Oopsie!

I saw Frank Zappa in concert in Sydney in 1971. It was very strange. A good friend of mine, Norman, bought up a whole row of tickets about six rows back from the stage and gave them out to all his friends. I was given two.

The night of the concert, I stopped at Tummie's, my favorite bar and restaurant, for a drink or two before going. I was hoping to see a chick I knew to invite her to the concert. No luck, but a waitress in the bar introduced me to a pregnant girl, saying that she had been recently dumped by her boyfriend and might appreciate the attention and the diversion to break her out of her depression. What the heck! So I agreed, asked her and she accepted.

I got to know her a little during the drive to the concert and decided I quite liked her even to the point of asking her out for a later date. We arrived at the concert a little late. The only remaining seats in our row were between Norman and his sister, Diane. I sat next to Norman, my date sat next to Diane. I was really enjoying the show but every time I checked on her, she seemed tense. When intermission came, she asked me to take her home. I was seriously disappointed but did as she requested.

After a long silence, she finally told me why she wanted to leave. It turned out that Norman's sister, Diane, was the girl her ex had left her for and her ex was sitting on the other side of her.

Way to go, Daniels! Lets just divert this damsel in distress from her depression and make a good impression in the process!

Need I say I never saw her again? I never got to see Zapp again either.

Recently, in the comments to the Rex Parker does the NY times crossword puzzle blog, someone mentioned the wooden acting in the library scene in Gone With the Wind. That produced a bevy of comments. Another person speculated that I might have some thoughts on that subject. As it happens . . .

When I used to work the Southern California Renaissance Faire™, at one point I became interested in  stage acting and got involved with a group called A Crye of Players. That got me looking closely at the way Shakespear wrote his plays. It dawned on me that the Elizabethan actors employed what I would call the "Itsey Bitsey Spider" school of acting. Something more like Ian McNiece's form of oration as the News guy in the HBO series Rome. His gestures come, perhaps, from Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric. Ther is very little stage direction beyond entrances and exunts in Shakespear's plays.

In high school, my girlfriend and I did the "Good morrow Kate" scene from Taming of the Shrew. We were told to ham it up and have a lot of fun by the teacher. For the life of me, as a high school student, I couldn't figure out what she meant, Nothing was called for by the script. Well, maybe a little tongue waggling at the line: "What, with my tongue in your tail?" Which line had been omitted from our prepared script handed out by the school. We got a paperback copy of the play as I'd managed to lose mine so we added the line back and got the only laugh from the class (and a gasp from the teacher, Mrs. Schwimley) when we did the performance. I have seen that scene performed in many ways since, mostly as slapstick buffoonery which I just don't get. Sure, it makes the scene visually interesting but most of the grabbing, tugging and pulling just seem to run contrary to the expectations of a first meeting between a man and a woman.

From my RenFaire days I also knew that there was no TV or radio for entertainment and music, unless one made it for oneself, was difficult to come by. The main evening entertainment, say around the dinner table, was conversation, the wittier the better. In Shakespear, most of the really good action takes place off stage and is reported by actors dashing on stage. I submit, Shakespear's theater was primarily conversational. Really, really dull to a modern audience unless they are lovers of rhetoric, poetry and language generally.

I've heard actors swear that Hamlet's "Speak the speech, I pray you . . . " speech advocates something akin to Method Acting, I just don't buy it.

I'm not going to go into performance practices in the intervening years because I haven't studied them. I'm going to jump to moving pictures. Simply put, silent movies were all about pantomime. The characters couldn't talk so they had to express the dialogue through gesture and "body language". Not very convincing forms of acting though early audiences, being rather naive, ate it up. Perhaps the very best actors of that era were Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keeton with their deadpan performances.

With the advent of talkies, the overstated gestures and postures slowly melted away. Eventually, Konstantin Stanislavsky and his method turned up. The Actor's Studio, espousing Stanislavsky's teachings, soon followed. This gave actors the ability to try out new things without the pressure of commercial productions. Acting began slowly to improve but not every actor embraced the "Method".

I remember reading and article written by Richard Burton about his love for Elizabeth Taylor and how much he learned from her. During the filming of Cleopatra, Burton was being very much the stage actor. In scenes he played with Liz, he would think that she wasn't doing any acting at all and that the results weren't going to be very good. Later, watching the rushes, he felt she had blossomed. Eye movements and tiny ticks in closeups spoke volumes to him and he began tempering his acting accordingly.

Many actors had stage experience then, the early days of the talkies. Gone With the Wind was made in 1939, twelve years after the advent of the talkies and ten years before the creation of the Actor's Studio. It is no wonder that some of the acting was a bit wooden. It has taken many years for films to reach the present level of sophistication in acting. The actor's needed to learn and the directors too. The current crop of performers have an entirely different set of examples to draw from.

As Yoda might say, "There is no acting, only doing."

Australia, The BLT And Me

For a while in the early 1970s, I used to visit friends who lived in Forster on the coast of NSW about 200 miles north of Sydney. They had a private beach. They had free-range chickens. They had a couple of acres planted as a vegetable garden. It was a lovely place to be and they were lovely people to be with. Sometimes, it seemed like I was commuting between there and Sydney on weekends.

I recall one Sunday, when I was driving back down south, being rather hungry. There was a café I knew of on the way and I stopped there. I'd had a sudden craving for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, something I hadn't thought of in years but there it was, bright in my imagination. Of course it wasn't on the menu there or anywhere else I'd eaten in Australia. I'm not sure anyone had even thought of it. When the waitress asked me what I'd like, I asked if they could make a BLT. She, of course, had no idea what I meant so I explained and asked if she thought they could make one. I was very specific as I described it saying that all the details were important, especially that the small bone-like thing needed to be removed from the bacon and that the bacon needed to be over-cooked to the point of crispness. She went to the kitchen to ask if it could be done and returned to tell me that I'd have my sandwich shortly.

I don't remember what sort of lettuce they used but I suspect it was romain. The sandwich was very good, the bacon done just right so that it broke as I bit into it instead of having to tear it with my teeth which would have pulled the sandwich apart. Satisfied after my little lunch experiment, I headed back down the road.

That craving was one of those odd things I get from time to time where something will stick in my mind and will stay there until it's satisfied but then will not come up again for a long long time.

Some time later, a month or two maybe, I stopped at that café again to get a hamburger with no beetroot. As I looked over the menu, I was surprised to discover they had added "the BLT" with a nice description of "mayonnaise, crispy bacon, tomato, and lettuce on toast."

Now I wasn't the only American in Australia at the time, not by a long shot. I'm sure I wasn't the only Yank to have a nostalgic craving for a BLT. I'm not silly enough to think I introduced the BLT to Oz but I know for sure that I introduced it to one café along the highway between Forster and Sydney. When I returned to to Australia in 1989, I did notice the BLT on the menus of various places I ate the featured sandwiches.

Test number 2

Trying this out again.
This should be my cryptic crossword 007:

Puzzle test

Aww, Look . . .

After aborting a world wide jaunt with my grandfather in 1965, I returned to London where I stayed for a few months. I had barely enough money to survive though I did find a flat in Ladbroke Grove. It was on the first floor (that would be the second floor to Americans). My window opened onto the roof of the covered entryway to the building. I used to sit out there, watch the traffic go by and smile at the surprised faces of top-deck bus passengers as they noticed me.

I was nineteen years old and, as I said, money was short. Every few days I'd take the number 23 bus to the American Express in Haymarket to see if there was any money from home. On the way back, I'd walk up Regent street to the Boots Chemist and go upstairs to where they sold books. I'd browse the science fiction section and usually manage to pocket one or two (you do what you have to do). Then I'd walk to Oxford Street and catch the 23 back to my flat. The conductors on the busses were usually around my age. When asked for the fare, I'd often say, "Four pence," the cheapest fare there was. I didn't always feel that I could get away with that but usually it worked. Possibly the tacit fellowship of poor youths was responsible. Anyway, that ploy was taught me by students around my own age whom I'd met in Trafalgar Square, the same ones who helped me find my flat.

Arriving home, I'd put up my books and take my beer bottle, it held two pints and had a wooden plug with coarse screw threads, down to the pub around the corner and have it filled for less than two shillings. Then on to the fish and chip shop for my daily meal which I would drown in malt vinegar and cary home. If the day was reasonably fair or at least not rainy, I'd sit out on my "balcony" with my meal, my beer and my book.

Riding on the bus, I always wanted to sit on the top level at the front where I could see out the front windows. Failing that, I'd sit in the rear-most seat on the left at the back. There was a heater there that protruded from the wall of the bus which I'm sure was welcome in the dead of winter when it can be very cold in London. For some reason, that seat was almost always empty.

One particularly dreary, drizzly day, on my way home, I was sitting in the rear seat when two women came up the stairs and sat two rows in front of me. The were in the middle of a conversation about several of their friends, calling them names that implied that they were of less than pristine virtue. Their language was not exactly appropriate for family audiences either. It occurred to me that they had just come from a pub where they had had more than their share of beer. Abruptly, the woman sitting on the aisle said, "I want a wee." She stood up, moved back to the row of seats in front of me, hiked up her skirt and pulled down her panties and squatted, one hand on the back of the seat in front of her and on hand on the seat behind her saying, "I've got to have my wee." And she did. While she was draining herself she asked rather loudly, "Why is everybody looking out the windows?" and a moment later added, "It's raining outside, it's raining inside." None of the other passengers even stirred.

When she was finished, she stood up, pulled up her underwear and went back to where she had been sitting as if nothing had happened. When I looked down, I saw a rather large puddle surging back and forth with the movement of the bus. I put my feet up on the edge of the heater to keep them dry. A few minutes later, she looked back over the seats at me and said, "Aww, look. He's got his little shoes up!" Not long after that, they disembarked. The odor was beginning to be noticable and it was not long before I was the last passenger on the top deck. Finally, I had to go downstairs and sit on one of the sideways seats.

The conductor, who was a big burly West Indian, went up the stairs, and very quickly came back down. "Somebody's wet my bus!" I was grateful I was only  two stops away from home.

Sometimes, when I'm feeling useless and hopeless I need to remember that I've been places and done things. Maybe nothing great but at least I haven't simply sat and stared at walls. I've watched grass grow. I've watched other things grow too. I've grown my own herbs and tomatoes, I've grown corn and California poppies, tulips and hibiscus, lilies and peppers. Ok, I grew one ear of corn, the row didn't cross pollenate and I only had room for one row beside the house. I wouldn't call myself a gardener but I enjoyed myself.

I've always felt that I was oriented oddly, a rural-urbanite or perhaps an urban-ruralite. I've always felt pulled in opposite directions. When I've lived in the city, I longed for the country and vice versa. Maybe it's because I lived on a ranch between the ages of 18 months and four and a half. When I lived in London, I lost much of my American accent. When I lived in Australia, I lost more of it. Nevertheless, I wore an American flag on the left shoulder of my Belstaff motorcycle jacket. When I came back to the U. S. I put an Australian flag over it. I had to smirk at myself while I was doing that but I never wanted to forget that I'd been there for six years.

As a teen, I used to hike the Sierra Nevada with my grandfather. For days. We called it going back packing. We would walk from Lake Utica near Hwy. 49 down to Hwy. 108 then hitchhike down to the Family cabin in Pinecrest. Usually it was rented out so we'd camp in the public campground. I spent a good part of a lot of summers at Pinecrest. I've also hiked the Grand Canyon from the north rim to the south rim. I believe I've mentioned that here in an earlier post.

Camping was always a big part of my life. My first camping trip, again with my grandfather, happened when I was eleven. Somehow, he managed to convince the ranger in Berkeley's Tilden Park to let him camp in a eucalyptus grove that was basically only accessible by foot. It was along the road to a Nike missile base in the park which was closed to the public. If I remember rightly, it was a three mile walk from the ranger station to the campsite. Or maybe it just seemed three miles to my eleven year old legs. I never actually measured it. Over the years, as I used and visited that campsite, the walk just kept seeming to get shorter.

I've camped in the Australian outback. "Out the back of Bourke" is an expression that means in the middle of nowhere. I had to go to Bourke and "out the back." A friend of mine, Bill, and I drove out there for a long weekend jaunt. We had a good map and found reasonably good roads. at one point we found a spot, pulled off the road and just camped. No preparations at all, we just threw our sleeping bags on the ground and slept. The next day we continued up the road to a spot on the map that was marked "bore." I guess it was an artesian bore as what we found was a pipe maybe eight feet tall that curved around like a cane. On one side of the pipe was a faucet. When we turned it on, water gushed out. Except for a very small settlement we came to that day, we didn't see another person or vehicle along the fifty or sixty miles we covered "out the back of Bourke." At one point, the pasture land we were driving through turned into desert with very red sandy soil. I'd hear of the "red desert" but had no idea how red it was until I saw it for myself. Even then, I understood that this was only the fringe of desert that stretched three thousand miles across the continent. At one point we came to a fork in the road with a tree in the middle. A dead tree with gnarled branches reaching arthritically to the sky as if begging for rain. We were transfixed by the desolation. The sheer emptiness is devastating. I've experienced what I would call desert hypnosis quite a few times but that was the first. We kept saying that we had to go but kept finding reasons not to get started. I suspect that was the day I first fell in love with deserts.

I've done a lot of camping in my life. When I worked the Southern California Renaissance Faire there was Pig's Gulch, the campground for all the actors. I stayed there for several years or otherwise pitched a tent in various places around the fair site but that wasn't camping, that was sleeping in tents. I've stayed in a lot of public campgrounds where that was more like camping with campfires to cook on and so forth. I used to take my daughter camping when she was small. We would camp out at least one night over the Thanksgiving weekend, and then go for a longer trip into the desert during Christmas vacation. The nights were cold but the days were usually up into the eighties. It took more than a few trips for her to learn that it was smarter for her to stay in her sleeping bag where it was warm until I could get a fire going in the morning. "I know you're cold but I can't hug you and build a fire and make coffee at the same time."

My favorite camping was outside of National Forests and Parks, mostly on BLM land where the NPS restrictions didn't apply. Pull my jeep off the road, set up my tent, drag some stones together for a fire ring, find a dead shrub or two, some wood from a fallen joshua tree and build a fire. I always carried a camp stove of some sort, usually a backpacking sized one but I preferred to cook over the coals of a camp fire. Even with the jeep and a huge carrying capacity, it took me years to make the transition from "light" camping to "heavy" camping where I could carry a two burner Coleman stove, a Coleman lantern, a cast iron dutch oven and a comfy six man tent. The Coleman stove was perfect for making my morning espresso while I built the morning fire. Among other things, I used to bake soda bread in the dutch oven. The other thing about camping in the Bureau of Land Management wilderness is the lack of amenities. There are no toilets, and usually no water. You have to bring enough water for your needs and a shovel or trowel for digging toilet holes. Just outside of Joshua Tree National Forest, I was camping with a couple friends. When I was setting up my tent, I saw a spider come crawling out and thought that was trouble. next morning, there was a small bump on my foot with a red ring around it. Apparently it was a brown recluse and its bite wound up taking eleven weeks and a visit to the emergency room to heal.

One of my favorite places to camp was in Saline Valley. There are several hot springs there. There are privies there, just outhouses over holes in the ground with a coffee can filled with ashes by the door.  Over the years, regular visitors brought concrete,building supplies and other useful things to "improve" the springs and make them more amenable. The effect is similar to Aboriginal camps which were often set up like houses but without walls or roofs. The lower spring is very popular in the winter season while the upper spring is far less populous. In the summer, the lower spring is virtually uninhabited with the exception of Rich who lived there year round. The BLM limited a person's stay on BLM land to six months. For some reason they made an exception for Rich, eventually they made him the caretaker of the hot springs. Rich was quite a guy. Over the years I used to go to Saline Valley, he never forgot me and even remembered my name. One summer, I was in the spring with several other campers when there was a little rain shower. A wind blew up from the valley floor bringing a huge cloud of sand with it. we all ducked as low as we could in the water with our faces away from the wind. When it was over, Rich was chuckling but didn't say anything. About ten minutes later the wind reversed bringing all that sand back down toward the valley. That's when Rich told us why he'd chuckled.

I recently looked at a map of Death Valley which is now called a National Park and seems to have expanded to include Saline Valley. I guess that's a good idea, for the preservation of the area but I also mourn the loss of the freedom of the wilderness in the same way it makes me sad that if you want to hike in the National Forests in the Sierra Nevada you have to make a reservation and book in advance with the nearest ranger station.

I had intended to write about other things today but I got side tracked. That's why these are musings. Somewhere I have a to-do list of topics I plan to write about but somehow I can't seem to get to them. I guess they seem kind of like school assignments and I was ever a procrastinator when it came to writing papers for school. I have no idea if anyone reads these things or what they think about them. I kind of wish folks would leave a comment even if they think this is all drivel.

Synchronicity . . .

This morning, I found a link to this on FaceBook: The oldest footprints found in Europe. I'm not sure it supports or refutes my last post but it certainly is interesting. Ultimately it points out that we just don't know enough about how we came to be and, sadly, that we may never.