November 17, 2007

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?"

I noticed today something I looked at, enjoyed every moment of, but remained in the car to do so. I have been savoring fall since my drive across the midwest earlier this week, and now that DC has a sense of fall, here, too.

The trees are in beautiful form. I spoke aloud to myself as I passed a house here in Takoma Park. "What a beautiful tree!".  When we are younger -do we choose not to see the beauty, have no appreciation for the beauty?  Does nostalgia for other trees from family yards, or wonderful picnics, or the ever elongating spans of years make you appreciate the trees - or the beauty, or the possibilities in life? - or the Grand Canyon? - better?

I am re-writing the script contained within the dance for "Funny Uncles". We have stumbled upon a new character - one inspired by the beautiful dancer Asanga Domask. Asanga will not appear live in this year's version due to work schedule. But a lucky happenstance: we are commissioning Molly Ross, our projection and puppet designer, to create a series of Asanga puppets. The use of Asanga as this Shadow character has been a lovely turn for the piece, I believe.

She has become a narrator of sorts - and the deus ex machina (if that is possible with shadow and light!) toward the end of the piece. We will find out.

 

But just like my new found appreciation for the trees today, and I am guessing if I were nearer the Grand Canyon I would be more entralled than I was in the past, I have an awe for whatever creative process truly is that feels also new found. We can rattle off tools and methods to create raw movement material. We can study forms of writing and narrative and dance composition. But how we all put it together or it puts itself together as we sit observing it happen in the studio, or on the page or on the screen, well, that is part of creative mystery.

As I finish up the script for today, I am humbled that I get to do what I do for a living. To have mystery to create awe is as spiritual an experience as the glaciers cutting through the rocks of the canyon as the turning of  a leaf as the turn of a phrase, the editing that allows a truer articulation of word or movement to fall into placce.....

Great day.

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November 13, 2007

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.

I had let my remaining family know that I would be back to get the last of my mother's belongings out of storage in my Aunt Marie's garage. It's been two years since we hurriedly boxed up what we knew would take time to go through and this the first time that I have had a chance to go get it.

Cousins and cousins kids and wives and husbands are all there for an early Sunday supper. My Aunt has made roast beef, mashed potatoes, corn, gravy, a jello I will name Sunshine Jello. The vegetable casserole, my aunt worries, might not be right: she bought cream of mushroom soup WITH garlic instead of without. (It turns out fine!)They ask for information on my sister and my brother, and we try to call up Donna and Paul and Sienna in Mexico to see what news there is on the adoption front and to just say hi. No answer.

The family tells me of their medical woes. I tell the family of my medical woes. There is a football game on the TV, and its mostly men folk watching. The woman folk - and me! - sit around the dining room table and talk a bit about everything and nothing. When my mother was living, she would have been there in "her" seat, smoking her non-filtered Camels. Now, the smokers have to go to the garage - something my aunt could never get my mother to do.

The talk and the meal are just as it has been for decades - with the kids growing older and the more new kids. It is just me from our side of the family now, and save for Sienna, trapped across the border because this adoption won't go through, there are no little ones on the DiMuro side of the family from Illinois. We all have dogs named after people.

We hint at past family transgressions,the black sheep cousin, the born-again relatives, the dead, the living. How who heard what about whom from whats-her-name.  We talk about baby showers, funerals, weddings. The illnesses are swept over quickly. I miss my sister at these gatherings, because she can be quite irreverent - and we do our best in her absence.

I am grateful my aunt has gone to the trouble of doing all this- this is really more like a holiday dinner. Comfort food with multiple meanings.

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November 10, 2007

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.

I suppose that in the boxes are family photos - and when I pull out each of them, I will nod my head to agree with myself that ah, yes, I remember the existence of it - the picture, the image, the memory, the real people depicted in it, the landscape. And I will mumble something like, I haven't thought about him/her/it/them for years. And then instead of nodding yes, I will shake my head no. Then I will pull another picture out and start with the nod all over again.

My Aunt Marie, along with my adult cousins and mayb some of their kids will come to a dinner my aunt has prepared, and I will nod yes, shake no several times as each incremental taste of the meal will remind me of previous family meals, holidays. 

In Gumdrops, we have begun to make a section about Elver's family's favorite dish - a simple dish of seasoned meat, that is cured in beer and within the wrapping of leaves of the plaintain. This all took place in Colombia, in the country where they had no electricity.

The meal: the lighting, the people, the relationships, the mood. Funny, or not  - most likely a mix of funny, sad, pedestrian. We all have memories of eating together- - these might be the stories most common to all families.

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November 9, 2007

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...

...your funny uncle.

...your fantastic grandmother.

...a family meal that will go down in history.

...a ritual that only you and a few others share that shows your commitment to each other.

...your sperm-donor dad you don't know, you do know, you have ambivalence about knowing.

Look in the shadows and back in to the light and name what connects them....

...and tell why those you love are like that connection.
 
Time is running: Get your entries on to the blog - or better yet: video yourself, your home, your family and answer some of the questions above as you do so....contact us as to how to get the clips to us. 

Thanks - Peter

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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.

I also received some prototypes for some of Molly Ross' new thoughts on projections as head to the final stretch of designing for our December shows. Asanga Domask, who danced live in the work last year, will be represented this year as a shadow and light projection designed by Molly,  as well as in video mastered by company member Matt Mahaney.

Her character is our guide to the proceedings in the theater. Without giving anything away, I think Asanga's spirit will soar off the screen and help the audience to the Land of Sweets by the end of the evening.

Still, I get to play in a garden. What flowers I get to work with, play with. All in a day's work.

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November 7, 2007

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.

We are as individuals and families multi-faceted, we are extremes of all things, not the confined definitions that we are fed from outside ourselves. Can I allow myself to be as full ranging, and as honest with you all in the process? I hope so. 

So as I reread the entries that our great attendees at Busboys and Poets Blog-A-Thon made, I applaud them for their quirky, honest, poignant nature. And I want to live up to their example.

AND

I want you to feel free to write whatever makes sense when it comes to family, blood-born or chosen versions: no need to white wash, no need to share only the examples of fun funny uncles.

In the original monologue I wrote called "Funny Uncles" I delved into "unfunny funny uncles": these are the guys like in the Alfred Hitchcock movies- Tony Perkins playing his own mother and doing-in Janet Leigh in the shower. Or like Vincent Price.  These are unfunny uncles in technicolor.

There are day to day examples of the funny, odd, quirky people in our lives, who by their actions teeter on that fine line between absurdly hilarious and aburdly painful, inducing tears.

One example: A woman in our home town, who came to be of a circle of friends, that came to be because these women were still alive: their husbands had died, their children moved away. My mother was among this circle, too, and they all sat at the same table in the Iron Horse Diner, down near the train station in my home town, every morning.

Mabel had never been married, had been a loner for many years. In the '60's and '70's Round Lake was not by any means the bed of high fashion, but Mabel's outfits, her car even, spoke more 1940's than the age of Aquarius. She worked for the phone company as a telephone operator, and it was if Lily Tomlin used her as a model for Ernestine. She maintained the puffy shouldered blouses and shirt dresses of an earlier era, her hair sat like dark died black honey-and-cinnamon buns on the side and top of her head. She was friendly but people held her at bay in the early years - she wasn't part of the circle at the diner until much later, after the husbands had all died.

Mabel was also pretty spendthrifty- - my sister was her waitress for many years and was lucky to get a 4 or 5 % tip on most days. Then, something shifted in the late 1970's: we all remembered the time because it was the height of the disco era. We never knew why, but Mabel traded in her 1953 Ford for a brand new red Chevy. The dark blue and white polka dot dresses became blue jeans (Oh my God!) and a white linen gauze shirt  - with the tails out! Tied at the waist! She began to wear lipstick. It matched her new Chevy.

Mabel let out a few more details about her life as she sat closer and closer to the circle of friends in the diner. As if the change from a hemline to unhemmed jeans equated to looser lips. She had never been married, but as we found out, she liked to have a few cats as pets (we figured that). What was even odder was that she often would leave all the doors and windows in her house open, without screens. She'd sprinkle nuts and seeds around the house in an effort to lure the neighborhood squirrels in the house. At first she would lie very still so as not to scare them.

They had no problem with Mabel. The squirrels came to stay. For close to thirty years, Mabel lived among the squirrels, all doors open. She became part of the circle of diner friends - and the squirrels became as normal as Mabel's having cats and my mother having a cocka-poo.

She died in her late eighties. The police got a call from the waitress at the diner when Mabel hadn't shown up for a few days (the same waitress and the same police who rescued my mother a few times). The doors and windows were open and while a niece came in from Chicago to hold a funeral for her Aunt Mabel, the wake had already taken place: the squirrels and cats had guarded the body for the two or three days until the police, and then the volunteer fire squad came to reclaim the body.

Another entry soon...more comments on the entries made October 31.... and a PLEA to get your stories out there for everybody to read...

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