It’s the busiest month of my tour! All things being equal, this one month could pay for a six-month vacation! (… assuming that I didn’t have, oh, bills to pay.)
“Making hay while the sun shines” is taking on a whole new meaning for me. This is no time to get caught up in self-doubt, or moodiness or exhaustion. Every once in a while something happens that makes me question, “How can this possibly work?” But as long as I tackle the task directly before me, and keep moving forward, I knock them down one after the next.
By the way, those of you who enjoy these tales of life on the road would probably enjoy Marcus Fernando’s “Canada Chronicles.” Parallel to my own reports, Marcus has released 75 of these hilarious chronicles, detailing his travels and travails around the world. To subscribe to his stuff, simply write to him at: Marcus_Fernando@hotmail.com. My favorite gem of wisdom from Marcus: “The best things in life aren’t things.”
I performed in Burke County, in North Carolina, at “Freedom School.” Ironically, “Freedom School” was completely surrounded by 8-foot wire fences, with a guard booth at the gate.
They were all very nice people though.
Their stage was a combination thrust/proscenium, with a little curved thrust, forming an arc. To the left and to the right of the arc, the lighting was terrific. In the center, it was terrible. In the rehearsal I asked the technicians to do what they could to adjust the lights in towards the center before the start of the show. I then put on my makeup and costume, and, upon entering, realized that they had never found the ladder to follow through on that request. The doors had been opened almost immediately after we’d finished, and 160 kids filled the chairs.
I spent the entire play sidling from one lit area to another. They’d requested the entire 85-minute play, and they were really responsive, early on. When “Tartuffe” is the 4th monologue of the show, (out of 10) the last six suffer by comparison, and in the dim light, somewhere around “The Imaginary Cuckold” I could feel that the air had been let out of the balloon. While “Precious Young Maidens” is usually a highlight, I could feel that the thrill had gone.
But up through “Tartuffe”, I was a hit. Having an adorable doe-eyed girl volunteer for the role of Elmire didn’t hurt. After that it was a long slow decline, but I was the only one to seem to notice, at least in the discussions afterwards. In fact the woman who hosted the event sent a terrific response: “The performance was stunning! … It really was an experience beyond what is available to most of the students here.”
From North Carolina it was up to Ferrum, Virginia, and I seem to have turned a three-hour drive into a six hour drive by not sticking to the interstate. For the last few years, I’ve been driving past the Blue Ridge Parkway without driving on it, and, with a little extra time, I found my way up to it, where the ride was smooth and the views were gorgeous. I pulled into Ferrum a little after sundown, found my host and got checked into the school’s guest apartment. I then went looking for some dinner.
I passed the Dairy Queen. … and quickly found myself out of town.
I drove back, drove up and down a few streets.
The only restaurant in town … at least the only one open after 7 p.m. … was the Dairy Queen.
Dairy Queen it was.
Unfortunately, the theatre director had scheduled my visit at the same time as he was in technical rehearsals for a show due to open that weekend.
Which meant that the guy who hired me wasn’t even going to see the show. And neither were the people who could supposedly benefit from the event, as they would all be in rehearsal.
There were about 25 people at the show.
But I got several free meals in the cafeteria that day, and had plenty of time to catch up on e-mails. I finally doubled back to e-mails that I’d left in my inbox from about 1999, and started deleting and writing to the senders. I got the inbox down to under 200 messages for the first time in years.
Anyway, the few who saw the show had big smiles on their faces throughout, especially one woman who turned out to be a local actress or acting teacher, and who volunteered for the Tartuffe scene.
The next morning I was on the road again, heading north to Connecticut, in anticipation of a show in New Hampshire on Saturday. It was a good 12 hour drive, with a stop to visit Kathy Conery at James Madison University, and I pulled in to Connecticut that evening, staying at Debby Reelitz’ house.
Friday, I continued to work on e-mails, and began drawing up the next phase of the e-mail campaign that I had been putting off: writing to the French Teacher mailing list.
Late on Friday, I received a call. New Hampshire was expecting 9-12 inches of snow and Plymouth College had closed the school for the following day. I had driven 638 miles for a show that was now off. My next show? Was back in Ashland, Virginia.
Now, this was the low point of the passage. I had just barely started making “real money” for the month, and was back at the “break even point”, but the first of the scheduled dates that was going to put me back on top was cancelled. For a moment, I found myself visualizing all of the other ways that the remaining dates could be screwed up: illness, bad weather, car problems, food poisoning … I was suddenly conscious of the very tenuous nature of my situation. There was a lot riding on making it through the next two weeks. I started doubling my intake of my usual nutrition drink (“Re-liv”). And I realized that the visualization was as much a problem as what might potentially happen. The anticipation of negative results (“Things never work out”) creates those negative results.
I also had to question what it is within my thinking that made me suppose I didn’t actually deserve to have things work out … for once?
In order to make lemonade out of these lemons, I dropped a note to one of the profs I’d performed for last fall, who’d given me wonderful feedback and encouragement, and mentioned that I’d be driving by on Saturday, and would he like to meet for breakfast? His response was that he’d love to have me over for breakfast, and also to bring me in to speak to his Saturday-morning French class for a bit.
I readily agreed, pending the ability to get through the anticipated snow, and showed up on his doorstep the following morning. He was extremely pleased. His mother had died some ten days before, and he hadn’t held his class the previous weekend, and was still down in the dumps, so Moliere lightened his mood considerably. Later he wrote all kinds of good things that I’m already using in the e-mail campaign, ("I've been organizing and hosting cultural programs for well over three decades, and can't recall one which has engendered more positive discussion and genuine enthusiasm.") and promised to plug my show at the next AATF conference, where he is to be a featured speaker. All in all, the reworked itinerary was probably worth more to me than the previous plan.
That night I stopped in Baltimore and visited my sister Maureen and her husband, Tim. I got in a bit of jogging, and a bit of laundry the next morning, and zipped south to Ashland, for my show at Randolph-Macon College.
Again, I was in a guest house, and with time on my hands, I attacked more e-mails. I met my hostess for coffee, and headed to the theatre. Once again, the lighting was lousy. It was a movie theatre with a tiny stage in front of the screen, and all the lighting pointed directly down. Fortunately, this time my technicians knew what they were doing, and they quickly got ladders and started climbing, creating some angles to the lighting.
The show was fun. The “Tartuffe” volunteer was a somewhat buxom girl who was playful. During the “Scapin” scene, climbing through the audience, I found my way toward a young boy, and where I normally would grab for a program, pretending it was the court “transcription,” I grabbed the papers that he had sitting by him.
“What, you got a game of hangman going here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he responded, even before the audience had realized that we were now ad-libbing. The subsequent laughter threw me off of my lines for a while, but I eventually got myself back on track and finished off.
Overall the show went well, and quickly I was on the road again, this time driving late into the night to Roanoke, Virginia, arriving after midnight.
The next morning, I was up at 7:00, and found my way to the school. It was a huge auditorium, and eventually, more than 500 kids filled the space. The only sound equipment that they could get to work was a boom box, and the place was so full you couldn’t hear anything.
My contact for this gig had been the Foreign Language director for the entire county, and she had brought in French and theatre students from nine different high schools and middle schools.
A side note: She had written me a few weeks back, noting that a teacher had actually read my study guide and noted that “On page 38 of the script, Tartuffe brings a volunteer on stage, to play the role of a married woman whom he attempts to seduce.” Well, I was pleased that someone, at least, was reading the materials that I was sending out there, but to complain that Moliere’s plays have infidelities in them is like complaining that Shakespeare’s plays have murder. … Of course, I suppose they would prefer that.
I was … careful in playing the Tartuffe scene in Roanoke. The girl was nervous enough, and kept moving away from me, and for once, at least, I let her.
Actually, the Roanoke audience was terrific. To get 500 plus kids to pay attention to a 90-minute one-man show is no easy task, but I was feeling the power. If I felt them start to get out of hand, I would modulate my voice, get quiet, or pause, and come back at them with stronger stuff. The sound of 500 kids being silent is an awesome thing.
The next day I was on to Blacksburg for shows at Virginia Tech. It was less than an hour away, and I still had a day before any performances. I settled into the hotel early and got more work done. I met with my host, Patty Raun, who some of you Nebraska grads may remember. Patty gave me the special rock star treatment, giving me a gift bag of goodies and taking me to lunch. Back at the hotel I saw a car pull into the parking lot, pulling a trailer that advertised a karaoke company. I asked the driver and he noted that they were hosting karaoke at Buffalo Wild Wings that night.
I went on to give my acting workshop, and to do a tech rehearsal for Moliere. The show went extremely well, and the volunteer was very playful. Afterwards, the volunteer stuck around to say hello, and I discovered she was a high school student. “Whoops, I’m sorry, if I’d known that I wouldn’t have molested you so much.”
Patty and I and a couple of the technicians then went out to the karaoke bar. It was her first karaoke experience, and her students seemed to feel extremely privileged to see that side of her.
I had most of the next day off, and I set the e-mail campaign into motion. That evening, following another tech rehearsal, I performed “Criteria.” While Patty had to bow out afterwards to pick up her son, some of the students were throwing a party, and invited me to join them. One student demonstrated that, while the rest of the audience were getting their hands stamped as they came in to “Criteria,” she’d had the usher apply the stamp to her chest. Somewhere, in the middle of the party, one student noted that she had been unable to attend my acting workshop, and with some encouragement, I performed the “Tartuffe” scene using her as “Elmire.” Around me, I could hear the party getting very quiet for about five minutes, before finishing to a burst of applause. (The fellow who had been the house manager for both my shows, and who’d invited me to come along, suggested that “I hope I’m half as cool as you when I’m your age.” Hmmmm …)
The next morning, I was heading south. It was almost seven hours down to Marietta, Georgia, where my friend, Linda, had arranged a small, living-room performance for ten people, including my good friend, Cathy Maday. It had been a while since I’d done the show in that intimate of a setting, and it felt very tense and immediate. I could see a fixed smile on their faces through most of the performance, and I fed on my awareness of their interest. (Linda’s daughter was in the audience, and she turned bright red in the scene where my underwear is exposed.) They all stood up to applaud afterwards, and Linda’s son seemed especially appreciative. Cathy then proceeded to upstage me with a dazzling demonstration of belly dancing technique. Now it was my turn to sit there with a fixed smile on my face!
Farther south, I had more “Criteria” performances at Georgia College & State University. I’d performed Moliere for them two years before, and now I got back to town to see that the promotional marquee announced “Tim Mooney’s Criteria,” once again elevating me to name-above-the-title status. The weather, by the way, had turned wonderful. Trees in Georgia are already in bloom, and you can smell the flowers everywhere.
When I got to the theatre, I discovered that I would be performing in an auditorium that holds upwards of 700 people! I’d never performed this show for more than 100. And, in fact, the placards that were the extent of my scenery, probably couldn’t be read from any farther than the fifth row.
The ushers, after stamping the hands appropriately, encouraged the audience to sit up front.
There were only 42 in the audience for the first performance, which was actually more than anticipated, since this was the last day of their spring break, and many of the students weren’t back in town quite yet. The show itself went great. In the different environment, I had a couple of stumbles, getting my tongue twisted around a couple of passages, but with the larger space, I could feel the “lid” come off of the show a bit, as I could expand my gestures in a much broader range. And the response was terrific. Several of the audience, including students and much of the theatre faculty stuck around to share their congratulations.
After the show, I noted that I was now all wound up from the performance, and that you couldn’t buy beer on Sunday night in Georgia! (How could I have forgotten? I’ll have to add this to the list of discoveries.) One of the students, overhearing this, called a friend from next door, who brought over an extra bottle of Guinness from her fridge.
The next day, I gave my usual workshop to an acting class, and since it was a class which was almost entirely women, I didn’t do the usual “Tartuffe” exercise, but instead worked with a “Misanthrope” exercise that I’d done only once before. This time, it seems, I explained it better than before, because it worked incredibly well, demonstrating the power of using the audience in an argument. (It’s an exercise that I refer to as “The Jerry Springer Show.”)
That night I performed the show again (and I seemed to have a couple of ‘groupies’ returning for a second showing), but while I was more confident than the night before, the impact of the show seemed lessened. Perhaps, with another rehearsal under my belt, my recital had become a bit rote. Or, just as likely, this was more of a student crowd than the night before, and they were there because they had to be for a class. There were persistent coughs through much of the show, and it was really starting to annoy me. I felt like “staring down” the coughers, but it was of no use. In fact, I had been tempted to cough, myself. The air was particularly dry, and I could feel some particle of some sort had found its way to the back of my throat. There is, of course no way of stopping to swab the back of your throat during the course of a one-man show, so I pressed on ahead, wondering what kind of a bug I was in the process of swallowing.
And yet, there’s that scene with my pants around my ankles, and suddenly they were all healed of their conditions. I heard almost no coughing through the remainder of the show.
Afterwards, I said a fond goodbye to several of the students who were very enthusiastic about my show, many of whom remembered me from my performance two years before. While I live quite an itinerant life on the roads, there are a variety of programs where I really feel like they’ve adopted me as one of their own, like an occasional fixture on the faculty.
I went out for a drink with my friend, Melanie, who I’d met at the American Assn of Teachers of French conference in Atlanta last summer. She and Tina (from Portland) and I had spent a good deal of time hanging out together at the conference when we all discovered that we seemed to have Milledgeville in common.
I drove the long haul north to Ada, Ohio the next day, about 12 hours on the road, and while everyone was very helpful, it was rough getting my internet hookup reestablished, and my e-mail campaign was stalled halfway through. And so, eventually, I started writing these long-delayed observations instead.
The next day was full: I taught an acting workshop in the morning, focusing back on “Tartuffe” again (they’d studied the play recently), followed by a French class in the afternoon. (It was the school’s French teacher who’d lobbied to bring my show in.) And then “Moliere Than Thou” that night.
There were at least ten technicians on hand to run “Moliere Than Thou!” They spent most of the rehearsal (and, I assume, the performance) sitting around waiting for something to happen that might require them actually doing something.
I assume that most of the shows that come in for this arts series are big events with big sets and large casts, but I just didn’t have enough “needs” to give them a sense of purpose, and I couldn’t bring myself to sending them off to fetch me coffee, or the like. (Of course, most of the crew was there to earn credit for their Intro to Theatre class, but I couldn’t think of a better way of turning students off to theatre for life than to force them to hang around doing nothing through the course of a tech rehearsal and a performance.)
I was amused by the sign on the green room door that indicated that the green room was “for the use of the cast of “Moliere Than Thou” only.” Once I’d gotten into my make-up, I felt like I had to at least go and sit in the green room for thirty seconds or so, just to put it to some use.
The show itself went very well, with about a hundred scattered around the large auditorium. I did an interview immediately beforehand with a local journalist, and when it came time to get a volunteer for “Scapin,” the French professor had his arm twisted to join me. It turns out he was a bit of a ham, and was satisfying his own sense of humor on a meta-theatrical level such as occasionally speaking a line in French, and sitting down on the stage after I’d left to climb through the audience. It wasn’t helping the audience follow the humor as I had written it, but at least the fellow’s wife was a good laugher, and she’d kept the rest of the audience responsive through the course of the show.
I finished the show, packed up (had all the assistance I might ever need in loading the trunk back into the car), and was on the road early the next morning, heading for the last show of this leg of the tour (at last), in Bradford, Pennsylvania.
Of course, what I wanted was to turn west at that point, but found myself instead going six hours east, where I had another workshop to teach at three o’clock that afternoon. Once again, the kids were really responsive, and this time I worked through both the “Tartuffe” and the “Misanthrope” exercise. When I performed the “Tartuffe” monologue for the students, I found myself reminded of my hypnotist analogy: the volunteer Elmire was extremely resistant in that scene, finding Tartuffe himself extremely offensive to her religious sentiment. She would stiffen up like a board when I would come close to her. And yet, three feet away, one of the students was falling under the hypnotic spell of the power of Tartuffe’s persuasion.
I was in a new theatre space: a brand new theatre space. Mine was the first performance that would happen in their thrust studio space. (The kids, who are opening their show in two weeks, envied me that fact.) It was also the first place that had hired me to perform “Criteria” exclusively, and not as a follow-up to “Moliere Than Thou,” and it was good to know that the show stands on its own. (It was the sixth performance of “Criteria” in this month, and it really seems to have come into its own in this time.) It took the lighting designer a while to get the bugs out of the system, but eventually the light plot he’d set up worked like a charm.
Before the show, I stopped to check my voice mail. There was a message from my brother, Kevin, that my father had experienced what they were calling a “mini stroke” (also known as TIA). He was all right now, and would be staying in the hospital overnight, but it was startling to have real life intervene. Fortunately, I am now ready to head home, and I will in fact be home before I get the chance to send this out, but for the moment, I still had a show to do.
I threw myself into it, knowing that I could not stop to think about what might be going on back home. Every time I did, I pushed myself farther into the character, feeding off of the emotional life of the moment. The performance went extremely well, though that hardly seems relevant right now. Please send thoughts and prayers for Dad.
(I am now back home, and Dad is doing fine.)
Love,
Tim
Miles on the Vibe 133,500
In the CD Player: Eagles: The Finest Hits of
Attendance: 160 + 25 + 50 + 500 + 10 + 20 + 60 + 50 + 42 + 15 + 60 + 8 + 120 + 60 = 1,180
Temperature: 20s-80s
Discoveries: I am making hay while the sun shines. I tackle the task immediately in front of me, and refuse to get caught up in moods or self-doubt. * The anticipation of negative results, such as “Things never work out,” creates those negative results. * You can’t buy beer on Sundays in Georgia. * Coughing is optional. * There are some programs where I really feel like the faculty has adopted me as one of their own. * “Criteria” can stand on its own.
Next shows: Luther College, Decorah, IA; Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Monday, March 07, 2005
The View From Here # 87: Gresham, OR, Palos Verdes & Long Beach, CA, Houston, TX, Greensboro, NC
I sometimes despair of the fact that I will not ever be able to capture all the details passing by as weeks pass between “Views.” I then realize that some of you probably despair that I will.
I am about 5,000 miles along the road since the last time I checked in. From Pocatello, Idaho, I raced on to Portland, Oregon, and a beautiful hotel/bed & breakfast/brewery/winery where I was being housed for two nights. Early on I was actually frustrated by the fact that there were no TV’s in the room, or phone connections. As time passed, I grew to appreciate the fact that this led me out of the room itself, and down to the winery, where cordial fraternity ensued. (There was a party of 8 lesbians celebrating a birthday.)
The hotel (McMenamin’s) was painted all over, with a different painting on every door, and even paintings on the hot water pipes, or any odd surface.
I arrived at Mount Hood Community College on a beautiful blue-skied day (the weather had been kind to me already, crossing the mountains in February). Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helens stood out vividly in the distance.
I met my host, who actually had first met me on the trip to Martinique two summers ago, and he led me to the performance space, which was a lecture hall next to an art gallery. What nobody had told me was that they were re-flooring the space, and the bare cement floor was interrupted by three power outlets elevated three inches above the surface. By some heightened sense of awareness that I don’t understand, I never came tripped over these during the show.
The 200-seat hall was eventually filled with 170 audience members (a good rear-end-to-seat ratio), and their response was great. It was a noon show, and the school had recruited some high schools to attend. Remembering the last noon show that I’d done had been interrupted by a 1 pm exodus of students going to their next class, I had suggested that we do my 1-hour version of the show, followed by a 1-hour lecture on Moliere’s life. My webmaster, Bruce (who’s been promoting the show for years, but only managed to see it for the first time now), noted that the lecture was as successful as the performance. A teacher, who’d seen a teaser that I put into the program, requested hearing my rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and I sang a verse of it to big cheers. I think the French professor wanted to get in a final word of thanks, but he was drowned out. (I noted sardonically the fact that 8 years of scholarly work on Moliere was upstaged by twenty seconds of singing.)
The professor is already suggesting that he’d like to get me back again for next year. One of the high school teachers e-mailed immediately afterwards with the perfect endorsement: “We really enjoyed the show. The students asked today if they could memorize some of these dialogues in French and act them out for the class. Thanks for offering the opportunity to inspire them.”
I continued into Portland proper, visiting with my friend, Tina. (I met her at the conference in Atlanta, where she failed in her efforts to set me up with her sister-in-law.) Tina brought me in to speak to a class of middle-school acting students the next day, which is quite a task. Getting their attention is like herding kittens. Afterwards we went to the famous Powell’s Books, where I bought three or four Moliere biographies and a book or two by Isaac Asimov.
I stopped in Salem the next day, visiting brother Pat (and Kathy and Ryan and Michael), before heading along again, this time to San Francisco. While I’d been receiving reports about the terrible rain that California had been getting, my visit was more sunny than not. I stayed, once again, with Stephen and Kajsa, and we hit the karaoke bar that night. Before racing on ahead, I had a really nice dinner with Mia, who’d had a one-woman show at the SF Fringe last fall.
And again, I was on my way south, pausing in Porterville to meet with a French teacher/theatre enthusiast (Alfonso) for lunch and a tour of the local community theatre. An enormous rainbow appeared over the mountains nearby.
I pulled in to L.A., staying with my friends Thessaly and Casper (also from the San Francisco Fringe). The next morning I actually went jogging again (my exercise program has fallen off miserably) around the lake at Echo Park, and noticed the impact that the rains had on L.A. There were sidewalks that had been overrun with turf, as the sod on the neighboring hill had slid completely off of the mud. Some homeowners had taken to covering the hills bordering their property with plastic sheeting, so that the rain could not soak into the ground any more.
From there, I went on to Redondo Beach, where my hotel overlooked the Ocean. The weather was bad, but the next day it cleared and the view was terrific. The hotel had a pool, so my exercise routine was gradually resuming. The show was in a private school in Palos Verdes, on a high hill overlooking Los Angeles. Again, the response was terrific. “Tartuffe” was a little “too good,” as the cute volunteer brought a boisterous reaction from the crowd, and it was not easy getting their attention back.
They’d wanted me to perform a 40-minute show. The start was delayed, as the kids took their time coming in, and the French students recited an introduction to their fellow students. By the time I finished the show and got back offstage, it was an hour after the scheduled starting time. I apologized at some length, but both the French teacher and the principal insisted that it was okay. The teacher later e-mailed the following:
“I got feedback from my students today. They were a little surprised by the ‘Tartuffe’ scene, but enjoyed the presentation as a show. They said that it was the best performance they've seen at school during our assembly period this year. That's a compliment! A colleague also called me to thank me for bringing you to campus, saying that she really enjoyed your show. My department chair also said that she was pleased, and wouldn't it be great if we could have you come every four years.”
I grabbed a quick lunch with the charming French teacher, before heading off to a same-day performance for California State University-Long Beach (CSULB). I was performing in a library gallery space on the fifth floor, and there were about fifty chairs set up in front of me. There were about twenty-five students in the chairs, and people continued to arrive as the show proceeded. As they arrived, they sat off to one side or another, where there were tables on one side and easy chairs at the other. By the end of the show, there may have been some sixty people watching.
The men were slow to volunteer, so I “volunteered” the professor who’d hired me for the “Scapin” scene. I could sense he had a bit of showmanship about him, and I’d also noticed that his four-year old daughter was a bit restless watching the show (lots of people had brought their kids to this show). I figured if I got her dad up on stage, she’d pay better attention, which she did.
Again, the show went great. My “tip basket” had $24 in it. And the host is already thinking about bringing it back in next year.
I worked my way down to San Diego, where I’d intended to meet some old friends for karaoke, but both were no-shows, and I ended up singing with a friend of a friend. When I realized that neither Lisa nor Jeff were going to make it, I decided to head off early, to get east of San Diego and avoid the next morning’s rush hour. I worked my way to El Centrino, where there was no hotel room to be found. Apparently there was either a new mall being built, or a film being shot or both. There were likewise, no hotels in Yuma, and I decided to nap my way to Tucson, pulling into town much earlier than expected.
I met with the chair of my former department at NIU (now chair of U of Arizona) who, in spite of my unkempt air, offered to book me for the coming year. I’d already booked Arizona State for September 25, and it turned out that Sept 26 worked for UA, which means that I’ll sweep through Arizona in the course of two days next fall.
I pushed on to Las Cruces, New Mexico before finally finding a hotel. The next day, I worked my way back to Brownwood Texas, where I’d performed in January, and where the professor, Nancy Jo, has been talking up my show to all the schools in her neighborhood (if you can call the entire state of Texas a “neighborhood”). I offered to perform my musical for her and her students once again. It had gone through numerous changes in the interim, and another dozen of her kids who hadn’t seen it the first time came to watch.
I’ve decided that my juggling metaphor (keeping three shows performance-ready) isn’t quite accurate. It’s more like spinning plates. The Moliere plate only needs an occasional spin, and the “Criteria” plate needs somewhat more management, while “Karaoke Knights” is one of those wobbly plates that threatens to fall off the moment you look away. Knowing that I’d be doing a show in Brownwood, I sang my way through the show three times as I drove, and recited “Criteria” twice.
While I’m on the subject of metaphors, I’ve decided that developing a one-man show is like rearranging the furniture in your living room. Every time you move something, it means that something else has to adjust, which leads to more and more changes. The sofa may be right where you want it, but the end-tables no longer fit where you wanted them, and the lamps no longer illuminate the important areas… and who can see the TV from there? But hey, once you get it all just the way you want, then it’s just a matter of running the vacuum over it now and then.
Sunday night Nancy Jo and I relaxed and watched the Oscars.
Monday I was off to Houston. My friend Cheryl (who, like Nancy Jo, I’d also met at the ‘04 TETA Conference, a very productive event for me) had set up another performance, inviting many of her theatre-teacher friends. The turnout was very small, and while there were some really enthusiastic observers, there was at least one guy who obviously didn’t want to be there. (I suspect that the invitation to the play made him think he was coming to a party, and he was disappointed to find the attention on somebody else.) When I asked for a volunteer for the Scapin scene, he noted very loudly that he had to leave for a poker game “in a couple of minutes.” (Meanwhile, the gentleman whose home I was performing in made an exit of his own to take care of the dogs, I think.)
On the good side, the volunteers that I eventually got for Tartuffe and Scapin were a lot of fun. (I always enjoy when the “Tartuffe” volunteer forgets that her objective is supposed to be to run away.) Later that night, Cheryl’s boyfriend (who just happens to be a rocket scientist with NASA) and I sat up drinking beer, arguing the efficacy of sending nuclear waste into the sun.
I was working my way east again. I made it to Montgomery that night, and dropped in on the Alabama Shakespeare Festival the next morning, before continuing on to Charlotte Wednesday night. I enjoyed a dinner with the darling Cathy Maday, who I hadn’t seen in more than two years. I shared a couple of the songs from “Karaoke Knights” with her.
I finally pulled in to Greensboro, where SETC (Southeast Theatre Conference) was happening. I’ve heard about SETC for more than twenty years, but never attended. I learned my lesson from the Texas conference in January and stocked up on loads of brochures and videotapes before going in. There were a series of booths set up for a couple dozen Universities, and I worked my way through, introducing myself to the faculty, some of whom knew of me already from the e-mail campaign I’d been running for three years. There were also some faculty I knew from my alma mater SIU, including Bill Lewis (one of several who said he wants to bring my show in), who wrote the first play I ever directed back in 1980!
Friday night I performed “Moliere Than Thou” as part of the conference’s “Fringe Festival”, and the attendance was disappointing. Apparently, the conference had design awards as well as audition callbacks scheduled for the same time, so there were only about 25 people in attendance. I recruited my North Carolina friend, Forsyth, and her boyfriend, Wayne, to help, running the house lights, and distributing brochures and videotapes afterwards.
There was a publisher in the audience, and knowing she was watching kept me redoubling my efforts throughout the show. The small audience was theatrically savvy, and everything was getting big laughs. In fact, the only parts that didn’t seem to work so well were the volunteer scenes, as the actors who volunteered did not have that wide-eyed bewilderment that usually makes the volunteer scene so funny. At the end, the show got a standing ovation, and the feedback was great.
The next day, I ran the lines of “Criteria” twice. Again, Forsyth and Wayne came in to help out for the performance, and this time the audience was about double that of the night before.
It turned out to be the best “Criteria” yet. The audience was laughing at the opening music. I could feel a new level of control, where I could take that extra instant before moving on to leave the space for the audience to respond. There were about five seconds where I spaced out the next scene, and started to grab for my script, but as soon as I relaxed, the words came back, and I continued.
The “diner scene” got great laughs, and just about every line from the “waitress” drew more laughter. I found myself wondering whether I’d lost the audience in the last twenty minutes, as they went largely quiet on me. There were still a few big responses, so I had a sense that they were responding more deeply. And when I finished off the show and came back onstage for my bow, I received one of the more gratifying ovations I can remember. The audience seemed to realize, individually, that the show was over, and the applause grew as they stood up spontaneously. (That is to say, it wasn’t a couple of people in the front row standing up, with others standing in response to their cue.)
In retrospect, I was especially glad that Forsyth was at this performance. I’d read “Criteria” aloud to her, back in the fall of 2002, and it was her laughs that encouraged me to turn the story into a show. And more than two years later, the humor this audience was picking up on matched what she’d laughed at the first time around. On some pathological level, I’m glad that my reports of the success of the show can be validated by a witness.
I disassembled the show quickly and some forty students showed up at the workshop I was delivering a half-hour later, about fifteen of whom had attended one of my shows or the other. The workshop was actually my most successful event in terms of giving out brochures and videos, and even the students were talking about passing word on to their teachers to bring me in. Which makes me think that, as well as the shows go over, it’s the workshop that communicates in my “voice,” and people respond to me as a human being rather than as a character.
Finally, with the shows packed into my car, I could spend the rest of the evening partying. The hotel had about three bars in it, and I drifted from one to the other, checking in with familiar faculty. I ended up hanging out with my friend Leni, who’d been the first to encourage me to come to SETC. She’d helped me build backup costumes for Moliere, and she’s starting to talk about bringing my shows back to Austin Peay University.
It’s Sunday now, and I’m hanging out at Forsyth’s house, before getting caught up in the whirlwind of March performances. I’m staring down about 20 performances over the next thirty days! I’ll send this out as soon as I get my new computer up to speed with the group mailing address list (Don’t forget to sign up for the listserv! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere) Unless you’d rather not get these messages in the future.
Temperature: 60s
Miles on the Vibe: 129,400
Attendance: 170 + 400 + 60 + 12 + 12 + 25 + 50 = 729
Discoveries: Eight years of scholarly work can be upstaged by twenty seconds of singing. Likewise, the workshop, in which I speak (rather than Moliere or “Albert”) touches the students more directly. * Doing three plays at once is like spinning plates. * Developing a one-man show is like arranging the furniture in your living room. * Always have plenty of “product” ready to hand out, because you never know when it’ll be in demand. *
In the CD Player: A Martha Wainwright CD I can’t name without getting “blocked” by many of your servers.
Next Performances: Morganton, NC (3/8), Ferrum, VA (3/9), Belmont, NH (3/12)
I am about 5,000 miles along the road since the last time I checked in. From Pocatello, Idaho, I raced on to Portland, Oregon, and a beautiful hotel/bed & breakfast/brewery/winery where I was being housed for two nights. Early on I was actually frustrated by the fact that there were no TV’s in the room, or phone connections. As time passed, I grew to appreciate the fact that this led me out of the room itself, and down to the winery, where cordial fraternity ensued. (There was a party of 8 lesbians celebrating a birthday.)
The hotel (McMenamin’s) was painted all over, with a different painting on every door, and even paintings on the hot water pipes, or any odd surface.
I arrived at Mount Hood Community College on a beautiful blue-skied day (the weather had been kind to me already, crossing the mountains in February). Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helens stood out vividly in the distance.
I met my host, who actually had first met me on the trip to Martinique two summers ago, and he led me to the performance space, which was a lecture hall next to an art gallery. What nobody had told me was that they were re-flooring the space, and the bare cement floor was interrupted by three power outlets elevated three inches above the surface. By some heightened sense of awareness that I don’t understand, I never came tripped over these during the show.
The 200-seat hall was eventually filled with 170 audience members (a good rear-end-to-seat ratio), and their response was great. It was a noon show, and the school had recruited some high schools to attend. Remembering the last noon show that I’d done had been interrupted by a 1 pm exodus of students going to their next class, I had suggested that we do my 1-hour version of the show, followed by a 1-hour lecture on Moliere’s life. My webmaster, Bruce (who’s been promoting the show for years, but only managed to see it for the first time now), noted that the lecture was as successful as the performance. A teacher, who’d seen a teaser that I put into the program, requested hearing my rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and I sang a verse of it to big cheers. I think the French professor wanted to get in a final word of thanks, but he was drowned out. (I noted sardonically the fact that 8 years of scholarly work on Moliere was upstaged by twenty seconds of singing.)
The professor is already suggesting that he’d like to get me back again for next year. One of the high school teachers e-mailed immediately afterwards with the perfect endorsement: “We really enjoyed the show. The students asked today if they could memorize some of these dialogues in French and act them out for the class. Thanks for offering the opportunity to inspire them.”
I continued into Portland proper, visiting with my friend, Tina. (I met her at the conference in Atlanta, where she failed in her efforts to set me up with her sister-in-law.) Tina brought me in to speak to a class of middle-school acting students the next day, which is quite a task. Getting their attention is like herding kittens. Afterwards we went to the famous Powell’s Books, where I bought three or four Moliere biographies and a book or two by Isaac Asimov.
I stopped in Salem the next day, visiting brother Pat (and Kathy and Ryan and Michael), before heading along again, this time to San Francisco. While I’d been receiving reports about the terrible rain that California had been getting, my visit was more sunny than not. I stayed, once again, with Stephen and Kajsa, and we hit the karaoke bar that night. Before racing on ahead, I had a really nice dinner with Mia, who’d had a one-woman show at the SF Fringe last fall.
And again, I was on my way south, pausing in Porterville to meet with a French teacher/theatre enthusiast (Alfonso) for lunch and a tour of the local community theatre. An enormous rainbow appeared over the mountains nearby.
I pulled in to L.A., staying with my friends Thessaly and Casper (also from the San Francisco Fringe). The next morning I actually went jogging again (my exercise program has fallen off miserably) around the lake at Echo Park, and noticed the impact that the rains had on L.A. There were sidewalks that had been overrun with turf, as the sod on the neighboring hill had slid completely off of the mud. Some homeowners had taken to covering the hills bordering their property with plastic sheeting, so that the rain could not soak into the ground any more.
From there, I went on to Redondo Beach, where my hotel overlooked the Ocean. The weather was bad, but the next day it cleared and the view was terrific. The hotel had a pool, so my exercise routine was gradually resuming. The show was in a private school in Palos Verdes, on a high hill overlooking Los Angeles. Again, the response was terrific. “Tartuffe” was a little “too good,” as the cute volunteer brought a boisterous reaction from the crowd, and it was not easy getting their attention back.
They’d wanted me to perform a 40-minute show. The start was delayed, as the kids took their time coming in, and the French students recited an introduction to their fellow students. By the time I finished the show and got back offstage, it was an hour after the scheduled starting time. I apologized at some length, but both the French teacher and the principal insisted that it was okay. The teacher later e-mailed the following:
“I got feedback from my students today. They were a little surprised by the ‘Tartuffe’ scene, but enjoyed the presentation as a show. They said that it was the best performance they've seen at school during our assembly period this year. That's a compliment! A colleague also called me to thank me for bringing you to campus, saying that she really enjoyed your show. My department chair also said that she was pleased, and wouldn't it be great if we could have you come every four years.”
I grabbed a quick lunch with the charming French teacher, before heading off to a same-day performance for California State University-Long Beach (CSULB). I was performing in a library gallery space on the fifth floor, and there were about fifty chairs set up in front of me. There were about twenty-five students in the chairs, and people continued to arrive as the show proceeded. As they arrived, they sat off to one side or another, where there were tables on one side and easy chairs at the other. By the end of the show, there may have been some sixty people watching.
The men were slow to volunteer, so I “volunteered” the professor who’d hired me for the “Scapin” scene. I could sense he had a bit of showmanship about him, and I’d also noticed that his four-year old daughter was a bit restless watching the show (lots of people had brought their kids to this show). I figured if I got her dad up on stage, she’d pay better attention, which she did.
Again, the show went great. My “tip basket” had $24 in it. And the host is already thinking about bringing it back in next year.
I worked my way down to San Diego, where I’d intended to meet some old friends for karaoke, but both were no-shows, and I ended up singing with a friend of a friend. When I realized that neither Lisa nor Jeff were going to make it, I decided to head off early, to get east of San Diego and avoid the next morning’s rush hour. I worked my way to El Centrino, where there was no hotel room to be found. Apparently there was either a new mall being built, or a film being shot or both. There were likewise, no hotels in Yuma, and I decided to nap my way to Tucson, pulling into town much earlier than expected.
I met with the chair of my former department at NIU (now chair of U of Arizona) who, in spite of my unkempt air, offered to book me for the coming year. I’d already booked Arizona State for September 25, and it turned out that Sept 26 worked for UA, which means that I’ll sweep through Arizona in the course of two days next fall.
I pushed on to Las Cruces, New Mexico before finally finding a hotel. The next day, I worked my way back to Brownwood Texas, where I’d performed in January, and where the professor, Nancy Jo, has been talking up my show to all the schools in her neighborhood (if you can call the entire state of Texas a “neighborhood”). I offered to perform my musical for her and her students once again. It had gone through numerous changes in the interim, and another dozen of her kids who hadn’t seen it the first time came to watch.
I’ve decided that my juggling metaphor (keeping three shows performance-ready) isn’t quite accurate. It’s more like spinning plates. The Moliere plate only needs an occasional spin, and the “Criteria” plate needs somewhat more management, while “Karaoke Knights” is one of those wobbly plates that threatens to fall off the moment you look away. Knowing that I’d be doing a show in Brownwood, I sang my way through the show three times as I drove, and recited “Criteria” twice.
While I’m on the subject of metaphors, I’ve decided that developing a one-man show is like rearranging the furniture in your living room. Every time you move something, it means that something else has to adjust, which leads to more and more changes. The sofa may be right where you want it, but the end-tables no longer fit where you wanted them, and the lamps no longer illuminate the important areas… and who can see the TV from there? But hey, once you get it all just the way you want, then it’s just a matter of running the vacuum over it now and then.
Sunday night Nancy Jo and I relaxed and watched the Oscars.
Monday I was off to Houston. My friend Cheryl (who, like Nancy Jo, I’d also met at the ‘04 TETA Conference, a very productive event for me) had set up another performance, inviting many of her theatre-teacher friends. The turnout was very small, and while there were some really enthusiastic observers, there was at least one guy who obviously didn’t want to be there. (I suspect that the invitation to the play made him think he was coming to a party, and he was disappointed to find the attention on somebody else.) When I asked for a volunteer for the Scapin scene, he noted very loudly that he had to leave for a poker game “in a couple of minutes.” (Meanwhile, the gentleman whose home I was performing in made an exit of his own to take care of the dogs, I think.)
On the good side, the volunteers that I eventually got for Tartuffe and Scapin were a lot of fun. (I always enjoy when the “Tartuffe” volunteer forgets that her objective is supposed to be to run away.) Later that night, Cheryl’s boyfriend (who just happens to be a rocket scientist with NASA) and I sat up drinking beer, arguing the efficacy of sending nuclear waste into the sun.
I was working my way east again. I made it to Montgomery that night, and dropped in on the Alabama Shakespeare Festival the next morning, before continuing on to Charlotte Wednesday night. I enjoyed a dinner with the darling Cathy Maday, who I hadn’t seen in more than two years. I shared a couple of the songs from “Karaoke Knights” with her.
I finally pulled in to Greensboro, where SETC (Southeast Theatre Conference) was happening. I’ve heard about SETC for more than twenty years, but never attended. I learned my lesson from the Texas conference in January and stocked up on loads of brochures and videotapes before going in. There were a series of booths set up for a couple dozen Universities, and I worked my way through, introducing myself to the faculty, some of whom knew of me already from the e-mail campaign I’d been running for three years. There were also some faculty I knew from my alma mater SIU, including Bill Lewis (one of several who said he wants to bring my show in), who wrote the first play I ever directed back in 1980!
Friday night I performed “Moliere Than Thou” as part of the conference’s “Fringe Festival”, and the attendance was disappointing. Apparently, the conference had design awards as well as audition callbacks scheduled for the same time, so there were only about 25 people in attendance. I recruited my North Carolina friend, Forsyth, and her boyfriend, Wayne, to help, running the house lights, and distributing brochures and videotapes afterwards.
There was a publisher in the audience, and knowing she was watching kept me redoubling my efforts throughout the show. The small audience was theatrically savvy, and everything was getting big laughs. In fact, the only parts that didn’t seem to work so well were the volunteer scenes, as the actors who volunteered did not have that wide-eyed bewilderment that usually makes the volunteer scene so funny. At the end, the show got a standing ovation, and the feedback was great.
The next day, I ran the lines of “Criteria” twice. Again, Forsyth and Wayne came in to help out for the performance, and this time the audience was about double that of the night before.
It turned out to be the best “Criteria” yet. The audience was laughing at the opening music. I could feel a new level of control, where I could take that extra instant before moving on to leave the space for the audience to respond. There were about five seconds where I spaced out the next scene, and started to grab for my script, but as soon as I relaxed, the words came back, and I continued.
The “diner scene” got great laughs, and just about every line from the “waitress” drew more laughter. I found myself wondering whether I’d lost the audience in the last twenty minutes, as they went largely quiet on me. There were still a few big responses, so I had a sense that they were responding more deeply. And when I finished off the show and came back onstage for my bow, I received one of the more gratifying ovations I can remember. The audience seemed to realize, individually, that the show was over, and the applause grew as they stood up spontaneously. (That is to say, it wasn’t a couple of people in the front row standing up, with others standing in response to their cue.)
In retrospect, I was especially glad that Forsyth was at this performance. I’d read “Criteria” aloud to her, back in the fall of 2002, and it was her laughs that encouraged me to turn the story into a show. And more than two years later, the humor this audience was picking up on matched what she’d laughed at the first time around. On some pathological level, I’m glad that my reports of the success of the show can be validated by a witness.
I disassembled the show quickly and some forty students showed up at the workshop I was delivering a half-hour later, about fifteen of whom had attended one of my shows or the other. The workshop was actually my most successful event in terms of giving out brochures and videos, and even the students were talking about passing word on to their teachers to bring me in. Which makes me think that, as well as the shows go over, it’s the workshop that communicates in my “voice,” and people respond to me as a human being rather than as a character.
Finally, with the shows packed into my car, I could spend the rest of the evening partying. The hotel had about three bars in it, and I drifted from one to the other, checking in with familiar faculty. I ended up hanging out with my friend Leni, who’d been the first to encourage me to come to SETC. She’d helped me build backup costumes for Moliere, and she’s starting to talk about bringing my shows back to Austin Peay University.
It’s Sunday now, and I’m hanging out at Forsyth’s house, before getting caught up in the whirlwind of March performances. I’m staring down about 20 performances over the next thirty days! I’ll send this out as soon as I get my new computer up to speed with the group mailing address list (Don’t forget to sign up for the listserv! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere) Unless you’d rather not get these messages in the future.
Temperature: 60s
Miles on the Vibe: 129,400
Attendance: 170 + 400 + 60 + 12 + 12 + 25 + 50 = 729
Discoveries: Eight years of scholarly work can be upstaged by twenty seconds of singing. Likewise, the workshop, in which I speak (rather than Moliere or “Albert”) touches the students more directly. * Doing three plays at once is like spinning plates. * Developing a one-man show is like arranging the furniture in your living room. * Always have plenty of “product” ready to hand out, because you never know when it’ll be in demand. *
In the CD Player: A Martha Wainwright CD I can’t name without getting “blocked” by many of your servers.
Next Performances: Morganton, NC (3/8), Ferrum, VA (3/9), Belmont, NH (3/12)
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
The View From Here #86: Chicago, IL & Lincoln, NE
People were complaining about the Texas Educational Theatre Association conference being at a hotel that was actually in the airport. I’d stayed at a cheaper hotel a couple miles away, but just parking the car I had to pass through a labyrinth, which eventually let me out two miles from the conference, and it took two shuttle buses to get back to the hotel.
Getting out of the car, I grabbed about 15 brochures, not wanting to lug too much around through the conference, but soon discovered that I was running into lots of people who wanted them. There was an exhibit hall, including a couple of publishers who were considering my work. One, in particular, seemed particularly interested in my collection of “Moliere Monologues,” and they’d remembered me from a conference in New York about 18 months ago.
I went off to give my workshop, now with about 5 brochures left, and another 5 business cards, and I had to double check that I was in the right room, when I saw that my workshop room was already full of people. My workshop had been a last minute addition to the program, so I had figured on no more than a dozen attendees. There were at least forty there.
My new friend Nancy Jo, from Brownwood, had recruited some friends to come to the workshop, and early on one of the publishers (who was also a friend of Nancy’s), who I’d also been trying to get interested in my work, showed up.
It was a brief workshop, and I had to fit two hours of material into about 75 minutes, which kept me from worrying about making sure that I covered everything. If the “next thing” wasn’t coming to me as I spoke, I just jumped to the next thing that came to mind.
At the end, a couple dozen lined up at my table to pick up a brochure and a card, and eventually I just had to shout out how to find me on the internet. My friend Cheryl, from Galveston, was there, and we chatted over setting up an invitation-only performance in the Houston area for theatre or French teachers who might want to book me in coming years. I finally had to hurry off, but even as I waited for the shuttle bus, I found myself chatting up a woman who runs an arts event series in Texarkana, who gave me HER card so that I could send her a brochure.
On my way north, I caught dinner with Susan, from the U of Oklahoma (which had brought my show in almost exactly a year before). Susan invited me to check out the renovated art gallery on campus, so I stuck around until the next morning, where I saw what I think is the largest private collection ever donated to a University gallery.
Snow had fallen on Oklahoma overnight, and Oklahomans are not so great with driving in snow. There was one harrowing moment with a bus splashing slush on my windshield which left me driving blind for several seconds. (“Bus splashing slush.” Try saying that aloud.)
In Tulsa I caught lunch with my old high school buddy, Dave Hirsch, and we made sure to catch a picture of the rare Oklahoma snow before I moved on. In a past issue of “The View From Here” I dubbed Missouri as “The Tourist-Trap State,” and for kicks, I started jotting down the names of the travel hot spots as I passed.
Precious Moments Park
Ozarkland
Walnut Farm Museum
Fantastic Caverns
Exotic Animal Paradise
Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Happy Trails Museum
Truckers Calico Country
Scrapbook World
Historic Downtown Branson
Hillbilly Hotrods
Fast Food Heaven
World’s Largest Coca Cola Collectible Store
Route 66 Rail Haven
Missouri Sports Hall of Fame
World’s Largest Barrel Maker
Jesse James Wax Museum
Jesse James Hideout
Meramec Caverns
Don’t these just make you want to pull off the highway and stay awhile?
I pulled off in Rolla, Missouri, and stopped at a school (UM-R) where I’d performed almost three years ago. The faculty guy I’d worked with was on sabbatical, but I ran into his replacement while asking for directions, and spent about 20 minutes chatting with him about my tour.
Saturday morning I got on the road early and drove straight through to Chicago.
Sunday, I had another performance, this one at Chiesa Nuova, in Chicago. My friend, Bob Hutmacher is a Franciscan Priest who hosts art events in his living room on Sunday afternoons. They’d seen me do Moliere last May, so this time around I was performing “Criteria.” Bob had “sold” the audience on “Criteria” based on how well Moliere had gone over, so it seemed that many of the audience of 25 were expecting something a little more comic than the dark, dystopian world of “Criteria.”
Immediately as I began, I could see that this full house was having trouble seeing what I was doing from the back row, when I was sitting down (which I do for about half the play). I found myself reworking as much as I could on the fly, so that whenever possible I would stand to deliver my lines, rather than sit. It made for a bit of a distracted performance, especially as their very close proximity found me making constant eye contact with the people observing. At one point I remembered that there was a woman that I’d met on-line, with whom I’d intended to set up a date, and to whom I’d mentioned this performance. It struck me about halfway into the show, that she might actually be attending this performance, and that that woman in the third row, sitting next to a girl who was probably her daughter, might actually be her!
My brain was sent into a spiral of replaying what I had already done in the show, and whether it was the sort of thing that you’d want your daughter to observe being performed by a guy that you might actually spend any time with. You might guess that this was even more distracting, and while I made it through the show with only a few flubs, I did find myself wondering whether I’d given my best performance.
The audience stuck around after the show was finished, asking about the script and the concept, and I fielded questions for about a half an hour, and even shared a quick preview of the opening number of “Karaoke Knights,” which, frankly, seemed more like the kind of thing that they were interested in seeing. I promised to set up another performance with Bob, as soon as “Karaoke Knights” was up and running.
Some of my Pathways friends (Bob’s relatives), the Hutmachers, had come to see the show and we went out to dinner afterwards, and had a great visit.
Unfortunately, my computer chose this week to slow down to a crawl. Some virus or DSL problem had limited my access to the internet. Instead, I dove into retyping a script from a show I’d directed years ago (“Secret Obscenities,” winner at the 1994 Bailiwick Directors Festival). Several recent conversations about possible collaborative projects had reminded me of just how effective “Secret Obscenities” was, and the process of typing it back up made me realize just how relevant the events of recent years had made it.
I also started work on new songs for the interludes of “Imaginary Invalid.”
When I could access the web, I wrote e-mails to the contacts I’d made at the recent conferences in New York and Texas. I wrote a bunch of e-mails to schools on Oregon, tracking down teachers in French and Theatre departments. Since circumstances found me spending several days in Oregon, I was offering special discounts to schools in the area.
Meanwhile I was rereading “Currency,” and was rather surprised with how good it was, having written it in 30 days, never re-reading the chapters as they passed.
Over the weekend, I traveled out to Detroit, spending two days with Isaac, celebrating his 11th birthday two weeks in advance. (It’s the 19th, for those who haven’t sent a card yet.) We went swimming, picked up the “Return of the King” DVD, watched the deleted scenes, and watched the Super Bowl. On Monday morning I raced back to Chicago and got back to work.
This time I attacked the “Tour Schedule” list of venues that had expressed interest in performances, but never followed through. I initiated new contacts with each of them, suggesting dates that I still had open in my spring schedule, and offering further discounts to schools that could schedule the event on days that were convenient to me. One long day of writing to the tour schedule left me with several new opportunities to perform, and a clean look at the performances that had actually booked by this point.
With only two days left before getting back on the road, I declared a “paperwork day,” addressing all the forms there were to fill out for upcoming fringe festivals, as well as the AATF (Am Assn of Teachers of French) conference in Quebec City. I finally decided, by the way, to take a pass on the Montreal Fringe Festival, so that I wouldn’t have to make two trips to Quebec in the course of a single month.
The day before getting back on the road, I finally went out and bought a new laptop. With the new bookings that were coming in from the last marketing push, I decided that I could afford to take the plunge. With April helping me to pick something out, we found that improvements to computers over the past three years meant that for the same amount that I spent on my current laptop, I could afford one with more memory, a bigger screen, faster processing time, and a DVD player that works.
Unfortunately, against the deadline of getting the hell out of Dodge, there was no time to get the new laptop to match the system as I had it set on the old laptop, so I found myself eventually packing two computers to travel with me on the road.
And there I was, back on the road, driving from Chicago to Nebraska. I made arrangements to meet up with two old friends from Nebraska on Saturday morning after my arrival on Friday night. Actually one old friend was a fellow I’d never met (Bob Hall), though I’d performed in a show he’d written some twenty years before. He told me that my “Tartuffe” had actually gotten a great review in the Lincoln paper, and I decided that I would sneak in to catch the show that night. (I wasn’t due to see it until Saturday.)
A half hour after arriving in Lincoln, there I was, sitting in the audience. And the show was really funny. They had gone very slapstick with it; even more slapstick than I tend to go, myself. But the director had captured the tone of the humor, and gotten her actors to give full weight to some of the phrasings of my adaptation that were suspect, at best. There were laughs in places I’d never heard them before.
At the end of the play, Bob Hall introduced me to the director, who responded “You weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow night.”
Of course, the fact that I was here already, and had seen the show, meant that no one had any reason to get unduly nervous about me coming tomorrow. I sat in on the feedback session from the ACTF respondent who’d come to see the show, and who turned out to be a former U-Nebraska student from one of my incarnations there. (He’d enjoyed the show very much.)
I headed back to the hotel, brimming with ideas about what I would talk about in the coming day, and didn’t get much sleep.
The next day I met Bob Hall (who’d written “The Passion of Dracula”, that I’d appeared in about 20 years ago) and my old friend (state senator and actor) David Landis. The three of us had breakfast, while trading stories of Dr. Morgan, our favorite UNL professor from the “old days.” In several cases, there were stories that had grown into legends, while the person who had set the story circulating in the first place (usually Bob) had a somewhat more prosaic version to relate.
That afternoon, I did my acting workshop for an audience of about twenty, most of whom were in “Tartuffe.” This is the first time I’ve done the workshop, which features an exercise of performing a Tartuffe monologue, with someone who has played the role of Tartuffe participating. The workshop was well received, though I was a little bit thrown when the fellow introducing me suggested “I hope you’ll give us a little bit of your background, and how you got to where you are now with Moliere, in the course of your talk,” as he was making the introduction. It is, of course, a long story, and I improvised my way through about 15 minutes of explanation before coming to the actual beginning of my workshop.
My introducer, Jay, took me to dinner before the show, and I discovered that much of the work on this particular play had been inspired by attendance at a performance of “Moliere Than Thou” at the ACTF Regional conference in Denver in January of last year. In fact, the professor who directed the show had taught a period styles class last fall, and they had actually begun work on the play in August! I was becoming more and more struck by what a labor of love this was.
That evening, I saw the show again, continuing to take notes, and eventually, gathered with the cast in a separate auditorium (they were striking the set next door) to give them my feedback. I was not bound by the severe restrictions of the American College Theatre Fest, which seems to prevent the “respondent” (formerly “adjudicator”) from saying anything substantial, probably because these things end up getting tangled in issues of tenure, and because any actual criticism becomes ammunition for a cast which may or may not have seen eye-to-eye with their director.
And so, being independent of the process entirely, I was simply able to tell them what I thought. For the most part it was good news, but there were areas where each could make some improvement, and in a couple of instances, I had to strongly encourage more specific work. That was the hard part, especially as I could see in their faces just how much they wanted to please me.
After about an hour, the actors’ presence was requested for “strike,” and I hung out chatting with teachers and actors as they got their individual work done. I read the review that had appeared in the paper, and noticed that the reviewer, Larry Kubert, who never seemed to have much good to say about my work in my past Nebraska incarnations (“Beyond Therapy” review excepted), couldn’t let this go:
“Now admittedly, this Timothy Mooney-scribed adaptation resorts to the use of some pretty contemporary expressions – a fact that is occasionally a bit too blatant – but on the whole the finished product is a worthy one.” He does, however, eventually say: “Don’t let French farce frighten you – this is one you’ll love.”
And, in fact, few were frightened off. The play performed to 85% of capacity, and made a lot of money for the department.
Eventually, I said a bittersweet goodbye to the director who had done so much work on my script, and headed back to the hotel.
The next morning, after working on compiling most of the thoughts that you are reading, I was back on the road, heading toward Cheyenne, WY. As I drive, I am working and reworking “Karaoke Knights.” Now that I have the songs in the order that I think they’re going to work, I continue to work and rework the “interludes,” getting snatches from pop songs leading into the original songs of the musical. I’m trying to smooth the transition from one style of music to another, while getting the introductory music to “comment” on the song coming up. It will never be a specific linear narrative, but I’ve discovered that all the audience wants is enough of a hint of a narrative whereby they can make their own sense of things. People will create their own associations with a costume piece, or a series in progression, to rationalize their own reasons about why the play is the way it is. I just have to make sure that the input that I’m giving them does not contradict the through line of what narrative seems to be there. (For instance, there are some songs that are late-at-night songs, which I’m pushing toward the end, rather than the middle, so that the audience will assume that the action happens in the course of a single evening.)
The real trick these days is in keeping “three balls in the air.” I have to work on “Karaoke Knights” a couple of times a day to make improvements in it. Meanwhile, when I’ve got a Moliere performance coming up, I have to recite those lines at least once a day for three days in advance of a show (especially when there’s been a long layoff). And a performance of “Criteria” demands about a week of reciting in order to get it securely in my head. It seems that just as I’m about to be ready to make some finishing touches to “Karaoke Knights,” I have to abandon it for several days at a time, just to get another show ready.
Anyway, that’s what’s occupied my mind as I drive from Lincoln to Cheyenne, and from Cheyenne to Pocatello, Idaho. (I met with the folks in Pocatello, at Idaho State, yesterday, and their new facility is gargantuan! It’s a palace sitting on top of a hill with mountains surrounding in the distance. I am dying to perform here!)
By the way, I’ve been looking over some critiques that I received; a professor recently shared with me the comments that his students had about my Moliere lecture and play last fall. I’ll be adding some of the nice things they said to the promotional package I’m sending out, but I thought some of you might enjoy some of those kids-say-the-darndest-things moments. (Each of these quotes is from a different paper. I’ve reassembled them into chronological order.)
“He later changed his name to Moliere in 1644, not to shame his family for in those times it was not socially expectable to have an actor in one’s family.”
“During the 1600’s actors were thought to be equal to prostitutes. Which is placing a harsh view on the actors of that time.”
“That astonished me. I cannot believe that acting could be something so horrible that you must repent to the lord before death for doing it.”
“In 1653 Moliere’s troop found a patron named Prince Contee (I couldn’t get the exact spelling because it was a lecture).”
“This lasted four years until the patron found God and abandoned Moliere.”
“He made crud jokes that were way ahead of his time and caused all sorts of controversy with his work.”
“In his final play “Imaginary Involate” where he died after the fourth production of the show. No doctor or priest ever came to tend to him or read him his last rights.”
“Mooney is simply brilliant because of him I now know, love and understand Moliere’s comedy.”
“I really appreciate Moliere now, and because of this I am now looking forward to Thanksgiving break.”
Miles on the Vibe: 124,000
Attendance: 40 + 25 + 20 = 85
Temperature: 25 Degrees (In Pocatello, Idaho now)
In the CD Player: “Karaoke Knights” (with a different order to the songs every day)
Discoveries: People will create their own associations with a costume piece, or a series in progression, to rationalize their own reasons about why the play is the way it is. I just have to make sure that the input that I’m giving them does not contradict the through line of what narrative seems to be there.
Next performances: Gresham, OR (Mount Hood Community College), Palos Verdes Penninsula, CA (Chadwick School), Long Beach, California (CSU-LB)
Getting out of the car, I grabbed about 15 brochures, not wanting to lug too much around through the conference, but soon discovered that I was running into lots of people who wanted them. There was an exhibit hall, including a couple of publishers who were considering my work. One, in particular, seemed particularly interested in my collection of “Moliere Monologues,” and they’d remembered me from a conference in New York about 18 months ago.
I went off to give my workshop, now with about 5 brochures left, and another 5 business cards, and I had to double check that I was in the right room, when I saw that my workshop room was already full of people. My workshop had been a last minute addition to the program, so I had figured on no more than a dozen attendees. There were at least forty there.
My new friend Nancy Jo, from Brownwood, had recruited some friends to come to the workshop, and early on one of the publishers (who was also a friend of Nancy’s), who I’d also been trying to get interested in my work, showed up.
It was a brief workshop, and I had to fit two hours of material into about 75 minutes, which kept me from worrying about making sure that I covered everything. If the “next thing” wasn’t coming to me as I spoke, I just jumped to the next thing that came to mind.
At the end, a couple dozen lined up at my table to pick up a brochure and a card, and eventually I just had to shout out how to find me on the internet. My friend Cheryl, from Galveston, was there, and we chatted over setting up an invitation-only performance in the Houston area for theatre or French teachers who might want to book me in coming years. I finally had to hurry off, but even as I waited for the shuttle bus, I found myself chatting up a woman who runs an arts event series in Texarkana, who gave me HER card so that I could send her a brochure.
On my way north, I caught dinner with Susan, from the U of Oklahoma (which had brought my show in almost exactly a year before). Susan invited me to check out the renovated art gallery on campus, so I stuck around until the next morning, where I saw what I think is the largest private collection ever donated to a University gallery.
Snow had fallen on Oklahoma overnight, and Oklahomans are not so great with driving in snow. There was one harrowing moment with a bus splashing slush on my windshield which left me driving blind for several seconds. (“Bus splashing slush.” Try saying that aloud.)
In Tulsa I caught lunch with my old high school buddy, Dave Hirsch, and we made sure to catch a picture of the rare Oklahoma snow before I moved on. In a past issue of “The View From Here” I dubbed Missouri as “The Tourist-Trap State,” and for kicks, I started jotting down the names of the travel hot spots as I passed.
Precious Moments Park
Ozarkland
Walnut Farm Museum
Fantastic Caverns
Exotic Animal Paradise
Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Happy Trails Museum
Truckers Calico Country
Scrapbook World
Historic Downtown Branson
Hillbilly Hotrods
Fast Food Heaven
World’s Largest Coca Cola Collectible Store
Route 66 Rail Haven
Missouri Sports Hall of Fame
World’s Largest Barrel Maker
Jesse James Wax Museum
Jesse James Hideout
Meramec Caverns
Don’t these just make you want to pull off the highway and stay awhile?
I pulled off in Rolla, Missouri, and stopped at a school (UM-R) where I’d performed almost three years ago. The faculty guy I’d worked with was on sabbatical, but I ran into his replacement while asking for directions, and spent about 20 minutes chatting with him about my tour.
Saturday morning I got on the road early and drove straight through to Chicago.
Sunday, I had another performance, this one at Chiesa Nuova, in Chicago. My friend, Bob Hutmacher is a Franciscan Priest who hosts art events in his living room on Sunday afternoons. They’d seen me do Moliere last May, so this time around I was performing “Criteria.” Bob had “sold” the audience on “Criteria” based on how well Moliere had gone over, so it seemed that many of the audience of 25 were expecting something a little more comic than the dark, dystopian world of “Criteria.”
Immediately as I began, I could see that this full house was having trouble seeing what I was doing from the back row, when I was sitting down (which I do for about half the play). I found myself reworking as much as I could on the fly, so that whenever possible I would stand to deliver my lines, rather than sit. It made for a bit of a distracted performance, especially as their very close proximity found me making constant eye contact with the people observing. At one point I remembered that there was a woman that I’d met on-line, with whom I’d intended to set up a date, and to whom I’d mentioned this performance. It struck me about halfway into the show, that she might actually be attending this performance, and that that woman in the third row, sitting next to a girl who was probably her daughter, might actually be her!
My brain was sent into a spiral of replaying what I had already done in the show, and whether it was the sort of thing that you’d want your daughter to observe being performed by a guy that you might actually spend any time with. You might guess that this was even more distracting, and while I made it through the show with only a few flubs, I did find myself wondering whether I’d given my best performance.
The audience stuck around after the show was finished, asking about the script and the concept, and I fielded questions for about a half an hour, and even shared a quick preview of the opening number of “Karaoke Knights,” which, frankly, seemed more like the kind of thing that they were interested in seeing. I promised to set up another performance with Bob, as soon as “Karaoke Knights” was up and running.
Some of my Pathways friends (Bob’s relatives), the Hutmachers, had come to see the show and we went out to dinner afterwards, and had a great visit.
Unfortunately, my computer chose this week to slow down to a crawl. Some virus or DSL problem had limited my access to the internet. Instead, I dove into retyping a script from a show I’d directed years ago (“Secret Obscenities,” winner at the 1994 Bailiwick Directors Festival). Several recent conversations about possible collaborative projects had reminded me of just how effective “Secret Obscenities” was, and the process of typing it back up made me realize just how relevant the events of recent years had made it.
I also started work on new songs for the interludes of “Imaginary Invalid.”
When I could access the web, I wrote e-mails to the contacts I’d made at the recent conferences in New York and Texas. I wrote a bunch of e-mails to schools on Oregon, tracking down teachers in French and Theatre departments. Since circumstances found me spending several days in Oregon, I was offering special discounts to schools in the area.
Meanwhile I was rereading “Currency,” and was rather surprised with how good it was, having written it in 30 days, never re-reading the chapters as they passed.
Over the weekend, I traveled out to Detroit, spending two days with Isaac, celebrating his 11th birthday two weeks in advance. (It’s the 19th, for those who haven’t sent a card yet.) We went swimming, picked up the “Return of the King” DVD, watched the deleted scenes, and watched the Super Bowl. On Monday morning I raced back to Chicago and got back to work.
This time I attacked the “Tour Schedule” list of venues that had expressed interest in performances, but never followed through. I initiated new contacts with each of them, suggesting dates that I still had open in my spring schedule, and offering further discounts to schools that could schedule the event on days that were convenient to me. One long day of writing to the tour schedule left me with several new opportunities to perform, and a clean look at the performances that had actually booked by this point.
With only two days left before getting back on the road, I declared a “paperwork day,” addressing all the forms there were to fill out for upcoming fringe festivals, as well as the AATF (Am Assn of Teachers of French) conference in Quebec City. I finally decided, by the way, to take a pass on the Montreal Fringe Festival, so that I wouldn’t have to make two trips to Quebec in the course of a single month.
The day before getting back on the road, I finally went out and bought a new laptop. With the new bookings that were coming in from the last marketing push, I decided that I could afford to take the plunge. With April helping me to pick something out, we found that improvements to computers over the past three years meant that for the same amount that I spent on my current laptop, I could afford one with more memory, a bigger screen, faster processing time, and a DVD player that works.
Unfortunately, against the deadline of getting the hell out of Dodge, there was no time to get the new laptop to match the system as I had it set on the old laptop, so I found myself eventually packing two computers to travel with me on the road.
And there I was, back on the road, driving from Chicago to Nebraska. I made arrangements to meet up with two old friends from Nebraska on Saturday morning after my arrival on Friday night. Actually one old friend was a fellow I’d never met (Bob Hall), though I’d performed in a show he’d written some twenty years before. He told me that my “Tartuffe” had actually gotten a great review in the Lincoln paper, and I decided that I would sneak in to catch the show that night. (I wasn’t due to see it until Saturday.)
A half hour after arriving in Lincoln, there I was, sitting in the audience. And the show was really funny. They had gone very slapstick with it; even more slapstick than I tend to go, myself. But the director had captured the tone of the humor, and gotten her actors to give full weight to some of the phrasings of my adaptation that were suspect, at best. There were laughs in places I’d never heard them before.
At the end of the play, Bob Hall introduced me to the director, who responded “You weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow night.”
Of course, the fact that I was here already, and had seen the show, meant that no one had any reason to get unduly nervous about me coming tomorrow. I sat in on the feedback session from the ACTF respondent who’d come to see the show, and who turned out to be a former U-Nebraska student from one of my incarnations there. (He’d enjoyed the show very much.)
I headed back to the hotel, brimming with ideas about what I would talk about in the coming day, and didn’t get much sleep.
The next day I met Bob Hall (who’d written “The Passion of Dracula”, that I’d appeared in about 20 years ago) and my old friend (state senator and actor) David Landis. The three of us had breakfast, while trading stories of Dr. Morgan, our favorite UNL professor from the “old days.” In several cases, there were stories that had grown into legends, while the person who had set the story circulating in the first place (usually Bob) had a somewhat more prosaic version to relate.
That afternoon, I did my acting workshop for an audience of about twenty, most of whom were in “Tartuffe.” This is the first time I’ve done the workshop, which features an exercise of performing a Tartuffe monologue, with someone who has played the role of Tartuffe participating. The workshop was well received, though I was a little bit thrown when the fellow introducing me suggested “I hope you’ll give us a little bit of your background, and how you got to where you are now with Moliere, in the course of your talk,” as he was making the introduction. It is, of course, a long story, and I improvised my way through about 15 minutes of explanation before coming to the actual beginning of my workshop.
My introducer, Jay, took me to dinner before the show, and I discovered that much of the work on this particular play had been inspired by attendance at a performance of “Moliere Than Thou” at the ACTF Regional conference in Denver in January of last year. In fact, the professor who directed the show had taught a period styles class last fall, and they had actually begun work on the play in August! I was becoming more and more struck by what a labor of love this was.
That evening, I saw the show again, continuing to take notes, and eventually, gathered with the cast in a separate auditorium (they were striking the set next door) to give them my feedback. I was not bound by the severe restrictions of the American College Theatre Fest, which seems to prevent the “respondent” (formerly “adjudicator”) from saying anything substantial, probably because these things end up getting tangled in issues of tenure, and because any actual criticism becomes ammunition for a cast which may or may not have seen eye-to-eye with their director.
And so, being independent of the process entirely, I was simply able to tell them what I thought. For the most part it was good news, but there were areas where each could make some improvement, and in a couple of instances, I had to strongly encourage more specific work. That was the hard part, especially as I could see in their faces just how much they wanted to please me.
After about an hour, the actors’ presence was requested for “strike,” and I hung out chatting with teachers and actors as they got their individual work done. I read the review that had appeared in the paper, and noticed that the reviewer, Larry Kubert, who never seemed to have much good to say about my work in my past Nebraska incarnations (“Beyond Therapy” review excepted), couldn’t let this go:
“Now admittedly, this Timothy Mooney-scribed adaptation resorts to the use of some pretty contemporary expressions – a fact that is occasionally a bit too blatant – but on the whole the finished product is a worthy one.” He does, however, eventually say: “Don’t let French farce frighten you – this is one you’ll love.”
And, in fact, few were frightened off. The play performed to 85% of capacity, and made a lot of money for the department.
Eventually, I said a bittersweet goodbye to the director who had done so much work on my script, and headed back to the hotel.
The next morning, after working on compiling most of the thoughts that you are reading, I was back on the road, heading toward Cheyenne, WY. As I drive, I am working and reworking “Karaoke Knights.” Now that I have the songs in the order that I think they’re going to work, I continue to work and rework the “interludes,” getting snatches from pop songs leading into the original songs of the musical. I’m trying to smooth the transition from one style of music to another, while getting the introductory music to “comment” on the song coming up. It will never be a specific linear narrative, but I’ve discovered that all the audience wants is enough of a hint of a narrative whereby they can make their own sense of things. People will create their own associations with a costume piece, or a series in progression, to rationalize their own reasons about why the play is the way it is. I just have to make sure that the input that I’m giving them does not contradict the through line of what narrative seems to be there. (For instance, there are some songs that are late-at-night songs, which I’m pushing toward the end, rather than the middle, so that the audience will assume that the action happens in the course of a single evening.)
The real trick these days is in keeping “three balls in the air.” I have to work on “Karaoke Knights” a couple of times a day to make improvements in it. Meanwhile, when I’ve got a Moliere performance coming up, I have to recite those lines at least once a day for three days in advance of a show (especially when there’s been a long layoff). And a performance of “Criteria” demands about a week of reciting in order to get it securely in my head. It seems that just as I’m about to be ready to make some finishing touches to “Karaoke Knights,” I have to abandon it for several days at a time, just to get another show ready.
Anyway, that’s what’s occupied my mind as I drive from Lincoln to Cheyenne, and from Cheyenne to Pocatello, Idaho. (I met with the folks in Pocatello, at Idaho State, yesterday, and their new facility is gargantuan! It’s a palace sitting on top of a hill with mountains surrounding in the distance. I am dying to perform here!)
By the way, I’ve been looking over some critiques that I received; a professor recently shared with me the comments that his students had about my Moliere lecture and play last fall. I’ll be adding some of the nice things they said to the promotional package I’m sending out, but I thought some of you might enjoy some of those kids-say-the-darndest-things moments. (Each of these quotes is from a different paper. I’ve reassembled them into chronological order.)
“He later changed his name to Moliere in 1644, not to shame his family for in those times it was not socially expectable to have an actor in one’s family.”
“During the 1600’s actors were thought to be equal to prostitutes. Which is placing a harsh view on the actors of that time.”
“That astonished me. I cannot believe that acting could be something so horrible that you must repent to the lord before death for doing it.”
“In 1653 Moliere’s troop found a patron named Prince Contee (I couldn’t get the exact spelling because it was a lecture).”
“This lasted four years until the patron found God and abandoned Moliere.”
“He made crud jokes that were way ahead of his time and caused all sorts of controversy with his work.”
“In his final play “Imaginary Involate” where he died after the fourth production of the show. No doctor or priest ever came to tend to him or read him his last rights.”
“Mooney is simply brilliant because of him I now know, love and understand Moliere’s comedy.”
“I really appreciate Moliere now, and because of this I am now looking forward to Thanksgiving break.”
Miles on the Vibe: 124,000
Attendance: 40 + 25 + 20 = 85
Temperature: 25 Degrees (In Pocatello, Idaho now)
In the CD Player: “Karaoke Knights” (with a different order to the songs every day)
Discoveries: People will create their own associations with a costume piece, or a series in progression, to rationalize their own reasons about why the play is the way it is. I just have to make sure that the input that I’m giving them does not contradict the through line of what narrative seems to be there.
Next performances: Gresham, OR (Mount Hood Community College), Palos Verdes Penninsula, CA (Chadwick School), Long Beach, California (CSU-LB)
Thursday, January 27, 2005
The View From Here #85: San Antonio, Brownwood & Dallas, TX
I bid goodbye to my host in West Virginia (Bess Park-Reynolds, wife of Lang Reynolds, for those of you who attended SIU), and got onto the highway. The temperature was zero Fahrenheit, and I watched it gradually climb as I proceeded south. I was amazed to see it jump from fourteen to nineteen as I passed through Charleston, and then drop back to fourteen as soon as I had passed. I realized that there was all sorts of ambient heat from the cars and buildings that was being lost in the city, and found myself wondering how long we could afford to heat the planet.
I was making good time heading south, aiming for Birmingham, Alabama for the night, but just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, the traffic stopped, nearly dead. Eventually, it was re-routed, through a side road, before returning to the highway, twenty miles south and three hours later. I needed to go to the bathroom for practically that entire time. Chattanooga is now the site of the two worst traffic jams I’ve encountered in my 30 months of travel.
I stopped just inside the Alabama border and continued south the next morning. I arrived in New Orleans early in the afternoon, and, using the coupon books that they have at the “Information” rest stops just inside the state borders, I found an inexpensive hotel room that had high-speed internet service as well as a free shuttle to the French Quarter.
I have noticed, over these past few months, that more and more hotels (and not just the expensive ones) have high-speed internet, which really saves me time when I’m downloading messages or tracking down websites. I expect that within a year, perhaps 90% of the hotels will be “wired.”
I took two days in New Orleans, enjoying somewhat warmer weather, and surfing the internet for French and Theatre teachers in Oregon. I’ve lined up Oregon bookings for Feb 16 & 20, and am now trying to fill in dates in-between. (I’ve promised myself that if I can get a single date added, I’ll buy myself a backup laptop, so that I can afford to lose this one long enough to get it fixed, or replaced.)
Of course, at night I visited Bourbon Street and the “Cat’s Meow,” the karaoke bar in New Orleans, where I rocked the house.
Early Friday morning I got onto the road for San Antonio. In the past, my late wake-up from Bourbon Street partying has meant passing through Houston at rush hour, and a two-three hour slowdown. This time I got in early, got on the road early, did NOT hit Louisiana construction traffic, and found myself passing through Houston at around 1 p.m. Even so, that city is about an hour’s drive from east to west.
I got into San Antonio, checked into my hotel and met my host for dinner. The next day I did an acting workshop for about six students and three teachers. (Saturday workshop attendance never seems to be as much as the faculty thinks it will be.) The material went over well, though, and a couple of teachers expressed great interest in getting my book, whenever I get it published.
That night’s show went about as well as I can recall it going. The evening was an annual benefit on behalf of an actor who had died several years ago, and the audience of about 250 was in a generous mood. They began the evening with a round of applause for their departed friend, and continued to respond throughout the evening. Some of the response was so good that I was thrown off my lines on a couple of occasions, starting the introduction for the wrong play once, and having to rewrite the “bridge” on the fly.
The “Tartuffe” volunteer was a rather stout young woman who was only slightly taller than I was when I knelt at her side. I could only kind-of get my arms around her in the several embraces, and the audience found it even more amusing than ever. The volunteer stuck around, later, for an autograph.
The show got an immediate standing ovation at the end, and cousins Kathy and Larry (along with their daughter, Janet) stayed to visit. (I was glad that they caught this show, because the performance they’d seen about two years ago was much more sparsely attended.) Likewise, some high school French students stuck around to get some photos with me and tell me how much they enjoyed it.
The next day I visited briefly with Kathy, Larry and Janet, before heading north to Brownwood, Texas. Howard Payne University had scheduled me for two performances (Moliere and “Criteria”), but when the teacher, Nancy Jo, heard about a preview I was planning of “Karaoke Knights,” she requested that I do that one for them, as well.
On Monday, I did my Life-of-Moliere lecture for a couple of French classes, followed by my Acting Workshop for the acting students (and a couple high school groups also in attendance). That night I did the show, followed by a reception at Nancy Jo’s house. (Nancy Jo made sure that I was always well-fed through the course of my stay, fixing me a sandwich after the guests had gone.)
I spent Tuesday morning pulling together what I could for “Karaoke Knights” (and dropping in on another French class). About 12 of the 17 songs were performance-ready, and I edited down the “interludes” to approximately 20-40 seconds each. The “interludes” are popular rock songs that people will (hopefully) sing along with between the original numbers, getting a taste of the actual karaoke experience, while I change costumes. I’ve spent the last several weeks listening for those pop tunes that are unavoidably sing-alongable; ones where you find your mouth moving to the words before you even realize it.
There were about six people in attendance for this “dress rehearsal”, and it seemed to go fairly well. There are volunteer sequences in this show as well, and the audience members didn’t hesitate to jump up to join me when requested.
The acoustics of the room didn’t seem that great, and it was hard to read the expressions of the audience, even though they were all sitting in the front row, or even to hear whether I was exactly on the note or not. Afterwards, though, they were enthusiastic, and it felt good to have it on its feet.
I then had to turn around and get “Criteria” ready to perform that evening. I requested that we actually do a full run-through of the show before the performance that night. I hadn’t performed “Criteria” full-out since the performances in Orlando last May, and though I’d been running the lines more lately, I was feeling fairly uncertain.
I had a couple of screw-ups in the rehearsal, and had to remind myself to edit out the “F-word” for the sake of this performance (as per special request from Nancy Jo). My voice wasn’t resonating quite the way I wanted, and so in the brief half-hour between rehearsal and performance, I chewed on a Halls cough drop. I could feel the vapor clearing some of the gunk out of my sinuses and my throat, and when I got on to perform, I suddenly found that my voice had much more power and clarity. Of course, the “gunk” in my throat had also been protecting it from other kinds of damage, and so I was playing a bit of an endgame with my throat, which took a long time to recover the next day.
Regardless, “Criteria” went extremely well, and buoyed by the rehearsal, I could really let go in the emotional climaxes of the show. It was apparently the talk of the acting classes the next day (not the least of which being the topic of my trousers being down around my ankles in one scene).
I’ll be particularly interested in any feedback I get from this school. This is the first group that has seen all three shows in short order, and that will be my big promotional push in the next year. My sense is that seeing all three shows teaches more about acting and the limitless possibility of performance than a semester’s-worth of lecturing. If I say so myself. (If I don’t, who will?)
The next morning I continued north, stopping briefly at the Dr. Pepper museum in Dublin, TX, on my way to Dallas. The Texas Educational Theatre Association is meeting at the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport, and I’d managed to line up a workshop I’ll be giving. I was also putting together a preview performance of “Karaoke Knights,” and I spent a few hours re-ordering the songs on the CD, to fix some issues that I’d sensed when running through it in Brownwood. I also pulled together a program, so that people could follow, and a few handbills that I could give out, once I knew where I was performing.
I arrived at the hotel hosting the conference and immediately recognized two students I’d known from a performance in Kingsville two years ago. They were coming to the preview I was giving, and helped me scope out an open banquet room for the show. It was a huge hall, with a huge stage, but the acoustics were perfect. I passed out some flyers, and with the assistance of my friend Cheryl from Galveston, who’d requested the preview in the first place, and Nancy Jo, who I had met at this same conference a year ago, we actually had a dozen or so people in the audience. (I’d only made up programs for ten.)
This time the show worked like magic. They were a great audience, and were laughing at every bit of wordplay, and every gesture or dance move. The volunteers were a blast. The audience sang along between numbers, and more people came in as the show proceeded. The characters were more defined and, on the wide-open stage, I could “spread out” my choreography, which I can’t do when practicing in a hotel room or the basement. It wasn’t perfect, and there’s still plenty of stuff I’ll need to work on as I get five more songs added to the repertoire, but suddenly my upcoming summer tour, performing this show throughout the fringe circuit, was looking like it was going to be a real blast.
Speaking of which, I just got official word that I’m “in” at Winnipeg for this summer! Also, Nebraska Wesleyan University is performing my “Tartuffe” this February.
So, it’s Thursday, today, and I’ll do my workshop this afternoon, before slowly (and reluctantly) continuing my progress north. Keep in mind, CHICAGO PEOPLE, that I’ve got a performance this Sunday at Chiesa Nuova (230 S. Laflin) at 3:00 p.m. You asked for it, and it is my pleasure to give it to you.
Don’t forget to sign up for the listserv! ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere/ )
Miles on the Vibe: 120,500
Temperature: 0-to-80
Currently reading: “Crossing the Rubicon”
On the CD Player: “Maroon 5”
Discoveries: Saturday workshop attendance is never as much as the teachers seem to think it will be. * The “gunk” in your throat may be hurting the tone of your sound, but it’s also protecting your throat at the same time. * If I don’t say so myself, who will?
Next performance: Sunday, January 30, 3 p.m.: “Criteria”
I was making good time heading south, aiming for Birmingham, Alabama for the night, but just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, the traffic stopped, nearly dead. Eventually, it was re-routed, through a side road, before returning to the highway, twenty miles south and three hours later. I needed to go to the bathroom for practically that entire time. Chattanooga is now the site of the two worst traffic jams I’ve encountered in my 30 months of travel.
I stopped just inside the Alabama border and continued south the next morning. I arrived in New Orleans early in the afternoon, and, using the coupon books that they have at the “Information” rest stops just inside the state borders, I found an inexpensive hotel room that had high-speed internet service as well as a free shuttle to the French Quarter.
I have noticed, over these past few months, that more and more hotels (and not just the expensive ones) have high-speed internet, which really saves me time when I’m downloading messages or tracking down websites. I expect that within a year, perhaps 90% of the hotels will be “wired.”
I took two days in New Orleans, enjoying somewhat warmer weather, and surfing the internet for French and Theatre teachers in Oregon. I’ve lined up Oregon bookings for Feb 16 & 20, and am now trying to fill in dates in-between. (I’ve promised myself that if I can get a single date added, I’ll buy myself a backup laptop, so that I can afford to lose this one long enough to get it fixed, or replaced.)
Of course, at night I visited Bourbon Street and the “Cat’s Meow,” the karaoke bar in New Orleans, where I rocked the house.
Early Friday morning I got onto the road for San Antonio. In the past, my late wake-up from Bourbon Street partying has meant passing through Houston at rush hour, and a two-three hour slowdown. This time I got in early, got on the road early, did NOT hit Louisiana construction traffic, and found myself passing through Houston at around 1 p.m. Even so, that city is about an hour’s drive from east to west.
I got into San Antonio, checked into my hotel and met my host for dinner. The next day I did an acting workshop for about six students and three teachers. (Saturday workshop attendance never seems to be as much as the faculty thinks it will be.) The material went over well, though, and a couple of teachers expressed great interest in getting my book, whenever I get it published.
That night’s show went about as well as I can recall it going. The evening was an annual benefit on behalf of an actor who had died several years ago, and the audience of about 250 was in a generous mood. They began the evening with a round of applause for their departed friend, and continued to respond throughout the evening. Some of the response was so good that I was thrown off my lines on a couple of occasions, starting the introduction for the wrong play once, and having to rewrite the “bridge” on the fly.
The “Tartuffe” volunteer was a rather stout young woman who was only slightly taller than I was when I knelt at her side. I could only kind-of get my arms around her in the several embraces, and the audience found it even more amusing than ever. The volunteer stuck around, later, for an autograph.
The show got an immediate standing ovation at the end, and cousins Kathy and Larry (along with their daughter, Janet) stayed to visit. (I was glad that they caught this show, because the performance they’d seen about two years ago was much more sparsely attended.) Likewise, some high school French students stuck around to get some photos with me and tell me how much they enjoyed it.
The next day I visited briefly with Kathy, Larry and Janet, before heading north to Brownwood, Texas. Howard Payne University had scheduled me for two performances (Moliere and “Criteria”), but when the teacher, Nancy Jo, heard about a preview I was planning of “Karaoke Knights,” she requested that I do that one for them, as well.
On Monday, I did my Life-of-Moliere lecture for a couple of French classes, followed by my Acting Workshop for the acting students (and a couple high school groups also in attendance). That night I did the show, followed by a reception at Nancy Jo’s house. (Nancy Jo made sure that I was always well-fed through the course of my stay, fixing me a sandwich after the guests had gone.)
I spent Tuesday morning pulling together what I could for “Karaoke Knights” (and dropping in on another French class). About 12 of the 17 songs were performance-ready, and I edited down the “interludes” to approximately 20-40 seconds each. The “interludes” are popular rock songs that people will (hopefully) sing along with between the original numbers, getting a taste of the actual karaoke experience, while I change costumes. I’ve spent the last several weeks listening for those pop tunes that are unavoidably sing-alongable; ones where you find your mouth moving to the words before you even realize it.
There were about six people in attendance for this “dress rehearsal”, and it seemed to go fairly well. There are volunteer sequences in this show as well, and the audience members didn’t hesitate to jump up to join me when requested.
The acoustics of the room didn’t seem that great, and it was hard to read the expressions of the audience, even though they were all sitting in the front row, or even to hear whether I was exactly on the note or not. Afterwards, though, they were enthusiastic, and it felt good to have it on its feet.
I then had to turn around and get “Criteria” ready to perform that evening. I requested that we actually do a full run-through of the show before the performance that night. I hadn’t performed “Criteria” full-out since the performances in Orlando last May, and though I’d been running the lines more lately, I was feeling fairly uncertain.
I had a couple of screw-ups in the rehearsal, and had to remind myself to edit out the “F-word” for the sake of this performance (as per special request from Nancy Jo). My voice wasn’t resonating quite the way I wanted, and so in the brief half-hour between rehearsal and performance, I chewed on a Halls cough drop. I could feel the vapor clearing some of the gunk out of my sinuses and my throat, and when I got on to perform, I suddenly found that my voice had much more power and clarity. Of course, the “gunk” in my throat had also been protecting it from other kinds of damage, and so I was playing a bit of an endgame with my throat, which took a long time to recover the next day.
Regardless, “Criteria” went extremely well, and buoyed by the rehearsal, I could really let go in the emotional climaxes of the show. It was apparently the talk of the acting classes the next day (not the least of which being the topic of my trousers being down around my ankles in one scene).
I’ll be particularly interested in any feedback I get from this school. This is the first group that has seen all three shows in short order, and that will be my big promotional push in the next year. My sense is that seeing all three shows teaches more about acting and the limitless possibility of performance than a semester’s-worth of lecturing. If I say so myself. (If I don’t, who will?)
The next morning I continued north, stopping briefly at the Dr. Pepper museum in Dublin, TX, on my way to Dallas. The Texas Educational Theatre Association is meeting at the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport, and I’d managed to line up a workshop I’ll be giving. I was also putting together a preview performance of “Karaoke Knights,” and I spent a few hours re-ordering the songs on the CD, to fix some issues that I’d sensed when running through it in Brownwood. I also pulled together a program, so that people could follow, and a few handbills that I could give out, once I knew where I was performing.
I arrived at the hotel hosting the conference and immediately recognized two students I’d known from a performance in Kingsville two years ago. They were coming to the preview I was giving, and helped me scope out an open banquet room for the show. It was a huge hall, with a huge stage, but the acoustics were perfect. I passed out some flyers, and with the assistance of my friend Cheryl from Galveston, who’d requested the preview in the first place, and Nancy Jo, who I had met at this same conference a year ago, we actually had a dozen or so people in the audience. (I’d only made up programs for ten.)
This time the show worked like magic. They were a great audience, and were laughing at every bit of wordplay, and every gesture or dance move. The volunteers were a blast. The audience sang along between numbers, and more people came in as the show proceeded. The characters were more defined and, on the wide-open stage, I could “spread out” my choreography, which I can’t do when practicing in a hotel room or the basement. It wasn’t perfect, and there’s still plenty of stuff I’ll need to work on as I get five more songs added to the repertoire, but suddenly my upcoming summer tour, performing this show throughout the fringe circuit, was looking like it was going to be a real blast.
Speaking of which, I just got official word that I’m “in” at Winnipeg for this summer! Also, Nebraska Wesleyan University is performing my “Tartuffe” this February.
So, it’s Thursday, today, and I’ll do my workshop this afternoon, before slowly (and reluctantly) continuing my progress north. Keep in mind, CHICAGO PEOPLE, that I’ve got a performance this Sunday at Chiesa Nuova (230 S. Laflin) at 3:00 p.m. You asked for it, and it is my pleasure to give it to you.
Don’t forget to sign up for the listserv! ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere/ )
Miles on the Vibe: 120,500
Temperature: 0-to-80
Currently reading: “Crossing the Rubicon”
On the CD Player: “Maroon 5”
Discoveries: Saturday workshop attendance is never as much as the teachers seem to think it will be. * The “gunk” in your throat may be hurting the tone of your sound, but it’s also protecting your throat at the same time. * If I don’t say so myself, who will?
Next performance: Sunday, January 30, 3 p.m.: “Criteria”
Saturday, December 25, 2004
The View From Here #83: Happy Christmas
Happy Christmas Everybody!
I've been enjoying a respite from the road for the past few weeks. A chance to dig in and sort through the piles of papers that accumulate and accomplish things that are actually impossible on the road, like getting something written.
I've caught up, and fallen behind again on e-mails, and I'm sure you all will understand that if I can't even keep up with the e-mails that go flying about without even the benefit of a stamp or envelope, that there's no way I'll get to Christmas cards. Of course, you guys get to read the equivalent of my "Christmas Letter Home" about every two or three weeks, and would probably just as soon NOT get any new photocopied pages from me. Ha! Just see me confining my annual report to one side of a single-spaced page of text. Only if they invent the one-point font size!
By the way, don't forget to sign up for the listserv at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere/ . I'll continue doing the e-mails for a few more issues, but signing up now will guarantee that you don't miss any issues. Or maybe that's not an incentive.
Anyway, bookings for the spring are falling into place more or less. Things will be on the thin side through January and February, but come on like a house on fire in March. I've scheduled a performance of "Criteria" at Chiesa Nuova in Chicago for Sunday, January 30 at 3 p.m., so for those who have been insisting that I have to schedule that one in town, please mark that date now. I've also broken down and, following a three-month break this time next year, plotted out a tour that will carry me through May of 2006.
Summer of 2005 will of course, find me doing Fringe Festivals again, although, my hopes were dashed by not being picked high enough in the Edmonton Lottery, alas. (I'll miss you, Emma!) Instead, I'm working on the new Boulder Fringe Festival.
Meanwhile, I'm rehearsing "Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera" as much as I can. Music is undergoing finishing touches by Ray Lewis in Rochester; David Jensen is working on another illustration; Debby Reelitz is putting together another bit of calligraphy, this one for the "Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre," and all of it will go to a new brochure that I am preparing, the tagline of which is: "One Man. Three Genres. Three Plays. Three Nights." (I'm readying myself for a booking conference in January, where I'll be pushing the shows, alongside Llysa from "theater simple" in
Seattle.)
And somewhere in there, I started work on a new book (writing, not reading). This one is an entirely new venture: a personal development, self-help tome, called "Currency." I woke up from a dream three weeks ago realizing that this was my one window of opportunity to write the thing, a project which has been on my mind for about six months or so. I write an hour a day, first thing every morning, which I intend to keep up for 30 days, or 30 chapters. So far it's all brilliant stuff. Of course, I haven't gone back to reread anything.
I'm continuing to work out, and my weight has edged back downwards by three pounds. Tomorrow's dinner will probably erase any and all progress. I'll close now, with yet another song from "Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera," continuing to tease those Vancouver audiences who will have to wait all the way to September to actually see the show. Since last issue I enclosed the Opening Number, this time around I'll attach the Closing Number, thus killing any possible surprise you might enjoy from seeing the performance. It does, however, come about as close as my writing comes to Christmas Eve mood. So, maybe you should save it for midnight and read it aloud.
As Gandalf said: "Look for me when you least expect me."
Love,
Tim
Simply Nothing
LIGHTS UP on TIM and a chair in the single upstage light. A star pattern gradually warms on the back drape. TIM sits for the first two verses, wanders through the audience for verses four and five, returns to sit, and eventually exits through an upstage "sliding door."
There's simply nothing that could happen
On a night that's got this late;
There's no eleventh hour redemption
There's no unthought of twist of fate.
As all the bars by now have closed
And I am home upon my porch,
The crystal sky reveals the way
The distant stars all burn and scorch.
There's simply nothing that could happen
There's not a condo burning lights
I am the only one who's up,
Just like all of those other nights.
The chilly night makes all the stars
More vivid and yet more serene
The puny earthling stares on up,
And feels more petty, small and mean.
There's simply nothing that could happen
To me at least, in one man's life;
My being doesn't balance on
The edge of some unsettled knife.
While somewhere else perhaps there are
Disruptions, conflagrations, riots
For me, the biggest danger is
That late at night I break my diets.
There's simply nothing that could happen
When everyone has all gone down
Here in this complex, on this block,
This neighborhood, this little town.
At three a.m. the only calls
Are ones that you don't want to take
The visitors that you might get,
Are ones that you don't want awake.
There's simply nothing that could happen
In any part of this small world
That could make me need to stay up
To see the story be unfurled.
But up there maybe something's up
Amid the zillion little stars
In places where they stay awake,
And don't go closing down their bars.
There's simply nothing that could happen,
I pale in insignificance
There's me, and there's the universe,
In all of its magnificence.
There's naught to do but to record
The fact there's nothing here to say
One man, a bunch of stars and just
The start of yet another day.
There's simply nothing that could happen
On a night that's got this late;
There's no eleventh hour redemption
There's no unthought of twist of fate.
There's simply nothing that could happen
It's all been done and all been said.
There's nothing left here for the doing,
Perhaps at last it's time for bed.
BLACKOUT.
Copyright, 2002-2004
By Tim Mooney (Music by Ray Lewis)
I've been enjoying a respite from the road for the past few weeks. A chance to dig in and sort through the piles of papers that accumulate and accomplish things that are actually impossible on the road, like getting something written.
I've caught up, and fallen behind again on e-mails, and I'm sure you all will understand that if I can't even keep up with the e-mails that go flying about without even the benefit of a stamp or envelope, that there's no way I'll get to Christmas cards. Of course, you guys get to read the equivalent of my "Christmas Letter Home" about every two or three weeks, and would probably just as soon NOT get any new photocopied pages from me. Ha! Just see me confining my annual report to one side of a single-spaced page of text. Only if they invent the one-point font size!
By the way, don't forget to sign up for the listserv at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere/ . I'll continue doing the e-mails for a few more issues, but signing up now will guarantee that you don't miss any issues. Or maybe that's not an incentive.
Anyway, bookings for the spring are falling into place more or less. Things will be on the thin side through January and February, but come on like a house on fire in March. I've scheduled a performance of "Criteria" at Chiesa Nuova in Chicago for Sunday, January 30 at 3 p.m., so for those who have been insisting that I have to schedule that one in town, please mark that date now. I've also broken down and, following a three-month break this time next year, plotted out a tour that will carry me through May of 2006.
Summer of 2005 will of course, find me doing Fringe Festivals again, although, my hopes were dashed by not being picked high enough in the Edmonton Lottery, alas. (I'll miss you, Emma!) Instead, I'm working on the new Boulder Fringe Festival.
Meanwhile, I'm rehearsing "Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera" as much as I can. Music is undergoing finishing touches by Ray Lewis in Rochester; David Jensen is working on another illustration; Debby Reelitz is putting together another bit of calligraphy, this one for the "Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre," and all of it will go to a new brochure that I am preparing, the tagline of which is: "One Man. Three Genres. Three Plays. Three Nights." (I'm readying myself for a booking conference in January, where I'll be pushing the shows, alongside Llysa from "theater simple" in
Seattle.)
And somewhere in there, I started work on a new book (writing, not reading). This one is an entirely new venture: a personal development, self-help tome, called "Currency." I woke up from a dream three weeks ago realizing that this was my one window of opportunity to write the thing, a project which has been on my mind for about six months or so. I write an hour a day, first thing every morning, which I intend to keep up for 30 days, or 30 chapters. So far it's all brilliant stuff. Of course, I haven't gone back to reread anything.
I'm continuing to work out, and my weight has edged back downwards by three pounds. Tomorrow's dinner will probably erase any and all progress. I'll close now, with yet another song from "Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera," continuing to tease those Vancouver audiences who will have to wait all the way to September to actually see the show. Since last issue I enclosed the Opening Number, this time around I'll attach the Closing Number, thus killing any possible surprise you might enjoy from seeing the performance. It does, however, come about as close as my writing comes to Christmas Eve mood. So, maybe you should save it for midnight and read it aloud.
As Gandalf said: "Look for me when you least expect me."
Love,
Tim
Simply Nothing
LIGHTS UP on TIM and a chair in the single upstage light. A star pattern gradually warms on the back drape. TIM sits for the first two verses, wanders through the audience for verses four and five, returns to sit, and eventually exits through an upstage "sliding door."
There's simply nothing that could happen
On a night that's got this late;
There's no eleventh hour redemption
There's no unthought of twist of fate.
As all the bars by now have closed
And I am home upon my porch,
The crystal sky reveals the way
The distant stars all burn and scorch.
There's simply nothing that could happen
There's not a condo burning lights
I am the only one who's up,
Just like all of those other nights.
The chilly night makes all the stars
More vivid and yet more serene
The puny earthling stares on up,
And feels more petty, small and mean.
There's simply nothing that could happen
To me at least, in one man's life;
My being doesn't balance on
The edge of some unsettled knife.
While somewhere else perhaps there are
Disruptions, conflagrations, riots
For me, the biggest danger is
That late at night I break my diets.
There's simply nothing that could happen
When everyone has all gone down
Here in this complex, on this block,
This neighborhood, this little town.
At three a.m. the only calls
Are ones that you don't want to take
The visitors that you might get,
Are ones that you don't want awake.
There's simply nothing that could happen
In any part of this small world
That could make me need to stay up
To see the story be unfurled.
But up there maybe something's up
Amid the zillion little stars
In places where they stay awake,
And don't go closing down their bars.
There's simply nothing that could happen,
I pale in insignificance
There's me, and there's the universe,
In all of its magnificence.
There's naught to do but to record
The fact there's nothing here to say
One man, a bunch of stars and just
The start of yet another day.
There's simply nothing that could happen
On a night that's got this late;
There's no eleventh hour redemption
There's no unthought of twist of fate.
There's simply nothing that could happen
It's all been done and all been said.
There's nothing left here for the doing,
Perhaps at last it's time for bed.
BLACKOUT.
Copyright, 2002-2004
By Tim Mooney (Music by Ray Lewis)
Saturday, December 04, 2004
The View From Here #82: The Internet
Following a week of poring over ALL OF THE BACK ISSUES of "The View FromHere," (360 single-spaced pages and growing) I now have everything, to date, loaded onto the Yahoo Groups website. If, for whatever reason, you joined in the middle of the tour, you are now welcome to go back and read tales of my misadventures to your heart's content. Or until you fall asleep. Which may be the same moment.
AND SO, rather than running The View From Here as a straightforward e-mail, I'm now going to be running it as a "listserv" which means that I'll send it to Yahoo, and Yahoo will forward it to you as an e-mail. This means that sudden crashes of my computer will be unable to destroy my address book. I'll also be loading photos and calendar information onto the website, so there will be other fun things available. (Downside: Yahoo will attach advertising to the beginnings of these e-mails. Please just ignore this. These are not products that I endorse in any way.)
Thus, IN ORDER TO CONTINUE RECEIVING "The View From Here," you will need to follow these instructions one time only. (I am told that a monkey can do it, in less than five minutes.)Point your web browser to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere/. (Probably just clicking on that address will take you there.) From this site you click on the button that says "Join This Group," and that will take you to a page where you answer a handful of questions. (This is "safe." I signed up a month ago and have not gotten spammed by it.)
I will continue to send the next couple of issues out via regular e-mail to those who have not signed up, but will phase that out very soon.In case you're not confused enough, parallel to this, I have begun a "Blog" (short for "weblog"). It will contain all of the same material from The View From Here, but will be accessed in different ways, probably by a whole different set of people. If you'd like to visit the weblog (still in its developing phases) you can go to: http://timmooneyrep.blogspot.com/.
AND EVENTUALLY, all of this will link up to a NEW WEBSITE that we are developing. There is nothing (worth looking at) loaded onto that site yet, so I'll refrain from giving you that web address for the moment! This website, however, will be the Master Website featuring the Tim Mooney Repertory Theatre, from which the public will be able to connect to "Moliere Than Thou," "Criteria," "Karaoke Knights," and other theatrical booking opportunities.
I know, I know, "Shut up before you confuse us any further."BUT FIRST, let me just note that my weblog is already linked to the Vancouver Fringe Web Page, and so I expect the Vancouver audience of the View From Here and potentially, my show this coming summer, is growing already. As such, and since I don't have any new performances to report on today, I want to TEASE those curious Vancouver readers with salacious selections of the show!Here, therefore, is the OPENING NUMBER for "Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera:" "I'm Looking for a Groupie" (For now it's just lyrics; Probably, at some point, I'll get MP3s of the music on-line.)
Looking For A Groupie
I'm looking for a groupie,
No soul-mate quite for me,
A woman who looks better
Than I deserve to see.
A lover in the thrall
Of what I say and do,
Oh, how I'd hypnotize her
Bed and wed her ere I'm through.
I've got to find that groupie,
Who can't hold herself back
But when I'm done
Performing comes on
With her attack.
I'd need no introduction
Except my probing eyes,
There'd be no competition
She'd just give me the prize.
Oh Lord, bring me a groupie
Who's way above my league
Who's thrilled with my performance
And looks for some intrigue
For while she watches what I do
She might not give a damn
About the way I tend to look,
Or who I really am.
And if I should find that groupie
Backstage or in a bar
She'd be my tender
Plaything and I
Would be her star.
We'd feed each other's needs,
It's perfect, though, in fact,
The toughest part would be that I
Could never drop the act!
Big finish; big bow. LIGHTS out.
Copyright, 2002-2004 By Tim Mooney (Music by Ray Lewis)
AND SO, rather than running The View From Here as a straightforward e-mail, I'm now going to be running it as a "listserv" which means that I'll send it to Yahoo, and Yahoo will forward it to you as an e-mail. This means that sudden crashes of my computer will be unable to destroy my address book. I'll also be loading photos and calendar information onto the website, so there will be other fun things available. (Downside: Yahoo will attach advertising to the beginnings of these e-mails. Please just ignore this. These are not products that I endorse in any way.)
Thus, IN ORDER TO CONTINUE RECEIVING "The View From Here," you will need to follow these instructions one time only. (I am told that a monkey can do it, in less than five minutes.)Point your web browser to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/viewfromhere/. (Probably just clicking on that address will take you there.) From this site you click on the button that says "Join This Group," and that will take you to a page where you answer a handful of questions. (This is "safe." I signed up a month ago and have not gotten spammed by it.)
I will continue to send the next couple of issues out via regular e-mail to those who have not signed up, but will phase that out very soon.In case you're not confused enough, parallel to this, I have begun a "Blog" (short for "weblog"). It will contain all of the same material from The View From Here, but will be accessed in different ways, probably by a whole different set of people. If you'd like to visit the weblog (still in its developing phases) you can go to: http://timmooneyrep.blogspot.com/.
AND EVENTUALLY, all of this will link up to a NEW WEBSITE that we are developing. There is nothing (worth looking at) loaded onto that site yet, so I'll refrain from giving you that web address for the moment! This website, however, will be the Master Website featuring the Tim Mooney Repertory Theatre, from which the public will be able to connect to "Moliere Than Thou," "Criteria," "Karaoke Knights," and other theatrical booking opportunities.
I know, I know, "Shut up before you confuse us any further."BUT FIRST, let me just note that my weblog is already linked to the Vancouver Fringe Web Page, and so I expect the Vancouver audience of the View From Here and potentially, my show this coming summer, is growing already. As such, and since I don't have any new performances to report on today, I want to TEASE those curious Vancouver readers with salacious selections of the show!Here, therefore, is the OPENING NUMBER for "Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera:" "I'm Looking for a Groupie" (For now it's just lyrics; Probably, at some point, I'll get MP3s of the music on-line.)
Looking For A Groupie
I'm looking for a groupie,
No soul-mate quite for me,
A woman who looks better
Than I deserve to see.
A lover in the thrall
Of what I say and do,
Oh, how I'd hypnotize her
Bed and wed her ere I'm through.
I've got to find that groupie,
Who can't hold herself back
But when I'm done
Performing comes on
With her attack.
I'd need no introduction
Except my probing eyes,
There'd be no competition
She'd just give me the prize.
Oh Lord, bring me a groupie
Who's way above my league
Who's thrilled with my performance
And looks for some intrigue
For while she watches what I do
She might not give a damn
About the way I tend to look,
Or who I really am.
And if I should find that groupie
Backstage or in a bar
She'd be my tender
Plaything and I
Would be her star.
We'd feed each other's needs,
It's perfect, though, in fact,
The toughest part would be that I
Could never drop the act!
Big finish; big bow. LIGHTS out.
Copyright, 2002-2004 By Tim Mooney (Music by Ray Lewis)
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