Warm Sunshine, Movies, Poems & Plays...

Spring is finally here in Vermont and I am so relieved to be able to walk outside in regular shoes and a light sweater! I can understand more and more how all of our grandparents could go to Florida each year to escape the winter. After 41+1/2 years of it, I am ready to go somewhere warm next February/March.

A few suggestions for amazing movies to see. Terri and I have spent a lot of time culling the shelves of our local Capital Video (and the lists of Netflix, too...shhh, don't tell Capital Video!) for compelling movies to watch. Our friends Maggie and David also give us choice ideas whenever they see something.

At the theaters
Horton Hears a Who! was actually done quite well. Our favorite character in the whole thing was Jo Jo and Jim Carey and Steve Carell were fantastic. But, alas, this is the only thing out right now that we've seen at the theaters.

On Video
"Feast of Love" with Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinear. Rent it. See it. Get a box of tissues and remember this movie was made from a novel by the same guy who wrote "The Hours" (which is also an intense and unconventional movie.)

"Things We Lost in the Fire" with Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro and directed by Susanne Bier. Wow. Riveting. Something you can watch even if you have several loved ones with addiction, and I think understandable if you don't. I wanted to smack Halle Berry's character about half way through. Stuck with it because I realized her character was so real I WANTED to smack her! I have to see EVERYTHING directed by this woman now! Unfortunately almost everything she's done is in Danish, so I'll have to find a foreign film section to see them.

OK - true to my word last blog posting, I have submitted two submissions of poetry so far this month. My goal is to put out there at least 5 submissions. Check out the two online lit mags I've posted to so far:

wicked alice poetry journal: http://www.sundress.net/wickedalice/

Stirring: a Literary Collection: http://www.sundress.net/stirring/index.html

I've also made myself sign up for the open poetry reading at Bear Pond Books on April 29th. I've skipped the last two years as I didn't feel I had anything new to read. I will this year. Work, work, work...

I wrote two short stories in March and am beginning to prepare to sit down for three days and write out my play "The Forensics of Sacrifice" which has been in process for almost a year now. The idea for this play came out of my reading two books. "Stiff" by Mary Roach, which chronicles what happens to donated bodies in our society. and a memoir of a survivor of "MBP" (see below.) called "Sickened" by Julie Gregory.

The story from "Stiff" that struck me was of a man who was studying how Christ died on the cross by having students come in and be hung on crosses. (though just with safe wrist cuffs, etc.) to see if Christ died of asphyxiation, exsanguination, etc. He was working one day when a girl came into his lab and asked if he would actually nail her to the cross. Ouch!

Then in "Sickened" by Julie Gregory, we read the chronicle of the life of a young girl who is abused by her mother through the abusive syndrome called "Munchausen by Proxy."

See: http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2822.asp?index=9834

When I heard of the girl who had asked to be nailed to the cross, I thought, "what would make a girl want to do such a thing?" When I read "Sickened" I thought, "perhaps this type of experience." The idea is that I want to write this play telling how a girl finds a way to cleanse herself of her abuser's touch through the ultimate moment of sacrifice...

I get to read things like "The History of Crucifixion" and "A forensic Study of Christ's Crucifixion" for this one, along with "Forensics for Dummies." I have to unfortunately return to all of my research "MBP" for this one, though. It's been too long since I read Julie Gregory's memoir (see http://www.enotalone.com/authors.php?aid=775)[though her personal site has been shut down recently.] and all of the other supporting material. The idea for the rewrite is coming together slowly this past month, though.

During all of that, I have begun to put together more concrete ideas for the staging of "Angel in the Fire" and will post some more thoughts on my "Angel..." blog in the coming week, but to give a tidbit on that, I think this piece needs to go multi-media to do all that I want it to. Stay tuned!

And finally, we've gotten in 7 or 8 scripts from local writers for the Vermont Playwrights Circle's summer reading series! Fabulous. The deadline is this Saturday, April 12th so I hope we get a couple more. Then I get to sit down and read them all and put together a few days of readings, collect actors, set up performances, make posters and programs! Woo hoo!

I'm still just a child with a pair of (digital) scissors and tape. Whether it's through fiction, poetry, collage, dance, plays or what have you, I just like to assemble things.

Readings, Writings & Partnership

Well Terri had her first reading of her very first play this past Saturday! Woo hoo! The reading went smoothly, the rewrites she did between rehearsals were small yet significantly improved the piece, and the audience and actors had nothing but glowing reviews for her. There was a lot of insightful feedback gathered during the talk back. Terri's already begun to tear the thing apart and add in needed scenes. I can see that the main structure will stay. She's so very good at knowing what needs to happen that I honestly am astonished, not because I ever doubted she had the skill, but because it is a sight to behold such bold talent in action.

The best part of this whole experience has been having other people hear it so they can join in with my chorus of praise. (partners often don't believe each other when told they are brilliant.)

The second best part is that we're both often found furiously pounding away at the keyboard together, writing, or rewriting, our masterpieces. It's great fun.

I have set my sights on performing "Angel in the Fire" this coming winter, but there are new plays coming off the presses soon, as well as two stories I completed in March. I am also considering submitting some poetry for publication again. (I must be a glutton for punishment to want to go that route again!) Or an eternal optimist.

Here's to creativity.

Spring Flu Season

So false alarm. turns out Doug just had his phone off. He called me back very chipper and feeling pretty much the same as he has been and said, "I found out I had left my phone off for the last few days. I was carrying it around with me, in my coat pocket, etc., but it wasn't on, so I have all these messages I'm returning now."

And I said, "phew."

Of course, soon after that both Terri and I came down with what my mother euphemistically calls "the creeping crud" and we've both been down for the count. Today is day 5. Day FIVE! of the flu.

On a good note I wrote a short story somewhere in those 5 days.

Hey, we take the good with the bad.

Now if I could only get the cats to stop asking to go out and in and out and in...

Ah, spring flu season!

Strange Relations

OK - I have to admit to being worried, and I know those who know me well will understand, but I still feel strange. My ex-husband's got Lymphoma. He's on treatment three - or is it four? and he's finally had to shave his head as he's been threatening and says he aches in his bones all the time. He's been putting on a brave front on his blog, but I see where he hasn't posted this week since his last Chemo treatment and so I called him on my lunch break. No answer.

I know he's probably at home feeling miserable and with the three dogs staring at him and wishing he'd pet them. I know he fell down and can't get up and doesn't have one of those little necklace thingys. I know he fell down a well and Lassy needs to go rescue him, I know I feel guilty because I'm his ex-wife and he should have someone with him right now and he's single and bored with his daily regiment and can't have folks over much due to his low immune system and...... I know. That's just dumb. We're divorced after all right?

But those of you who don't know us, won't realize that my partner Terri and I call Doug "Our Ex-Husband," and he and I paid like $76 bucks in some legal office with one legal guy and said, "divorce is done, you take the cat, I'll take that cooking pan, Phew! Let's go to lunch!" and he came to My and Terri's wedding and gifted us with a beautiful krokinole board he made (We'll need another post to explain krokinole, which I'm sure I'm mis-spelling) and he's one of my favorite people in the world and he deserves to have a partner with him at his side right now, hanging in there with him and... I know... I'm being dumb.

So, I'll just wait to hear from him when he's feeling better, 'cause I'm sure if I were home feeling crappy I wouldn't answer my phone either.

It's funny because most people who have only met me since I've lived in Montpelier have to hear that whole story with a puzzled look and they go "Oh! You were married before I didn't know that!" and it always makes me feel strange that folks don't GET that a woman who lives with and is in a committed relationship with a woman might actually have not been attacked, run over, molested, or raped by a zillion men to get there and/or just hate them out of some genetic requirement.

The fact is, I have been in love many times in my life. Never has the requirement been that the person had to be one gender or the other. So yes, Doug and I found eventually that though we cared about each other we just were miserable living together. We found after a short period of adjustment we could be friends, and it turned out to be the basis for why we weren't breaking up. I mean, we felt like "If I still like you I can't get a divorce 'cause we'll be required to hate each other..." Maybe that's the more idiotic idea, and we didn't make that one up.

I remember actually going to the therapist after my divorce - she was our couples therapist while we tried to work things out - and saying - "Man am I NORMAL? I'm happy. I'm not trying to break into my ex husband's house and steal the cat or the car or some conch shell we picked up on our honey moon and I'm not trailing him with a private eye or something..." and she said "Yeah. You're normal. Those other things people do are the abnormal behavior. That'll be $50." Hey, and I gladly paid that. Why not?

Relations are strange... But hey, Some day before I die I'll start to accept that actually, that fact is also the norm.

Vacation finally...

Well, I've finally made it to a week of vacation in March. Very nice. Where am I going did you say? My favorite vacation plans... nowhere...!

So now I get to settle in and rest & relax. One of the biggest things I've been looking forward to on this vacation is a chance to do some writing. I've done so little over the last month or two.

Just a quick report on how the panel went last Saturday. It was marvelous! A lot of work, but it was really worth it to be able to be in a room full of a dozen or more playwrights. To quote Sarah Brock, (who wrote an amazing play about 5 medieval women trying to keep their castle after the Lord dies called "Twist in the Rising") "It's good to be in a room full of people who don't think I'm crazy when I say I hear voices in my head."

The picture above is a shot of some of us speaking on the panel (From the left, Jeanne Beckwith, Sarah Brock, Dana Yeaton, Monica Callan, and James Lantz) - taken by a lovely friend of mine who agreed last minute to take the photos while I stood up and jibber jabbered - Thanks Mary Beth!!!

So far this past few days leading up to vacation I've created some lovely sheets on the panel which I hope to post at the vermontplaywrightscircle.org/ site soon - and I've started a short story which is actually a full blown fantasy based on some words from an exercise that the folks in my fiction writing group do once or twice a year. The exercise is called "Short Story in a Week." and is just that. A list of words is generated and everyone has to write a story using those words in the tense they are giving in.

Not sure what I'll call this yet as the ending's not written yet, but here's a sampling of the opening. (typos & all as you're not supposed to edit during this exercise...)

First, the words given: bray, pendulum, elixir, zealot, apse

Now the opening of the story:

"Start here…" the label on the map said. A drunken arrow lead from the word 'here' across the parchment and down the right side of the map to an almost indecipherable phrase – which had clearly been written by the same hand that drew the arrow – "Pendulum Fault." Alara smiled and sat down at her rickety desk to examine the map more closely. The fire crackled in the overlarge fireplace.

There was nothing she liked better then a mystery, and this map was proving to be just that. Shadows danced on the wall in the dim winter afternoon. Her sister huddled by the warmth of the fire in her gray traveling robes, which she hadn't even taken the time to change out of upon her return home. The drunken line ran from the Gerin Mountains far in the north down through the kingdom of Olikuma and finally to the sea. Through the thin cut window of the castle, a weak afternoon light tried to reach the table, to no avail. Alara moved the lamp closer to the map. Her sister had brought the map back from the Gerin Mountain Monastery where she had spent the past three turnings of the years as an initiate. She had procured the map from the Matron of Initiates, what was her name? Matra Inisthulen. That was it. How long had it sat on some dusty shelf waiting to be handed over to Alara's family?

"And this Matra was clear you were to keep the map a secret from Father and Bonin?" Alara looked up at her sister, who seemed to have blended into the gray rock of the fireplace where she huddled on a low stool.

"The Matra said, 'we have awaited you many generations, Child,' as she handed this to me. The monks were all out in the courtyard with Brother and Father. It seemed to me this map was not meant for the eyes of the men in our family." Ri rubbed her hands together to warm them then shrugged at Alara, "I got a sense of it, anyway, when she slammed the drawer shut as the door to her chambers opened. So I shoved it quickly into my robes and left to join Father and Bonin in the courtyard."



"'Start here…,' seems a bit puerile, don't you think?" Alara ran a gloved hand over the map. She had been out Falconing before the royal entourage arrived. The leather glove was thick. She couldn't feel a thing through it. She took it off and repeated the gesture. "Ahha…" She laughed. "Look," She said. She lifted the map and turned toward the shifting firelight. "Here at the center, embedded in the map, look here."



"What? What could possibly be fit inside of a map? It is only parchment isn't it, I – Oh…" Ri had come over to Alara and placed her hand on the map at center. Alara nodded.



"You feel it? See?" Alara stepped forward a bit so that the map came away from Ri's hand. In the firelight, in the faintest of shadows, the firelight illuminated a small wisp of an object. It could have been a hair or two caught and dried in the ink, or the spine of a feather if one did not know what to look for, but both Ri and Alara had seen such objects before.



"Dragon's breath!" Ri whispered.



***OK - That's all you get so far***

Angels and Mothers...

OK - So I'm thinking more and more about my piece "Angel in the Fire" as of late. Below is an excerpt of one scene. Emily is the grandmother, Halle (short for Hallelujah) is the mother. Claire is the daughter. Three generations, two different stories. They are woven together as our memories of life, reactions to moments, and relationships with our mothers and grandmothers most always are. Do they work, evoke something when you read them...?

CLAIRE
The moon blocks out the sun today.
For a brief moment, night at noon.
I am eight.
The cement steps
on our stoop have
a hole beneath them.
Bees dip and fly
silently between my legs,
waiting for me to move.

HALLE
We steered clear of that field
mostly.
The bull hunched like a tank,
afternoons.
The sun was down before I knew it,
the rock getting cold
beneath me.

EMILY
When your sister came home
alone, I wanted time
to deal with her.
First, we got that bull
back in his pen,
then I turned to her,
a good switch from the elm
in my hand.

CLAIRE
You came and picked me up in the dark
And we watched the moon do-si-do with the sun.

HALLE and EMILY
And when I came and picked you up

HALLE
from the stoop,
visions of old apocalyptic stories
fresh on my mind,

ALL THREE TOGETHER
The sound of the bull
In the field across the way
Startled me

HALLE and EMILY//CLAIRE
And I took you inside. //And you took me inside.

Twenty Days After...

Yes, it sounds like a scarey film! But it's just how long it's been between posts. It's another snowy day today. Spring seems infinitely far away, and this weekend is the VATTA (That's the Vermont Assocation of Theater and Theater Artists to you!) Town Meeting on "Staging Original Works in Vermont." I'll be co-facilitating with Dana Yeaton. There'll be so many cool folks there that you should come too!

WHAT:Theatre Town Meeting

WHEN:Saturday, March 1st from 4:30 – 6:00 pm

WHERE:McCarthy Arts Center, Saint Michael's College, Colchester,Vermont

WHO:The Vermont Association of Theaters and Theater Artists, (VATTA) in conjunction with the Vermont Playwrights Circle

PRICE:$7 Donations at the door*

*Artists participating in VATTA's Statewide Auditions and Networking Event admitted for free.

DETAILS:
Despite tighter financial times, arts organizations in Vermont remain committed to staging original works written by local authors and – more and more – artists are taking production into their own hands. Their can-do attitude, spit and vinegar, and moxie have spawned an innumerable number of original artistic projects over the past few years. What does it take to mount an original production? How much risk does an individual artist or arts organizations take in mounting a piece by an unknown artist rather than staging a classic/known piece? How rewarding is it to see a piece rise to its feet for the first time? Join us for a brief presentation of two short original works by local artists (TBA) followed by a community discussion on the risks and rewards of staging original theater works in Vermont.

The discussion will be co-facilitated by local writers Dana Yeaton of Middlebury College and Kim Ward of The Vermont Playwrights Circle. Speakers will include the following local authors: Jeanne Beckwith, Sarah Dawson Brock, David Budbill, Maura Campbell, Monica Callan, Marisa Krauss, James Lantz, Kim Ward, and Dana Yeaton.

Along with playwrights, several local organizations committed to staging original works in Vermont will be present, including Lost Nation Theater, Moxie Productions, The Parish Players, The Valley Players, The Vermont Playwrights Circle.

For more information, or to RSVP for the Theater Town Meeting
(not required) call: 802-229-0112 or Email VTPCirc@yahoo.com

For information on The 20th Annual Statewide Auditions and Networking Event from 9:30am-3:30pm, please contact Veronica Lopez, VATTA Coordinator at 802-862-2287 or email catalyst@gmavt.net