Sunday Sundries, 24

1. An exciting Saturday night: to Stow-Kent Starbucks (drive-thru), then home to stream the first of the latest episodes of Wallander, just released to Netflix. The only problem? All Swedish--no subtitles. (Did some Netflixian screw up? Or do they just overestimate our polyglottery?)

2. We've been recycling our plastic bags (from the grocery, cleaners, newspapers,etc.) at the recycle center here in town; today, that bin was gone ... ? The replacement said bottles and containers only. Now what?

3. I had another wild dream last night, a dream I was going to write about today. I was really looking forward to it. Didn't take a note last night. And now I can't remember a damn thing about it. (Maybe I'll learn when I get older?)

4. I just remembered!

5. For some reason a group of my former students (from various eras of my life, various schools) approached me about a Super 8 film they'd just made. (These guys--yes, they were all boys--were all about 8th-grade age, even though I taught them in many different decades.) They'd made the film, but they didn't know how to thread the projector.

Well ... I told them that I used to teach filmmaking courses (which I did, back in the 1970s--at Aurora Middle School/Harmon Middle School), and I would love to thread the projector for them. They handed me the beginning feet of the film, and I stuck the end into the projector (which looked like no projector ever), then realized it was probably self-threading. I did something that activated the self-threader, and the film leapt into the projector, and the boys ran out ahead to see ... what? I woke up. Never did know what their film was about. (Yes, this is disappointing, I know.)

I'm pretty sure I know the source of this dream. We've been cleaning out/downsizing, and I have, in one of our closets, a couple of boxes full of footage that kids shot over the years. Back in the 1970s I had a four-week elective on "Film Study" (we looked at old films by Chaplin, Griffith, Keaton, etc.), followed by eight weeks of "Filmmaking." The kids would write scripts, plan and shoot their stories, edited their films. Then we had a public showing of their works for their parents, families, friends. One group (all girls) won a local PBS contest in Cleveland with their film that matched images from Van Gogh works to the popular song "Vincent" by Don McLean. (I see now that someone has done the very same thing on YouTube; I will not look at it.)

So ... what to do with those films?

I also have some file cartons stuffed with the 30+ play scripts and production information about all the 30-some shows I did in Aurora--1966-1997.

What to do with those file cartons?

I also have photo albums full of pictures of kids in rehearsal, in production.

What to do with those albums?

I'd floated the idea that the Aurora Alumni Association could sponsor an Aurora Alumni Archive at the local library--but I don't know where that stands.

I hate to put them out for Waste Management to pick up some Friday morning,

**

And what happened to those filmmaking classes? Well, one of those Back-to-Basics movements swept in like a tsunami. And that was that.

6. I'd not done anything with filmmaking in decades when I had to shoot some video of my colleague Andy Kmetz, who had been chosen for Aurora's Honored Educators Hall of Fame. Andy couldn't go to the ceremonies, but he wanted to express his thanks via video.

I had no idea how to edit digital video and had some real adventures finding an editing program that was simple enough for me to use and understand, yet sophisticated enough to allow me to do some things with titles, fading in and out etc. Before it was all over, I'd spent some $$$, uttered many foul words and expressions, felt Less About Myself as a Person.

I had all been so easy for me back in the Super 8 era: I knew how to cut and splice film, how re-order scenes, insert titles, etc. ... how to thread a projector.

Shakespeare and a Sick Boy's Dream

One should not be held accountable for one's dreams, right? Especially during an illness? Still, this one had me wondering about myself ...

It is intermission in a production of Antony and Cleopatra. I am in costume in a production directed by Peter Sellars, though the director looks nothing like the actual Sellars. He looks more like ... I don't know. He's a younger man, more like someone you'd see in a soap opera, someone who's having an inappropriate relationship with someone else's bored wife.

I am also somehow involved with the creation of some sort of prop, a concoction that resembles a ball of sourdough starter. I am having some trouble preparing the mixture, and I add a few things that don't help--like bananas (in their skins) and spaghetti.

It dawns on me, in the dream, that I didn't really know I was in this production. I'm told that I'm Antony's son, but I know that no such character appears in Shakespeare's play. I don't know any lines, but, somehow, I'm supposed to open the post-intermission action.

Now here's the weird part ... In my dream, I ask, "Is this a dream? Let me know right now so that I don't have to worry about the humiliation that's about to ensue."

I get no reply. So I decide to feign illness. I drop to one knee and tell "Peter Sellars" that I'm sick and can't go on. He seems oddly unperturbed (he must have seen me act in high school) ...  I figure I can read Antony when I get home (where am I?) and be prepared for the next performance ...

Of course, I've been sick all week. Wednesday was an all-day-in-my-jammies day. Thursday was little better (I showered and dressed for lunch, then slept most of the rest of the day). Friday I was dressed all day but mostly lay around and coughed and sniffled and drifted in and out of sleep and felt sorry for myself. Today is the first day I've gone outside--over to the coffee shop in late morning to do my Kirkus reading (I'm a couple of days behind ... hmmm ... a source for my dream?).

Mercifully, I woke up before the "plot" of my dream advanced any farther. I know that I've had various versions of this dream before--being in a play I didn't know I was in; teaching a class I didn't know I had; taking a test in a class I didn't know I was taking; etc. I know that most people have various permutations of this dream, as well.

Do we know in our hearts that we're not really ready for the lives we're leading? That we're, to one extent of another, fakes? And we fear discovery?

I don't know. But I do know this: I am ferociously grateful that my dream did not continue, that I did not walk out onto that stage and start delivering lines from Hamlet or The Taming of the Shrew--or some of the sonnets I've memorized.

But now I remember that one of the biographies of Richard Burton tells us that during his great run in Hamlet on Broadway in 1964 he became bored at times and, here and there, spoke lines from other Shakespeare plays, just to see if anyone noticed. No one did. So maybe I would have carried the thing off, you know?

PS--YouTube Link to Burton delivering "To be or not to be ...."

Down, down, down ...

I woke up on Tuesday, my 70th birthday, with a sore throat. Nice. (It would get "nicer" as the hours advanced.) This was not good news: We'd planned to drive that day to Pottsville, Penn., to donate my entire John O'Hara collection to the Schuylkill County Historical Society, a collection that included all of his books, many of the movies he worked on (or that were made from his novels), and many other goodies, including copies of all the "Entertainment Week" features he wrote for Newsweek back in the 1940s. I'd spent an afternoon at KSU copying them all from bound copies of the magazine.

Anyway, I didn't want to delay the donation, for Pottsville is in the mountainous region of eastern Penn., winter is approaching, and I didn't want to wait till spring to make the drive. So off we went, proving, once again, that you don't get wiser with age.

We arrived at the Pottsville Ramada Inn (right downtown) after dark. We've stayed there before. Ramada has named the hotel's meeting and conference rooms after O'Hara works and characters: The English Room (Julian English, dark star of Appointment in Samarra), The Lockwood Room (for The Lockwood Concern), and the John O'Hara Ballroom.

The Society does not open until 1:30 on Wednesday, but that's okay: There were some sites I wanted to visit, including the farm where he spent all his boyhood summers, only about five miles away. (His father was a physician and could afford such things.) I'd driven along Panther Valley Road before, but I'd not known the address. This time I did. And we found it easily (GPS!), and were sad to see that it's looking much the worse for wear. No surprise, really. They bought the place in 1907 (John was only 2) and had to sell it when Dr. O'Hara died at age 57 in 1925.

After that--and a few other sites--we sat in the local McDonald's and read and worked until about 1:30 when we headed over to the Society.

I was feeling ever more crappy, by the way--throat, congestion, energy about zero.

I had made arrangements with the Executive Director to make the donation between 1:30 and 2. But when we got there, he had just gone to lunch, and the two remaining employees didn't know anything about any donation. Awkward. So we left the thee cartons--big, heavy--right on the floor by the entrance. And set off for home about 1:45.

I was feeling ever more crappy, by the way--exacerbated now by the singularly unsatisfying transfer of materials I'd spent some years accumulating--not to mention some $$$.

Oh well. The materials are where they belong. O'Hara's home town. When I first visited the Society (two years ago), they had virtually nothing on O'Hara (he is not popular in Pottsville: He told too many secrets, I guess), and the Research Director told me O'Hara was "a spoiled brat"--a phrase he repeated on Wednesday. Well, "spoiled brat" or not--he's a winner of a National Book Award and an important figure in twentieth century American literature (friends with Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and others), despite his nearly invisible status these days on our cultural radar.

I was feeling ever more crappy, by the way.

And by the time we got home--about 8 on Wednesday night--I plopped into bed and pretty much stayed there until about an hour ago. I'm going back for another visit (to the bed, not Pottsville) as soon as I finish this little posting.

I'll post some pictures of some things when I have the energy to do it--tomorrow? Let's hope ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 69

After a couple of exchanges dealing with merely quotidian matters, there was a two-week silence while I was out on the West Coast.

I look now at my journal from early October 2000 and see that I arrived in my room near the San Francisco airport about 11:15 p.m. I had, I see, a fairly typical flight: there was a crying baby in the seat in front of me and an obnoxious recent college grad behind me who talked full voice and who thought the in-flight film, Big Momma’s House (no, I didn’t watch it), was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. I wanted to punch her.

I see that my thoughts about my fellow passengers in life have not really changed all that much in the past fourteen years.

I see, too, that I was reading a Trollope novel on the plane (The Duke’s Children)—so superior am I!—and that I sent a quick email to Joyce before going to bed. Why didn’t I call? Well, it was three hours later in Hudson—about 2:15 a.m. Not a good idea to call.

Early the next morning, in my rental, I zipped up to northern California, to Redding, where I spent the night, then up early the next day to drive to my cousin Gail’s in Pendleton, Oregon. I spent the next couple of days visiting with my myriads of relatives out in the area—and learned that my late uncle Clark, a former police chief in Milton-Freewater, had been buried in his full policeman’s uniform, Sam Browne belt and all.

By the eleventh, I was driving back south to the conference, where, if I may trust my journal, my slide show/talk about The Call of the Wild went pretty well. On the fifteenth, I took a leisurely drive over the mountains from Glen Ellen, California (site of Jack London’s ranch), back to Rohnert Park, where I’d attended a transformative Jack London seminar for teachers in the summer of 1990. I don’t think JL is in my future, I wrote that day; it is time to move on. Which, of course, I’d already done, by then fully immersed in the story of Mary Shelley and her circle.

After a day of reading and relaxing at Half Moon Bay, I took an early flight on October 17. I read now that I had an entire row to myself on the flight from San Francisco to Cleveland. Luxury. Landed at 2, I wrote, with the lovely sight and presence of Joyce there waiting for me.

By October 19, I was back fully in the flow of Shelley, reading more about that famous “Frankenstein summer” of 1816 when Mary was in Geneva, Switzerland, and found the idea for her most famous story.

 I had written a note to Betty when I got back on the 17^th; the time, I see, was about 8:30 p.m.—near my bedtime nowadays. I basically summarized what I’d done out on the Coast.

She wrote back the next morning with some concerns about the reviews of Miranda Seymour’s new biography of Mary Shelley (2000). The competition was unnerving for her—it giveth a queasy feeling, she wrote.

I wrote back a long (and, as I view it now, presumptuous and maybe even condescending) email, reassuring her. The good news: Once your book appears, I wrote, the ball game (as the saying goes) will be over. Yours will immediately become the standard against which all other once and future biographies will be measured. … I went on and on—I’m blushing now—until … Well, this is sounding like a pep talk, isn’t it? Uh, yes. (I’m blushing some more.)

Betty replied twelve minutes later.

Sunday Sundries, 23

1. In your family ... what did you call that section of the Sunday paper--the funnies or the comics? We were a funnies family.

2. This week I finished Claire Harman's wonderful biography Myself & the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (2005). It took me about a month (other things intruded), but worth everything. I learned a lot about Stevenson, whom I first "met" back in boyhood. He was one of the writers included in the card game Authors, which my brothers and I played all the time.  I recently bought an old deck on eBay ... remember who the others were? Twain, Dickens, LM Alcott (the only woman), Thackeray, Shakespeare, JF Cooper, W. Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, Poe. (Here's a link to the rules of the game.)

(As an aside, I've wondered before if this game had an influence on my adult reading habits. I've read the complete works of about half of the authors.)

Stevenson's works on the game cards were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child's Garden of Verses, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island.

By the way, the old Disney film of Treasure Island (1950) scared the hell out of me when I was a Wee Lad--I was only six when it was released. (Link to trailer for the film.)

One of the great things I learned about Stevenson from Harman: Just before he left for the South Seas (where he would build a home in Samoa--and die later on), he was living in Bournemouth, on the southeastern coast of England. There (1884-87), he was friends with novelist Henry James and other literary and artistic notables. But what I didn't know was that he also socialized with Percy Florence Shelley, Mary's son, and the only surviving member of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley gene pool. PFS was not a literary type at all--loved the money from Sir Timothy Shelley's estate, the yacht, the mansion, etc. (Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Mary Shelley: all are buried in Bournemouth; PBS remains in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.)

Percy Florence Shelley,
son of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
grandson of William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft

Anyway, Harman tells us that Shelley showed Stevenson some of the family relics--including that most astonishing one, the partially roasted heart of Percy Bysshe Shelley, snatched by Shelley's friend Edward J. Trelawny from the fire on the beach near Viareggio, Italy, where they were cremating (Italian law) the drowned remains of the poor poet in 1822. Percy Florence Shelley (the son) had discovered the dessicated heart after the death of his mother, Mary, in 1851.

3. We had another mixed-bag of a Friday night: TJ Maxx near Chapel Hill (where I bought a roasting pan I didn't know I needed/wanted), OfficeMax (bought nada, but drooled over some technology), Books-a-Million (where I bought the new bio of Tennessee Williams), Stow McDonald's (2 lg Diet Cokes), Giant Eagle (Hudson-Stow--a chicken to roast today). Home to stream an episode of Whitechapel. Now that, my friends, is excitement!

Waking Up Weepy

Did you ever wake up weepy?

Happened to me today. I've been waking up about 6:30 a.m. these days--nothing like the Old Days (when I was teaching) when the cruel alarm jarred me up at 5:10. (Often, though, it didn't jar me: Nervous about oversleeping, I was usually awake by five, cursing the clock.) But in these Retirement Days (and Days of Medications) 6:30 is about it.

But today ... it was about 6:15. I'm not sure if my waking and weeping were related to a dream; I can't remember. But I do remember why I was weeping. I was thinking about our son ... Steve.

I was thinking about the years he was with me at Harmon Middle School (1983-1986), the years he was in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. He had begun his sixth grade year at Hudson Middle School, but the (ill) luck of the draw had placed him for most of the day in the room of a teacher (who will remain nameless) who seemed to have decided to end her career early. She had him for homeroom, science, history, English, and when we went to Open House in October, we were astonished in her classroom: The walls were bare. Absolutely antiseptic. She told the parents that her method of teaching science was "directed study"--i.e., the kids would sit at their desks (in tidy rows), read a section of the science book, answer the questions at the end of each section. While she sat up front and ...?

Joyce and I immediately recognized the horror of this. Even more--we knew that just down the road, in Aurora, were some of the greatest teachers in the country. And for sixth grade science--if Steve were there--he would have Eileen Kutinsky, who has no equal in my mind (well, except for her late sister, Vivian LoPresti, who taught first grade at Aurora's Lake School and was, well, a magician). And so at the end of the first marking period (after a conference with an intractable principal at the Hudson school--no, he would not alter Steve's schedule), we withdrew Steve and took him to Harmon School, where he had three wonderful years--among the best years of his life, I think. He had great teachers, made great friends, threw himself into the many activities of the school (from bike club to sports to band to bowling to drama).

Drama.

This is why I was weeping this morning.

I was during my Aurora Middle School (and, later, Harmon Middle School) years (1966-1978, 1982-1997) the "drama guy." I directed over thirty plays during those years, and many of them I wrote with groups of kids. (I did a couple of shows at Aurora High School, too--Grease and The Merry Wives of Windsor.)

When Steve was a Wee Fellow, Joyce used to bring him to see the Harmon shows, and he got hooked on theater. When he came to Harmon late that fall of 1983, he wanted to be in the show we were doing, Murder on Bus 10, a comedy/thriller (?) I'd written with some kids. I plopped him in the chorus, and his career began.

In subsequent years he was in six more of my shows, gradually earning more important roles (I was reluctant to cast him too prominently at first, but a couple of my colleagues told me not to worry about it--the other kids knew he was good). He played Dracula in a silly musical I found (Dracula, Baby) and played Snoopy in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

He was with a wonderful group of kids, by the way, classmates who welcomed him immediately. I'm nearly weeping right now as I think about how he--at least from my point of view--seemed to slip seamlessly into Harmon life.

He was a good little actor, had a strong soprano voice (right through 8th grade--he was not happy about that; he's now a strong baritone/bass), and was absolutely devoted to the productions--as were his cast-mates. They were a superb group to work with.

And then--suddenly, impossibly--it was all over. His final appearance was in The 90th Annual Eighth Grade Farewell-to-Harmon Show (no, there had not been 90 of them--1990 was their graduation year ... clever, eh?). My great colleague Andy Kmetz and I had started those end-of-the-year shows just a couple of years earlier. I wrote them--collections of skits and songs about school life, each year having a different theme. (Steve's year we used the device of having a new family tour the school with their kid they were going to enroll.) Our final show in the series, by the way, was the "2000th" of them.

So, suddenly, it was Saturday night, May 31, 1986, and I was sitting there watching Steve's last performance on the Harmon stage. And I was weeping.

Afterwards, kids were out in the Commons (what we called our "auditorium") hugging and crying, and Steve grabbed me around the waist, blurted out a thank-you, and cried against my chest. I wrapped my arms around him and added some moisture.

And then it was over.

He was in numerous theater productions in high school (at Western Reserve Academy, where Joyce taught)--including The Taming of the Shrew (he was Lucentio), a play we'd read in my 8th grade English class. I don't really know if he auditioned for any shows at Tufts, where he went to college.  Later, Joyce and I got to see him in the chorus of two Akron opera productions--The Pirates of Penzance and Don Giovanni. But then job and family and Life intervened; other priorities. Happens to all of us.

Last spring we got to see his older son, Logan, 9, in a performance of The Little Mermaid in the Green Schools.

I was moved to tears.

His younger son, Carson, 5, dresses up all the time in costumes. I think he'll be in school plays, too. Last year for my birthday dinner he showed up at the Welshfield Inn in full Dracula costume. He was the hit of the night, and a kind server brought him a glass of red juice. (I do not drink ... wine.)

I was moved to tears.

As I was early this morning, thinking about that amazing relationship I'd had with my son back in middle school, about driving him to school every day (talking, laughing, seeing things), teaching him in 8th grade, directing him onstage seven times, watching him perform, watching him grow, admiring him beyond measure.

Frankenstein Sundae, 68

Silence for a couple of weeks—from both of us. A silence I finally broke on September 21.

I wrote a newsy letter about my recent reading (Shelley-related and book-reviewing-related), wondered if she could tell me more about the smallpox vaccination that Mary and Bysshe had arranged for their little boy, William (less than a year old), in that Frankenstein summer in Geneva. And I wrote excitedly about an imminent trip to Oregon. I’m hoping, I wrote, for a day or two out on the coast, too, near the place where my parents lived their happiest years, at Cannon Beach.

Those years, at least at first, were happy for my parents. Both had recently retired; they had—as I think I’ve written earlier here—one of the most glorious views in the world, overlooking Haystack Rock out in the Pacific surf; they were both still fairly healthy. Dad was still making his way to the beach every day a couple of times to take walks. Mom was very active with community groups and had found some friends to hike local mountain and beach trails with. They were far, far away from their three sons (I was in Ohio; my brothers were in Massachusetts), but maybe—just maybe—after decades of dealing with us, it was kind of refreshing to be out in the Oregon air, the two of them.

Of course, their idyll could not last … whose does? Soon, Dad’s health would fail, his mental acuity soften (some minor strokes), and they would have to leave their Cannon Beach paradise for a “senior-friendly” place they built in nearby Seaside (no view of the Pacific). And not long after that, they would return to the East, to a retirement community in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, not far from my brothers’ summer place (an old farmhouse in Becket). And then … more decline.

Mary’s relations with her father that Frankenstein summer of 1816 were nonexistent. William Godwin had not forgiven her for running away with a married man in 1814, for bearing two children by him (the first had died after only a couple of weeks). Even when Mary—with great hope—had named her son William, her father did not soften. He refused all forms of communication with her, and it was not until the suicide of Harriet Shelley (Bysshe’s first wife, late in 1816) and the subsequent marriage of Mary and Bysshe (December 30) that Godwin relented and once again embraced the daughter whom he loved so profoundly.

Betty wrote back a day later with a letter that surpassed in newsiness even my own. Her computer troubles, her reading, her planned journeys and family gatherings, her teaching and administrative duties and the political situations at American University—all filled an entire single-spaced page and a half.

Silence for a week.

Betty sent a little inquisitive note—just, she said, to check to see if all is well with you and yours.

It was. But was I starting to show signs of the inattention that would eventually end our correspondence?

I wrote back the next day (September 29) with word about my writing progress (I was into 1817—the year Mary turned twenty). Shared some news—including an announcement of our son’s performance (in the chorus) of Pirates of Penzance with an Akron (Ohio) opera company. It was great to see him onstage again (he was now twenty-eight), and he always had a fine singing voice—from his boyhood soprano to his adult baritone/bass. I’d directed him seven times in middle school productions, and he had continued performing in high school. But as far as I know, he did not audition for any shows at Tufts University (he’d graduated in 1994). At the time I wrote this note to Betty, he had completed his master’s in journalism (Kent State) and was a reporter for the Akron Beacon-Journal. He would earn a co-nomination for a Pulitzer Prize before leaving journalism for law school.

After a couple of exchanges dealing with merely quotidian matters, there was a two-week silence while I was out on the West Coast.