Self Salute

In the arena of accomplishments, in the sort of having something accepted for publication vein, tonight and tomorrow and Saturday my words will again be projected from a stage in NYC. If someone had told me years ago (or whenever), “Oh, yeah, you will have a couple of short plays done in New York but you won’t see either of them,” my mouth would have dropped from disappointment and disbelief. But I’m old enough to know things never turn out exactly how you envision them—whether getting published or having something on the boards. But like with any small success, I do take pride in the accomplishment, in the ability to toss off the small potatoes of being able to say, “Oh, yes, I’ve had a couple of plays done in New York.” Never mind that they were short plays and in festivals or however flawed the productions may have been. Let anyone who asks about my playwriting fill in those blanks with ideas of a huge production with dancing chorus boys and girls and the like. Other than some stories published early on, real accomplishments in the writing arena came late for me, late bloomer that I am. Tonight I will have a drink in an unabashed salute to myself. I plan also to tilt the glass toward NYC in a salute to those actors saying my words and the audiences hearing them. Pardon me, but here’s to me, a boy who grew up loving film and music and all things written and who turned out to be a writer.

Atomic Shadows

There were two big old boys in the neighborhood living a street over from us on Lafaso, Mert and Dick Tugwell, older, maybe my brother Wayne’s age or maybe even older than that. They are nice guys, fun-loving, always horsing around with the younger kids, and I am one of those one day, doing whatever, maybe trying to tackle one of them by wrapping arms and legs around one of their stout legs. One of the Tugwell brothers reaches down and pries me off, grabbing my legs with one hand and the other hand on the back of my neck, lifting me up and making gorilla noises like he is going to slam me to the ground. When he does release me on my feet, I am aware of slight pain under my ears, his thumb and middle finger pressing under my ears while suspending me above his head, like some native in a Tarzan movie holding up a sacrificial child. It is not long before there are rounded lumps under each ear the size of a tennis ball. What is lost is whether I go to the doctor then or the next day or go quickly to the emergency room. The next distinct shadow is being in one of the hospital rooms, one bed only, windows always presenting a view of home.

Whatever my illness is—ruptured lymph nodes or salivary glands?—it keeps me in the hospital as a pampered patient for weeks, doctors coming and going and hushed whispers to my mother, nurses coming and going and a daily series of injections in my buttocks, first one cheek and turn the other, please. There are two other particular shadows imprinted during that time.

After several days, my backside looks like a human dartboard, a chaotic pattern of blue on both cheeks like bruised fruit. And the injections sting and the hurt lingers. Finally one of the nurses starts giving me a sharp slap on whatever cheek is up for duty right before the injection. It works, her sharp swat masking what quickly follows. Bless you, nurse-angel, whoever you are.

The other ghost image is books—probably many of them comic books—scattered always over the bed, on the nightstand, stacked on the window ledge. There is no television in the room, I don’t think, I would remember that, so the days are spent in adventures far beyond the hospital room, with Batman and Robin and Superman in thrilling deeds of capturing criminals and rescuing always grateful ladies in distress. There is the absolute joy also of my mother reading to me, being able to lie back on the pillows and watch the changing sky while those escapades play in my head, the imagined stories fulfilling some need in me I didn’t know I had, allowing me to leave behind any pain in my neck and backside, presenting an escape route from the hard truths of growing up in the neighborhood nearby.

I See By Your Outfit / Part One

Bookseller, actor, theatre owner and producer, author.

Casting director for film, theatre director.

New York actor, writer, teacher in Japan for 28 years.

Software developer

College theatre professors in California and Nebraska.

Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of Creative Writing in Stockholm.

Freelance journalists.

Author and editor of The Advocate in Los Angeles.

Madame Librarian.

Editor and author.

Art historian.

What we become, the artistic, fortunate youths, with an outlet for theatrical adventures in Baton Rouge, all attracted like moths to mates, to peak experiences, a cross section of youth everywhere, the adopted, the verbally and sexually abused, ones unsure of sexual leanings and some who consider themselves aberrations because of it, the over-sheltered girls whose parents consider theatre a playground of the Devil and his Corrupters of morals, the merely directionless with closed avenues everywhere they look, the sad, the shy, the well-adjusted, all banded together as conspirators in the creation of Art, fulfilled and thrilled by their accomplishments, by their sense of belonging.

A hot gym, echoey, an entire wall of windows facing 10^th Street, bottom windows opening outward and doing nothing more than serving as an airfoil for the hot breeze flowing along the building, basketball goals on each end, a proscenium stage on one end with barely enough wing space for set pieces and actors waiting for cues. But it is the hardwood firmament from which dreams are launched.

Teen Town Theatre.

A musical every summer. Those without automobiles catch rides on humid summer mornings for a day of building sets and gathering props and sewing costumes and memorizing lines before rehearsal in the afternoon. It is an everyday thing, something to look forward to while other friends the same age hang around swimming pools or cruise neighborhood streets without destination. Two or three plays during the year, catching rides after the last school bell and heading downtown for the same routine and rehearsal in the evening.

In time, shows adding up, crushes unspoken, painful first real romances, facing audiences with learned lines and surviving, thriving, knowing so much is out there to blunt the fear and slowness of growing up, word gets around and some are lying, sneaking to work on shows at TTT, parents somehow finding out about nightly trips to Sammy’s Lounge to hear Nelrose English pounding the keys while older singers around the piano bar are howling out dirty lyrics, congenial booze hounds with upturned faces, teenagers edging closer to the bar, prized bar stools coming open, raising drinks and voices, wise to the world of show tunes and bawdy ballads.

Some nights after rehearsal, long before the interstate, long trips down Highway 90, through small towns with speed zones and neon-lighted bars in gravel parking lots, heading toward New Orleans and the dark mystery of jazz, Alan Jokinen carrying his guitar, looking every bit like Conrad he plays in Bye Bye Birdie, leading us to smoky French Quarter apartments where there are other musicians and girls dressed in black like characters out of experimental plays, apartment doors thrown open to enclosed patios crowded with plants, girls named Sissy and Decky with dark eye shadow and pretty faces who take notice, unexpected twists, night-long romances.

Over the River and Through the Woods

   At age eight, listening to the hushed fragments of conversation at the farm in Mississippi, some images enlarged by my imagination become fixed so strongly they bleed into sleep.

   Long ago, Allen Brister, my Great Uncle, Mama Cothern's brother, is an alcoholic, who when he spends the night at his sister's raises the upstairs window and urinates slowly on the tin roof of the porch, hoping his relatives below will think it is rain. Strikingly handsome in his youth, three-piece suit, early photographs belie the disheveled, rheumy look I remember. Uncle Allen manages to kill his wife Vera during a dense fog while she is riding on the front fender of a 1935 Dodge with a dim flashlight so Allen can see the edge of the gravel road. She is crushed between the automobile and the ditch when the car runs off the road. Sleeping upstairs in the cold, in the same bed Uncle Allen slept in years before, I am always afraid Aunt Vera will be standing at the bottom of the stairs during my family's short Christmas visits at Mama Cothern's house. Not ghost or imagination. But there. Nude. Her left breast gone from the accident. Scarred body. Bloodless wounds. Staring up the stairs at me.

   Hello, Raymond.

   Merry Christmas.