My Next Play

My next play will be about the poet Edna St Vincent Millay. Years ago I took a couple of classes in script writing, and one of the film scripts I wrote I titled 'VINCENT UNBOUND'

I had written a play about the sculptor Louise Nevelson, who grew up in Rockland,so in keeping with the biographical story about a Maine artist, I chose the poet Millay, who was born in Rockland and grew up in Camden, and went on to become one of the most popular American poets of all time. Well, the movie version most probably will never reach the screen, even though biographical movies of artists are not at all uncommon and some, like Lust For Life and Frieda K. among others were big at the box office. But having no contact with the movie industry, and actually preferring stage to screen myself, I think I ought to put all the research I did for the Vincent Unbound script to good use. I am sure that because of the local element in the story I should be able to fill the house when the play is performed in Rockland or Camden.

I have personally related to Edna St Vincent Millay since my high school days. My high school girl friend, Jo Maheu, recited Millay's Renaissance in a state public speaking competition. Years later when for more than a decade I was living in the Midwest, her poems of Maine again spoke to me and were partly responsible for drawing me back to Maine. I had "been too long away from the sea, I had a need of water near."

WINTER IN MAINE

YEARS AGO I LOVED WINTER IN MAINE. I remember when my family moved back to Maine from Illinois. WE moved in the summer from DeKalb, where I was working on my PhD, to Five Islands, a small fishing village in the town of Georgetown, and on an island of the same name. My parents lived there, and we bought one of their two houses. Eliot and his family moved there too, and Rolfe and his family came and spent summers there, and Rolfe enrolled in the Master's program at Colby College and commuted. So the whole family was there. I had gone through a period of deep depression in Illinois, and the move revived me entirely. Nan loved Five Islands so much we decided to winterize the house, and we hired Eliot to design and build an addition onto the existing house. When fall came, I had to return to DeKalb briefly. All I had left to do for my PhD was to write my dissertation, and pass oral exams. I dd not have to be there full time to do that, so I soon returned to Five Islands to spend the winter, and presumably to write my dissertaion.

Well, I loved that winter. Eliot and I got new snowshoes and we cleaned off the snow on the little pond in the back yard and made a skating rink. I had always loved winters when a youth. Eliot and I had a "gang" of kindred souls,of both sexes, and we would go sledding and tobogganing. I remember snow shoeing across a frozen East Pond to the Ready's cabin on the other side. Mrs Ready would have arrived there by car and foot ahead of us and had hot chocolate and lunch ready for us. We would ride back to town in her car. Sometimes she would tow our bobsled to the top of a country hill. We would go down fast as a bullet, often ending in a snow bank. Whoever was siting on the end of the bobsled might end up further into the bank than the rest. The last shall be first? Mrs Ready would tow the sled back to the top of the hill for the next run down. She was my best friend's mother. Joe Ready was the son of General Ready, who was off in Japan as head of the occupation force on Okinowa. I believe he was the commander who was the model for the colonel in the musical Tea House In The August Moon. General Ready returned to Oakland before I graduated from High School. That put an end to the good times at the Ready's as he was a strict disciplinarian and seemed to object to anyone having fun.

After we bought our house here in Thomaston, Maine in 1995, I still loved the winters here. They were not so different than winters in Boston. I had lived in Presque Isle, far north of here in Maine, when I taught at the University there one year, and that was the coldest I have ever been. And that includes the winter I spent in Baffin Island in teh Canadian Arctic, North of Hudson Bay. I spent a few winters in Toronto, Ontario, and the winters there were not very snowy, but almost always sunless. Long gray winters. Icy sidewalks. No one there seemed to own a snow shovel, and the light snow would be packed to ice from walking. Maine has winterss -- sometimes ice storms and nor'easters, but when it isn't snowing, we have a lot of sunshine here in Maine in the winter.

However, now that I am about to turn seventy seven, I have had enogh winter and enough snow shoveling. We had our house on the market for 6 months. Our Sotheby's contract expired today and we took it off the market, at least for the winter. So we are in for another long winter. It is early December and already we have had two major snow storms. Last winter we had two thirds of the house re-roofed with with a great clatter, it all slides off at once, a veritable avalanche. You would not want to going out the back door when it happens! Last winter, it blocked the exhaust vent of the monitor in Albie's ofice. I smelled the problem right away, and we had to turn off her heater. It took two days to shovel out the vent after it stopped snowing. Our new pellet stove in the living room saves a lot of money for fuel oil, but it has an intake air vent which also get pluged up when the snow slides of the roof onto the side deck. Then the stove also had to be shut down until we can get out there and shovel out.

I thought this year I ought to buy a snow blower, but since we were hoping to sell the house, Albie thought that was a bad idea, as did my daughter Lauren. In fact, Lauren sent a check for $300 to use to hire a youth to shovel our walks and driveway this winter. Trouble is, there are no more teenagers in Thomaston it seems. So Albie and I shoveled out the first snow storm, and I actually enjoyed it. Then today we got another huge storm, so we called Herb Jones, who has done a lot of yard work and odd jobs for us before, and he came to clear the drive so I could go to work tomorrow. I have to leave for work at 6:30 AM, and if I have to shovel the drive and clear the car before I leave, I would have to get up at 4:OO AM, in stead of the usual 5 am waking hour.

Web, blog, twiter, facebook, etc. ad finitem

So no I have a blog I should be satisfied, but I was hoping I would be able to cut and paste things I have already written into the blog, but when I try I get a message that I can not accomplish this seemingly simple task. Oh, it will paste the poem or play or magazine article into the post, but in HTML code, which I cannot read or edit. So I guess I will also need to have a web page.

Over the ears I have published many articles about art and artists, and would like to make them accessible on the web. A few of them already are. Someone in Canada put many of the pieces I wrote for Artscanada over a 15 year span of writing for that great publication, but not all. and now I would also like to put my plays and screenplays on the web, as well as a few poems now and then.

A friend of mine has written a number of songs without music. He would love to find a band that would ask him to write lyrics for music they produce and gigs they perform, but has a=had no luck locally. So I have offered to help him publish past works and see if we can attract a band, preferably a Caribean, calypso-like group, to make use of his considerable talent. I showed him a draft of a title page for the proposed book, and he balked at the idea that we might copyright the poems. One of his songs, "Hidden Talent" has the words: "Hidden Talent/Broad daylight/Need no patent/Or copyright/Need no keys/Or locks at night/" and so on. The title no doubt refers to the Bible's advice: "don't hide you talents under a bucket."

Although I did copyright many things in the past, I did it without thinking. I have decided in the future not to copyright my poems, plays and screenplays. Actually, screenplays are rarely f ever copyrighted. You can download the script of Casablanca, for example, without charge. I suppose it is because screenplays are not "art."? Once the movie i made you have to pay for reproductions of it. I have never received a dime from anything I have ever copyrighted anyway. I would be flattered and proud to have someone pick up one of my recent plays and produce it. That would be compensation enough. Just give me credit as=s the playwright.

"Lighthouse: A Down East Musical" which was a collaboration between Robert N Richardson and myself, is copyrighted. Bob and I have an agreement that if the play is produced, he and I would share 7% of a net profit. As yet we have not had a net profit on the production of this play, but it may yet produce a small income for each of us or our heirs.

We are living in a new age..the internet is the great leveler. The software that enables me to blog was free. If I add to my blog something called "Translations" someone who cant read English can translate it into one of 2 other languages. and this can be added to my blog for free. If my "followers" (a strange word for anyone who wants to read what I have posted; I don't want to be followed, by hope to encourage a dialog) cannot read, I can add a gizmo that will have some one read aloud what I have written. Can you imagine hat that would cost? But it too if FREE! So much for "Intellectual Property" I have been copying other's intellectual property on my Zerox machine for years and somehow managed to avoid prison time.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

The movie tonight is Dickens Christmas Carol on Turner Classic Movies.

Some years ago I had the great pleasure to be an artist in residence for eight weeks at an artists residency program on West Port Island, Called the McNamara Foundation. During that stay, I wrote two plays. One of them was a new version of the Christmas Carol. I had it take place in the present, partly to avoid the hassle of costumes, but the most significant difference between my play and others was that I combined live action and film. I filmed all the scenes during which the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future took Scrooge to visit or revisit. There were about thirteen or so of these scenes, I cast, directed and filmed these scenes, and hired another person to direct the live action. Filming these scenes and projecting them on a scrim at the appropriate times turned out to be very successful, and has encouraged me to combine film and live action again in other plays.

I recruited friends to play all those roles, and included them all in the program notes. Most of them came to see the production. My neighbors, Tom, Cindi, Elena and Phil Bertocci were in one scene...the one where the Spirit of the Past took Ebeneezer to see the woman he ought to have married. She and her family were having their Christmas dinner in their elegant dining room. There was a fire in the fireplace. I had baked a turkey for the shot as well. The scene toward the end where the Spirit of the future took Scrooge to see his grave was shot late one winter afternoon in the Thomaston Cemetary. Light snow was falling. And so on with all the other scenes.
I produced the play at the Lincoln Street Center for the Arts where I had been Director.

The other play I wrote at West Port Island those eight weeks was a play about Louise Nevelson, the great American sculptor. She grew up in Rockland, and had gone to high school in the very building that was now the Lincoln Street Center for the Arts. I wanted to bring her back to Rockland and her high school in triumph. However, I was let go. I guess the board discovered they could get along without me during my eight weeks leave to attend the artists residency program. The Nevelson play,which I titled "Self Portraits" has never been produced.

A REBEL WITH CAUSE

I have finished the first draft of my play about and old and blind John Milton in prison for writing a justification for the trial and execution of the king of England, dictating Paradise Lost to his young poet friend Andrew Marvell.
It is short. Only 8 pages, about ten minutes, perhaps. Just the right length to submit for some of the short play competitions.

It needs work. I read a play aloud to see, or more accurately, to hear, if it sounds, as Shakespeare would have it, "trippingly off the tongue"

This did not. So I will rewrite it until can be spoken by actors intelligibly and not make them tongue tied.

Albie began to blog today. She tried many names before she found one still available. I think she named it freescreech.

Now that we are both blogging, we will probably see each other only at mealtimes. We still cant eat on line.

Holidays, both holy and not

For many years, we have had Thanksgiving at our home in Thomaston, Maine. We usually have twenty or so for dinner. Sometimes we have it in the loft of our barn and if it is too cold up there, we have it either in the house or in Albie's heated studio. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Unlike Christmas, no one is ever disappointed in Thanksgiving. The only expectation is to have a great banquet and a chance to visit with relatives and friends.

This year Lauren and John hosted the holiday at their home in Hyde Park, a part of Boston. They had added a large sun room to the rear of their house, and it was big enough to seat everyone at one very long table. We had two big turkeys, the usual root vegetables, Albie's rolls, and 8 pies. The year before Lauren had offered to host the event and let us of the hook. It was just as well as in the meantime we had put our Maine house on the market, and had it sold, we would have had to find another place to celebrate the holiday.

Christmas is entirely another matter. Albie and I do not make anything of the day itself. No tree or presents. We do put a wreath on the door and another on the barn. For a few years we even bought and decorated with lights a tree, and placed it on the porch where neighbors could enjoy it, but lately we have skipped the tree. I miss it. I love parts of Christmas, especially the caroling and the aura of good feeling that permeates society at that time of year. But the gift giving I have never cared for. I think Christ might very well have been one of the greatest men to ever live, but I am not a Christian or even a believer anymore.

That does not stop my children from celebrating Christmas. They gather at one of their houses in Massachusetts, usually at Kathy and Jim's, and have big dinner and gift giving. This is an unusual gathering for Christmas, as my children and their spouses and children are not all Christian. My daughter Ruth married a Muslim, my son Greg married Jew. Their two children are Muslim and Jewish. My daughter Karen married a Muslim from Pakistan, and their children are Muslim. They live in Texas and usually don't make the trip to Boston, but they nevertheless celebrate Christmas with a tree and gift giving in Texas. My eldest son, Paul,and his wife and children are Witnesses and do not believe in celebrating Christmas at all, so do not attend. MOST PEOPLE DO NOT REALIZE IT, BUT THE PILGRIMS AND OTHER EARLY SETTLERS OF MASSACHUSETTS, DID NOT CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS EITHER, AND FOR THE SAME REASONS AS THE WITNESSES. They forbid the celebration of Christmas, as it was a pagan holiday. When Ebeneezer Scrooge says of Christmas, "Bah Humbug!" he is reiterating the same belief. It was once against the law in England to celebrate Christmas as well, when the Puritans were in power.

Part of my feeling about Christmas may be because I am a Christmas baby. As a child I had to share my birthday with another J.C., whose real birthday was most likely sometime in April. I would get one of my presents early as my birthday was actually Christmas Eve. When other school kids would have a special day at school on their birthdays, my day was always a school holiday. Even later in life, my mother always sent me "Happy Christmas Birthday cards.

I wrote a poem about my birthday and my first Christmas:

Christmas Birthday

Although she was not a churchgoer
Christmas was always her favorite day
Refusing to spend it in a
hospital,her child was born at home.
Carolers sang outside her window.

No kings arrived bearing gifts, yet
Christmas morning she told my brother
"Look what Santa brought us last night."
An bundled her joy for the ten hour ride
In the Model A to grandparents house.

Neither snow nor sleet nor predawn dark
Would stay their course that snowy morning.
The road became impassable by Portsmouth
Where therewas room at an inn for the night.
Baby was bedded in bureau drawer.

By morning the road was clear again
Nothing more prevented the family
Celebrating the birth of a child.

Having worked most of my life either for non-profits or as a freelance writer, I arrived at retirement age without any pension and hardly any savings. To supplement my social security checks, I have been working for a mental health agency as a counselor for people with schitzophrenia who are living in group homes. When I started doing this, I did not think I would laast, but it turned out that I enjoy my work and have been doing it now for almost 8 years.

Many of the people in these homes had spent most of their previous lives institutionalized. It was thought that they might be better off living in these homes in a community and that if given some guidance to shop for groceries, make their own meals and learn the rudiments of running a household, they might get to a point where they can get a job, rent their own appartment and live normal lives. I have seen a few of them do just this. I read that over 40% of people with mental illness can live normal lives.

One of my present clients is capable of this, but the last thing he would want to be would be "normal." Unfortunatley, I cannot write much about him due to rules about "confidentiality." However, I may from time to time refer to his progress without mentining his name or where he lives. At this point I can say he is a very intelligent and creative personality. I think you will find him interesting.

John Milton and ME: A new play in progess

I've been working on a new play. Looks like it will be a one act, two person play. It is about John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and many other poems and essays. Paradise Lost is perhaps the most famous English epic poem read by almost nobody anymore. I began to read it a few years ago and was struck by how some of it resonated with me. So I began to read more about the man who wrote it and found he was a rebel with many causes, some political, some religious and others social.

His bride, half his age and a Royalist, left him and moved back with her parents, stimulating him to write a defense of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. He criticized the Church of England for its bishops and its dissimilarity to the early church of Biblical times. He wrote an impassioned plea for the right to express opinions and argued for freedom of the press. He supported the English revolution and wrote a justification for the trial and execution of the king if he were tyrannical and unjust. All of this in the 17th century when there was no freedom of speech and once could have his ears cut off and worse for saying such things.

He was fluent in all the European languages as welas in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He supported Oliver Cromwell who made him his secretary of foreign affairs..

After the death of Cromwell, and the restoration of the monarchy many of the supporters of Cromwell and advocates of the regicide were arrested, imprisoned, and often hung, drawn and quartered by the Royalists. Somehow John Milton simply spent some time in prison.

So my play finds Milton, old and blind, in prison, writing Paradise Lost. A younger poet and friend, Andrew Marvell visited him daily to record Milton's words on paper. Marvell had connections in high places and was advocating Milton be spared and released from prison so he could continue to write.

But even while in prison for doing so, Milton continued to write his radical ideas. Marvell tried to reason with John in order to get his old friend to tone it down if he ever hoped to get out of jail. He thought what John was writing would be seen as blasphemous and critical of the governement. This may seem odd to you because Paradise Lost was John Milton's retelling the Bible's story about Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden. Ah, there's the rub. Who the hero of Paradise Lost is unclear. Many have thought John Milton's protagonist is Satan himself. Certainly, there has been no more engaging and intelligent fictional character in all of literature. Milton's Lucifer even rivals the "villains" of the Batman stories.

Milton most often calls Satan by his other name: Lucifer. Lucifer, literally the bringer of light, or the enlightened one. Lucifer was also the ancient name of the planet Venus, the harbinger of light, the brightest star in the pre-dawn sky, announcing the Suns' arrival.

Although Angels are occasionally mentioned in the old testament, they are not mentioned in Genesis. It seems they were not part of the initial creation, and yet Satan must have preexisted or how could he tempt Eve with the apple? To Milton, he and other angels existed before the creation of the world. Much of what contemporary believers in angels think about angels may very well come from Milton's own pen and not from the Bible itself. At any rate, Milton wrote an account of a tremendous celestial war between Lucifer with his multitude of followers one the one hand and the angels that were loyal to God on the other. I found myself identifying with and rooting for Lucifer while reading Milton's description of this sky-shaking battle.

So, here we have a man who rebelled against the powers that be and justified a regicide, a killing of a king, writing about a rebellious angelic army attempting a Deicide, the killing of a god. Hardly a coincidence, is it?

learning to blog

My daughter Lauren is my teacher and tech adviser. Sometimes I feel I am too old a dog to learn new tricks. She is only 51, and an excellent teacher. But I am a slow learner.

I had to name my blog. Ever name I could come up with was "not available." I wanted the name to indicate my interest in theater, but also relate to my age, my past, my limited future. After many attempts, my son Greg, an actor turned math teacher, suggested exuentstageleft, and it was not only available but almost perfect – a stage direction: "everybody off the stage to the left" and by extension, a suggestion of leaving the "world's a stage" in my old age. LEFT seemed most appropriate considering my politics.

Lauren showed me her own blog: www.MathMakesSense.blogspot.com which has bells and whistles including a translator which can translate her text into many different languages, and a gadget that when activated reads her blog to you. Both of htese are free downloads. Isnt the internet wonderful?

In only one day I find myself hooked, line and sinker.

Why am I blogging?

Hi. I have been writing most of my life and I write something every day, so my daughter Lauren told me I ought to blog, I am about to have my 77th birthday, so you might imagine I hate the word "blog" but here I am nevertheless blogging. What have been writing all these years?

Well, lots of school work to start with. I spent six years in graduate school, so lots of term papers and theses. I have graduate majors in English, history and philosophy. A master's thesis was on David Hume's Theory of Criticism. All of the school papers have long been lost, thankfully.

So fast forward to my first (and only) novel, Time To Murder and Create. From the time I was 12 I wanted to be a novelist. I made numerous attempts in my late teens and twenties and never got beyond the first chapter. Seemed I labored over first chapters forever, wanting to write the Great American Novel. My early writing attempts were all stuffy, florid, pompous and strained. At the University of Chicago I had a great teacher, the novelist Richard Sterne. He suggested I write as I spoke. I have been doing that ever since. I wrote Murder and Create as an experiment. I told myself to forget about writing the Great American Novel and write a mystery novel. I gave myself an assignment: write 10 or more pages every day, whether I felt like it or not, and at the end of 3o days I should have a mystery novel. I think it was well written. A New York agent liked it and had a few suggestions. I followed her advice and resubmitted it. Then she had a few more suggestions, and then a few more. However, I one told her that a few of the characters in the story were based on actual people, and they had read the manuscript and were happy to be in it. But I guess this may have worried her, as she dropped me. And I dropped further attempts to publish it. Later I thought what she wanted me to do was to write a number of other mysteries with the same "detective" character. However, my character was myself.

You see, the thesis of the novel was this: A murder of a TV art critic was discovered in an art galery during an exhibition of an artist's sculpture. This critic had given a thumbs down review or the art on display. So the main suspect was the artist whose work was criticized.

Another critic, the main character in my novel, who liked the work on display very much, thought the murder was "created" as a "work of art." At the time, there was a lot of art being made which was extensions of artists bodies. Some of it was almost self destructive. Thinking like an art historian, he thought if he could attribute the art to an particular artist, he could thereby identify the murderer.

Well, you see I was the art critic/sleuth. I wrote art criticism for major art journals for several decades. Almost all of my published writings have been feature articles in Art International, artscanada, At New England and other art journals. I also wrote monographs and exhibition catalogs. My critical writings opened up opportunities to work in museums and art institutions, so as chief curator of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and subsequently director of other art galleries and venues, I continued to write about artists whose works I exhibited. So, you see, following the usual advice to young writers, when I wrote Murder and Create, I was writing "about what I knew."