FROM MY MOUTH TO YOUR EARS: An Occasional Newsletter
SPOOKEDcreated for the MassMouth Fundraiser of that title 10/2011
He called last night to remind me “I’m coming in at 9:30. I sent you my itinerary.” My son, coming home for a visit and, as usual, I am running around like a chicken without it’s head. (Of course, a chicken with it’s head isn’t the most rational thing on earth either.) Quickly, while running out, I check on the computer and see a Jet Blue flight from DC due in 12 minutes sooner than he told me. I note in the back of my brain that he doesn’t usually fly from that airport, but no time to think, he’s early, and i am perennially disorganized and late! So, I fly to the airport and then hit the breaks and cruise slooooowly by Gate C. Of course none of us may stop because we might be terrorists who want to detonate a self immolating bomb around all the sweet elders heading out to Florida for the winter. I cruise by again...no him. Must have been delayed. Why didn’t I bring the flight details? Am always spooked by my endless ability to ignore my own shortcomings. Disorganized disorganized disorganized! It wouldn’t be that hard to develop strategies to improve these behaviors, but do I do that? Be patient, I coach myself, and head towards purgatory to wait. The cell phone lot is a sea of gray, dotted by people encased in metal and glass, their faces caught in the odd half dead light of the particular electronic gadget they are bonded to. I am spooked that each of us wait in our individual vehicles, fired by finite fossil fuels that we go to war for, support hideous totalitarians for, destroy the ozone for, hoping all the while that our person, soon to arrive, is safe from the ramifications of our choices. Irony is the driving force of the universe, but it is spooky.
At least my birth son can take a flight. My adopted Pakistani son is afraid to get near an airplane. Teaching at a language school for the State Dept., he has heard too many horror stories about his countrymen’s attempts to fly. One was taken out of the line, held up 5 hours in an empty room, questioned by interrogators who assumed his criminality, and another cuffed and removed, no one one knew to where. So, Nashaud remains grounded in place spooked by air travel. Maybe he’ll take a bus up for Christmas. That’s an important time, when Muslims and Jews can go to Chinese restaurants and catch up on each other’s lives.
Well, hell, i’m spooked by air travel. It puts more CO2 and ozone depleting chemicals in the air than any other form of transportation, and when you do decide that you need to make a big carbon imprint, the whole thing is surreal. Lines for tickets, lines for baggage, lines to be groped by a TSA guard that you remember from high school as the kid who tortured small animals. Then there are endlessly flight delays due to ‘Weather.’ That’s all they tell you. “We are delayed because of a noun.” This summer, was delayed 2 hours. When it was time to board:
Would All Our Gold Passengers please step up for pre boarding
Now Our World Card Passengers
Now our Diamond Club Passengers
Now our Gold Card Passengers
Now Our First Class Passengers
Now our Red Carpet Passengers
Now out Preferred Passengers
Now our Remaining Precious Metals and Jewel Passengers
Now those with brats or limping geezers. Finally the rest of you.
How on earth have airlines talked people into believing that status is held by those who get to board first? The opportunity to imitate a sardine in a can for 30 extra minutes, can be yours! It’s spooky that we buy this.
We were shoehorned onto the plane, where we sat for another 2 hours and 47 minutes before the co-pilot’s shift timed out. Then the pilot’s shift timed out. Then they finally unloaded us back at our city of origins, and announced that the flight had been canceled. A man, hauling his briefcase off behind me, ventured, ‘Seems like a lot of heavy rain lately.” I am spooked by his ignorance. Why yes you moron, that’s what happens when the way you live causes mountain peaks and ice caps to melt. Matter cannot be created or destroyed and so now we get it all in liquid form! Two days ago, at the end of Oct. the state of Connecticut was devastated by a snow storm, over 18 inches and 3 deaths. Tell me this has nothing to do with how we are treating our world!
I am spooked by a major political movement that claims this is not so, that the weather is a natural undulation of the earth, a cycle. I am spooked by people who actually go to the polls and vote against their own self interest. Why would someone who is making 34,000 dollars a year, has 4 kids, 3 ankles, and type 2 diabetes not be favor of public health care? Do they like the idea of an early death? The Boston Globe the other day had an article on the front page “British Health System Denies Life Saving Drug” Yeehaa, you’re supposed to think, ‘ain’t I happy to be an American where we don’t have that commie single payer health care system. I can buy any medicine or medical care I want. Go ahead Brits, you can kill people in the name of national health, not us Americans.’ At the bottom of the article were the facts that the drug cost in the quadruple digits and will lengthen your life, with this particular disease it addresses, 4 months.
Where is the kid? After leaving a 4th voice messages I revisit the morning, and come to a pathetic conclusion. Why would he miss a day of work? Why wasn’t there a 9:30 arrival on the Jet Blue site from the airport he likes to fly from? Why didn’t I read the itinerary carefully? He was due in that 9:30 PM. I pull out of purgatory. With my tailpipe between my legs I put more exhaust and carbon into the air and as I drive home, I am spooked, spooked big time. I have seen the enemy and it is me.
My Dinner With Collaborators
If we could but walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, then our feet would hurt! Possibly that is why so few of us do it.
An old and dear friend, who has left this country to return to the nation of her birth, came to visit the US. She had no means of transportation and was staying with her very old friends from the town she had lived in. They were Estonian by birth, but both had eventually found their ways here and made good lives for themselves with careers, children, and grandchildren and a peace of mind that was evident in their warm reception and graciousness. As our visit progressed they invited me to stay for diner and told a very funny story about the time their home was robbed. The Estonian flag, a large one, had been displayed over their stairwell and the robbers found it so attractive, they took it. Actually, they found it so attractive that they hung it in their apartment. Then the police came with a very loosely connected query as to their whereabouts on the night of the robbery and saw the flag. The rest is litigable history, and the nice folks got their flag back.
They are both in their late 80's and had many stories to tell, so I asked them about their war experience and how they met. The gentleman told about how in '44 they knew the Russians were coming close. They were terrified of how uncivilized and brutal they were. “We knew the many horrors they had inflicted on the populations they had invaded.” Evidently many Estonians ran for protection to Germany. These two, still unknown to one another were among them them.
I am sitting across the table, enjoying their salad and bread, and find that my free hand is digging rivulets into the underside of the table. Can you imagine how this already feels oxymoronic; Germany offering safety in 1944. By this time, for the most part, my tribe had been rounded up, transported, and incinerated by this same protective authority. Their faces did not reflect one ounce of the pain or irony I was feeling. I asked if they weren’t afraid of allied bombings and he explained “Oh no, we knew they would go after the big fish in the cities and we found work in the countryside.”
After the war, knowing that this part of the world was irrevocably scarred and searching for a future he made his way to to South Africa. “Really” he said with quiet authority, “It was difficult for me there because I was so used to order and a respect for the law.” By this time I am gnawing at the edge of the table. He went on to talk about how much better life had been in South Africa during apartheid. “It was ‘safer’ and more ‘orderly’ under white leadership. Plus, I feel that even the blacks and coloreds were happier knowing their roles in the society. Now it is chaos.” He had lived on a farm and told of how the black farm workers lived in their own huts and area of the farm. He explained that the men would save and save their pennies until they could buy a cow because that was the bride price then. The men would then accumulate a few wives and sit about all day smoking and chatting with other men, while the women worked, and at night “they made these charming stringed instruments from cans and sang happily.” I started developing a tick in my left eye, and my shoulders were beginning spasm.
This man was not ‘evil.’ He had not designed these worlds, but simply responded to them from the shoes he was born to. That’s what part of me kept saying while the other part wanted to leap up and scratch out his eyes. This act would not have changed his thinking about anything except inviting strangers to eat at his table.
I made up any number of endings to this very authentic experience. Many I concocted to give it meaning, or a lesson that might resonate for all of us in a world where tolerance and love must trump fear and bias. Everyone of them felt like what they were, concocted. All I know is that 2 human beings were sharing the same air, the same meal, the same table and yet our understandings of this world had little in common. I know it is as useless for me to hate him as it is for him to objectify South Africans and Russians. How on earth do we touch each other?
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Technology and Connectiveness
ARG! You know that you are over 50 when the opposable thumbs, that supposedly sets us in a more elevated hierarchical position from other mammals, simply refuse to text message. How hard can it be? Teenagers do it at lightening speed. I run a program for teens in my home town and about two years ago they simply stopped responding to e-mail. Those who understand the changing tides of communication have informed me that if i wanted them to pay attention to announcements or missives, they would have to be ‘texted.’ Given that I have to hit a tiny button, smaller than my finger tip, 4 times to get the letter ‘T,’ it would be more efficient to walk the half mile to the kid’s home!
My step son is a hip hop producer and musician known as Memory Man. He made a new mix tape to sit beneath the rap on a disk called Cuban Revolution (If you need to ask, you are over 50). In a popular Hip Hop Blog that reviews new works the writer said:
“The responsible party is, of course, Memory Man whose Cuban Revolution tape is easily one of the hottest releases to drop in the last … 18 hours or so.”
Yes, my darlings, the last 18 hours! 18 Hours! Our Andy Warhol moments of fame are getting narrower and narrower. Actually, the kid is doing well as I believe that Andy Warhol only anticipated 15 minutes of fame for any ordinary citizen. What is clear though is that to remain competitive in this world you’d have to be a hurricane of creativity and production. I’m dizzy thinking about it, but know that to remain relevant the language must be learned.
I asked a cyber communications maven to come over and usher me, kicking and screaming, into this new terrain. She talked about the need for a constant presence and how having a blog would represent my thoughts, interests, and knowledge, and make me more available to enter into cyber conversations about these passions. Also, how can people avail themselves of your work, if they don’t know about it? Get yourself out there. This makes complete sense, but on the other hand if everyone is writing a blog, who has time to read them? She said this was not the point, the point is to skim, see where your interests intersect and create a communication around shared interests and endeavors. She then dragged me (in cyber terms of course) to a gmail site where one can start a blog for free, brought up blog page models on the screen and said ‘choose one.’ Fast as lightening she showed me how to format, transfer pictures, add links, insisted that I add a short poem, composed on the spot,
“It stinks” I observed.
“Doesn’t matter” she responded, “Let’s just get it out there.”
She proceeded to put it on the blog. Then she rode off into the sunset, checking her e-mails on her blackberry, and saying:
“My work here is done!”
Four days later,:
-I can’t figure out how to get to the blog
- Don’t remember how to import video or pictures
- Am humiliated by offering bad poetry to the world
- Question the fact that I have anything on earth that wouldn’t require a year of mental composting before it had enough sense or meaning in it to make it worth sharing with folks
-Finally, I don’t enjoy sitting at the screen.
The garden, the gym, the kitchen, the family, the stories all call to me with much more enticing entreaties. So, I will become marginalized in a field where I excel. That’s real, not cyber life.
Going to The Tea Party
The Kid (my son who has moved to work in DC) and I were headed towards the Native American Museum on a breathtakingly beautiful Saturday in Sept. last year when we heard the hue and cry of 40,000 people in complete unanimity. It sounded like nothing of the demonstrations of my youth where the anarchists congregated in one area, and the social-democrats in another, the communist youth league in another, and the union folks in yet another. All of them sort of.......kind of....maybe, agreeing on the general principal of the gathering, but none completely in simpatico with one another’s visions or methods of reaching them. What we were hearing was a unified force. The Kid and I looked at each and beamed "Demonstration! Yippee! Let's see what's happening." Our antennae began to tingle as the number of "Don't Tread on Me" flags increased. Then we crested a hill and fell into a hushed silence. In a city where 80% of the population is represented by people of color, not one of them was among this mass of 40,000 or so.
“Ma” said the kid evenly “This is not our demonstration.”
“But honey” I offered “Don’t you want to know who these people are? Where they come from? What do they want?”
The kid looks at me leerily. We have always been different in this way.
I am a counter-phobic, always walking squarely into the middle of my fears.
He is cautious, always has been.
“Oh come on” I encourage. “just a few minutes, to find out what they are about.”
“Ma, don’t get us killed, OK!”
OK, so I have a bad habit of alienating people. There was the time the radio talk show host in Johnson City was so offended by the politics of a story I told that called President Bush to task for everything from destroying education with The No Child Left Behind Act, to reintroducing hundreds of dangerous carcinogens to the environment, that he called the National Endowment for Arts, The TN Endowment for the Arts, the hosting organization and wrote to all the local papers, making sure I didn’t work in that town for the next five years. The kid will often call before a big gig and sweetly remind me “Ma, don’t piss anyone off.”
I gently approached one protester, admitted ignorance of the gathering and asked what had brought her there on this lovely day.
"Haven't you heard of the Tea Party?" she asked, clearly surprised by my ignorance.
"Oh, of course I have. That’s who you are. (I tried lightheartedness.) Not throwing tea into the harbor to protest taxes are you?”
"Well" she replied proudly "that's what we're doing. We're here to protest Obama's healthcare plan. It will tax us to death, and i don’t see why I should have to pay for illegal immigrants to get health care!"
The kid (standing at 6’ 3” with shoulders like an iron worker) gently touches my arm.
Ms Self Righteous sucks in her breath, smiles, and thanks the nice lady for her explanation. It is, after all, a fair use of their first amendment right to be here loudly proclaiming their beliefs.
“Ma, we really should get out of here.”
Having spent 4 years as a Marine in Iraq, the kid knows a combat situation when he sees one, but I am not ready to leave hostile territory. I want to collect intelligence.
Then we started reading the signs. Many of them had almost funny misspellings,:
Get a Brain Morans
Feedom Doesn’t Come Free
English is our language No Excetions Learn It
Stop Waisting my hard earned Tax Money
Respect Are country speak english
Youth in Asia will kill your Grandma
Sociazed health care equals death of choice
Then we got it that much of the sentiment had nothing to do with healthcare. OBAMA HALF BREED MUSLIN (that was the spelling)
TOO MUCH WATERMELON IN THE WHITE HOUSE
LIBERAL FASCISM ( a creative turn of phrase)
WE NEED TAR AND FEATHERS
Obama's image screened into a picture of Hitler
Obama's image screened onto a dope smoking Rastafarion (sp?)
A picture of a tea bag and a picture of a pitcher of kool aid.
When I asked the sign holder what it meant, he asked his mother and she told me it was a reference to all those people who killed themselves in Johannesburg! I think she meant all the Jim Jones followers in Guyana who killed themselves and that this was somehow a clever association with the ‘death panels’ that some one at FOX conjured up as being a logical result of a public health option.
The creepiest sign read:
BURY OBAMA WITH KENNEDY
These folks were afraid, and the healthcare issue was a lightening rod to gather them.
The kid gave me a sidelong glance. He knows his mother. "MA, we need to get out of here."
“Honey, we need to talk to these folks and understand their reasoning.”
“Ma” his voice edging above a whisper “No! We need to get out of here. Have you noticed that we ARE the ethnic diversity at this thing. Let’s go!”
A speaker was enthralling the crowd:
“I am a man of God. (cheers) I have been a man of god for 40 year. (more cheers) I have given my life to God, and this i can tell you....”
And the spirit takes me. I cannot control myself and i call out loudly in the same cadence as the speaker “And God doesn’t want poor people to have health care.”
With this, the kid literally lifts me off my feet and sets me in the opposite direction, puts his big arm around my shoulder and gently, but with no room to brook protest, ushers me off towards the museum.
“Ma, honest to G-d, you are going to get us killed some day.”
News From My World of Storytelling:
THAT FADING SCENT: A Seditious Comedy About Women and Aging is now available on DVD. If you haven’t gotten to a show and are a woman 45-65, or lovingly in relationship with one, buy it! You can drop me a note with your address or order it through the website on products page:
http://www.storiesalive.com/orderform.html
I WON!
Receiving an award is lovely, but winning a competitive contest is a complete rush of adrenaline.
MASS MOUTH is a wonderful new organization dedicated to bringing storytelling into the sunlight, zipping it through every portal in the cyber sphere, and insinuating it into everything from community arts celebrations to subway tunnels. They sponsored a year long series of story slams at 'hip' Boston area locations ranging from Ryles Jazz Club to Kennedy's Midtown. As a guest judge at one of the first slams, the energy that the time constraint (5 minutes), slam theme (the story had to reflect the theme), and (yes, it's true) competition, infused into the proceedings leant a blast of electricity to the entire affair. The MASS MOUTH organizers, Norah Dooley, Andrea Lovett, Doria Hughes, and Stu Mendelson are brilliant entrepreneurs for the art. It was so much fun that i entered one of the local slams and as the 'runner up' won a spot at the big MOUTH OFF. Here is the best news, these folks filled the Boston Public Library's Rabb Auditorium with over 350 people and most of them were completely new to storytelling! They engaged 'celebrity' judges including a Boston Globe columnist, NPR producers, professor of narrative studies and our own Jay O'Callahan. They offered a great first prize:
1 week at a vacation house in Tuscany Italy and $200 in cash for play and cleaning costs covered!
The last bit of nice news is that out of the 21 finalists, I won. There are few things more exciting than hearing your name associated with 1st place, unless it's a trial and you just eluded jail time.
If you'd like to see a video of the story (we had to melt it down to 4 minutes, with a 30 second grace period), here it is. Homecoming is the story of waiting for my son to emerge from a plane that brought him home from combat duty in Iraq. Thank-you MASS MOUTH for ushering in a new revitalized style of storytelling. This would not have been created without you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOVgkVCQ2AQ
This Spring in Europe:(to the tune of LET IT SNOW)
The economy is frightful
We should all take barbital
Looking for a place to go
In Europe they have so little snow!
Am off in less than a month and what began as a single workshop for ESLA in Paris has blossomed into storytelling in two schools and two public performances in Finland (OK, lots of snow), training insurance industry executives in communication skills and helping them to identifying branding issues, as well as creating a story slam in Amsterdam, and then work in two schools, as well as the conference in Paris! When this is done, shall be meeting the husband, sister and her hubby and Laura Packer and Kevin Brooks, to avail ourselves of the Mass Mouth winnings in Tuscany. Yippee.
Check back here in six months for a full report.
A New Show:
Bittersweet Midnights; Women's Walks on the Dark Side
This storyteller scorches a path from local history and hysteria to contemporary hilarity and and hysterics as I explore the power of female hungers and relationships- both here and in the hereafter. From dances with ancient witches to the physic joys of window washing, this show echoes the howling season while it unpacks your funny-bone.
In the first act you walk with accused witch, Mammy Redd on Old Burial Hill and through the music of Betsy Rose and musicianship of Vince O’Donnell and Bill Smith, are transported to a time when the ocean’s healing power ruled the coast and the Calvinist’s caused havoc on the land. It provides a unique vantage point on the Salem Witch Trials and draws you into this old costal town where rum and cod were god.
The second act leaps to the lighter side of contemporary female appetites. HUNGRY, written after a weeklong Kripala workshop on eating disorders explores the only thing the class instructor did not touch. When we first entered the workshop space, the women (not a guy in the crowd) self selected space. The skinnies (anorexics and bulemics) sat on one side of the room and the fatties (compulsive over eaters) on the other. We explored our real needs, how to discover and live with them, but we never did address our fears of one another. That is what Esther and Catherine must do in this tale that reflects so many women’s struggles around their bodies, self esteem, relationships, and simply being in this world.
The sublimated sexual passions of a middle aged Bevely Farms matron express themselves in the second tale, when her window washers show up.
The last story is about making peace with and helping my mother die. It’s very funny! Steve Allen said that pain + time=Comedy, and getting your mommy’s approval sometimes takes a lifetime. This show basically rounds up all the usual suspects that live in a woman's psyche!
The show had a 15 performance run at The Salem theatre Company and enjoyed these reviews:
A New Class: MAKING STORIES FROM YOUR LIFE
This February, 8 wonderful humans came to Marblehead and dedicated a weekend of their lives to exploring and creating stories born of their experiences. The time was used to explore various techniques for unearthing our experiences and reauthoring them so that they might not only have meaning for us, but find shape to speak to others. It was such an invigorating and healing time that i am planning to offer this class annually in the cold of Winter. Limited to 8 participants and including Friday diner and endless snacks (yes, i love to cook), it will run the first weekend in March 2012. There will be a page on my web site dedicated to it soon .... honest ....you got to believe me. Here is what folks had to say about their work here:
“We saw our skills and understanding develop over just one weekend in which we learned how to find and shape our own stories. I appreciate your grounded inspiration, your ability to help us find what was in us and to show us how to birth it. The shared humility before the grandeur of stories was precious to me.”
Brava!
Roberta Russell, Ph.D., LICSW
“Trust and risk and a damn good teacher pulls the best out of me. To get your story up and running you can work on it by yourself for a decade or take a weekend with Judith Black. Yeah, she’s that good. What Michaelangelo did with marble, Judith Black does with words.”
Tony Toledo Boff, storyteller
“My heart is full.”
Gwen Rosemond
Administrator, Salem State University
“You are a gem, every moment of the two and half day workshop was presented with enthusiasm, passion and compassion. It is Monday morning and I feel like a part of me was on vacation while other parts were living for themselves, for once! My heart, my spirit, my creativity and my desire to find out what else is out there for me are all satiated by the experience.”
Susan Fader
Business Owner, artist and author
“I have known Judith Black to be an amazing story teller, but had never realized what a great teacher she is. Having completed Stories From Life, I am ready to not only to continue working on the story I created at this intensive weekend but to begin creating more. I highly recommend this weekend workshop for anyone wanting to create their own stories.”
Susan Raskin Abrams, Maggid and former Children's Librarian