The Departed

Famous people keep dropping like flies.  This seems to be the worst year for celebrity death in quite some time, perhaps since the year that John Denver and Sonny Bono died young and needlessly.  Of course, not all of the celebs who shuffle off this mortal coil are on the level of a Michael Jackson or a Patrick Swayze.  Some are known for other things than performing and are really only celebrities in the loosest definition of the word.  Two of those who have recently died are Larry Gelbart and Jody Powell.

Gelbart was a writer and more specifically a comedy writer and more specifically than that an immensely skilled comedy writer.  In death as in life, he is best remembered for creating, or, rather, adapting from the movie of the same name, the sitcom M*A*S*H.  there was more to him than that, though, and he wrote movies and plays and other TV shows.  Some of those are pretty damn good, too, such as the play Sly Fox and the TV movie Barbarians at the Gate.  He started out in radio at the age of 16 when his father, who was a Hollywood barber,  got him a job writing for Danny Thomas.  that led to a stint working on Duffy’s Tavern which led to writing for Bob Hope for a while.

In the ’50s, he worked for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour and some specials.  He is represented by the character called Kenny in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and I want to go further off to the side on that and say that the character of Lucas is not Neil Simon’s presentation of himself, but is, in fact, his take on the young Woody Allen.  It’s not about Your Show of Shows, which is what Neil worked on.  It is about Caesar’s Hour, which was where Woody came on board.  In fact, there is a legendary story about Woody being brought to the writer’s room by Milt Kamen, who you probably don’t remember, but should.  Kamen had found Allen when Woody was writing sketches at a resort in the Catskills and convinced Caesar to hire him.  On the appointed day, Kamen collected Allen and ushered him into the writer’s room with the introduction, “I have with me the young Larry Gelbart.”  To which Gelbart, who had been a top comedy writer for about ten years, responded, “The young Larry Gelbart is sitting right here.”

But that’s how young he was when he started.  He was maybe 26 or 27 at the time and seemed like an old pro.

Gelbart was best known as a writer of clever dialogue in the spare, unsentimental tradition of George S. Kaufman.  As the guy who wrote most of the best episodes of the first four seasons of M*A*S*H and who also had a hand in all the others from that period, his influence on me was enormous.  His characterization of Hawkeye showed that he could have been a good writer for Groucho, had Groucho still needed top-notch film writers in the later decades of his career.  for many years, my true ambition was to be the young Larry Gelbart.  For a while, it was to be the middle-aged Larry Gelbart.  A person could do worse.

The second person I wanted to bring up was Jody Powell.

Now, I can’t say that he was any particular influence on me, although I’m sure he would have been had I actually known him. ( At least that’s what I got from the tribute that Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about him on The New Yorker website.)  I just wanted to note that I saw him once when I lived in Washington.  He crossed K Street in the opposite direction that I was, and I recognized him.  He gave no indication of knowing me, as shocking as that might seem.  I didn’t stop him, didn’t follow him, didn’t pester him, just took note of him.  “That’s Jody Powell,” I thought.  “Cool.”  He certainly didn’t look like a guy who would die, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age 65.

You just never know.

St. Patrick’s Day

This morning, while I was doing my part to get everyone up and out of the house, I found myself singing a song.  It is a song that I learned many years ago, and now only fragments of it remains.  The song was called “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder,” and I learned it in 5th Grade at St. Vincent de Paul School in San Francisco, which I attended for 4th and 5th grades.

The school had a tradition of holding a concert on St. Patrick’s Day that featured the 5th Grade croaking out various tunes, most of which were alleged to be Irish but were, in fact, written in places like Chicago and New York.  We spent the entire year leading up to it learning “Mrs Murphy,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “Danny Boy” (the only one that had an Irish pedigree), and some others.  I don’t remember the teacher’s name, but she was a nun (technically a sister since she wasn’t cloistered) and didn’t seem to be too happy about it.  I remember her as being wide and bulldog-like.  She had a face like a female version of the guy who played Cheswick in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, only meaner.  But she loved music.

She taught us both geography and music, and while I don’t remember much of what she taught us in the former, I remember quite a bit of what we learned in the latter.  And that St. Patrick’s Day was memorable, if nothing else, just for the size of the audience.  The school had a rather sizable gym, which had the mandatory proscenium stage at the far end.  We were seated in gray metal folding chairs arranged as a block.  What sense this made, I don’t know.  As I recall, I was about three ranks deep.

At the appointed time, the curtains were drawn and we were treated to the sight of a large gymnasium that was packed to the rafters.  Of course, the rest of the student body–seven grades’ worth of students–was there, as were the teachers and the staff.  On top of that, there were hundreds of parents.  (More grades than the 5th must have been performing that day, but I remember them not.)  I was told that my father would be there somewhere, but, scan the crowd as I did, I never saw him.

And we sang.

I’ve always enjoyed singing, sometimes to the dismay of those around me, and that day was a triumph for me.  I sang loudly and with enthusiasm these songs that I knew were mostly terrible and sentimental.  And yet I liked “Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder.”  A good song for a ten-year-old.  And after all these years–almost 40–I still remember most of the first verse and the chorus.

Just in case you’re curious, here’s a recording of someone singing it long before I did, courtesy gutenberg.org:

Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder

I Get the Picture

Despite checking it relentlessly throughout the day, I don’t always get a lot of value out of Facebook.  I look at my homepage, shrug, and move on.  There’s something about both it and Twitter that I have trouble with.  As egocentric as I am, I still can’t be persuaded that anybody needs to know the excruciating minutiae of my daily life.  Does it really matter what I’m doing at any given moment, as long as it’s reasonably legal and only involves consenting adults?

However, I have just had an interesting experience on Facebook.  The niece of one of my “friends” (he and I were true friends during high school, but are, in reality, something less than  acquaintances now) posted a series of pictures taken at some family event.  Now, of course, there’s a very human tendency to remember people as they were rather than as how they are.  This was brought into sharp focus for me when I came across, among these photos, a shot of my friend’s parents.  I remember them as they were 30 or more years ago, probably about the age I am now.  And here I saw them, aged appropriately, still easily recognizable for who they were, who they had been.  And yet it was still a shock.

The smiles were still the same, hers open and friendly, his more wry and knowing.  He looks at her with love, as he always did, and I am transported.  I am young and callow, thin as a straw and riddled with acne and insecurity.  We are in their kitchen in the sturdy yellow house on a quiet small street.  My friend’s mother is cooking or cleaning or waiting on someone.  His father sits at the table at the wall by the door, reading the paper which is spread flat before him.  He sips a beer in tall, slender beer glass at patient intervals, spicing it with a taste of salt taken from a supply he keeps in the crook at the base of his thumb.

This is a happy memory for me.  More than that, it is a memory content.  This is a home for me, a second home, not in opposition to my real home as is so often the case, but an extension of it.  Another haven of acceptance and accord.

To see these people again, the mother, the father, the brother, the sisters, to see the person who was once the friend of the person who was once me is a pleasure, a welcome wave of sentiment and remembrance.  Many years have passed and all of these lives, mine and theirs, have gone in ways discrete and different.  I am, such as I am now, mostly unknown to them and they to me.  And yet in  my memory, so many years ago, I feel their presence and their being.  And amongst the strains and trials of life, amongst the difficult people and the slights and troubles that refuse to be forgotten, I still have that haven.

He’s Italian, His Name’s Frank, and He’s Not Sinatra

I write a lot, like many expatriate writers, about my original home.  I was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, and I spent about 20 out of my 49 years in the state.  I’ve lived in Warwick (very briefly as a baby), East Greenwich, Pawtucket, North Kingstown, Providence, East Providence, and Bristol.  Since I do write things set in Rhode Island so often, I have a need to burrow through my past for usable material and bits and pieces I can use.  In some recent work, I have reason to refer to the venerable Rhode Island broadcaster Frank Coletta.  It’s hard to not like Frank.  He has a sly smile that that just gets to a person.  Here’s the tribute that was done for Frank’s 30th anniversary with the station.  And, Frank, salud!

Hiding in Plain Sight

This post is dedicated, warmly, to my friend RGM, for reasons that are no one’s business but our own.

This past Saturday, my wife made mention of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon posted on gocomics.com on Saturday in regards to it reminding her of me.  And I had to agree with her.  Here’s the strip:

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterston

The reason why it reminded both of us of me was because Calvin’s ploy was similar to strategy I employed when I was in junior high school.

I have always had a problematic relationship with large institutions. I don’t mind that they exist. I can even appreciate their function. However, whenever I find myself inside one, I get claustrophobic and combative and start looking for any and every means of escape, much like the late Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.  Conversely, large institutions rarely know what to make of or do with me.  I am the ipecac in the belly of the beast, generally speaking.

Back when I was in 8th grade, my relationship with the large institution called “School” took somthing of a turn for the worse, and I got in the habit of not showing up much of the time.  Frankly, about a third of the time.  Goff Junior High was a mere three blocks away, an easy walk for anyone.  You could just about see the school from our window.  And, one morning out of about every three, I would collect the lunch my mother had made for me, time-step my way down the stairs from our flat to the street, and take off for parts unknown.

In Rhode Island, this is called “bunking.”

I went many places over the course of that year.  Slater Park, the Ten-Mile River.  When I could get away with it (my parents both worked), I’d just stay home and watch TV.  My most ingenious destination, though, the one that I never saw another student replicate, the one that I never told my friends about when we’d bunk in small groups, was the Deborah Cook Sayles Memorial Library in downtown Pawtucket.  I spent many a day there browsing the shelves and sticking my nose into whatever books struck my fancy.  I was particularly enamored of the history section, which was upstairs on a mezzanine level, and I would immerse myself in wars Civil and Napoleonic.  I also made the acquaintance of several comedians and comedy writers whose works have meant a great deal to me over the years, especially Fred Allen, George S. Kaufman, and the One, the Only Groucho.

These sorts of sheanigans are more difficult in these days, but I doubt that they are impossible.  And I am not recommending any of these activities to the youth of today.  No, sir.  Stay in school!  Just say “No” to drugs.  Remember the Alamo!  And every other cliche you can think of.  What I can warn young people is that you will inevitably get caught.  I was.  A couple of times.  I can remember the city’s truant officer, a washed-up pitcher for the Red Sox called Lefty Lefebvre, leaning out the window of his Ford Granada and saying to me, “Len, I’m going to get you!”  And I guess he did.  But whenever that day was, I know he didn’t catch me at the library.

Apprentice Work, Part 2

My twenties were a fallow time for me as a writer.  From the time that I moved out of my parents’ home in 1983 until I started working for Ernst & Young when I lived in the DC area in 1988, as I recall it, my total output was three short stories, each quirky and experimental in its own way.  The most conventional of them was a story I wrote in 1986 called “Dreg of the Wildebeest.”  The story of a Neanderthal who has a midlife crisis, it was inspired by my reading of about a page-and-a-half of the second book of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series, Valley of the Horses.  The scene in question featured the heroine of the piece, a young and beautiful (they’re always young and beautiful in melodrama) Cro Magnon, who is about to be deflowered by a Neanderthal whose band she has fallen in with.  (And don’t chicks, even paolithic ones, always go for guys in bands?)  Now, this ever-expanding pool of absurdity was instantaneously metastasized when the Neanderthal’s thoughts were presented for our viewing pleasure.  It turned out that not only was getting it on with a hot chick–possibly of a related yet still different species–not his only concern, but it wasn’t even near the top.  His main concern, an absurdity written with such a straight face that my mind reeled when I read it in the file room at Fannie Mae, was that he be gentle with her since it was her first time.  In the 23 years that have elapsed since I read this revelation, I have still not been able to wrap my head around the idea of your average Neanderthal being a sort of neolithic Cary Grant, suavely seducing the ladies and always making sure that they finished first.

And so I wrote the story, almost in a fever.  And here it is, in pdf format that shows edits I made in pencil for a subsequent draft.

(Click on the link below and then click on the link on that page in order to get the pdf.  Thanks for making it so damn easy, WordPress.)

Dreg of the Wildebeest

We Interrupt This Series of Posts

Okay, I was checking out Baby Got Books this morning, and the current post, which concerned a book of photographs of country music stars at a variety of open concerts during the ’60s.  It’s called Pure Country, and it looks to be very interesting.  As part of the post, Tim, who runs BGB and very well at that, added some streaming audio of Hank williams, the Carter Family, Dolly Parton, and George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today” on Austin City Limits.

Well, it just so happens that I saw that Austin City Limits, or at least most of it.  And old George was sensational.  I hadn’t really paid him the mind that he deserved before that night, but I’ve done my best to not continue that mistake in its wake.  You can’t understand what country music is and ought to be without understanding George Jones and others of his generation, especially Johnny Cash (whose version of Soundgarden’s Rusty Cage I just heard last weekend and am still recovering from).

My favorite bit of George Jones on Austin City Limits was him singing a song called “The King Is Gone.”  Here it is for your enjoyment:

And what the hell, here’s Johnny’s video for “Rusty Cage”:

Enjoy.

Chrysalis, Part II

So anyway.

It is not the artist’s job to assess; his (or hers or its, let us, after all, be inclusive) is only to create.

There are many ways to create, but not everyone wants to see that.  There’s no money in it.  And the idea that The Iowa School for Famous Writers and other bastions of academia that try to turn a calling into a profession exist on is that artistry can be deconstructed, dissected, analyzed, and understood by the mind.  They rely on the misconception that creativity can be distilled into a method, into something that can be taught.  However, they are wrong.  Artistry cannot be learned.  It must be discovered.

I am not an expert on the work methods of great artists.  There are a few that I know about, and what the work methods of these few have in common is not method as much as a reliance on instinct and serendipity.  Index cards never seem to play a role.  Which is not to say that it is impossible for index cards to play a role; we are securely in “to each his own” territory here.

Throughout my creative life, my method has evolved haphazardly into no method at all.  I blunder forward and suddenly stop.  I step back and rewrite and revise.  I look for places where the writing is skimpy and try to fill it out, fatten it up.  And then I go forward a bit, and look back and write anew and revise and blunder forward again in blindness.  I look for the happy accidents, which are all markers, and try to follow their lead.  I try to keep in mind the Taoist wisdom that says that he who makes breaks.

I look, again and again, for the unnecessary word in order to remove it.

This approach is now infecting the way that I write essays.  I started out blogging some four years ago.  I started out relying on the traditional five-paragraph form of essay, and everything proceeded in a linear, sequential, logical fashion.  However, as the years have worn on and worn me down, I’ve found myself writing, more-and-more, in a nonlinear way.  Instead of following one idea, instead of writing from a proposition to a conclusion, I’m combining thoughts and letting the essay tell me how to get written rather than me imposing a structure on it.

This post and the previous one are steps in that direction.  I wonder how the next one will turn out.

Chrysalis, Part I

Back in the mid-90s, I hit hard times.  A job disappeared suddenly, and I found myself having to break the lease on my apartment and stay with some friends because I could no longer pay the rent.  Things had been hardscrabble for some time, and I had suffered some bad luck and made some bad choices, endured heartache and once again tasted of disappointment.  The night before I was going to shove my belongings into a U-Haul and end a chapter of my life, I lay on my futon in the bedroom dark and tried to sleep.  Anxiety, however, trumped sleep, and I struggled for a way to quiet my brain and calm my nerves.   As I lay there, I formed the image of me hanging from a rope over a gaping abyss.  And then some words of Joseph Campbell’s came to me from his interview with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth:  “You know the rule.  If you’re falling, dive.”

And in my mind, I let go of the rope.

In the years since, I have gotten more jobs, paid rent again, gotten married, and fathered a son.  I’ve grown, deepened, and learned.  I have been slandered and praised, been wronged and wronged others.  I’m a different person than I was then, older and wiser in the sense that I now understand a smidgen of how much I don’t understand.  I’m wiser because I now know that I am not wise.

Like everyone else, I have been on a journey, part of which has been artistic.  In fact a huge part of it has.  I suppose that this makes me, in these years at least, a journeyman.  That’s fine.  I can accept that.  Perhaps it’s all just a journey, and most artists are only ever journeymen.  The further along I’ve gotten, the less that mastery seems possible, which is not to say that I think that I’m a lousy artist who produces lousy works.  I have no idea how good I am or what the value of the works I create are.  I don’t think that’s my function.  I just put the pieces together as best I can and hope it works out.

The Play’s the Thing

In yesterday’s post, I talked about my experiences as a lad in organized sports and my feeling that playing in leagues actually sucked the fun out of it for me.  In the comments, thanks to a dissenting and very legitimate response, I revealed that, more often than not, I got bounced from the various teams because I skipped practices and sometimes, even, games.  And this got me to thinking.

The activity that I got most immediately embroiled in after my love affair with sports waned was theater.  Between the ages of 15 and 23, I was involved in something like 35 productions, mostly as an actor, sometimes working tech, and often doing both.  And in that entire time and in all those shows, I don’t think I ever had an unexcused absence.  In fact, I don’t think I was ever even late.  Rehearsal or performance, I had an unblemished record.

That’s quite a contrast.

So I had to ask myself “Why?”  The two activities involve similar disciplines and routines.  Both certainly involved adhering to schedules and working at the direction of others.  Both required me to obtain someone’s approval and recognition of my ability before I could participate.  Why did I rebel in one and acquiesce in the other?

Perhaps it had to do with talent, because I was certainly a better actor (or prop master or stage manager for that matter) than I was an athlete.  Perhaps it was some less-well-defined sense of comfort, since I never felt as at ease on a gridiron or a diamond as I did on a stage.

It’s also just a matter of personal preference, isn’t it?  There’s really no accounting for these things, these differences.  It’s just how people are, it’s their nature.  And this is something that can’t be put down to genetics, either, I don’t think.  Neither of my parents were theatrical nor their parents before them.  In fact, if anything, on my father’s side I come from a line of natural athletes.

And yet there is never an empty stage that I am not tempted to climb.  How deep is the stage?  How deep are the wings?  How much room is there on the apron?  What’s the lighting board like?  How many Lekos have they hung and how many Fresnels?  Is there a booth in the back of the house or does some poor sap have to throw huge levers on some out-of-date board just offstage?

Although my experiences with organized sports were less than endearing, my infatuation with playing sports was doomed the first time I got cast in a play in high school.  And it all comes down to the same thing:  fun.  Cavorting about on stage was fun for me, and I was good at it, better than most.  In fact, I continued acting until, after two straight years of dinner theater, it stopped being fun.  Again, it was no longer worth doing when it was no longer fun.

I’ve performed on occasion over the years since, but never again with that youthful enthusiasm and commitment.  Perhaps I stopped performing, in part, because while I was good–very good, in fact–by 23 I was as good as I was ever going to be, and I knew it.  I could have continued working at the same high level, but there was nowhere left to go, no new areas of growth and development.  It was right about the time that my father died that I just stopped.

But still, right up to the gruesome end, I always showed up.