starts doing the pre-clipping to themselves. When I say that we are meant to have the highest expectations of those who trust us or who are dependent on us, that means starting with ourselves. Self-confidence is not the learned skill to elbow oneself to the front of the line. It is the trust in one's imagination and the knowing that we create our updraft all together. May we each soar freely, marveling at all the flutter, all the new skies that surround us. summary of vital changes
As those who have read my January posts (i.e. http://tinyurl.com/n2b8z3y ) will know, last March I received an enormous blessing in the form of a top notch transplant of one of Jane my sister-in-law's kidneys. This blessing changed my life fundamentally. It turns out that without anyone knowing it, I'd spent 54.5 years of my life living with impaired kidney function because of a near-death experience and a big, medical Hail Mary when I was 18 months old. Even when, at age 56, I learned (because of a routine physical) that my kidneys were functioning at one third of their capacity and, even when a biopsy confirmed this reality, I knew this only as an interesting fact and not as a life-changing revelation, I could not imagine what was in store for me, in so many more ways than one. When I was in my 21st year of devoted service to the school I'd given 50 hours a week and all my heart to, my Boss [the uptight, anti-body, power-drunk, half-million-a-year getting Head of School] seized the opportunity she saw to fire her nemesis because I showed a 19-minute, Academy Award nominated, unrated film to my freshmen Core Arts students. The reason that this Head thought that she simply had to fire me was that this utterly non-sexual short film about an art student showed one naked woman and five topless women while exploring the mind and fantasy life of a young artist. This dismissal and the way the entire administration and most of my colleagues simply looked the other way rather than ever standing up for me combined to create the greatest trauma of my life. From one day to the next I was banned from campus and turned into an unemployable pariah. (We call that "stank voor dank" in Dutch. That means "stench as thanks" and, yeah, that stinks.) I was brave and somehow kept myself together. I got enormous help from my husband and my family and my incredible legion of friends. The kind words, spoken and written, about my work as a teacher, director, advisor and mentor are golden and will sustain me all my days to come. I am mighty grateful. [ whereisbear.org ] My body, however, didn't remember how to pretend. Over a three year period, after I was stabbed in the back, understandably, my kidneys began to fail. Down to 20% function. Got in line for a transplant. 15% function. Waiting and feeling very low energy. 10%, flat on my back. 8% at last the transplant. During the difficult time between my being banished and my losing all my energy, I experienced, for the first time in my life, what depression was. I was prescribed one anti-depressant, then another. Because the help these drugs may have been giving me was mostly overwhelmed by my declining energy, I felt emotionally okay, but so drained physically that, after a while, nothing seemed to matter much. getting to the point Receiving Jane's healthy (100% Norwegian by the way) kidney, everything changed for me. I cannot say this emphatically enough. Everything. Energy in abundance. Health and vitality in ways reminiscent of my young adulthood. Mental function amazingly improved. Happy. Optimistic. Peaceful. For months after my transplant, I was carefully monitored by the stupendous Stanford Transplant Team and an assigned nephrologist whom I saw quite regularly. With every visit their medical mentality became more and more obvious. Whenever I reported any change for the worse in my body's functioning, any symptom as yet unexplored, any not-so-good blood panel, any small setback, they were all ears. More tests. Come back in a week. Try this. Stop doing that. I'll email you this afternoon. Let's monitor this closely. Yet whenever I shared with them the phenomenal, positive changes I was experiencing every day in my feelings and in my thinking and truly in my soul, their eyes glazed over and they seemed to be patiently waiting until I'd gushed myself out. "It's just the (minute dose of) prednisone talking. Yadda yadda, transplant patient." Have all the grueling years at school and all the paperwork and insurance hassles and fighting for status and needing to see SO MANY patients to satisfy the Powers That Be ... has all this dragged the optimism and idealism that so many started out with down into darkness? Can you no longer see and be thrilled to see that your patient has experienced a revolution in his life? These are my questions. I shall carry on interacting with these doctors-who-changed-my-life until I get at least a semblance of an answer. Meanwhile, dear reader, I'm happily assuming that you will share in my enthusiasm and joy. May you be blessed with clarity in your gaze and warmth in every embrace. You won't find me in any of the above pictures. But you will get a view of the kind of space I feel so at home within. Making theater -- from skits with siblings and cousins at age 8 to full scale musicals in summer stock, from self-written whacky fun plays for 6th graders where all parts are leads to workshopping original new productions with a playwright, a composer, musicians and actors -- makes me feel alive the way playing basketball may ring some other guy's chimes.
Throughout the 20th century, theatermakers' ways of producing plays have evolved and branched out. Big, commercial theater still runs with a business model of top-down management. But alongside the money-model, since time immemorial, there have been men, women and children with theater running through their bloodstreams. And people with music pulsing through their veins. Parents of college-bound teenagers will quake at the idea of having a son or daughter so afflicted --- no future! no stability! --- and sometimes the curse is outgrown or discarded along the way to adulthood. But for some of us, making music and making theater is simply who we are. You can't stop us! So you, dear reader, can imagine how lyrically happy I am now, after a weekend FULL of music and movement and themes and actors, singers, musicians. My tribe! We were gathered up in San Francisco in a rehearsal space to "workshop" a new play. And what a group! Nine actor-singers, the playwright, the composer-pianist, a violin-viola-cello player, a director-facilitator --- plus a whole van-full of polyinterpretable props and noisemakers to play with. Heaven! What did we do? Well, Friday evening we sat around a very large table (made with sawhorses and large table-like surfaces) and first got to know one another a bit, then read the play aloud with pre-assigned parts (most everyone playing multiple roles). Actually, we didn't quite finish reading it aloud, as one respects starting and finishing times quite strictly in theater, especially when working with professionals. New beginnings are so exciting. Bring together 14 creative minds and a wonderfully provocative director, together with the excitement of a brand new play, and you've got the makings of an action-packed, brainstorm-on-your-feet kind of workshop. We spent all day Saturday and Sunday exploring spaces, themes and characters, making music and whale-sounds, and learning about an Alaskan coastal village that's 4,000 years old and the inhabitants' struggle to survive. Singly and together, we explored through composition-creation and improvisation the lives of the people this play (Arctic Requiem) dramatizes. I met and worked closely with incredibly talented, curious, courageous people. We took leaps of faith together. We laughed and we mourned. We battled each other and embraced each other. We harmonized to I'll Fly Away and made music with gravel and bottles and assorted body parts. There was storytelling and intimate quiet. There was no boundary between the emotions of this Inupiat tribe we evoked and our own, flowing feelings. In the carpool on our way home after Sunday's session, I felt exhausted and exhilarated. And though I arrived home in love with both the characters we played and each member of this newly formed tribe of theatermakers, my husband (also a man of the theater) shared my joy. I'm a different person than I was five days ago. And to all who made this possible, I am eternally grateful. Amen. Yesterday I told you about my difficult encounter with a well-intended, ill-conceived arts program at a local charter high school. Today I have a happier tale to tell. Four months ago I got a note from a former student of mine whom I hadn't seen in twenty years. I got to be Sherene's Drama teacher when she was in 6th and 7th grades, back in the early 90's. Since last I saw her, this beautiful young woman has continued the dance education she was already passionate about when we first met, including two years of top notch training in St. Petersburg at the Kirov. Sherene Melania is Founder and Artistic Director of the Presidio Dance Theatre in San Francisco. When I went up to visit her, I found her at the beautiful converted Presidio Library, now a spacious ballet studio where the Dance Theatre makes its home. It was just marvelous to get caught up. She was glowing with memories of those magical classes and plays we did together when she was a child. I was particularly gratified to hear how, in addition to continuing her stellar dance career, she is dedicated to the work of giving disadvantaged students and underserved neighborhoods of SF a chance to take ballet classes at little or no cost. And then she made her pitch. After years of writing grant applications and holding benefits, her company is finally in a position to create and mount an original full-length ballet and she wanted my help! I was nodding and smiling almost before she could lay out her ideas for how we might work together again. I've been helping with the libretto and dramaturgy for the storytelling voiceover that accompanies the original music. Because Sherene loves her Uncle Bear's voice, I will also be recording the voiceover together with a young actor/dancer who is playing the niece of the storyteller. Wonderfully fun is that I also get to teach classes in performance and character creation to her young students! Most of the time, working with 8- to 16-year-olds and dramatic expression, my job is to help the young ones focus their play energy and work together. I'm finding that in my classes for these gifted young dancers who've already dedicated years to this discipline, I'm doing almost the opposite. Their focus is sublime. But when I ask them to make some nutty sounds, they at first giggle and hold back. Dancers don't vocalize, Uncle Bear! The last time I went up to the Presidio to teach, it was gorgeous weather in the City and I taught outdoors on the grass under sunny skies. A sight to behold! Once we start tech rehearsals at the Palace of Fine Arts, Sherene (who is not only choreographing the whole shebang but also dancing the lead!) will need a trusted theater person out in the House acting as her eyes and ears and getting things coordinated between the lights and audio and transitions from scene to scene. Ready! And to top off this confection, I'll be playing the role of the King, a non-dancing part. All the dancers and actors will be costumed in original pieces just created by the amazing designers from the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg! Ain't we got fun!?! Five weeks from tomorrow, on June 6, 2014, THE LITTLE LANTERN will premiere at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. A second performance is on June 21 when the Assyrian Aid Society presents its annual Mesopotamian Night at the beautiful California Theatre in San Jose. Looking forward to all the flurry of activity, everyone working as a team. I am so proud of Sherene for taking on such a grand project! Here follows a summary of this lovely story, written by the beloved Ghassan Kanafani: The Little Lantern is a story about a king who dies, leaving his only daughter and heiress to the throne. He leaves his will with the wise man in the castle, which instructs his daughter that in order to become the queen of the kingdom, she has to bring the sun into the castle before the candle melts. The princess, being young, thought that she would be able to catch the sun and carry it on her back to the castle. She tries many ways, but to no avail. She later locks herself in her room, and on the eighth day, finds a note under her door, saying that by locking herself in, she will never find a solution. Find out how this young princess "brings the sun into the castle". |
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