Riches...with no embarressment

All last week the Funny Uncles crew and I were in tech development time for the piece - with many thanks to Black Rock Center for the Arts and their opening the doors to their Black Box space.  While a hike from Takoma Park, it enabled us to focus on the work and not deal with (at least immediately) the emails, the phone, the daily interruptions to art-making.

It has been a rich ten days or so. And these kinds of riches are not an embarrassment at all.  Our designers Molly Ross, Staub, Matt Mahaney, and Kathleen Geldard, along with our Production Manager Amelia Cox and Stage Manager Kate have all brought an amazing wealth of talents - great thinking, great designing amidst the perseverance it takes to try to "get it right". The company of dancers - only two of whom are from our core group, with the rest being adjunct artists joining us for this production - benefited, too, from having the designers present a full week as we rehearse, replicate, rejuvenate, rest, repeat. The dialogue helps the work get better.

A new/old, or old/new?, colleague, Michael Bobbitt, artistic director of the Adventure Theatre at Glen Echo has been generous to offer his response to what we have put together. I would run into Michael more recently on the street or at a theatre. Early on during my DC days, Michael and I met at American University. It has been to have him, along with my Dance Exchange colleagues Martha Wittman and Elizabeth Johnson helping me to rehearse and direct.

AND SO:

We have a rich show to share with you this weekend. And the next, in LA, and the next after that in B'more. More soon.

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If we understood it all mysteries, the interest would fade just as quickly...

During a day like today, I often think back to a trip that my mother, Aunt Thelma and I took once across country. We headed directly west from Lake County, IL, just north of Chicago, across the great plains to get to the west coast- San Jose. We then head south to more relatives in LA, area and then head straight east. I remember in St. Louis, with the great arch in the background, some other driver flipped my mother off, and I flipped her off right back. I was probably 11 at the time. I asked my mother if it was ok that I flipped the other driver the bird, after I had done it instinctively. I don't remember what she said.

But: I digress.  The highlight of this particular trip was stopping at the Grand Canyon. I was in a foul mood, and in response to my saying that I wanted to stay in the car, my mother tilted her head forward and looked out of the top part of her eyes, a sign she was about to say something she really meant.

"You will get out of this car immediately, young man, and you will go over to the edge of that canyon, and you will look at it, and you are going to enjoy every moment. Do you hear me?"

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The Last - or most recent - Supper

On Sunday, after finishing up with our convening at Northwestern in Evanson, IL, I rented a car and drove to Round Lake, which is about 50 minutes northwest of Chicago close to the Wisconsin border.

My father had been Police Chief here for about 30 years spanning the fifties through the eighties. The population in  the early days was as low as 150. The old Milwaukee Railroad stopped there then. The newly named Metra Transit offers daily commuting between Chicago and Round Lake - unheard of as a concept when I was growing up. Chicago might as well have been Mars!

The Iron Horse Diner, I have mentioned here before, where my mother sat at "her" seat at the end of a communal table, the pleather/plastic chair playing host to a revolving group as my mother had coffee usually from 6 am through about 10:30 am - and then she'd be back for lunch, mock fighting with John the owner and helping Patti, friend/waitress/confidante, make coffee filter setups and to count her tips.

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A Return Home

I have been at a little convening of four artistic directors of companies who engage in community arts-making, in Evanston for the last few days. We are staying a block off Lake Michigan, and it certainly is fall in the midwest by now. And chilly, too. Like my growing up days - although I must admit I don't remember fall - or life!- as colorful as it seems here. 

Tomorrow I will return to my hometown to pick up the last of things that were in my mother's house when she died two years ago. The house was sold almost immediately, so these items have been in my Aunt Marie's garage all this while.

For the life of me, I can't remember what it is specifically in those boxes. The big stuff includes two Appalachian stick furniture chairs that my grandmother had bought off the back of the truck of some man as he sold his home-made chairs in the "affluent" Midwest. They are beautiful. I can see my grandmother sitting in one of them on our front porch watching the traffic turn onto the main street of our downtown. At the time the population was most likely under 400 people - the first traffic light was still twenty years into the future. We had rotary phones. TV's were still black and white. Nuns who still wore black and white robes with starched peaked headgear (habits, I think they were called) can be seen with big gardening gloves on, snipping at the roses in their garden, which butts up against our yard. This is the view off the backporch.

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My Kingdom for Your Story

Are you from...

... a broken home?

...a fixed home?

...a man-made (or woman-made?) home?

Were you ...

...a test-tube baby?

...a darling baby?

...Gerber baby?

...a big baby?

...fond of Santa Baby?

...mature beyond your baby years?

Tell  me about...

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Among the Lilies

It's colder here in the Midwest, and drier, too. And flat. The land is flat.

But I am lucky to be among some beautiful flowers. Michael Rohd, of Sojourner Theatre and who is also a visiting professor at Northwestern has arranged for three other artistic directors of companies who engage communities in the making of their work to convene here for a few days, share some conversation. Exemplar funded our time together.

Today, Micheal Garces of Cornerstone Theatre, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women, Michael Rohd and I co-taught a class to a mix of theatre and dance students. Vincent Thomas, who has danced with us at Dance Exchange and has taught for Bush Women's Institutes, also taught. How inspiring to be among others who share similar values but also offer new perspectives. Today I got to play in the garden.

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Funny and Sick...Sick of being Funny?...Lauging at being Sick....

I flew to Chicago today - the first flight I have taken since having what I thought was a bad cold. What wasn't a cold was actually strep, compounded by the chic new affliction this season: mrsa.

So in the thick of our physical rehearsals in the studio and the efforts of a lot of good hardworking people to get this blog up and running and enticing enough for the general public to drop their individual stories onto the site I have not been myself - or all myself.

This flight today:  I went to a place that is probably the polar opposite of my funny uncle self. The role I play in life as a not-quite-dad-or-older-brother to the Dance Exchange, to my niece who's not quite adopted in Mexico, who can't cross the border into the states, the roles I usually play on stage usually leans more toward where the humorous, the facilitator, the narrator, the translator. I am usually good with this.

But today I realised I have been running on empty, a bit depleted  - and, just like the thin chocolate covering on on of those Cadbury Eggs, from a distance I am that sweet, chocolate-y outside, cheery, functioning. But on closer inspection, the chocolate skin is cracked and oozing sweet goo all over, and not able to contain it.

I have had the pills and am on my way to getting healthy, so this is not a pity party. But it is an apology for not being more upfront with this public forum. Really, if I had been more up front with myself, I could have been more up front for this writing.... and probably more true to what I think Gumdrops and the Funny Uncle is trying to say.It may just be part of what makes me a funny uncle that I am in a bit of a denial.

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You're Invited to Funny Uncles Blogging Party in DC on October 31st

My dog, Madeleine - who some of you may have seen performing as Cupid in one of our recent works, the VSA-commissioned "The Farthest Earth From Thee: A Suite of Sonnets" - is asleep at my feet. We have a great tradition. Well, maybe tradition is too strong a word. She's only ten months old, so it hasn't been that long we have been doing this. But it has been almost her whole life, so in those terms, it has been a long time.

Whenever we're in the car, she will sit on the armrest between the two front seats, which puts her face level with mine. And there she'll sit while I drive, leaning against me for balance. Every now and then, if I lean my right cheek forward and toward her and say, "Kisses!", she plants several wet licks on my face. And then she resumes her watch from her perch, watching the world and all its other dogs go by.

A moment for our Funny Family File.

I am watching Jay Leno, and Ross the Intern is on TV. How far funny uncles have come! They have sent Ross to cover a Texas football game. He kids around with all the folks - very down-home Texans who don't seem to care about who Ross probably "is". In another time, either Ross would have been made fun of, or he would have come off as superior to the country locals. When Ross meets the Redneck Queen of the Sooner Schooners, he quips something about how he'd make a fine Redneck Queen. No cowboys recoil.

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What is a Funny Uncle?

When I first started working on what I thought was "Funny Uncles", I knew that I had to define the term, or re-define it, or even introduce it to people who had never heard it.

There is the wink-wink, nudge-nudge acceptance of funny uncles in some of the films of the thirties and forties: think of all the movies with the bumbling best friend, the British fop, dandies. Sex is not mentioned but alluded to - so sexual orientation would not be questioned.

Skating Scene from December, 2006 Funny Uncles Performance

I am sure if you are a great scholar - or even a mediocre one!- we could trace the not-the-leading-man type in drama, dance, fairy tales, etc. way back into history. My first introduction were the movies I mentioned above, with actors like Edward Everett Horton playing the fop to Fred Astaire's suave romancer. TV in the sixties (yes, I am that old to have watched the first run of almost everything on Nick at Nite) included characters like:

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Back to Blogging about "Funny Uncles"

I am typing with one hand and reaching with the other for some errant gumdrops that fell out of the bag. These are generic brand gumdrops but still good. I thought it fitting to begin writing and communicating again after so long surrounded by split gumdrops.

For those of you who have written, wondering what was up with the Funny Uncles site, thank you. We come back after a hiatus refreshed, looking forward to telling you what's up with development of the work. For those of you who happen to be here by some unexpected turn, we'll catch you up as well.

Highlights of the past year or so:

Debuted an in-progress version of "Gumdrops and the Funny Uncle" at Theatre Alliance in Baltimore and at Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, Millennium Stage (Dec 06)

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