—From EF—

We’re been through this before, when Three Mile Island tried to do its tango. We were in Millersville, 21 miles from ground zero and thus a hangnail’s distance outside the evacuation zone. We were in Philly with the children, doing a little gig, when the news came down. We had a gig upcoming in State College after that, and didn’t head back home. After all, we had ourselves and our kids already in go mode. We did our gig for their excellent Unitarian Fellowship and then asked if anybody could host unexpected refugees for a little while. No problem.

But if anybody remembers that particular cliff-hanger, there was a problem with a hydrogen bubble that could blow the whole thing sky-high, or not, and it took a while before it made up its mind. In the midst of this uncertainty, Conrad decided to make a fast run (3 ½ hours) down, a quick grab of our non-human essentials, and a fast 3 ½ return. Making that list was a challenging spiritual exercise. Not to mention the idea of possibly being unable to return for 150,000 years.

We agonized, then decided he should risk it, and he went. That was a very long day for me.

It all resolved OK, except for the many many people in that area who are now trying to assemble the stories of their families’ cancers and get somebody to at least admit that something happened.

So after a blissful beautiful Sunday in Golden Gate Park (at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival) and a slam-dunk birthday dinner for CB with our son Eli and his lady Meg, we crashed comfortably at their apartment in the Mission with a feeling of warm well-being.

Monday morning my body clock went ding at 7:30 AM, and nobody else was up. I was bored and lit up the iPhone and checked Facebook. My god, Sonoma County is on fire.

I woke the rest of the family with apologies and said we had to get the hell back home. Now. And as we drove, it became real. You couldn’t see Mt. Tam. Soon, breathing was uncomfortable. It was mid-morning with sunset light. As far as we could tell from the radio we weren’t yet in an evacuation zone, but the fires were moving fast as hell. We got home, comforted our cats (lonely from their unpeopled overnight), and started throwing together the stuff from the list we’d put together en route.

It ain’t over yet. The wind is predicted to kick up again in the next 24 hours, and all the fires are still active. The closest is seven miles, but in a high wind that’s a heartbeat. I’ve spent two days moving through the most beautiful place we’re ever lived, what was to be the cradle for our aging, and simultaneously saying hello, thank you, and goodbye. If we are spared, I will never forget this.

—From CB—

The Greek poet Cavafy wrote of a budding artist who despaired of achievement, seeing that he was only on the first rung of a tall, tall ladder. The response in the poem: Congratulations! The first rung is a huge achievement! Most never make it there.

I’m paraphrasing a translation, but I connect with this, both in its pain and its triumph. Only difference: the artist in the poem is young, and I’m 76 this week.

The first rung on what ladder? On the ladder of recognition, I and my mate were once a bit past first rung, but now we can claim the dubious distinction of 47 years of full-time professional life and being utterly unknown, except by a few souls who honor us for surviving. That ladder is one that it’s honorable to climb if it meshes with what calls you to be created, but we were ill-fitted to it, or it to us.

The ladder of craft: we’ve had a good climb. In theatre, radio, puppetry, fiction, I’m intensely proud of what we’ve done and in some of those arenas continue to do. I remember the slams much more vividly than the plaudits, but despite the fact that Elizabeth and I are our harshest critics, we’re also our biggest fans. I love the work we’ve done … and are doing.

But I’m still on the goddamned first rung. As you age, if you’re any damned good to start with, the rungs get further apart, harder to reach. You know how much you don’t know. You can’t write a word without hearing in your soul what Shakespeare did in King Lear, what Dickens did in David Copperfield, what Joyce did in “The Dead,” what the story-crafters of millennia have struggled to bring forth to whomever will give it a passing glance.

If Cavafy’s young artist persists, he may do great things. He may even become the peer of Cavafy. But he’ll never get past the first rung, at least within his own estimate, unless he fools himself. A few reach the second, perhaps, by the whim of gods who ask a terrible price: to be struck by lightning.

The rest of us keep walking into the dark, trudging to reach the inn where we can rest. Ah, we’re here. No, this isn’t the one, it’s the next one, only ten miles. No, the next…

###

DamnedFool.com. . .

Coming up to the 18th weekly post on our personal blog. It’s free.  Visit and subscribe.  It includes my voice, Elizabeth’s, and the voice of our Court Fool, who claims to be more highly unqualified than any pundits currently punding.  Hope you’ll visit.

Lear progressing. . .

We’re in the fourth of fifteen months’ work on a King Lear for two actors (us) and thirty puppets.  Three acts (haltingly) memorized, all but five puppet heads cast and their bodies now being mass-produced.

And I finished the eyes and painting on the ten tiny finger-puppet heads that perch on my fingers as Lear’s riotous knights — hair still to be added.  But odd problems arise.  Thanks to American enterprise, the matte varnish I used turned out to be high-gloss.  Shakespeare did not intend his text for high-gloss actors.

Ko. . .

As mentioned last month, we’re invited to perform at the Ko Festival, an annual festival of progressive theatre in Amherst, MA.  On July 25-27, we’ll be presenting an amalgam of our Co-Creation memoir and Gifts, in keeping with the Festival theme, Work/Job/Career/Calling.

And we hope you can spread the word to students or friends about our workshop July 28-August 2.  “Shape-Shifting Your Story” will be an intensive process (6 hrs. a day for 6 days) of evolving stories, shaping them, and finding the best “language” to bring them across.  More info at the KoFest website.

Gifts. . .

Two great performances of our house-concert show Gifts in Sebastopol last month, and three coming up in Southern California May 9-11 — Los Angeles, San Diego, and Van Nuys.  Email us if you’d like an invitation.

 Miscellany. . .

Our personal garden is proliferating, thanks mostly to the hands of Elizabeth — this year tomatoes, garlic, beets, strawberries, raspberries, currants, beans, squash, artichokes, asparagus, zucchini, and various herbs.  That’s in addition to our plum and apple trees, and our inedible feral cats.

We’re now in the second draft of our novel Hammers, based on our 1996 play premiered in Baltimore and Philadelphia.  You can read the playscript here if you’d like.  It’s a radical reconception, of course, and very compelling to take a deeper journey into it, but it keeps the basic spine.

Our other novels — Realists, Galahad’s Fool, Long Shadow — have continued to garner rejects (actually one offer, which we’re pondering).  But persistence is like garlic: there’s never too much.

And our son Eli, who’s been an actor, a graphic artist, and a perpetual inspiration with The Independent Eye for the past 40 years, is getting married on May 24th.  His bride Meg Chilton is a performer and one of our tribe.  We’ll be joined by her parents from Illinois, our daughter Johanna and her guy Francesco from Italy.  We’re insanely pleased.

Lear in April. . .

We’re in the third of fifteen months’ work on our King Lear.  I’ve finished the text edit — condensing it to a playable length, making dozens of choices between alternative words, phrases and whole speeches that vary between versions.  And in my script I’ve reproduced the punctuation and capitalization of the First Folio, which I’ve found helpful in emphasis and scansion.  It’s a debatable theory that they’re related to spoken rhythm, but as an actor it offers me fruitful hints.  We’ve done a rough staging of two of the five acts, and I’ve almost memorized the first two.

And I’ve cast the heads of 10 hand puppets and 10 finger puppets (30 puppets total) plus a Fool doll for the Fool.  Still a vast amount of work to do on these: eyes, paint, hair, bodies, costumes.  We’ve bought a dandy bald wig with frizzy ruffs of side hair for Elizabeth’s Fool, and today went out for thrift-store inspiration on her costume.

Elizabeth has constructed the aluminum-tubing frame for the set from my model and devised a set of clasps that will serve up our puppets as needed.  Hand puppets are normally hung upside down, but we need our hands to go through a slit in their backs rather than up their skirts, as there are times when we shuffle them in a mad scramble.

And I’ve written two grant requests.  We’ll do the show no matter what, but a grant would fund a Bay Area run as a starting-point for the touring. And it’d mean we’d actually make some money for fifteen months of work.

Every morning, walking home from gym, I struggle with memorizing a couple of pages of text.  As an actor, I’m astonished not only by the language but by the small surprises, the things I missed reading it the first three times — Cornwall advising Gloucester, “Come out o’th’ storm,” as a coded way of saying, “Keep your nose out of this business.”  And for a writer, every day is a master class in language, like the rhythm of my grandpa honing his blade on the razor strop.  In memorizing, one’s mind runs through multiple paraphrases of a line until you finally grasp the words as they actually are.  Generally, Shakespeare’s words work better.

Strange to be working on Lear while watching Oliver Stone’s ten-hour TV special “Untold History of the United States,” a chronicle of our less savory moments from WWII to the present.  It calls to mind the Polish critic Jan Kott’s comment, speaking of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, that he “falls victim to his own mythology.”  The same might be said of Lear’s image of kingship and our own image of empire 2014.

Next week I’m scheduled for sculpting & casting two minor characters’ heads, Elizabeth for building a half dozen puppet bodies, and in rehearsal we plunge into Act 3: the storm.      At this point, staging tends to be very mechanical: who’s handling which puppet and on which hand? how do I get Oswald across from the left-hand bar?  Sometimes early rehearsals are more improvisational, more exploratory, but with this one, often the creative leap happens in the midst of working out some trivial technical problem.

Strange too, knowing that 3/4ths of what we come up with will change. In writing, I’m a terrible writer, but a damned good rewriter.  So too with directing: I just have to get it on its feet, then look at it and say “Who came up with that junk?” and make it work.

DamnedFool.com. . .

Our personal blog is now in its 13th weekly edition. It’s free.  Visit and subscribe.  It includes my voice, Elizabeth’s, and the channeled voice of Lear’s Fool, who has his own way of looking at things.  Hope you’ll visit.

Ko. . .

There’s an annual festival in Amherst, MA — six weeks of progressive-theatre performances and intensive workshops (intensive = 6 hrs. a day, 6 days a week).  This summer, we’ll be part of it, presenting an amalgam of our Co-Creation memoir and Gifts, in keeping with the Festival theme, Work/Job/Career/Calling.  And we’ll torment workshop students the next week in “Shape-Shifting Your Story” — our process of evolving stories, shaping them, and finding the best “language” for them.  If you’re interested, keep abreast of the KoFest website.

Lear. . .

At last, we’re fully committed to our new production, King Lear, intended to open in March 2015.   Yes, we’ve made noises about it before, but it takes a while before I manage to make sure that I’ve trapped myself into actually doing a project.  That process involves talking about it a lot so I’ll feel embarrassed if I renege; getting Elizabeth into solving some impossible technical problem; and making some hard-copy commitment that I sign my name to — in this case, sending in a grant application for support.

This week Elizabeth finished the basic frame for the set: a cage-like structure of square aluminum tubing, 6 ft. wide, 4 ft. deep, 7 ft. high, sloping backward on a forced perspective, designed to unbolt easily for touring.  It’ll support all our miniature spotlights, with a bunch of puppets dangling from it, and ourselves enclosed in the tiny space playing the vast, panoramic play.  It’s always the same starting point with her in solving a technical problem: utter panic.  And the eventual result is always the same: it works.

Myra’s Channel. . .

As mentioned before, we’ve been writing a great deal of fiction in the past two years and, as expected, experiencing what most newcomers to an art form do: regular, multiple rejection.  Three novels circulating out there like stray cats, a fourth in progress, and a number of short stories.  So we were pleased that last week, our first-ever acceptance for a short story.  It’s a small on-line publication, Crack the Spine, and “Myra’s Channel” is happily ensconced in Issue 103.  You can read it free on-line.  If you read it, we’d love to hear your reaction.

It’s a futuristic glimpse of a moment that starts a woman’s day, tuning into a personalized romance channel, considering suicide, rushing off to work.  Kinda mean and depressing, but we hope there’s some grim laughter in it.  A short story can capture only a tiny fragment of what life is about, and for all I know, next time Myra appears in our fiction, she may turn out to be a real fireball on the dance floor.

Blogging on. . .

Our personal blog is now in its ninth weekly edition: www.DamnedFool.com. It’s free, so visit and subscribe.  It includes the challenges of daily life, small triumphs, responses to the news, reflections on writing, and commentary by the great-great-grandson of King Lear’s Fool, who has his own way of looking at things.

Committing to a weekly schedule — it’s posted on Sundays — is a challenge.  We managed it for a number of years with our radio series, and it finally became like a weekly visit from the vampire.  A friendly, loveable vampire, but he still sucks your blood.  This one is easier, though, and it’s a great spur to go outside our blindered focus on the immediate next project.

Hope you’ll visit.

Nixville. . .

This was our fourth showing at the Forbidden Cabaret Puppet Slam in Vallejo.  Always a juicy, packed audience, and this was sweet.  Normally we’ve tended to be the “serious” piece in the show, but this time we dug out a very old sketch and recast it with puppets from our bins.  Victor Frankenstein was a bit reluctant to be recast as a stuffy college prof with a secret volcanic passion, but  he warmed to the role.  We probably weren’t the silliest piece in the show, but we were very much in the running.  Next month we’ll bring “Nixville” to Arcata

And Gifts. . .

The shows continue.  Saturday was a true love feast.  Our hosts laid on generous drink and snacks beforehand, then about 25 souls packed themselves cheek by jowl into a small living room.  It was an audience like a fine violin — it accepted every touch, responded as if in a wordless dialogue.  Truly magical.