Ides to Ides

Game Expo 2012 Presentation Notes for "The Details Where Devils Dwell"

2012-01-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

As you can see from the Power Point slide up there, the title of my presentation is “The Details Where Devils Dwell.” This blog post is intended to fill in the details and notes I had around each slide and cover some of the tangents and anecdotal examples I threw out during the live show at the 2012 Game Expo.

Before I get into the meat of this, some hearty thanks are in order, so allow me to call out some folks critical to the success of this presentation now.

First of all I'd like to thank Dave Warfield for approaching me to speak at Game Expo, I feel very honored to be one of the presenters among such a cadre of caliber cohorts! Big shout out to all the folks that organized and ran the event, particularly Thuy Khuc who has the calmest demeanor during a tornado of activity I've ever seen.

Massive thanks to Christopher Molineux for coaching so well on how to speak to a subject I enjoy and bring an audience along for the ride.

Big burly thanks to Dan McBride, Ruth Spink, Anna Sloan, Stephanie Bachmann, and Paul Martin for supporting my involvement, allowing me to represent Slant Six Games during the Expo, and setting me up with both a coach and several media interviews. For my virgin effort as a presenter, this really turned out to me an amazing, albeit exhausting, adventure!

Last I'd like to thank all the folks that took time out of their own busy schedules to look at various forms of this presentation from inception to this incarnation. The end result would not be as succinct, palatable, refined, or chalk full of goodness without the feedback, ideas, opinions, and constructive criticisms you afforded. So stadium wave slow clap accolades for Kirsten Forbes, Tim Bennison, my amazing wife Lindz Williamson-Christy, and my confoundedly incredible colleagues Paige Meekison, Devon Detbrenner, Rebecca Lathangue, and Ben Hanke. A big chunk of what this presentation could be snapped into place while running the sea wall with the Slant6ers running consortium, so kudos to them too.

If at any point you read an acronym or expression that's unfamiliar or unclear, please don't hesitate to email me so that I can explain whatever jargon I might have slipped into this presentation without providing sufficient context or definition.

Allow me to quickly establish a bit of context. I’m a designer by trade, so if you’re hoping for deep insights about secondary lighting sources, you might be in the wrong room.

I'm a 16 or so year veteran of the industry, starting out at Dynamix in Eugene, Oregon working on Starsiege and Tribes 2 among other things. I started out as a texture artist and learned on the job how to build 3D models, BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) architectural constructs, HUD (Heads Up Display) iconography, pause menu graphics and information, dialogue writing, audio slicing and processing, and a bunch of other things that still help inform choices I make and sensibilities I have today.

I later worked for Radical as Lead Level Designer / Senior Designer for Scarface: The World is Yours, Crash of the Titans, and other projects and demos and pitches.

I've worked a brief stint as EA Black Box, another year with Next Level Games making the film tie-in merchandise game for the Captain America film.

Most recently I'm working as a Senior Designer for Slant Six Games, currently acting as Lead Campaign Designer for the Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City game. Have to say now that SSG is one of the best places I've ever had the good fortune to work. When looking for prospective employers, remember that it's not just about the money, or the brand name. It's about culture, experience, and being surrounded by people you're inspired by and feel you want to learn from. Anything else is just a gig, and without positive culture, can become a grind very quickly.

For the extent of this presentation, the sorts of details I’ll be talking about relate to Intellectual Properties, or IP for short. Every game represents an IP. We won’t be talking about original IP games much today, as creating original IP is a whole other Pandora's Box of demonic details to consider.

Today we’ll be chatting about designing and creating games from existing IP content; both designing for an additional installment to an existing game franchise, and converting a non-game IP like a film or comic book into something interactive and fun to play.

I aim to demonstrate how understanding the limitations of your IP can help you to get more rewarding designs and gameplay experiences out of it and I’ll share some of the hard knocks lessons I’ve learned working with IPs like Scarface, Crash Bandicoot, Resident Evil, and Captain America.

And the biggest lessons I’ve learned have been about the potential gold that awaits deep down in the details of every prospective IP you might encounter. The real trick sometimes is knowing where and how to dig in. That said, before you dig in and start getting creative, you need t sort out where the buck stops are, and that starts with identifying who owns and can ultimately answer for the IP.

You can waste a lot of time asking the wrong people for allowances or details. Determine who can ultimately say yes or no to design ideas, and get those questions in from of those people as quickly and concisely as possible.

Before we get to the fun use cases I’d like to be up front about the most important lessons I’ve learned when designing around an existing IP. The IP must be part of the Filter you use to judge the quality and relevance of any design you come up with for the Game. I’ll talk more about creating Filters in a bit. Most importantly you really must identify the constraints of your IP, and once you start digging in you’ll be surprised how many there can be; marketing, publisher, licensing, story cannon, actor contracts & likenesses, other merchandising rights, target audience, etc. We’ll discuss some examples I’ve worked with shortly.

You need to make time to understand your audience and appreciate their needs and expectations, no matter how flimsy or fickle those aspects might at first appear. While you can’t just cater to your IP’s existing diehard fans you also can’t ignore them. Likewise you also have to consider whether or not your IP is stale and if your game is the chance to breathe new life into the IP and create new fans.

You should want to consider what features are required as “price of entry” for your game’s genre, while you want to avoid simply “Feature Chasing” other games in a similar genre. Throwing in features just to be competitive that don’t directly relate to your IP will feel awkward and you’ll end up writing in plot lines to justify features your fans might not expect or want.

The important thing is that as part of understanding your prospective audience, you include the wants and needs of your games entire target audience, not just fans of the IP or just fans of a particular genre of game. By defining the breadth of your overall target audience you can better preserve the integrity of the IP you are trying to leverage and empower.

You might notice I didn’t call out Designers as your target demographic. For sure designers play games, a lot of them; for fun, for research, for competitor analysis, and hopefully for fun again. While you may earn kudos from designers for clever designs, if you lose your perspective audience by intimidating them with overwrought, convoluted designs for design’s sake, then you may have made a mistake.

Designs that serve to empower and enhance the narrative and integrity of the IP you’re representing will serve you far better than anything you implement simply to be clever or to show off your designerly prowess.

OK, so that was a deluge of "You should this, you better that..." instruction. Let's back up and break this down so that you can decide for yourself what you actually want to take away from this presentation. Cool?

At the core, we’re going to talk about creating games from established IPs, creativity within constraints, and investigate some tips and tricks for adding depth to your games what will translate to consumer satisfaction that further translates into better financial returns, which is usually the bottom line after all.

So I’d been with Radical a couple months as a designer, and we were working briefly on a pitch for an open world 50 Cent game, I’d gotten elbows deep into researching project housing in Queens and urban distribution models in Brooklyn when I was asked to come into my Producer’s office to spitball the idea of making a game out of the movie Scarface.

50 Cent had possibilities, and certainly had me in the right mental space, however Scarface certainly made more sense for our team as a sweeping, epic crime story that spoke to a fairly substantial demographic across 20 years worth of fans. Another studio went on the make a 50 Cent game and made some quick cash and a whopping 48% Metacritic. Key point though is that the games eventually made for 50 Cent understood their core demographic, and particularly the second one, were pretty fun to play without being big sprawling open world situations. The games focused on allowing players to be 50 Cent just as we came to focus our game around being Tony fucking Montana. In the second 50 Cent game a mechanic went in where players could purchase more weapons or buy better profanity. Which do you think players maxed out on first? Genius.

Back as Radical, the intense design session quickly resolved that Scarface made sense as an open world adventure, a laundry list of questions became immediately apparent. Tell the story of the film? Maybe a prequel? He dies at the end, doesn’t he? Maybe in the game he survives? Should we include other characters from the film? If so, which ones? Do we even let people play as Tony, or someone in his gang?

Already in research mode, I switched gears and began researching the world of Tony Montana. I started with the film, then soon dug into the time frame the film represented, the actual history of drug trafficking and distribution into the US through Miami at the time, and the growing trade through Mexico that came soon after. I read the DEA website’s massive library of history, learned about the cartel heroes and conflicts, and the history of drugs through the Caymans, Bahamas, Cuba as well apparently. I learned about Norman’s Cay and dozens of other tidbits that could be peppered throughout our game to add integrity and connect the fiction better to reality.

As we answered the questions about playing as Tony, and in what time frame respective to the film, I could then pull ideas and concepts from the film’s script, the film itself, and the time period the film is set in and topics the film touched to create locations, landmarks, characters, narrative options, and more. Essentially laying down the restraints of the who, when & where for Scarface the game we then had the restraints required to judge all of our future design decisions and maintain the continuity of the game.

A Golden Age comic book inspires a film that inspires a video game. Here is where research alone wouldn’t be enough. With over 70 years of history, Captain America became a real learning opportunity about constraints.

Basically, the game’s story would exist within a tiny bubble that was is a montage within the film to briefly explain the origins of Caps’ military career. Since the game wouldn’t be telling the story of the film, we then had the freedom to make up our own. Except, we couldn’t conflict with the reinvention aspects of the film IP that may or may not match with the comic books. Yet we wanted to include characters that were classic to the comic book version of the character but not necessarily included in the film.

Other examples of existing IP include game franchises, like Crash Bandicoot, originally established by Naughty Dog, and Resident Evil from Capcom. Working with IPs like this, you have to ask yourself, is this a Reboot or an Installment?

Crash Bandicoot has a lengthy track record of games, some great, some others not so great. Working with this IP meant trying to find ways to reinvigorate the brand, rekindle audience excitement without alienating long time fans. Something we’ve seen brands like Batman do repeatedly despite many flawed installments along the way.

With Crash the biggest obstacles for designing for it turned out to be the legacies of the brand itself, partially manifesting with publisher unwillingness to financially subsidize a full brand reboot and the development costs that would accompany such a bold move. So the games, despite the best efforts of the team to infuse new energy, mechanics, and aesthetic sensibilities, simply felt like more installments of a serial that had jumped the shark with a nuked fridge several dev cycles ago.

Resident Evil is a whole other thing.

Films, toys, comics, games, and a very rabid fan base.

Identifying the constraints of the franchise, the hero and villain characters, the history of events as they unfolded in 1998 in Raccoon City, Capcom’s expectations, and both shooter and survival horror genre enthusiast expectations would be pivotal to working out how to weave together designs for narrative and gameplay experiences that would satisfy the full breadth of our perspective audience.

I joined the project later on and had to ramp up quickly in the lore of the land, what constraints we faced, so that at this late stage every nudge or judgement call I make is best serving the quality of the product and the expectations of our target audiences while also remaining timely and in budget.

I’ve mentioned identifying the constraints of an IP previously, however let me get a little deeper into what that means.

An IP has a narrative side. Story, characters, locations, plot points, and established histories that you need to be aware of so that any conflict you introduce is deliberate and not a result of sloppy continuity.

I recommend calling these things out during your research into the IP. Wiki is a great place to start for a lot of better known IPs, though go to the source content as much as possible to be sure you’re acting on fact rather than opinion.

For Scarface we went through the script and film and film credits and listed every name dropped, every person referenced, every location visited, and every action in the film that could be turned into a possible gameplay mechanic or system. Distribution, staffing, property ownership, and money management quickly rose to the top of the list. The characters we’ll listed soon filled in the roster of bosses and mini-bosses we would eventually weave into the game’s story to contend with.

Further, though, we learned we needed to match key beats and locations. The mansion, the Babylon Club, an Frank’s Motors with the famous Hawaiian wallpaper for example. We could add to those to make them more gameplay friendly, sure, but the spaces had to be there, and had to have the integrity of those iconic locations in the film.

The product you intend to make has a bottom line as well, and that also provides constraints that will affect your design. Your budget, your engine, your staffing, your timeline all contribute to making your designer life miserable.

Once you recognize and all out your fiscal and technical constraints, you can better begin to make smarter choices about what baskets you want to put your eggs into. What features contribute most to the integrity and quality of your product? What designs would cost most to implement? Designers that lose sight of cost, resources, and schedule are designers that will run late, go over budget, and burn a lot of OT that probably could have been mitigated by better, more frugal preplanning.

The other aspect that needs to be considered is what else your project is being bundled with or tied into. The Captain America game, for all intents and purposes for Marvel’s marketing and merchandising group, is another toy on the shelf to cash in on when the film comes out. Scarface, on the other hand, had competitors’ marketing to worry about externally, while internally there was a push to cash in on the unexpected success of a deluxe DVD reissue of the film while also making deals with companies like Def Jam and Bodog for cross-marketing opportunities.

As I'll describe shortly with a Captain America example, you must define your allowable cannon. What parts of the IP can you use, will you use, and do you want to use?

Also, once you know what is viable for you to use, work out what isn’t. For Resident Evil we’re restricted to the timeframe and events from the games RE2 and 3. We’ve looked to the films for inspiration, like using shipping containers as zombie spawners ala the RE film in Vegas. However, we aren’t using any of the film characters per say, or narrative events, like all the Jill clones.

For Scarface, we pretty quickly established a need to use Tony Montana as a filter, both his moral code and his demonstrated behaviors from the film. Let Tony dance in Babylon Club? Well, he did that in the film, so ok! Let Tony kill a bus full of nuns and orphans? No can do, violates his moral code. Let Tony be a pimp? Nope, would be subjugating women, more or less violating his moral code. He can kill pimps though to “liberate” the ladies if he likes.

Our contribution to the Resident Evil behemoth has been to move the IP into 4 person cooperative shooter space. This has the advantage of bringing the IP to new fans while at the same time risks alienating fans of the most typical, slower moving classic RE horror games.

This is something that needs to remain firmly fixed in a designer’s mind when making choices about the experiences in the game, the narrative choices or collectables or combat or use of monsters or puzzles or timers or any number of other minute examples.

Classic RE games have a lot of puzzle aspects to them. Shooter games, by and large, don’t. Classic RE games have a lot of inventory management to them. Shooter games generally don’t. As our game is a sideways sequel that’s returning to classic events and affording some fresh perspectives on that timeline, we were able to sidestep puzzles and inventory management that might slow down the action and found other ways to appeal to classic fans through hero cameos and more extended interactions with keynote monster characters, particularly in the Versus four on four multi-player modes.

Had we been a direct sequel like RE5, I believe we would have been far more required to include puzzles and some degree of inventory management, simply to remain true to the established brand’s enumerated titles. Being a one-off does have certain advantages, streamlining you design agenda definitely being one of them.

Take the character Dum Dum as an use case for needing to define narrative and IP constraints up front. He’s in Captain America the Movie, and he’s from the comics. Therefore he should be easy to include in the design, right? No.

Dum Dum has a pretty rich history in the Marvel universe. He’s accompanied Nick Fury through WW2, the Cold War, and later into the SHIELD agency where he spent considerable time and resources chasing down Godzilla. Unfortunately none of this history lines up with Marvel’s reinvention of Nick Fury as played by Samuel L Jackson. In the comics, Dum Dum was part of the Howling Commandos along with Falsworth and Gabe, though Dum Dum was never a part of the Invaders, a group of superheroes comic book Captain America fought alongside that included forgotten greats like the unfortunately yellow suited Whizzer. In the movie, the Howling Commandos have been stripped of Nick Fury and been renamed The Invaders.

Confused yet? So were we.

Essentially, we were allowed to have Dum Dum in the game, however we weren't allowed to acknowledge his role in the Howling Commandos, friendship with Nick Fury, or have Godzilla show up as an Easter Egg, despite the relationship Dum Dum has to all those things in the greater comic book cannon. One one hand, as a designer, these constraints feel like missed opportunities, however on the other hand identifying these hard constraints helped ensure time didn't get wasted chasing designs the IP owners wouldn't go along with.

Through identifying these conflicts and from them resolving constraints that we would design within, we found ways to put characters and fact tidbits from the comics into the game without violating the continuity constraints we’d been given from Marvel.

One of the first things we needed to do on Scarface was determine what audience we were trying to reach. GTA fans, sure. GTA has paid homage the Scarface film enough through the years that the connection was self-evident.

But what does that mean? Urban youth?

Not exactly, that’s an aspect but doesn’t cover the market share. Urban culture. Broadening our target demographic to include fans of the sorts of things that reference the Scarface film suddenly gave us an initial idea of our target LCD.

From that we could investigate what appealed to that demographic. Brands, music, etc.

Our producers and the design team worked with Universal and Vivendi’s marketing groups to build relationships with other companies that were trying to speak to the same or similar audiences. Soon we had cross-promotional deals with Def Jam and Bodog, and worked with Def Jam to include new and catalogue tracks into our game’s music player and soundtrack.

When we showed the Scarface game to press and various handpicked folks behind closed doors at E3, I had my first real encounter with prospective players of our game.

Sure, I’d played against other players on line when I worked on Starsiege or Tribes 2, heard them on the chat headsets and all, but meeting people in person and shaking hands and seeing them physically react to the events on screen gave me far more insights into what worked (and what didn’t so much) with the game.

Focus testing is always a mixed bag for designers. No matter how unbiased and pure you try to make the focus tests, the minute folks are in a room playing a game together, they affect one another as much as the game affects them. If there were a way, I’d love to try focus testing games by showing up at people’s houses on the weekend with pizza and beer and watch them play a build of the game the way people likely will play the game once it’s gone to market.

So while you can define a target audience and use that to help steer your designs, you also need to watch people play your game and keep a sharp eye out for what they get excited about. With Scarface, it turned out for some people to just be hearing him talk to people, a good thing since his dialogue feature turned out to be a tremendous effort in time and technology. We’d commit to that choice because Tony Montana is so often quoted, how he says things as much as what he says. So we wrote unique dialogue for him for every character in the world, so that whenever he talked to anyone, he had new things to say, and they had new things to say back.

Establishing your constraints and defining filters should be a key part of your initial preproduction, though they may change or become better clarified throughout your production process. It’s a good idea to revisit your agenda and ensure you’re still on target regularly throughout production, that you can make nudges and course corrections and cut with the most relevant and realistic information in hand.

Once you know what you can and can’t do, and have filters for measuring how well designs can benefit or enhance your product, you’re more than halfway to knowing what your product’s pillars are. They’ll probably match you’re filters, basically.

For example, the key filter for design on Scarface was “Be Tony Fucking Montana”. Sorry to go blue, however that phrasing mattered, as Tony says a lot of off color commentary and we wanted to remind everyone on the team to keep that frame of mind when dealing with the IP.

Another filter for Scarface entailed defining what we were and were not. Initially I believe we were inclined to simply look at GTA and say, “OK, we’ll do all of that, and better.”

Meanwhile Rockstar is making their own next installment and saying the same thing. As are the fellas on True Crime and Godfather, etc.

On Scarface, we did a dense competitive analysis to help inform our assessment of where the average mean of our audience, essentially the lowest common denominator, stood. However, by looking at our game as being Tony Montana, rather than another installment of open world crime and driving, we realized we needed to look at the breadth of the market and consider any games focused on empowering a character the way we intended too. Strangely, Zelda: Wind Waker became one of our inspirations for the way they handled emergent gameplay events and world discovery; despite the fact that by and large I have deep misgivings about elves.

We did much better developing our IP’s unique identity once we changed our mindset and world view from being a killer of something else, which is just an imitation with more antagonistic wording, after all.

Every designer has styles of game mechanics and compulsion loops they like and would like to play. Not every mechanic works in every game setting. Not all players go for the same tried and true compulsion loops.

For example, I love collectables and had been playing mad numbers of hours in Bethesda’s Fallout games. So when given the opportunity to design collectables for Captain America, I went a bit overboard. Retrospect, maybe we didn’t need quite so many.

Pick mechanics and compulsion loops that best suit and empower your IP.

Collection mechanics might work for a lengthy RPG, however for a romp and stomp superhero game, maybe not so much, despite how much bonus content the collectables unlock.

Also, resist the temptation to pad out a design with a bunch of staple mechanics you know or like from other games. Instead, carefully pick and choose what best suits your IP and intended audience.

During preproduction, or any time I join a project mid-stream, I deep dive the IP like a tax audit to learn everything I can about the IP and all associated spin-offs, merchandise, inspirations for it and things it might have inspired. I read fan sites, wikis, and summaries of the comics or books if time prohibits reading all the actual content.

For Scarface I watched a slew of other Brian Depalma films to better appreciate his cinematic techniques and choices to help inform player camera choices. I had the soundtrack cycling on my iPod for weeks.

If set in a period, I research the period. If set in a town or country, I research the places and look for things I can use or extrapolate from. I deep soak the IP so that I can think from inside of it as I design. I take notes and make potential outlines and mind maps of prospective mission and goal interconnectivities.

I think about compulsion loops, and try to map items that repeatedly crop up in my research to compulsion loops or gameplay mechanics to give them context that will support and empower the IP through gameplay.

Even a linear game has choices and strategies. To better empower the idea try to afford players choices that have consequences that are meaningful to the story, either immediately or overall. Both if possible.

In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator explains beating writer’s block by staring at a brick wall and describing each brick left to right in turn, starting at the bottom of the wall and working your way up. Eventually you will have to find something about the details to write about or die of boredom.

Consider the constraints of a product to be the framing that wall of bricks is mounted too. Digging into the grout and divots of the bricks is where the details live and inspiration can spring forth from.

My presentation coach, Christopher Molineux, pointed out that you can dig into catch phrases and characterizations to understand a market, however you need to dig into the reality of your subject matter to understand your possibilities. Through defining your allowable realities you can give your designs integrity. And through knowing and understanding the realities informing your content, you can make smarter choices about what to use and what not to use.

And example of this would be our research of Miami during the 1980's, the landmarks and neighborhoods and ethnic diversity, the cultural history that makes the city so iconic. Of course the film had done that, and I certainly cataloged every location in the film and tried to identify what neighborhood or area those locations would have existed in. Some were easy, like South Beach. Others were more subjective, like the Babylon Club. We knew we didn't simple want to make a photocopy of Miami, extrude a Rand-McNally map and try to make game spaces out of that. The landscape and level design of the Miami we intended to present needed to serve the narrative of our game, and the gameplay of our game, while also capturing as accurately as possible the feeling and spirit of both the film and Miami through the lens of how Tony saw Miami, pelicans and all.

Better understanding the real Miami, and all the other spaces I researched like the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Cuba, Costa Rica, etc. helped me to make better choices for what locations to pay homage too versus neighborhoods or areas we could occlude since they wouldn't benefit the story or experience of the game. I do feel bad we didn't do more with the Everglades, though.

A Filter is a technique I learned from a GDC presentation about applying Broadway lighting practices to game lighting and thought that the notion could also be applied to design.

The idea for lighting is to create a framing image, a single picture that sums up the cumulative experience of the game to compare all lighting designs against. The picture could well be a collage of images or image fragments, but the end result had to stand up as something that remained evocative and meaningful when viewed directly.

For design, while images do help, I think the idea is a bit more conceptual. Create a filter using the research you’ve done and the constraints you’ve defined and the expectations you’ve established. Once you have this filter, thereafter push all designs through it to see if they pass.

If the designs support the IP’s narrative, don’t violate any constraints, and would appeal to at least the LCD target audience, then they will pass through the filter and can be developed and implemented into the game with a knowledge that at least conceptually they’ll add value and integrity to the product.

These are the questions you need to ask yourself as you set up filters.

And these are some more questions you should ask yourself as you set up filters.

An interesting thing about filters is that they also can be used to together, like a chain. For example, something might work great for the IP, and be awesome for combat, however when filtered through your vehicle system, might bring the whole show to a screeching halt.

A huge risk for gameplay design is building mechanics in a vacuum irrespective to one another. The end product will have players potentially able to utilize several or all those mechanics at once or against one another. I love emergence and affording the player tools for ingenuity; however mechanics not filtered against or through one another can easily break, impede, or ignore one another, and that makes an over all experience feel ragged and disjointed.

Using the massive pad of paper slung onto a wobbly easel and wielding a fat marker that smells vaguely of grape, I shall attempt to step through this process of design, for demonstration purposes only so please don’t try this at home as I am a trained professional.

For the live event, someone form the audience suggested Doctor Who. We ran with that and began identifying constraints. Who owns the IP? Which version of the Doctor would we use? Narrowing to Tom Baker, we then ask which sidekicks? Abilities? Use existing narrative threads and threats or come up with new ones? Classic villains or new ones? Locations? Can the players tell the Tardis where to go or is the adventure linear? Who is developing the game, what studio with what Technology?

Fun fact, in the Green Room I mentioned to Skyrim's Director of Design Bruce Nesmith that the audience expressed hope Bethesda might tackle the Doctor Who license someday. He leaned close and said he'd let me in on a secret: never happen. Oh well, a fan boy can dream, can't he?

Identify your constraints. Publisher, IP owner, licenses, actors, narrative, canon or not canon, engine, mechanics, timeline, budget, resources, target market(s), etc.

Allow those constraints to fence in your playground, put boards up to hold in the sand for your sandbox, and then get creative within those constraints!

Don’t facilitate self-indulgent design phone-ins. Really take time to understand the wants and needs of your perspective audience! Nurture your IP into the outstanding and unique experience it has the potential to be. Rather than feel blocked by constraints, work within them get creative and make better, smarter choices to benefit your product, turning towards integrity and focus over kitchen sink and feature chase.

IP should always be a key aspect of how you filter your design choices.

Work with your team, publishers, marketing group, and through establishing your target audience to establish a set of constraints to better scope and mitigate risks for your project.

Keep your player in mind at the end of the day. Will they enjoy the experience? Sounds simple, however this is an easy perspective to lose sight of when deep in the brambles of production, swimming through issues and implementations like a commando air-conditioning repairman from Brazil.

I really appreciate you’re letting me speak here today, and I hope you’ve gained some strategies for your next design masterpiece!

If you have questions or would like to discuss particulars that won't violate any of your NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreement) or mine, drop me a line at ichristy@slantsixgames.com

OK, so I am a week late with the blog, Sorry about that, things got busier at work than I expected and I wanted to do the presentation first before I commit to the content of the blog post. Hopefully the proverbial iron hasn't cooled off too much yet.

Kudos to Vancouver Film School for this snap of me in action, apparently teaching a favorite Hula move.

On This Voyage Together

2011-12-09T21:39:00.000-08:00

236

So I’ve never really told you how we met.

Really, let’s be honest, I’ve never really talked about the woman I’m married to at all. A lot of reasons for this, maybe some excuses, however I think as she faces another birthday like a runaway train, high time I did, no more reasons or excuses allowed.

What seems like eons ago now I secured a gig working for a fine video game development company called Radical, maybe you’ve heard of it. At the time the company had diverge their workforce into separate teams, and spun those teams in orbit around a technology team nucleus developing a proprietary engine that the various teams would both benefit from and contribute aspects too. I joined one team, second largest on site. The woman I’d eventually be betrothed to, well, she worked on the main stage, the big show; the team with the big project and bigger funding to prove it. As Ang Lee tried to turn Marvel’s Incredible Hulk into a gamma irradiated answer to Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, her team tried to turn a cartoon rail driving engine into a combat corridor conquest the likes of which the company had never previously seen.

I came aboard after a year out of game development, a year of film school lessons and hard knocks; twelve months of savings account draining unemployment in a country that would let me legally study, just not legally work until Radical took the bold leap and sponsored my sordid arse. During that year the game development landscape had shifted, as had my personal game playing practices. The market had shifted from PC to consoles, PS2 leading the charge, XBox making a solid foothold soon after. I left games for a year as PC games appeared to be teetering on the edge of extinction, and reentered during the veritable console renaissance of PS2, and XBox, with the so called Next Gen consoles looming on the distant horizon.

I reentered game development full of PC development philosophies and attitudes, and quickly found I had no idea what the hell was going on. Radical had a long history as a developer, largely console based, and largely sports title centric. Coming aboard onto the second largest team that intended to leverage the newly forming engine from the tech team downstairs to make a game bigger and more ambitious that Grand Theft Auto meant getting up to speed so fast liberal amounts of one part attitude two parts bullshit were required on regular basis. Not long after beginning my year off from game development I’d procured a PS2 with the sole intention of playing GTA 3 and GTA Vice City. Sure, I’d played Res Evil 2 and Wipeout and Tekken like mad with my roommates back in Eugene, but having played the top down GTA installments on PC, that IP (Intellectual Property) grabbed my scruff and needed scratching. Couple hundred hours of gameplay over the course of the following year, I entered Radical feeling certain I could, given a chance, fix everything broken or wrong with GTA for certain.

I’m explaining all of this to establish how alone and vulnerable I felt when I officially met Lindz the first time.

I had seen her around work, in the Great Room, had noted that she held power within what I considered the A Team, the Hulk team. I’d gone to the Hulk wrap party as arm candy for a Quebec weight lifter woman and seen Lindz clearly large and in charge at that event. I watched her more than I should have, enough for my diminutive, muscle bound friend to tell me Lindz’s name and ensure I wouldn’t be getting lucky with my bench pressing beauty that particular evening.

At the time I had little to no actual comprehension what that power Lindz weld with her team might actually be. Women in game development up to that point in my modest career had been administration or human resources or artists. I hadn’t met any women who produced, or designed, or programmed yet. Of course Radical changed my game development world view pretty quickly, thank goodness. At that point though I still lived in a tiny bubble as the only other designer on a project that had only just gone from being about star struck lovers on a crime streak to 50 Cent (for a month) to Tony Montana in Scarface. I felt overwhelmed, alone, and largely hell bound. Growing up half Catholic and half Presbyterian leads to a lot of melodramatic dispositions given half a chance.

So thanks to landing the Scarface license / IP, I received my first ever business trip down south to GDC (Game Developer’s Conference). A part of my duty as a representative of Radical at the conference involved stopping in at the recruiting booth to cover for the full time folks there, give them a break while talking to young hopefuls trying to get their foot across the threshold into the games industry. And so it was as I hung out at the recruiting booth talking to kids and leveraging my art background to intermittently review the occasional portfolio that I first spoke to Lindz. Actually spoke to her. What I said, or answered, because all I can remember is a crushing, roaring wall of sound, the sort that comes from stuffing your head inside of a seashell, so I have no idea who spoke first or about what, but I remember feeling like nothing I said or quipped impressed her whatsoever. Of course, she’ll tell you differently, that she made chit chat about the ladies going to the mall later, asking me if I’d like to come along. I don’t remember that, I mean, really? Those that know this monkey know full well a trip to the mall with the ladies is a bunch of bananas not to be refused. I think realistically we just probably glared at one another, circling the water bowl of complimentary Radical “More Cowbell” stickers, suspiciously mumbling vowels. Who knows?

A few months later Radical had a Town Hall. Now something you should understand about the video game industry is that there is a definite penchant for beer, or drinking in general, in the industry. Not irresponsible drinking, there are taxi vouchers always. Beer is the typical crowd pleaser, and every company I’ve worked for or have pals at has sponsored some sort of weekly, biweekly, monthly, and / or annual event that would make many a Brew Master nod appreciatively. EA called them Beer & Cakes. Next Level called them Beer & Tapas or something like that. Slant Six Games calles them Beer O’Clocks. Radical had them monthly, and called them Town Halls.

At Town Halls I quickly figured out that the best policy to ensure continued employment entailed never, ever talking to a woman after enjoying a tasty brown pop. Beer plus my acute degree of social inadequacy equates to HR complaints, so after a plastic cup brimming with complimentary Sun God or Black Raven Brew, I zipped lip and found some manly types to skulk around lest I risk blurting out something inappropriate to piss off the fairer gender in the workplace.

So of course, always one to break every rule I set for myself, I find myself after a Town Hall sitting down in the vacant seat next to Lindz’s desk on fine Friday evening, with two pints in hand fully intended for my own consumption though I did clue in enough to offer one to her for the hoped for refusal before consuming both myself. Call it liquid courage, call it foolhardy adventure, call it wuzzy if it helps you smile; what I know is that I sat in that chair like a suspect in a police station asking her questions about her game of WOW (World of Warcraft) as she played with her fellow A Team associates as though I had genuine Inquisitive Designer Must Know and Understand curiosity as a less that subtle pretense to asking her out on a date.

And somehow, instead of annoyance, I got explanations about the mechanics, about inter kingdom travel on flying ships, about familiars, inventory systems, the WOW answer to EBay, and a date on the following Friday. At the Locus on Main, a place I’d never heard of. And a place where she arrived wearing a hoodie with the hood up as though for fear of being recognized and I arrived feeling vaguely proud of myself for stopping home to brush my teeth before trudging up the hill along Main to the venue of the evening.

We talked a lot that night, perhaps screening, perhaps investigation, perhaps realizing mutual curiosity. Perhaps appreciating same.

We dated, we grew closer, and somewhere in there I realized I needed to grow up. We took some time off, I got some things out of my system. I realized I both needed to grow up and really, really missed being around Lindz.

And there is more to Lindz than simply her. With her comes her family and friends, and over the years they’ve become dear to me as well. She grew up an only child with another only child, a product of her parent’s best friends, Alex. Alex eventually married David, the man who’d be best man when I eventually married Lindz; as much because he chose to smile at me at a gas station on Main and 2^nd during the time Lindz and I were split up as anything, and there are a lot of things, I look up to the guy. What an honor to get to be his best man when he married Alex, get to make a speech that remains one of the most rehearsed pieces of prose I’ve ever attempted only to still have it evolve and become that much greater on the day.

With Lindz comes her parents, her wonderful parents, her Mom with all the stories of Newfoundland, and her Dad with a presence of a mountain on the horizon at dawn, with all his stories to tell, and the gold cufflinks he’s entrusted me with until he needs them again. And their friends, Alex’s parents, Peggy and Dave, and all our holiday traditions that Peggy calls the Turkey Club, when we all take station at a long table for Thanksgiving (the Canadian version in October) and Christmas (the Canadian version is still in December).

With Lindz comes her surrogate sisters, all five of them, some closer than others but all noteworthy and frankly intimidating. Closest to roost the real sisters Kim and Nichole, a wealth of shared history, various misadventures, and their children who our son Otis will effectively know as cousins. That is a very beautiful thing.

Most of all though, with Lindz comes Lindz. Her mutual affinity for Halloween, her stunning culinary skills and curiosities, her amazing ability to work as a high powered manager by day and still wrangle a toddler and a household by night. Her bright eyes and creased grin. Her loyalty, belief, and patience. Her knowledge of Canadian literature, introducing me to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Stewart McLean’s Vinyl Café. For building traditions and planning trips and believing I could ever me more of a person, partner, and parental influence than I would have ever believed possible.

And I’m married to her. Holy bucket of chicken, how did she ever let that happen?

Happy Birthday, Lindz. I’m glad we’re on this journey together. I’m proud of how far we’ve come, and gaze with unabashed wonderment at the sprawling mystery of what adventures dwell ahead.

My Aunt Jen

2011-11-16T22:39:00.000-08:00

237

I don’t remember when I first met my Aunt Jen, though I’m sure I probably met her even earlier than that, during the time before memory. Essentially I’m declaring definitively and with definite enthusiasm that my Aunt Jen has been a role model and veritable icon in my personal iconography of family for as long as I can remember.

Her beautifully big voice, her bigger personality, and her bigger still heart have been there when a lot of other things didn’t seem to be throughout my childhood. Her visits, sometimes solo and sometimes with Her Mom and Aunts were things my brother and I looked forward too, like they were bringing the vacations to us since we couldn’t find the means to leave Tennessee to see them.

Aunt Jen is the first woman I knew that played golf, and I thought of her years later when my neighbors Glenn and Katsuyo tried to teach me the most thoughtfully strolling game on the mosquito infested fields of Eugene, Oregon. Aunt Jen is the first woman I knew for certain my biological Father was afraid of, at least, other than my Mother. His older sister, she’d cut the cloth defining what rebel and outlaw looked like in their homestead, and I suspect he always felt a bit awed and overshadowed by her zany shenanigans. True, he managed to destroy the family car more epically than his sisters, driving over an open manhole and ripping the drive shaft manifold thing off the underside of the their mother’s family sedan. If you’re going to exceed the rebellious accomplishments, short of teen pregnancy, that’s a pretty good start.

Jen’s last name is Henry. At some point previous to my walking the Earth, Aunt Jen married a fellow that I’ve always thought of as named Henry though of course that’s actually his surname. They’d been divorced a while before I met him, and wasn’t until the past decade I came to learn concepts in the Gay and Lesbian community like Beard, so while he might not of been a certified “Beard”, or she for that matter, does help fill in missing details as to how these to people I grew up knowing as Best Friends, Ever could have ever gotten divorced. My only hint of contention between them comes from an anecdote about his missing sense of smell, and how that meant he had no idea the cat box had ripened beyond tolerance a week ago, or that the gas primers were out. Mr. Henry remains the only person I’ve met with that strange handicap / affliction, and while he is spared the unpleasant odors, I feel very bad for all the scratch and sniff opportunities denied him in life.

My Aunt Jen is the first Lesbian I’ve ever known. Not that I knew she was when I knew her first, and I met many others before I officially found out sometime in my early twenties when Aunt Jen and I began to reunite, catch up, and realize one another both pretty damn cool folks for various reasons likely puzzling to the other.

Moving to and living in Cincinnati’s Gaslight District with my friend / girlfriend / fiancé / first wife Lisa, I had my first exposure to Gay Culture. I’m capitalizing what I feel deserves respect, or at least, has earned my respect. While I worked at GJ’s by Gaslight across the street from the Roach Motel aka The Roanoke I met a wondrous cadre of folks that had found themselves not fitting the norms television and media pushed down our collective throats, the nuclear family, the man woman two kids picket fence pink houses and a pet. Sure, might keep and flip those tacky-gaudy pink houses, but the rest turned out to be rubbish for many of the friends I made while I lived there, and through them I learned about how to confront insecurities, or social awkwardness, being different, defining yourself for who you are and what you want to be and believe in. Who you’re realizing you actually are despite what the TV tells you, the church tells you, your school or work or supposed friends and peers tell you.

Excuse the tangent to explain a few very key points that will prove embarrassing to me yet had the unforeseen benefit of helping my Aunt Jen and I understand and open up more to one another.

As an early twenties male with a couple years of college radio under his belt and a sense that his narrow mind is wide open like some armchair Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac with a healthy, or unhealthy, interest in all things boobs and beauties, I’d tired of doctored photo airbrush touch up Playboy and plastic fantastic Penthouse type men’s magazines and begun to look for something more real. Or at least, different. Not hardcore, not people humping sheep or anything. Had unfortunately seen a bit of that during my freshman year in college thanks to my friend Shawn, and I really wish I never had, absurd and unappealing as it had been.

No, I wanted something real, something speaking for an audience to an audience that wasn’t utterly manufactured. And the, ironically from a Club International column I learned about Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle. That would prove to be the last issue of CI I would ever purchase, a final glossy paged Adult equivalent to teen classic Hit Parade requested from the considerable rack (pardon the pun) behind the corner convenience store counter on my way to one of my last overnight shifts at WRFL 88.1, that in a plastic sack with a two liter of Coke and three Honey Bunch frosted buns (ironic, I know) and a couple packs of Camels, all the stimulants I’d need to stay alert during the 3am slump. By this point the improbable necking twins and dynamic doubles were scarcely enough to solicit more than an appraisers grunt, good form here, could stand to lay off the Oreos there. And so of course, as any Playboy aficionado will tell you, when the eye candy looses luster, you begin reading your secret journals for the articles. And while Ween sang about weasels in their chimney and Alice Donut bemoaned an egg and Boss Hog growled about finding water, I read about two women that were feminists of a completely different ilk, and suspect the entire time someone had hired a female intern on a lark at Club International, possibly a feminist or at least a liberal arts major, because the articles author seemed deeply intent on steering me away from plastic pretenses to something smarter, owner empowered, and far more fair to the females involved.

I’d read Our Bodies, Ourselves when about the same time I hit double digits of age, and while I would never claim to have understood half of what that fine tome contained, I did appreciate that women should have some control over how they chose to objectify themselves, how they serve themselves up to the consuming public. This goofy little interview in Club International so many years later helped me to better understand what I’d read as a kid, and further, plant a few signposts for me to follow as though searching for some sort of guilt free, non-oppressive porn OZ in the wilds of alternative media and literature.

And in Cincinnati, I found the magazine that seemed to reflect a non-exploitative, honest sort of erotica, a magazine that incidentally cite Susie Bright as a managing editor called On Our Backs. Sure, the pictures were all black and white and the paper didn’t lend itself to splaying out easily on a thigh in the throne room. I actually never felt I could treat a single issue I procured with the indignities many a cheap issue of Club International had suffered. Instead, I wanted to read, to know, to understand, everything that could possibly contextualize the few scant photos the magazine issues contained. Picture might be worth a thousand words when you want to read into a photo, however when you want to know just the facts, ma’am then the photo, well, she has some ‘splainin’ to do. And through those issues I learned about bell hooks, about Betty Dodson, and about Susie Bright’s gynecological stage performances with the audience meets speculum line-ups.

And sometime about then is when Aunt Jen and I began to reacquaint after years of minimal, birthday card sorts of interaction. And somehow, like yet another example of how a quest for boobs has lead to some small or large personal enlightenment about life, art, culture, etc., I had more to offer for substance and questions for my Aunt Jen, and through that, she felt more able to share with me.

And when Aunt Jen came out to me, I seriously thought she could not have found a way to become even cooler in my book than she already was. Surprisingly, perhaps, not for the obvious virile straight male reasons, I mean, sure the lipstick lesbian fantasy sounds awesome for let’s pretend time, however people are people are people and having recently discovered through On Our Backs a tiny lens into one strata of society not getting a lot of mainstream exposure, that my Aunt Jen represented a stand up and be who she wanted to be regardless of social perception or awkwardness commanded my respect, my admiration, hell, even my envy. Didn’t take that many club land field trips with my coworkers from GJ by Gaslight to sort out that despite my interests in fashion and dramatic flair, I would forever be straight and thereby typical and mundane.

I remember seeing Dead or Alive at the Dock in Columbus, and during the Halloween after party being asked off the wall while wearing jeans and a sleeveless Abercrombie & Fitch flannel shirt to dance by a handsome doppelganger for the prime of career version of Arsenio Hall, and feeling deeply flattered while turning him down. I don’t care about gender, when you’re 260 pounds and wearing a mall boutique store lumberjack wife-beater and someone still finds you attractive, you blush, you courtesy, and you goddamn well say thank you. I didn’t dance with the silk suit wearing Seal looking beauty for a few reasons. For one, I’d learned to dance from Yo’ MTV Raps with Ed Lover and Dr. Dre, and yes Who’s the Man is one of my favorite movies, as is Coming to America. Anyone that knows me can attest to the epic majesty of my shuffle step, however no way on a throbbing gay club self illuminating dance floor after a warm up set from Pete Burns with his sequined pasties and Yankee Doodle Dandy sequined thong. For another, even if the dance went well, I didn’t want things to go farther, or to encounter an awkward moment of confronting misunderstanding. Sure, I might look vaguely bear or butch, but I work for a bank that represents credit cards for clothing stores, collect Kenner Star Wars figures, and have a girlfriend back home that I look forward to getting personal with if she’ll let me when I get home. Yeah, sadly straight, or so I thought back then, normal, typical, and boring. Not like my Aunt Jen at all.

Lisa and I braved a literal hurricane on the highway to drive from Columbus to Buffalo to stay for a week with Aunt Jen. That’s where the picture at the head of this post is from. Somewhere is a picture of me holding my first ever lobster a few minutes before I discovered how traumatic killing your first lobster can actually be. If I find that picture, I’ll post it, pretty funny stuff.

We stayed with my Aunt Jen and together the three of us went on a tour of everything she could think of to show us. My first Canadian cigarettes? My Aunt got them for me. Expos. I marveled over the strangely wider, short packaging and different, less toxin infused flavor. My first and second Lesbian owned & operated venues? My Aunt took us to them, introducing us to her friends, her surrogate family, quietly explaining the real meanings to terms I’d learned from porn, what a lipstick lesbian actually is, and how that repressed power play is not nearly as endearing or fancy free as I might’ve been lead to believe. She pointed out women that turned to the gay and lesbian community for support after abusive relationships, something Aunt Jen professionally understood and worked to remedy through counseling and support, then for children, later for people probably not unlike the handful she indicated during our whirlwind Willy Wonka tour of her life and lifestyle.

We accompanied her to meet and chat with her therapist. Having had a strange couple rounds with shrinks as a kid, I had to wonder why someone all grown up and so seemingly in charge of her epic like as Aunt Jen would need a couch to cry on, so to speak. And then I learned how human Aunt Jen actually is, and somehow, that just made me love her more. She had regrets, memories, and at least for a couple of those I think our visit helped dispel some ghosts, exorcise a couple demonic doubts, something like that.

When Lisa and I got married, we of course invited Aunt Jen. And she came, and further, she brought Mary, and Mary rocked, and now all this time later the two of them have finally, officially been able to legally tie the knot that was apparent as noses on faces for Lisa and I way back when, when my youngest sister thought flower girl meant flower power and my brother still blushed when I teased him and my Dad showed up with tortoise shell sunglasses looking not unlike a young Jack Nicholson and my biological father Tom wanted to take pictures of everything signifying a bourgeoning career with his wife Gloria that would come full circle snapping beautiful shots at Aunt Jen and Aunt Mary’s wedding last month.

You’ve read me mention churches in my past, and I could do well to clarify that some other day. Suffice to say the Presbyterian church has been an aspect of the Christy family for quite some time, back to Aunt Jen’s Father, a Granddad I never met but fortunately have a number of recorded sermons my biological father Tom digitized years ago. While I never knew the man, I’m positive he would have been proud his daughter, his firstborn child, chose to also be one half of the first ever Same Sex union in Presbyterian history, in New York and apparently anywhere else, including Ohio. And I know I am.

Despite the strange ways we get to know one another again and again over the years, results clearly justify the means, and I could not be more happy for or earnestly congratulate my Aunt Jen for making official for the world the life and love that reflects her being as an individual, self-wrought and whole.

Nothing but love, respect, and appreciation this day for my Aunts Jen and Mary. Hope to see you again soon, introduce you to my family, my better-half Lindz, and most of all my son, your Great Nephew, who I hope you’ll both inspire every bit as much as you and your Aunts inspired me.

Love,

Loneliness is Listening to Rob Halford inside a Concrete Bunker Beneath a Cow Pattie Minefield

2011-11-15T00:20:00.000-08:00

238

Wearing a black London Fog sort of rain coat with tattered pocket flaps and long lost waist belt, a t-shirt, faded iron-on-patched kneed jeans, and kitchen duty grease grime grizzled Nike clone sneakers; I’d hike up the narrow asphalt road that lead away from Washington College Academy swinging my tape player Radio-Shack boom box like a logger foot falling away to fell a forest somewhere.

Scattered school buildings falling away behind me, the boys dorm last to pass by, I followed the route I’d had to run up for innumerable gym PE classes and again later in the day for Soccer practice, running up to where the footie pitch and the baseball diamond were cleared on a level lot shoulder checked by the back sides of several farms’ worth of backend scrub and pastures gone to seed. Passing the soccer field, a little further on a road begins heading off to the right. If I were to turn and follow that, eventually that narrow paved road would run into another, turn right again and be halfway back to Washington College again, another right turn soon after and you’d be looping up the delivery drive same as all those other times I ran the designated outdoor mile with gym class or the soccer team.

I pass the turn off and keep going straight, passing the house where Jeff and his parents live. Another house owned by the school, the parents do work for the school managing the grounds, the cemetery, general repairs, handyman stuff. Occasionally Jeff’s mother had to sub in at the girl’s dorm as a Ms. Garret sort of house mother should the normal night chaperone fall ill or the day den mother become more ill tempered than usual. My Mom got on well enough with Jeff’s Mom, perhaps out of the sort of indentured servitude sort of housing situations both families shared. Oddly enough, Jeff and I had known one another from the mental health summer camp way back when, and were quick to become friends at school, despite our age difference. Easy to glom together when no one else will talk to you.

Jeff had a couple years on me, wore glasses, had a Don Knotts physique, got comics every month at the convenience store with his allowance money and actually let me read them, wherein I discovered the X-Men, specifically when Kitty Pryde befriended Lockheed to date myself, and soon after I got Alpha Flight and discovered the ads for Alien Legion, the ones that only showed the silhouettes of the aliens wearing what I took to be Stormtrooper armor, and though took another couple years before I actually encountered a comic book store and caught up on Alien Legion, I redrew ever silhouette and filled in the details as best I could guess for months in many a spiral bound notebook.

Jeff and I were both on the soccer team, and both rode the bench through pretty much every game, only allowed to go out on the field if the team fell into the double digits behind their opponents, a fair regularity actually, or if Jeff’s parents managed to make it out. Mine never did, too busy and spread too thin, a standard that unfortunately remained true through every stage or sporting event I ever took part in. After a while I stopped telling them what I was in or doing, reverse psychology treatment that made the events mine to hide so that when I joined the kids in the eves peeking out to see if we could spot my parents, I did it from a place of worry and dread, like I feared they’d catch me touching myself inappropriately in public, instead of letting the disappointment get the better of me that my parents would never see a single play I acted in, a debate or speech or mock trial team event I compete in, a single soccer game or thankfully a single one of those horrific three baseball games I played in.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. My first acting opportunity, outside of the talent show dog pile mime fail I’ve previously blogged about, arose in sixth grade at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Johnson City, Tennessee. I landed the role of Santa Clause, not because I had the girth, I didn’t get the ol’ Christy Gift until college. I landed that choice role because it had a lot of lines compressed into two appearances, meaning, a double whammy of massive memorization with minimal parent pant inducing presence on stage. Oh, and I would have to lead the entire cast and audience in a rousing round of Silent Night, singing the first stanza verse utterly acapella, unless you count the squeak of shifting weight as parents look around to see who in the audience this creaking hinge squealing on stage belongs too. Balls dropped about a year later, by the way.

My Mom was there, at least, for the first half of the play, and for the first of my two scenes, when the Martians or whatever arrive to abduct me, grabbing me so hard the seat cushion I have belted to my midriff shoots out onto stage like a Pillsbury dough baby. I’m surprisingly hard pressed to remember if she could stay through to the end of the play and my stunning solo singing debut. I recall being picked up, and I also remember feeling outside of the other kids, not a lot new there, however off stage I became more than just another kid again, I went from being a persona people adored and coveted enough to come from another planet to steal to being a chumless child deeply wishing he could wish away to some Little Prince planet with a flower and a chatty volcano for company. I wanted to be the Last Starfighter, the kid that transcended, got to play the hero and wrestle with how to be humble when everyone kept assure you of your inherent greatness.

I worry my self-obsessing during the natural come down from the rush of performing obscured my poor Mom trying to celebrate my premiere. Perhaps I manufactured my own loneliness that time. Maybe I manufacture a lot of it now, too. Probably should work on not making myself so hard to get to know, and generally unsociable. Not to sidetrack into another tangent, just a quick stage whisper that insecurity and a lot of alone time during your foundational years can lead to some real reluctance, or inversely, awkward overcompensation, when dealing with groups of people as an adult. Getting bullied, attracting hassles via the very traits I just outlined, simply ensconces withdrawn and distrustful disposition.

Keep walking, making long strides as I pass by Jeff’s house, not knowing by sensing that in a couple months I’d be moving on, leaving Tennessee behind, and that meant Jeff as well, likely never see him again. During eighth grade I’d become more withdrawn anyway, puberty kicking in, hormones setting the moods to swing like a piñata in batting cage, so Jeff and I weren’t as close anymore anyway. He’d gotten older; I’d gotten more detached and socially evasive, etc.

The trench coat I’d picked up from some flea market while out with my Mom I submit as testimonial to both my poor fashion sensibilities and my burgeoning desire to be different, hardcore, something. I mean, my black Member’s Only clone from Sears had three Motley Cure buttons on the lapel that eventually the church youth group director at the televised Presbyterian strip-mall scale church Tom used to take me too some weekends asked me to take the them off. I’d offended the church man, look at me, I’m edgy!

Pfft.

Maybe edgy enough to play Truth or Dare on the Church Bus and too win a sloppy tongue slapping make out with the dumpy soccer mom in training behind a Little Ceasers while rest of the kids played Putt-Putt nearby, too swirl a finger around her sweaty cleft trying to Helen Keller my way to understanding at last what I’d read about in my Mom’s Our Bodies, Ourselves a couple years earlier. Full of snot and flurry, signifying nothing.

A couple months later my family would be uprooting and moving to Kentucky. I didn’t know that yet. I just wanted to get to the cow pasture on the next hill past Jeff’s family’s house. I’d clomped around there a few times before and discovered a strange concrete platform with an entryway on one side, like a window with sill or ceremony. Looking down inside, you could see three rungs made of rebar fashioned into the wall. Inside the window, and largely underground but for the higher roof part that formed the platform outside, I found a concrete box of a room with wicked reverb acoustics that turned a cheap Radio Shack tape player into a throbbing, ear bleeding boom box. Or so I projected, as this trip would be the inaugural attempt to wrap a wedge of lemon around a gold brick, so to speak.

I did the cursory quick look around and detect no one around except a couple very bored cows that clearly couldn’t be bothered to care, then threw a leg over the lip of the window, found a rung with my sneaker toe, and clambered in after with the rest of me, reaching out to drag the tape player carefully in last.

Enough light filtered into the space through the entrance to give even the edges of the space a gloomy legibility. At most twenty feet by twenty feet side to side back to front, it went down into the ground about four feet, so I had to duck if I wanted to go beyond the part of the roof forming the platform visible to the outside.

I sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, sat the radio down before me, popped the cassette to check that it still sat spooled and cued to the particular spot I wanted, a lost art now that cassettes have vanished from the face of the planet. I shoved the tape back into the drawer and slapped it home with practiced perfect flick. I paused, waved my hands and flexed my fingers like a pianist about to commence his concerto, carefully rolled the volume button to eleven as best I could, then slowly, decisively, deliberately pressed the play button with one pointy pointer finger.

Maybe not citrus wrapped around construction materials, the explosion of sound bouncing around the inside of the concrete box shocked me enough to feel caught out. I squint at the entrance for fear the police had come to investigate, that fast a response to this sudden seething screeching sound, literally ‘Screaming for Vengeance.”

The song eventually faded off, and without a second thought I pressed stop. I carefully stood, ducking so as not to brain myself on the concrete slab ceiling, fetched the radio and made my way to the exit, climbed out over the lip and flopped down on the grass to watch the clouds go by for a while, ears ringing though the ringing faded quickly, transitioned into the rustle of grass, breeze in the thickets by the fence I’d hopped over earlier, tug huff crunch sounds of cows nearby trimming the lawn casually. I noticed the sounds of the world more distinctly after the boom box experiment, as though decibel ranges came back on line separately, red lights going green and there’s grass, and wind, and crickets are on line, and cow bell is a go!

As the afternoon faded I remembered I had kitchen duty and heaved myself up to head back towards campus and home and duties to serve. I liked washing dishes, the sense of completion you got from shoving trays laden with plates through the loud, steaming, scalding moisture machine, and the way the din and racket made conversation beyond incidental shouting and caveman gestures impossible.

Being alone isn’t always an awful thing. Loneliness means partly wanting to share your adventures with someone else, if anyone cares too. Maybe codependency is always having to share your adventures, or is that just ego? A need for constant validation? Maybe loneliness is an inability to self-validate?

For me, loneliness meant being an outsider, for whatever reason, and when I’m not wearing the pity party toga, I think I facilitate a lot of my own segregation. However the origin of species, I am a being that likes to observe, and likes to be observed when given a platform that permits a constructed personae. I suspect this isn’t particularly unusual, except perhaps for the extremes I take each too.

I love the chaos of stage, yet don’t really want to be the star, just appreciated, get the laughs and back off. I inversely also love the roar of silence in large, open spaces natural or man-made, the anonymity inherent to a speck of man versus a mountain of monumental magnitude.

And I want to be able to walk home with something knew in my head, maybe to share, maybe to hold dear and mull over for later use. Because as Rob sang:

If you think I'll sit around as the world goes by

You're thinkin' like a fool cause it's a case of do or die

Out there is a fortune waitin' to be had

You think I'll let it go you're mad

You've got another thing comin'

Maybe not the most majestic mantra to live by, perhaps.True all the same. So thanks for letting me cure some of my lingering little loneliness sharing these rambling monologues with you.

God’s Own Chow Runner of Death

2011-11-13T02:07:00.000-08:00

239

The way the U.S. Navy boot camp works, allowing others might be wildly different as I’ve never bothered to ask anyone, is that they bring in recruits like collecting bushels for Noah’s ark, pairs of groups of 80 collected and called “Divisions” every few days, such that each pair of Divisions were offset enough the various supporting faculty and facilities could facilitate the deluge of farm boys and urban have nots. Eventually enough Divisions would form for administration to set a graduation date for the lot of us, and while that meant we would all be getting out of boot camp, the date had a very loose and liberal definition of date, not like the prison terms so many of the recruits had dodged to enlist.

I lucked into a grouping that initiated a brand spanking new graduation cache. That meant I would finish boot camp, then get to enjoy a week or three of ancillary service before the actual, technical graduation happened. For the part of our division that volunteered (or were “volun-told”) to participate in the marching presentational portions of the graduation ceremony, this early slate meant they’d be front of the phalanx of new sailors paraded before whoever came to populate the bandstands for photo opportunities and / or book signings. In July. On asphalt. In San Diego. During a record high summer. Bonsai.

For the rest of us schleps quick to step backwards when volunteers were summoned, other tasks were assigned on the Idle Hands principle. Sensing my childhood in industrial scale kitchens with my parents, perhaps smelling the soap suds forever whetted into my very marrow, I got a carbon copy blue on fallow while paper scrap assignment, verily my first ever post boot camp completion orders, to muster at the back delivery dock of the base mess hall the next day at revelry, meaning, 4 am. I had to venture looking more stupid than the sunburn on my forehead already did for me and ask when the revelry actually occurred since the paper melting in my hand didn’t specify a time. The military is all about economy. Why update to Xerox machines if technology might go handheld and digital someday? And why specify a specific time for an occasion when the time might be subject to change, while the occasion never will?

As a House Yeoman, capitalization fully a self-worth assessment there, I already had the dubious honor of last to bed, first to rise. Until that point, first to rise translated into 5 am. Rest of the boys, aside from the two on watch for our tidy little “Ship”, were up at 6. Muster at 4 am meant up at 3 to shower and shave and dress. Shaving, there’s a funny thing. They required you to pass inspection by anyone of rank or title at any time for being clean shaven, and if you were a hairy sort, that could mean ducking into the barracks for a second shave mid-day to maintain your baby butt façade. Trouble is, when you’re late teens or early twenties, and in the last year of the almighty John Hughes aka 1989, shaving more than once a week with only a wish and a disposable Bic as your options means you break out like crazy, especially the beard at puberty set. Navy solution? Not reduce the inspection requirements, no way, not budging on that. Instead, afford anyone with a severe reaction to overly dragging a cheap, chipped blade across their cheeks every day at an hour earlier than their eyes can function a little slip of carbon copied paper that absolves them of the duty to shave until such time as their skin can be deemed field ready for a fresh barrage of navy blue (irony noted) plastic-handled Bic brand safety razors. Since skin gets all the more agitated about getting scraped in hot climates, a good two thirds of my Division sport wonderful, albeit youthful, Feel Real G.I. Joe beards and Movember ‘staches through a fair amount of my boot camp. Might have only been a handful of really delicate epidermal cases, however there were enough for me to resent them, because while my skin grew agitated and pimpled a bit too, I simply didn’t have the summer coat to bristle up enough acne to muster a staff doctor’s pity for a pass permitting my pubescent version of a pithy plumage.

The role of a House Yeoman is a strange thing I should take a moment to explain. Being fair, I’d gotten a tip from someone along the recruitment line, or might’ve been Reggie come to think of it, since he’d done the Army / National Guard version of boot camp, and surely they have their version of yeoman as well? Any rate, I had the term with little sense of what it meant firmly ensconced in my melon from the moment I stepped of the blue school bus in the dead of night to be stripped clean of belongings, dignity, personal style, and individuality. I clung to the word “yeoman” like a particularly buoyant bit of vessel left over from the Titanic my life had thus far turned out to be. And when given a chance to give the word some voice, some sound before the teeming masses, or as it were, before 79 other exhausted and delirious recruits and a few official types as yet unidentified clearly to the raggedy lot of us, when asked if any of us had ambitions, had desires from our enrollment into the nations Naval Forces, I exclaimed sure as thunder, “Yeoman!” Then amended, recalling Full Metal Jacket, “Yeoman, sir! Yes, sir!”

This, folks, is what both the terms “Tool” and “Keener” mean to infer, nigh, describe.

Shocked and bemused expressions abound, a few annoyed and more still puzzled. One cat named John looked me square in the eye and nodded slowly. He knew what I was on about, and raised his hand. A Master Chief, though not the submariner we’d eventually get saddled with, audibly sighed and pointed at John. “Yes?” John did this bob thing with his nose, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a practiced swipe of his southpaw, and said, “Me too, sir, if the spot isn’t filled already.” He waved a hand my way to indicate the prospective filler.

This had every recruit riveted, because while most of them had no idea what a Yeoman consist of, and frankly, neither had I, they all spot a pre-reality show conflict coming on, and welcomed a few moments wherein the focus of all authority figures had clearly become focused elsewhere.

The Master Chief calmly regard each of us, one after another with the slightest of eye and head swivel, before raising his gaze to speak such that the whole 80 and the next Division besides could hear, “Who here has been to college?”

Enough silence passed for me to think, “Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?” Pretty cutting edge sub-referencing for 1989. I hid my snicker and raised my hand. A few others popped up, though scant few, depressingly few, maybe five out of the eighty boys gathered there.

In the military, guess what happens when you have more education coming in than others? You get put in charge. John had a year on me, he became Field Yeoman with greater responsibilities, and as such, more hours to sleep and permanent exemption from watch duty. Another kid, tall handsome fireman from Roxanne fellow from one of those north east cities where everyone talks through their nose like a Kennedy, had a few months on me but passed on Yeoman and became a lead of some sort, a role that turned out to change hands as regularly as the people wearing the dubious mantel disappointed management. To his credit, the kid served that role the most, and when we finally graduated and marched across the Sahara parking lot before the well shaded bandstand, he held the mantel and had the expansive chest to make it look natural, and well earned. I had two years of college, didn’t matter a lick what I’d studied, as none of that had any relevance really to anything boot camp might instill. Or install. Just a measure of maturity, really, as was the following weight test that identified my studious ass to be morbidly obese and sent me to special fat boy afternoon workout sessions on an insane timeframe every afternoon for the following several weeks wherein I worked out with Navy Seals and Master Divers enjoying their rotations inland for low stress duty before rotating back out to the worst hellholes the world might manage to part cheeks to reveal.

Two years of college meant I could snap up the yeoman role the handsome bastard had passed on, and I became the new House Yeoman. A black kid from Mississippi whispered behind me, “Soun’ like he say house nigga to me.” I whispered back over my shoulder, “Like Uncle Tom.” Thinking I might’ve found a kindred spirit of something in the face of our collective adversity. “Like who?” He replied sounding annoyed. I’m pretty sure he ended up being the guy that stole my extra dress socks from the laundry cart, but who knows, could’ve been anybody...

House Yeoman is a strange role. While the Field Yeoman gets to always march at the head of the Division, gets to carry a snappy metal box with a clipboard for a lid that contains everything vital to anyone about our group or the individuals therein. He is the go to guy when the group is on the go, and getting to know him better over the subsequent weeks, he most certainly was the right man for the job, anyone else from our lot would have crumpled under the constant barrage of demands and requests, myself at 19 included.

House Yeoman has a vastly different laundry list of accountabilities. I then romanticized the job as being something like Radar’s role on M.A.S.H., though that projection later proved true as I began to liaison with other House Yeoman’s to swap and trade for various precious goods. Prison has cigarettes, lip gloss, and bad wine. Navy boot camp is far less nefarious, however after a few weeks away from easy access to the mall or Mom’s kitchen, things like coffee start to really matter, and those who have the beans control the universe. I facilitated exchanges of surplus toilet paper for extra carbon copied Chits, small squares of paper seemingly worth a Seaman’s weight in gold to any recruit nervously checking their front left pocket of their regulation denim shirt to discover they’ve lost, misplaced, or worse, given the laundry services one or both of their precious Chits.

Chits were just pieces of paper with spots for someone of authority to fill in your name, company, and then turn over to your Division authorities to let them know you were doing something wrong or stupid or otherwise unbecoming somewhere out on the base. However Chits were also like having the right papers for the Gestapo. Should anyone, for any whim or reason, stop you and you fail to furnish them two pristine folded Chits for them to peruse, you will face summary punishment well exceeding that of simply having your Chit pulled by an annoyed Chief looking to teach some snot nose a life lesson. Failure to provide both chits at any time meant negligence, and when one of the prime objectives of boot camp is teaching all the kids attention to detail, negligence is just short of murder.

So while my role meant getting up an hour before the rest of the recruits, and often getting to sleep a full hour or three after, I had in my possession an inexhaustible supply of Chits, and for all extents and purposes, that made me a sort of god. Not a major one demanding gifts or sacrifices or even kind words. Rather a minor deity that simply didn’t want to be hazed, or hit with bars of soap slung inside a sock, or pushed into the shower tree while my eyes were full of shampoo, or generally screwed with in any way. Having survived a childhood rife with neck-less bullies, I’d found my Chit security quite a wondrous thing, a power not to be taken for granted, nor exploited, just handled clearly, carefully, and with as much benign objectivity as I could muster. Simple rules, really. Replacement Chits weren’t given without questions. If taken, wait a week to see if the taker bothers to turn it in. Usually, I had on stern assurance from another Yeoman who was probably just guessing at basic human nature, the people taking Chits will simply throw them away and let a person get caught for being short a Chit, which punishes more severely anyway. Lost Chits would be replaced, however repeatedly lost Chits would not be. No one gets extra Chits. Having three on hand if stopped would sink us all. There were more rules and conditions, and yet it’s a wonder I never thought to turn a profit from the power I had. Apparently not being messed with or hazed sufficed. Definitely a life lesson in there somewhere.

The House Yeoman gets to know the managing staff better as well, particularly after hours, as that’s when they generally stay on hand to write up reports and check off check lists and whatnot. My Division had three, a First Class, a Master Diver, and over them a Master Chief dry docked from submarine duty and a bit scary to anyone who met him, though generally a very nice guy all told, maybe a bit lonely really, and definitely intimidated by the Master Diver. Ever seen Dirty Jobs? Imagine Mike Rowe as a blonde and you’d have the Master Diver. He warrants a blog post some other day, what a character. The First Class fellow, a really nice guy that could easily pass as Jimmy Smits’ cousin, he left his professional shot faux leather triptych fold up erotica photography shoot collectable keepsake of his wife in the top drawer of his desk, same desk where most of the Yeoman supplies were kept, something a group of young men in an office will of course tastefully discuss with all the best above board terms. Finding out later that he had been in the middle of a nasty divorce throughout the course of our 8 weeks plus of boot camp certainly added a strange twist to my perception of his strange faux leather fold out pin up. You’re getting a divorce from a woman, and you want to remember how sexy she could be? Different strokes, I guess, just left me feeling sad we’d ogled her or made any comments, especially since I’m the one that found it. I could have hidden it better, put it somewhere else, left the guy a polite note telling him the House Yeoman and Quartermaster also use that desk, and neither of us has seen a woman romantically or otherwise in a very long time, if ever. Certainly not one with a caboose like that. Or heels. Or that pink feather boa thing. Or what she was doing with it. Ahem.

So after we’d completed our eight weeks of boot camp training, we were put into a holding pattern and given jobs. Mine entailed working in the mess hall kitchen. Fortunately, after my first week of mustering at 4am I moved to evening shift and no longer had to effectively go without sleep since I also had to maintain my admittedly far more lax Yeoman duties.

My first week, working predominantly with a fully immigrant Pilipino staff that were gaining citizenship through military service, I learned how to step, fetch, clear, move, deliver, and restock at a speed and capacity I’d previously never experienced or fathomed possible. Everywhere I turned something seemed ready to lunge out and scald, scour, scrape, slice, or slip me into a coma. I felt like a cartoon as I spun around busy, efficient staff cooks trying not to drop massive pans full of scrambled eggs from massive plastic sacks on their thankfully short stature head heights. I ran pans of still spitting and spattering bacon, pans of seething and frothing fried potatoes, strainers of steamed green beans, heaps of emptied, boiler broiled bins and pans and plates and utensils, seemingly catching them in slow motion, plucking them from the air as I passed busy stations like collecting spent shell casings, efficient as each trip delivered food one way, recovered emptied vessels and spent instruments the other.

After a week my proficiency and perceived lack of required supervision got me bumped to the evening shift. This moved me out of prep territory, as well as missing the breakfast riots all together. I showed up fresh for the lunch rush and stayed through to closing, working clean up instead of prep, and helping polish off any leftover food deemed too little or old to bother storing for the following day. Late shift meant sleeping in, meant missing breakfast, so leftovers were a welcome treat most days.

As with any service industry, there are active times, and lulls between. Ask anyone in the restaurant industry, or read some Anthony Bourdain, and you’ll quickly spot the insanity of the rush and lull mentality, the gallows’ humor disposition that existence inspires. After two months of alien living as a Navy recruit, I felt strangely at home in the kitchen, running chow and cleaning gear and subbing in to pump suds and flush countless trays and utensils through the mammoth dish washing machines. After a couple weeks in the kitchens, I thought I might have found my place, and after a couple more, I graduated and got sent to another kitchen to work on another leg of the base to wait for the next phase of my training to begin, the class that would teach me to hunt submarines from the surface, to kill the silent killers, sink the submerged, torpedo the titans.

During my four weeks in the general mess hall, I wore paper hats that were similar to taking two legal envelopes and attaching their ends, then filling the gap between them with gauze mesh. After a week or so of wearing through those, I had the idea of drawing on them. The lull between lunch and dinner had little to do for the night crew, our cleanup from lunch with full staff went swiftly, and the rest of our big job came during and after dinner. The afternoons were an hour or so sitting around tables listening to Sinead O’Conner sing that sing Prince wrote for her every half hour while guys pushed the breeze around and wish aloud repeatedly that someone had a deck of cards or some dice.

I picked up a ballpoint pen somewhere along the way, not as easy a feat as you might suspect on a basic training military base where everything is disposed towards frugality and resource management, attrition is a lesson learned quickly, as is spatial management – who knew that much denim and cotton could fit into such tiny metal drawers or a single sea bag?

I began drawing on my hat, no real plan, thinking about running chow, how exhilarating that gig had actually proved to be, and that I liked skulls. Something you should appreciate about the military, we share a similar aesthetic disposition to strong iconography, the objectification of buxom beauties on the noses of notable machines, and a liberal use of skulls. And tentacles, the Navy Cargo Handlers have a patch design I completely have patch envy over. Half paying attention, half toe tapping to Sinead, I drew a Don Martin style sprinting skeleton seaman wearing his working denims and dog bowl cap running a tray of chow that trailed a stream of gunk well behind it. I looked up and noticed I had something of an audience. Couple days later, I had requests and a stack of hats waiting to be enhanced. And for all that art, all that goofy art, no one said a thing.

No one complained about breaking some foodie hat regulation, or that the drawings were obnoxious.

A few people mentioned they’d never seen anyone do that before, draw on their disposable hats, make them worth showing off. Especially after I realized my original had a short shelf life what with all the steam and sweat and grease and all. I recalled patching bits in Architecture studio with packaging tape before a jury to hide breaks and tears while shoring up structural integrity. I used my Yeoman powers to trade another Yeoman for a couple rolls of the stuff and scored some scissors from the mess hall supply closet, as well as more pens, and I recreated an improved replica of my dying original hat and taped it up to help preserve it’s freshness for prosperity. The packaging tape trick is a keeper, still use that today, just avoid the cheap stuff, it bubbles up and / or wrinkles on itself too much.

Before sealing up the illustration in a protective sheath of transparent adhesive tape, I added a monicker to my mayhem, “God’s Own Chow Runner of Death”. Strangely, the Pilipino shift wranglers I worked with and for loved that touch, maybe the Christian aspect, maybe the sarcasm over the quality of the chow. Who knows? Those hard working bastards found my stuff funny when they looked to really need a laugh, and they didn’t bust me down, win-win.

During my four weeks working in the mess hall, I probably contributed to some forty hats or more, and saw others take up the idea until one out of every three hats on the line had something on it. Not always something good, but something, and like nose art on bombs, there’s some great mirth evident throughout, even if the taste is utterly subjective. Other than genitalia or vulgarities, pretty much anything went on the embellishments. A lot of sports teams, though I enjoyed seeing teams I’d never heard of, local teams from whatever piss water Podunk town these crazy cretins had cruised, crawled, or crash landed in from.

Later when I moved on to the ASW base (Anti Submarine Warfare), and took on full time dish washing duties, I made a new hat called, “God’s Own Dishwasher of Death”. One night of high power suds took care of that hat despite the tape, steam is packaging tape’s mortal enemy after all.

I’ve attempted to homage / recreate the bookend images from memory, a fun exercise and strange sort of time travel, though I should try again to do it properly, maybe ask the culinary school by work if I can borrow a couple paper hats, a ballpoint, and a metal table for a couple hours sometime. Ambiance is everything, after all. Put some Sinead on the PA. I’m sorry I don’t have the originals, they would be far more interesting to see, I’m sure.

Couple links of note I had to refer to for some clarification. A very rosy though basically (pardon pun) accurate description of what Navy boot came is from geek legend Gamergirl; and a very spot on bit of information from a larger series on About Dot Com.

I went through all that and never clued in that the 80 kids were considered a Division, or that our bunkhouse was considered a Ship. Makes sense, just never caught on to that. Weird, considering how many other details are burned into my mind’s eye. The jokes about why we stenciled our names on our clothes, and where we placed them. The kid that looked like a young Michael Keaton and turned up with crabs pretty much to the day the Master Chief said folks would that shacked up with unscrupulous company before shipping out to boot camp. The awful painting of a hydrofoil ship I painted on one of our Division’s flags because the Master Chief Submariner didn’t want to be outdone by the other flag the Master Diver had picked, an Iron Maiden Trooper painted by a madly talented kid from Michigan I had no hopes of besting with my clumsy, cartoonish applications of acrylics.

But calling our long quarters a Ship? Nope, that is something brutally obvious that I never actually caught on to. So much for attention to detail.

Twins

2011-11-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

240

Muppets came into my life somewhere around birth. Sesame Street informed my childhood, and as I entered those tumultuous post kindergarten years, prime time weekly Muppet shows broadened my imagination, perspectives, and sense of comic timing. There were films, Fraggles, and myriad other points of interest that furrowed into my consciousness from the minds of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and the rest of the merry band that brought Muppets, Labyrinth, Dark Crystal, and so many Star Wars characters too life.

Ninth grade is when I returned to public school from private and Catholic schools. No more uniforms, no more morning church in the chapel or Thursday masses unless you count what showed up served on the trays in the lunchroom. Also, with the family’s relocation to Lexington Kentucky from the rolling hills of Eastern Tennessee, no more bullies or tobacco fields or ample acres of fields with nothing by cows and corn around to call friends. Relocated into suburbia, into a sea of strangers and cliques and big haired Heathers in the making, I’d moved from an Appalachian academy with a student body of a couple hundred to a high school with an anticipated graduating class of a half thousand.

Layer by layer things I’d held dear from my childhood were hidden away or discarded, embarrassingly more often than not from fear of being different, or ostracized, or called out and ridiculed.

One example would be a baseball jersey I had from when I briefly held the post of Assistant Bat Boy for the Milligan College baseball team when I was in fifth grade. The jersey had been given to me with some faux ritual by one of the chewing tobacco spitting players after one of the practices at the tail end of a semi-decent season with a few more wins than losses. I’d helped carry gear, man the press box and press buttons to update the new electric score board with all the numbers made out of a multitude of light bulbs. It could fit an adult, a fairly burly, Eastern Tennessee scale adult, and it had across the front, half on either side of the zipper, a huge embroidered buffalo, the team name and mascot. On the back were the numbers zero and zero, since the Head Bat Boy’s jersey just had a zero on the back, and he outranked me and had all his adult teeth in already. And could shave. And needed too.

That jersey had been a prized possession I’d sport proudly through sixth grade wearing gthe thing like a gown as I hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet. I kept it folded up nicely and hidden away during my family’s stint at Washington College Academy for seventh and eighth grade, not wanting to share my prize with anyone for fear one of the bullies I endured there might damage or steal the thing. So of course, about a week or two into being the new kid at Tates Creek Junior High, as that middle school included grades seven through nine, I decided to wear my cool, unique jersey to school with poorly formed hopes of wowing the lads and wooing the ladies. Neither happened, and I didn’t get within forty yards of the school before Big Al, a kid on the plus side of an early growth spurt and towering seemingly several feet above me, pointed and asked with much snickering ado what the hell I had on, was that a furry cow on my shirt?

I’d shrugged, turned around and walked home to change, grumbling in my head and anger in my heart. Retrospectively, Big Al turned out to be a pretty funny guy, and had some great sight gags of his own to enhance his wardrobe that demonstrate a confidence I simply didn’t, couldn’t muster, at least, until I’d gotten older and developed a sense of self that extend beyond kicked cat and that hotline to inevitable failure that is the sense that you need to please and be liked by everyone. Someone famous said something I saw quoted somewhere, I believe on a slide in a theater between shows, that if you live a life afraid to piss people off, that you’d be living a futile and ineffective life indeed. And yes, I’m clearly paraphrasing, so good thing I can’t attribute the quote. Want to say it’s from Jimmy Carter, or Teddy Roosevelt. Regardless, makes sense, and when I can keep my insecurities at bay, when I can self-validate (or medicate) enough to drop a pair and erect a spine, then I’m really not one to be bothered with other’s concerns over my attire or cosmetic choices, all the more so true for my significant or substantial choices. If I’m not hurting anyone else, well then to paraphrase and not credit someone else famous: fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

During high school as rap became a thing suburbanites glommed too – predominantly meaning white kids, a rash of hood ornaments began disappearing off the Mercedes around town, and you’d be impressed in Lexington how many of those rides there were to be looted, horse money maybe? Big Al, already reknowned for actually being black, being physically mature well before most, being great at most sports, and generally being able to jokingly get along with pretty much anyone, even me once I got over the whole Buffalo jersey slight, decided to lampoon the stolen Mercedes hood ornaments thing. I’m not sure if he meant to mock it the way Flava Flav did, as a deliberate act of satire, or if he’d just youthfully decided one of those bling Benz trophies looked to definitive on his broad, JJ “Dynamite” Walker / Daymon Wayon’s physique chest. What I’m sure of is the kerfuffle he caused when he showed up to school with a massive VW bus hubcap dangling from a chain around his neck, a thick chain like you’d secure a bicycle with. And no matter how people reacted, he kept his chin up, his grin wide, and strut through the halls slapping skin and punching biceps with the best of them. Even when his personal parade became abruptly detoured into the principal’s office and resulted with a school wide ban on all necklace ornaments of automotive origins, his notoriety and status simple ratcheted up safe and secure. A far cry from the balls I should’ve shown, or at least, bemused apathy, when he’d poked fun at my unique, atypical, didn’t get this thing in the local mall jersey.

Late in my ninth grade year, roughly around the time I’d begun making friends and finding some sense of my place in, or at least, alongside the social order of things, the junior high and elementary school band mothers threw a fundraiser flea market to sell off the contents of people’s garages and crawlspaces. My Mom, siblings and I walked up to the school that misty Saturday morning and entered the gymnasium with perhaps about ten or fifteen dollars between us. I’d only just started mowing lawns for money, picking up Kenny Dyer’s yards and later expanding my range across a couple more regulars. I made two purchases, one for fifty cents, a little plastic skull that opens in half to hold whatever might fit, jelly beans maybe, that I named Corpus Christy and told folks it was an aborted sibling, very heady wordplay for a ninth grader. Later in life I procured a sweet big headed, small bodied foam filled latex skeleton I also named Corpus Christy, proving getting older doesn’t necessarily mean getting more clever.

I probably walked past my second and final purchase about three times before I discovered it. Five dollars later I owned a 1978 Fisher Price Animal Muppet puppet. Still pre-growth spurt, my hand fit easily inside the gap in his vested back to work his eyebrows and jaw flaw with ease. The moment ensured a couple things. One, that my deepest, darkest dream of dreams is to work for Hensen Studios, perhaps not as a puppeteer, but as some creativde aspect, designing puppets or writing skits or painting backdrops or post-production compositing and wire removal. The other, that I will tour any flea market or garage sale more than once before deciding there is nothing there of interest. Simply too easy to miss the details, to separate the gems from the wall of sound white noise of other peoples flotsam. Too easy to miss the tuft of orange felt and pink fuzz that once exhumed from a pile of plush pandas and stuffed rabbits turned out to be a true mascot for the ages, at least, for me.

The summer between ninth and tenth grade I attended a summer camp of a different sort called the Kentucky Humanities Institute, a multi-week, dorm residence, deep soak indoctrination to arts, culture, musical forms, theater, literature, and a myriad other things like getting to see a sixteen year old’s boobs or discovering the mood soured for me when I learned I had prudish dispositions based on my repulsion on discovering she had lost her virginity at fourteen. And Animal went with me, on the bus, in the classes, to the ice cream socials. I practiced voices, poses, reactions, and generally had a lot of fun with it. Not like a ventriloquist with his dummy, I never went that far or tried to mask my voice or anything. Rather I tended to defer to the Muppet as a prop, an extension of myself, and something to draw away attention I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable having focused on me, an irony considering the puppet drew more attention than my horrible John Hughes era accurate fashion sense ever would have.

Fast forward to a bit over a year later, somewhere between sophomore and junior year. I’d fallen into hanging out with a girl that brought around all the hormonally drenched emo inclined jealousy jiggling pathos laden bad poetry writing reindeer game playing boy girl idiocy you might expect from kids in the drama club, art club, school plays, and on the speech team. She’d moved to Lexington to live with her biological father, a guy who had remarried, had more kids, and afforded the girl shelter largely because he feared his ex wife more than he feared having a teenage girl under his roof. The girl, Jackie, had a twin sister back in Louisville. Same genetic template, cell split identical twins physically, driven to extreme lengths mentally and sometimes violence physically to try to differentiate themselves from one another. Jackie had the Wednesday Addams thing going on, round Peanuts head and big eye poster art peeps nested in deep, dark sockets, small to petite body and several years of violin lessons to sound out her personal woes on.

Jackie went home for the summer and after a couple months of pretty regular fighting, I somehow thought trusting her with my most prized possession would win her heart and mind for her triumphant return at the end of summer. Imagine my surprise when a mutual friend stopped by the theater where I worked to give me an unmarked white envelope full of developed photos, considerately with duplicates in case I wanted to share any, that document the deconstruction, the demise, the murder of my Muppet. She cut Animal into pieces small enough to flush into the toilet. The mechanisms of the head were stripped clean, and what couldn’t be flushed got flung into a tin waste bin wrapped with a floral print paint job. I went numb thumbing through the pictures, leaning heavier by the second on the concession stand counter top, and eventually I had to excuse myself and retire to the break room for a good sob.

Fortunately Jackie chose to stay in Louisville, at least, for the rest of high school span. I glimpsed her once during my freshman year walking with some punker brute past the Cut Corners Records, army jacket looking all the worse for wear, and I found that my anger, rage, hate had only gone slightly blunt, only a bit dulled. I still wanted her dead and quickly steered myself in any direction that went opposite where she appeared to be headed.

Freshman year of college, not long after seeing Jackie in passing, though sadly not passing away, I had to go to the Administration building to see folks about my grants and loans. And imagine my surprise to discover Jackie’s twin holding down the front reception desk, setting up appointments, taking calls, and filing student folders after their meetings or consultations have concluded. Where Jackie had appeared a college age, dark haired understudy for the pre-grunge Seattle set, her sister belonged to a sorority, though the fact that she had a job and I could discern her actual skin tone meant she didn’t belong to a fuck me I’m rich not find me a man that’s richer sorority set. The tri-delta, everyone else has set. And more surprising, she recognized me. We’d never met, guess she’d seen pictures, and since we both disliked her sister, we became friends. Not let’s make a baby friends, just friends happy to see one another around campus or catch up when I stopped in to sign this or turn in that for the administration office.

I remember the episode of the Incredible Hulk about twins, and how the punch line in the end is that a childhood tragedy that had killed one of the twins had left everyone thinking the evil twin had died, when really, the evil twin had spent the rest of her life trying to live up to and effectively be the good twin, because of guilt, or shame, or maybe actual love. Meeting Jackie’s sister was like meeting a version of Jackie that had decided to be the good twin, and succeeded. The sort of Jackie that could’ve been trusted with my Muppet for a summer. Regardless, the experience largely ensured I’d never again date a twin.

Fast forward to decades later living in Vancouver and having access to things like EBay. For months I’d check with bran diet regularity to see if another 1978 Fisher Price Muppet were out there in the world, as Halford would sing, just waiting to be had. And one fine autumn morning one appeared. I won the auction, though stranger that I won it as the only bidder, and stranger still the auction hadn’t mentioned that the seller still had the original box and sales receipt. Those discoveries were made when the toy arrived.

The new Animal, while different, is an identical twin to my original one, the murdered one. And there is no evil twin among these, unless you consider that this iteration of me that happens to be wedging a short nailed hand inside of Animal’s gaping maw is a kinder, gentler, trying to be the good person version of the megalomaniacal me that once weld the Muppet like a shield so many years ago.

The Fine Art of an Improvised Bomb: Class Four

2011-09-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

241

Improv 101

The Fourth Day of Class

This final class is about putting everything we’ve learned together. Receipts for the class are handed out, which is when I learned the cost of my birthday present. Clearly my wife must adore me, as now the immersive and intensive quality of the course makes sense, as it isn’t cheap.

We got warmed up, ran through a few exercises like Zoom! And Word Association Zoom!, followed by the Experts Game wherein I helped to discuss & divulge the history and cultural impacts of Floss and Tuques. Did you know the Tuna Tuque of Tahiti is still used today with certain classical wedding rituals to represent fertility and casting a wide net? So far I’ve been a cohort collaborative with three other student actors and have been fortunate all three were clever as hell and thereupon made me look really, really good sitting there nodding and agreeing and expanding with the ever present, “Yes, and…”

We double lined up for a few rounds of the Johnson File, adding twists once the class had all had a turn as giver and recipient. One twist where the instructor, Pearce, told the recipients their character or context, and another where he told both giver and recipient to exist within a certain cinematic genre; therein learning that I really have no clue how to exist within an afterschool special teen drama, although replicating how I used to write peoples’ papers for fun and profit, and often had to haggle over the sliding scale of higher grades costing more, seemed to supply enough knowing honesty that we managed to garner a couple chuckles.

After we’d warmed up, we dropping into a new game called Slide Show and the variant Film Review Show.

Slide / Film Review Show: four actors, two as commentators as though on a TV talk show, the other two as actors posing as “slides” or acting out “clips” from fictional films. The commentators essentially set up the content of the slide or clip, then react to and explain what the actors in the slide or clip construct or present. Each side presents offers that potentially raise the stakes, and certainly that natural tension got a few laughs for each of the groups of actors.

I got to play in one of the slides version games as one of the two slide posing models with a talented lady recently moved to Vancouver from Dawson City up in the Yukon, where they like their comedy physical since it’s so damn hard to stay warm. The commentators warmly set us up with opportunities to be inventive, instead of being specific about what we were doing, affording us some great creative choices for being utterly obnoxious. Framed as a nature travel show like the one by Mutual of Omaha, the hosts would set up seeing the hyenas, where upon we posed a slide of my riding one while my cohort tried to catch up. And our hosts mentioned enjoying the moonlit beaches, and so naturally we posed as a couple swooning romantically. The hosts took that offer in stride and remarked on how the trip had really brought them together a team. Brilliant, albeit a touch lowbrow, stuff. And of course that simply meant the next slide show with male slide show actors and female talk show hosts would involve male strippers, a bachelorette party gone sideways, and genital warts on the bride-to-be’s tongue that fortunately could be cured by a medicinal lollipop prescribed by a doctor MD that looked suspiciously like the male stripper from the night before. Women really can go lowbrow much better than men when they want too, I’m only saying.

After the slides we switched to the film clip format, and despite my soggy suggestion of “Swallowing Sharks” as a film title, the student actors managed to rock out with some great offers and adaptations. The tricky part of the film clip format seemed to be finding the right balance of supplying too much plot from the show hosts, risking really boxing the clip actors into a celluloid corner, or inversely not being specific enough and seeing the scene go sideways as the clip actors have to create something with too little foundational structure.

After that exercise we moved on to another new game called Typewriter.

Typewriter: One actor takes a bench off to the side as the narrator of the scene, a sort of benign voice of god that sets the scene, defines the characters and environments, introduces problems, raises stakes, and suggests resolutions. The narrator is effectively, as Pearce described it, a training wheel to ensure the scene keeps moving and stays remotely on track. At the same time, the narrator must listen and indulge whatever bubbles up from the ideas and choices the other actors bring to or introduce into the scene.

My group during this exercise chose to ask the audience for a suggestion for and environment. Someone said restaurant, while someone else said dinner theater. Pearce pointed out that by being more specific about the location and context, the scene is better empowered. We went with dinner theater, and as narrator, I framed that as a murder mystery type of dinner theater, having recently seen Psychoville season one, which more or less kicks off around a murder mystery dinner theater evening gone horribly sideways.

The other actors made my choices easy and apparent. The nervous, deer in headlights choices of first male actor described his characters as low status despite being an actor in the play. Seeing that, I put the strong female actor into a role of an annoyed, aggressive, angry wife that had been dragged to this stupid dinner theater play and wasn’t buying the shtick for one second. She naturally came off as high status, and she ran with that notion so well the natural conflict had the audience engaged. I interject to tap the third actor, a tall fellow able to rubber-face on a dime from cheer-leading captain to lounge singer extraordinaire to game warden super cop, as the manager / director of the play that sensed the conflict as a threat to his dinner theater production and wanted to intercede, however he would step into the fray not as manager or director, instead he would step in as a new character for the play. This detailed description made the role for that actor a touch more challenging, as it suggested he’d come to save the day, but could not do so as a simpering manager of low, groveling must appease the always correct customer. Rather, by stepping into the scene as a character within the bounds of the play itself, the manager came forward with status, effectively balancing out the bitchy wife character.

Sensing the need to both raise stakes and push for a resolution, I as narrator pointed out that just then the bitchy wife noticed the nuts in her Waldorf salad, nuts she happened to be deathly allergic too. As the female actor clutched her throat and dropped writhing to the stage, gasping and asking for help, the male actors made even better choices than I’d hoped, both showing confusion and alarm that the woman had fallen to the floor, while doing loud stage whisper asides between themselves pointing out what a great actor the woman was, Oscar worthy, conveying their character’s mistaken belief that the woman had been a plant, an actress in the show, after all. They’re of course wrong, and the audience knows this, and as she goes still, there were laughs a plenty.

After a break for lunch wherein I consumed a wrap from a coffee shop after discovering the horde scale lineups around the Market were procurable prohibitive, I returned to the Improv theater and had some time sit out front and chit chat with some of the other actors before being allowed back inside. Helped me to better appreciate how different our respective backgrounds happen to be. No other game designers, no other digital artists, no other toy collectors. Fair enough, and groovy, however also really enjoy the rich diversity of backgrounds among the student actors. Like a burgeoning film maker & currently employed film editor. Like someone from the courthouse with a civil reputation to protect. Like someone breaking bad from the business world. Like a aquatic mechanical engineer, or an actor that’s been in films with animal stars, and not one but three stand up comedians including a grandmother that’s clearly had to maintain a healthy sense of humor, or someone that has drunk a sour mash shot that included, nigh, featured kissing a severed & pickled human toe – the Yukon’s equivalent to the cod cheek / screech / tack thing in Newfoundland – while getting egged on by a row of retired gold mining grannies. Everyone there had a different background, and that meant a wealth of unexpected and wonderful things to draw upon and bring into the scenes, choices, and offers each of us made on the day upon the stage.

After we were let back into the building, we got our swagger back with some One Word.

One Word: A mime scene where through the course of the sketch each actor may only choose and say one word, and that word a single time, to like a smart bomb in the games of yon, behest thee to make thine word countest most bestest. Making sound effects with your mouth is allowed, though beware the slippery slope into yabbering gibberish in [place of words like Mr. Bean, as that is unacceptable and such play shall be flagged. The scene should have an environment, verily though might it be audience suggested, and defined characters, that they too might perchance arise from such things as the audience might yowl, and should attempt to introduce conflict, and attempt if can some sort of resolution.

I would venture to say the three actors that assembled a car salesman versus car salesman rivalry trying to sway a young, impressionable woman buyer over with value versus speed made the most of the exercise, however all embarkations had solid moments to them. From the car salesman scene specifically we learned the term “Mortar”, the through-line that holds a scene together. For that scene it had been the inherent competition between rival salesmen, who would get the sale?

After this exercise we moved boldly into a “wheels off” scene. No narrator. No quirky constraints. Just tie everything we’ve learned together and compose a scene from suggestions of character, setting / environment / time period, and a problem. Can get all of that from suggestions, or just one thing and introduce the rest from whatever bubbles up from your playing inside the environment.

Wheels Off: We can talk, can use “cut too” to change location, and can use “so many hours later” to change time frame. We’re encouraged to take our time, to not rush, to swim / play in our environments, savor our characters, to better bubble up offers and ideas while all the more setting and selling the scene to the audience. We’re intended to establish / empower an environment, and then characters, then present a problem, raise the stakes, and find a resolution. Each actor should emerge into the scene one at a time, to ensure no collisions as two try to simultaneously deliver new, potentially conflicting offers or elements.

Side note, generally improv scenes on average go for around 5 minutes. Anything longer starts to lose steam.

My team had a tough scene suggested from the audience and never quite found our alienment in it. The pretext suggested involved one roommate cheating with the other roommate’s fiancé.

Epic fail number one: I played the bad roommate, and made the choice of trying to be something like Jack Tripper from Three’s Company meets Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, all “Show me with your mouth and money is on the dresser” sort of douchebaggery, yet within a sitcom punch line cadence. My ill defined character choice proved immediately too complicated, and I began playing the rest of the scene reactively to the other actors, who I’d effectively left marooned on islands of self-discovery as I scuttled my own character craft.

Epic fail number two: difficult to convey and fellow actors did not pick up on it, thus did not make complimentary choices, and why should they, straddling such distinctly incongruent archetypes demonstrated a lack of commitment to a particular character, and instead of playing in my scene and environment, I’d tried to tack it, and effectively my fellow actors, into place as though with a ball peen hammer.

Epic fail number three: Left an actor stranded. Not just to define her character, she did that fine. However plot-wise I’d gotten her to hide in a closet, or more specifically, between / behind the stage flat with a cityscape painted on it. I didn’t define if the closet door were open or closed, or if even had one. And after my roommate arrived into the scene and we discussed his declaration of love for this woman and how he’d like to marry her, I have stalled completely unsure how to bring her back into scene. Sure, she could have brought herself in, yet as the one that put her there, surely I’d had some plan for how to get her out again? Nope. Couple my inaction with the tension the audience had definitely begun to feel, the one that seemed funny at first, then awkward, then strangely unfulfilling like soppy sandpaper, and you could hear crickets, or at least, the instructor’s molars begin to work together.

Epic fail number four: asynchronous tones, meaning, after the inevitable, awkwardly handled reveal of the soiled lady in the room that’d been hiding in plain view behind the never described or accounted for imaginary closet door, my male counterpart made choices that followed commitment to his character, make note that unlike myself, he’d actually defined one and stuck with it beautifully. So from the rosy heights of elated adorations exclaimed he plummet with a sharp intake of horrified hiss into fiery display of disgust, betrayal, and dismissal as he stormed away somberly, leaving the stage. I became so enthralled with his performance I felt I had actually stolen my best friend’s one true love for a night of knavishly nasty nookie. I felt ugly, ashamed, and completely unsure how to react. I tried to fall back on the tattered remains of my ill defined Jack Tripper / Harvey Keitel hybrid, and managed to glibly, hollowly offer a solution to get the lady and I off that stag as soon as humanly possible. Something wicked or dark might have worked if I’d sold my character that way from the get go, yet I hadn’t, and couldn’t swerve into that ditch now. He’d played it sober, I’d tried to play it sitcom, and not one of the three of us had managed to fully sort out our intrepid scene. The scene had sadly been failure to launch from the first words out of my mouth, and I will be need to be damn sure I know what / who I am as a character, and commit to that, before I ever try storming into a scene again, particularly as first man. Or at least, allow myself a base template, something that can percolate and evolve and grow as I play with others, yet have enough structural integrity to fall back on however the scene’s ante’s get raised.

The Wheels Off scene I think best delivered on all cylinders that day would have to be the scene set in a soda shop in the 50’s wherein two teen girls and a soda jerk preparing a steady stream of one and two scoop Coke floats discuss their options when one girl reveals she’s pregnant, just sure of it, after getting busy with a Greaser in the back of his Black Lightning the night before. Environment: 50’s soda shop. Check. Characters: from mannerisms to poodle skirt references and swapping in, “Oh, poodle skirts!” for proper swearing to displaying laugh out loud naivety in the age of sanitized TV and idealized Americana. Check. Problem, teen pregnancy by someone from different social strata. Check. Raising stakes, prom is coming and won’t fit in brand new yellow dress. Check. Solution, praying. Check. Functionally sound, had several offers that could have been mined for gold along the way like the prom dress, or the impending prom period, yet held up, hit all the key aspects the class has been trying to teach, and got a slew of laughs along the way for good measure. If the Wheels Off scenes were final exams, that one would have screwed the grading curve.

After the Wheels Off scenes, we went into a fine round of Freeze Tag, replete with impromptu musical numbers, two even, and several strange orifice extraction elements. During this Pearce called each student into the hallway to let them know if they could continue on to the 200 level of the course if they would like too, and additionally offer some notes about key areas to focus on for improvement.

When summoned, I stepped into the hallway with some tightening in my chest. I really worried I’d bombed too much and wouldn’t have “passed” enough to get into the next level of training. Instead of solving the mystery, Pearce asked if started a lot of projects I didn’t finish. I felt pinned like a butterfly and smoked like a bee. Three novels sit half finished on my laptop. A half dozen barley to marginally contrived comic book stories litter the hallways of my past and across dozens of papers and pages stuffed in my office spaces. I haven’t been diving since last October. I’ve still never gotten to be the driving creative vision for a video game project, despite all honorable intentions and professional efforts. I’ve been divorced and had several breakups painful enough might well as have been legally binding. I joined the Navy and ended up never really serving any active duty time after all that submarine hunting training. I have a tattoo design sitting with an artist for my leg that I’ve never bothered to get around too. And all this flashed though my head as I wondered how this man had seen through me so well. I believe my jaw must have dropped open because my tongue went dry.

He looked surprised, perhaps because I did, and revised, saying that he felt I appeared to have ADD. Meaning, I changed my mind a lot, and that had several times gotten in the way of committing to character. By not making up my mind, or second guessing myself, or trying to do too much, I ended up undeserving everything, rather than selecting something manageable and committing to it to see where it lead too.

He said that I have clever ideas and insights, however I need to commit to my characters, make them real and let them breathe. This might well explain why I do well as a narrator type, yet flounder when trying to be the hero, villain, or circus elephant.

I’m debating now about the 200 level classes. Part of me wants to do it, continue to learn more, if only about myself as I have immensely so far. Part of me is afraid he’s right, and that I will never learn how to settle down, pick something, and follow through with it. And for the expense of the course, as with running, writing, drawing, diving, or any of the other things I have thrust myself into yet never followed through with, i want to pause and consider before committing myself. Somewhat for cost of the class and the Saturdays I’ll be giving up. More though for the time I’ll miss from my family, and knowing that I can make a full commitment to contributing to the new class and everyone in it, eyes wide open and all that.

We’ll see what I decide. For now I’m just happy to have had the opportunity, appreciate the gift from my Wife and all the things I’ve learned and experiences shared with my classmates and instructor, Pearce.

Now a couple snaps of the mini-after party where we went next door for a pint to celebrate completeing the class. Noice!

The Fine Art of an Improvised Bomb: Class Three

2011-09-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

242

Improv 101

The Third Day of Class

Received our named comp tickets for a Wednesday or Thursday show of our choice.

Learned that the 200 level of the Improv Class would commence in October. Discussed the merits of having the class over two weekends instead of tying up four Saturdays in a row. Also learned that regardless of the calendar composition of the classes, we’d first need to get the grade from the 101 class, an assessment that would decree we could proceed or that perhaps we could use another round of 101 before advancing to the next tier of training.

Warmed up with some Yes, lets! and Zoom! Zip! Screech! And some Word Association Zoom! Before moving into new exercises intended to build a sense of narrative, the five parts of a fictional scene:

Environment
Characters
Problem
Raise Stakes
Solution

Narrator Game: 2 teams form 2 lines, a person from one side endowing a person from the other side with a name, character description, and story that presented a context, an environment, a problem, a compounding element to that problem, and a solution. The recipient of the narrative adapted and acted, perhaps adding lines of dialogue, to support the narrative, and sometimes help shape the narrative, returning offers for the narrator to pick up on and play with.

I narrated scenes wherein a warlock bough a witch’s gingerbread house in the black forest and then had to contend with pesky kids trying to eat it and an astronaut names Major Tom lost contact with ground control but elected to take a space walk anyway and then had to contend with space flatulence. In space no one can hear you toot.

I had to play a midget Elvis impersonator having his bank heist foiled by an RCMP touring security demonstration presentation and a swaybacked cowboy that rides a 15 foot stead and slings a 15 foot long gun facing off with his 15 gallon hat versus a 15 year old nemesis.

5 Parts of a Story Game: teams of 5, each person have to contribute an aspect of a functional scene. The first person sets the environment, the second names the character or characters, the third describes a problem, the fourth finds a way to elevate / raise the stakes / compound the problem, and the last person provides a solution.

Example:

A hospital
A doctor treating a man
Man is having a heart attack
Man owns hospital
Get man to sign papers before surgery

The thing to avoid with solutions is the dues ex machina approach that brings in divine intervention or otherwise miraculously solves the problem.

Example:

A hospital
A doctor treating a man
Man is having a heart attack
Man owns hospital
God / an alien ascot / Chuck Norris steps in and abolishes heart attacks, the people rejoice

Narrator plus Two Actors Exercise: narrator describes the location, characters, problem, stake raising aspect, and solution while actors play it out. The trick is to keep simple, don’t add too much detail.

Example:

Enchanted forest
A unicorn
Unicorn is hungry
Must eat every 5 hours or dies
Satyr has some apples

As folks returned from lunch learned a bit about the process for folks to go from beginner s to rookies to eventually, if they have what it takes, ultimately get onto the Main Stage and perhaps even get paid to perform before live studio audiences. Most of their performers / actors came from having gotten through the 100, 200, and 300 level classes, as well as the Sunday Night Session Classes to get into the Rookie League. Then it’s a matter of earning your stripes, and putting in your time and getting experience.

Tell a Story One Word at a Time: Start with a sense of a Name and a Noun, say Rosie and Ball, then go around the group with each person adding a word to try to tell a story that establishes a location, something about the character context, a problem, perhaps a raising of stakes, and a solution. The story is emergent and has a tone that is something like the old “See Jane Run. Run Jan run!” stories from when we were kids.

2 Person Scene Building: a pair of actors take the stage and build a scene describing an environment, characters, problem, raised stakes, and resolution. The tips were to physically move around in the scene to better bring the environment to life; take time to think; spell out logic to better establish what you’re doing and why for the audience.

2 Person Word Story: After getting a suggestion for an object and a suggested action from the audience, each person alternately says a word, building between them word by word a narrative that presents a problem and presents a solution. Tips were to speed it up, not to think too much, to say the obvious thing, as audience enjoys the natural tension of the risk factor and there is more drama from the incidental unexpected. The resolution of the day had to be a tie between, “The worms had worms!” and “I kicked the basket in the basket!”

During the writing up of my notes I discovered a great resource as well for more detail and information on a myriad variations of the exercises and games I've described, and oodles more besides at The Improv Encyclopedia

The Fine Art of an Improvised Bomb: Class Two

2011-09-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

243

The Second Day of Class for Improv 101

Class began with a review of some of the basic, core improv terms.

Block: When you say “No!” to someone’s offer. This is generally bad form in improv.
Endowing: Give other person character or plot. Can be good or bad. Offering someone with something, or can be presenting self into a scene as a character.
Offer: Give someone an object, idea, emotion, status, character, or anything else really.
Wimping: Being vague, now endowing your offer with properties.
Shelving: Putting someone’s ideas to the side, not empowering the other person.

Five blocks of basic scene structure:

Environment
Character
Plot / Problem
Raise Stakes
Resolution

Number One Rule of Improv: Accepting

Warmed up with some cross-circle variants of Zoom! Screech! Zap!, then moved into Freeze Tag, Power Ball, and Word Association Firing Line.

Freeze-Tag: Start with two people, everyone else in a line. The two people begin a scene, something basic probably on a suggestion from Pearce, and mime out what they can. When Pearce yells, “Freeze!” someone from the front of the line steps forward and taps one of the two players out, then adopts the tapped out person’s position and stance. When the scene resumes the new player must change the context of the scene and redefine the mime currently under way. When people get tapped out, they leave the scene and move to the back of the line.

Power Ball: Stand in a circle. One person makes the mime and sound effects for a massive ball of energy, then pretends to pass / shoot / compress and slingshot / etc. the energy at someone else n the circle. The recipient must “catch” the energy, make as big a show of the size / mass / weight / impact / damage / near miss of the energy as possible, then retool / refashion the energy into something else, say an arrow or atomic missile or commemorative statuette of liberty, and then hurl it on / at / into / around someone else in the circle. Hilarity and sprained spleens ensues.

Firing Line: The aforementioned one versus three word association game.

Character Creation, Tableau, and Tips:

So important to establish a distinct and clear character, this will make the character easier to know, to speak as, and to represent

Know and communicate the gender, age, disposition

o Is this character predator, prey, outgoing, shy?

· Ask questions – why are you or they doing something, what are you adding with your character choice?

· When entering a scene, you should be a complimentary character, there to make an offer and add to the scene as a whole

o Parallel characters coming into a scene seem like Xerox and add little, no tension or drama

· Opposites work better in comedy & drama, a contrasting character is likely going to be more beneficial to a scene

How and what to choose about a character:

Physicality and physical nature; how do they walk, move, carry themselves through and otherwise occupy space

Voice:

o play with your voice,

o play with how you talk,

o the speed,

o the volume,

o the inflections,

o the accents,

o the pitch,

o keywords or catchphrases to repeat

Archetypes and stereotypes can make for easy shorthand when communicating a legible character to an audience quickly

Nature:

o Predator or prey?

o What is their motivation?

o Shy or outgoing?

o Stoner or uptight?

o Chaste or cougar?

Status:

o Status is relative

o Customer, boss, client, servant, victim?

o Authority, officer?

o High and Low status

o Power balance

High Status:

o Open, take up more space, confident, head up, not fidgeting or wandering, solid on the ground.

o Voice is strong and clear.

o Eye contact, very powerful.

o Disposition, don’t have to be unfriendly or mean to be high status

o Avoid always coming in high status, as those often drive the scenes

Low Status:

o Body language is closed, slumped, a dead spider

o Little or no eye contact

o Muffled voice

o Fidgety, not grounded

o Shy, coward, prey

Thing about setting to ground characters. Characters in a vacuum are largely without context for the audience. Two accountants would be one thing. Two accountants on a beach another. Two accountants at a race track, something else again.

Use what you know. Pearce gave the example of getting a suggestion from the audience to be a teacher. As he knows more about science from college than history or romantic languages, he would default to a science teacher, just to have some nuggets of truth from his knowledge of the subject matter to fall back on or infuse into his fictional character to give it life and validity.

Use your physicality. If you’re a big fella, shape your characters around that. For example, if playing a sheriff and fortunate enough to appear to have paid for the proverbial keg over the six pack, perhaps play the role as a beer swilling sheriff like from a Paul Newman film. Or use your physique to add irony, such as the buxom ballerina should such circumstantial opportunity arrive, like those hippos and alligators in Fantasia.

In a setting, chose your role. An undefined role will appear unformed and vague and ultimately confuse or disengage the audience.

Second to the Chair Status Game: Stand as close as you can to the chair without touching it and prove to all comers that you are the highest status on the stage other than the magnificently mighty chair.

Vending Machine versus Customer Game: Variations include high status vending machine vs. high status customer, low status vending machine vs. low status customer, low status vending machine vs. high status customer, and high status vending machine vs. low status customer who totally wasn’t worthy of the Tom Cruise Meets U2 Producing Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark Money Pit Majesty of the Diamond Age Platinum Plated High Status Vending Machine.

Having explored status, we moved on to dip a toe into the pulsating pool that is scene work. The ground rules were simple sounding enough; suggest an activity, agree to it, and do it. Further, keep the scene moving, both the plot and the action within space. Don’t plant and stay anchored to a solitary spot, move around the stage exploring / playing with your character in the scene, helping to convey it to the audience through your discoveries playing within it.

Improv isn’t all about comedy, it’s about acting and creation and motivation. The comedy is emergent from ideas to generate scene, problems, and resolutions as they arise / arrive.

Animal Mannerisms Game: Receive an environmental setting, situation / problem, and an animal your character will have affectations of. Play out the scene demonstrating identifiable animal characteristics while resolving the dilemma of the situation within the confines of the assigned setting.

Pearce repeatedly reminds players to avoid for resolving scenes with deus ex machina solutions, like having Superman show up with an EKG machine to save the day, or aliens, or gods, unless the scene were already about super heroes, extraterrestrials, or divine deities.

The Animal Mannerism Games entailed teams of three. First up a moose, a butterfly, and a lizard tasked with trying to design a commercial barn for mass production. The comedy and hard won lessons were immediately apparent as each player tried to shape their mannerisms and body postures and gestures around their associated animal, all the while receiving notes and corrections from Pearce. The next group, asked to stuff a thanksgiving turkey, contained a parrot, a cricket / grasshopper, and a camel. Initially the group discovered that they needed to better establish who their character was to give the audience a context for the scene; not just the animal aspects, also the social associations, who was family, and in what station, etc. Also learned that talking on top of one another more often adds confusion than comedy. The player playing as a parrot type person kept insisting on adding more pine nuts with a high pitched urgency, much like wanting a cracker, and got great laughs.

After the turkey stuffing, an antelope, deer, and ostrich opened and operated a hair salon, learning along the way that use of props is great to ground a scene, however the setting must be maintained as though actually there, not just offhandedly referenced, else the audience’s suspension of disbelief will evaporate, or worse, spectators will become confused and detached. The use of the cubed grounded the sketch, the scene setting, and if actors respect the setting they’ve empowered, those same cubes could be pretty much anything you say they represent.

After that came a snake, dolphin, and orangutan trying to decorate a holiday tree. While the dolphin player kept hopping around squeaking observations and the orangutan meandered and flailed along waiting to be told what to do, the snake player sent the others for more tinsel and using the time alone to steal away all the presents from beneath the tree. Early in the sketch Pearce made a note that the quiet player in a scene runs the risk of being “Snowballed”, shut out of the scene due to a lack of creative input or clear vocalization.

Last up were my group, a worm, a Labrador dog, and a penguin played admittedly poorly by me. We were tasked with building an IKEA shelving unit. I stalled, fell to using my normal voice and just walking like a wobbling cane. My only idea was to sit on the crate we’d put forward as our IKEA box, thinking of the way penguin males all sit on the eggs during the harse winters ala March of the Penguins or Happy Feet. Not once did I think of Burgeous Meredith or Danny DeVito. Pearce interject very quickly and asked why I wasn’t doing anything to emulate or insinuate a penguin-esque presence into the scene. Clearly my egg sitting bit had been confusing or simply inane. I struggled trying to channel classic Batman villains for the remainder of the time on stage, while acutely aware of the rubber-bones dexterity of the fellow emoting worm-itude into every facet of his performance, really killer work secondary only to his performance as a male leader of a cheerleading squad with a nasty fungal toe infection on the big trials day the following class.

Empower Game: Two lines, one side says they have a package for… and comes up with a name that the person from the other line must bring to life, something Monty Python absurd like Ms. Lampbottom or Mr. Leadfish, and the latter person enact the role / character they’ve been empowered / endowed with as they cross the stage and receive their package, declare perhaps what the package actually contains, and react accordingly.

I did poorly with the Empower Game, chiefly for over thinking it, trying too hard to come up with a name that got a laugh from get go. The error with this intention is that I’m thinking about myself, and essentially being selfish. I’m trying to get the laugh. And maybe if I hadn’t over thought things and stumped myself in the critical moments, I would have gotten away with it. However, by blowing it a couple times, I realized the error of my ways ran deeper than just choking or failing to be crotch grabbing pee leaking funny. The real mistake I’d made stemmed from blowing off a core tenant of improv, the rule about striving to make others look good, and more importantly, to never cause another player to look bad.

So standing there waiting my turn to offer a package to someone with the name I’d make up, trying to make up the most brilliant of names, I thought I need a pronoun and an adverb or adjective, and then wait, it’s my turn, and instead of delivering a solution, I choke, and fail to even get gender correct. I say, “I have your parcel, Mr. Abject Pronoun.” And then I can feel my face lock into a freeze for fear of revealing my shock over the words that have just sprung from my mouth and pronounced me via subtext loud and clear and absolute asshat. I see the player across from me with the seasonal real life name reacting with surprise, confusion, and a fair degree of warranted annoyance, though remaining good spirited. I offer a new name as an alternative, and still stinging from my own lackluster performance as an aquatic fowl, amend my offer and endowment with a quick, “Sorry, I mean, I have your package, Ms. Penguin!” What I should have said to save face for all involved, other than not saying “Abject Prounoun” in the first place, could have been, “Oh, my apologies, I see I’ve completely read the logo wrong. Allow me to amend, this parcel is indeed for a Misses Beaverpastry.”

Next time my turn came around to give someone a name I did only slightly better with “Mr. Shower Trowel.” Clearly concerns about patching up my relationship with my fellow actors bled through into my stage life.

Some finishing notes on Blocking. A Block is just a “No”. A Block is not a Conflict. A Conflict is a “No, and but…” or a “No, I was once…” You just feel a Block, it tastes sour, and is clearly not an acceptance, instead a denial and can kill a scene without providing any alternative direction. Conflict is pitting things against once another to progress or evolve the situation, to build drama, present problems, raise stakes, and strive towards resolutions.

Over-Acceptance Game: An exercise of everything ending with “Yes, and…” to get creative juices flowing while crushing any opportunity or option to block.

Bus Stop / Park Bench Game: Long lineup of all players. Start with one player on the bench, happened to be me pretending to read a paper and projecting more or less with the same amount of resentment as I would normally feel about awaiting public transit. The next player along the line moves to sit down on the bench, projecting posture, mannerisms, and character that incorporate what we’ve learned about stature, recognizable traits, and mentioning details as clues for other players and presumably the audience to pick up on and relate too.

I fared better with this game, quickly off the bench as first man and ready to play once my turn came around again. One of the Canadian actors had adopted a very television land over the top US - of F*&k Yeah! – A style redneck American, and while she’d done a fine job, being from the South where those dueling banjos stereotypes come from (technically Deliverance reflected an aspect South Carolina and Georgia, and where I’m from in East Tennessee rather jabs right into that aromatic armpit if you squint enough at a map), and also being a fan of banjo players like Steve Martin and Grandpa Jones, I elected to play my next turn as a banjo plucking and strumming, East Tennessee (though sounding more like Lexington Kentucky, really) sincere southerner that said absurd things with a syrupy smile and sincere smirk. I made a point to play to the other actor, let them set the lines up and play through with whatever sprang to mind, not trying to be funny, or trying too hard to be anything except sincere within the character I’d designed, and I ended up getting a few laughs and guffaws. I suspect my gentleman redneck routine might have mixed messages for some folks, however having grown up around folks like that, felt like an honest choice to make, though perhaps I could have pushed it more, better established the character, like the guy running for governor or the Cyclops in O Brother Where Art Thou.

The blue ribbon, had I one to give, that day would have gone to the fellow that made the clever choice to show up on the park bench as an astronaut who repeatedly required the assistance of the other players to keep from floating away in his reality of zero G. Shout out as well to the cat that decided to channel Jeff Goldblum, and the pair of actresses that brought a Yaletown patio conversation to the stage with laser precision. Have I mentioned the class is full of very talented, clever people?

The Fine Art of an Improvised Bomb: Class One

2011-09-17T23:17:00.000-07:00

244

Improv 101

Taught by Pearce Visser from 10 am to 4 pm for 4 consecutive Saturdays on the dates of September 3, 10, 17, & 24 in the year of her majesty, 2011 at the Improv Centre on Granville Island.

I’d been a longstanding fan of improv without knowing that those shows and sketches came about as a product of improv; or at least, the comedians and actors accountable for providing so much entertainment and inspiration were themselves products of the improve syndicates.

The British Who’s Line Is It Anyway initially gave me the term. I wouldn’t fully appreciate what improv truly consists of until seeing it live with my Wife, the same gal that got me into this class as a grand birthday gift, when we went on a whim to see Theater Sports on Granville Island one balmy evening many years ago.

We procured tickets for the first show, found out tickets to subsequent shows would be cheap should we elect to stick around, and ended up staying through all three. We particularly enjoyed the third show, which is the notoriously “blue” show, since no minors are allowed to that one.

The live show is a simple revelation. Seeing actors react to the crowd, to crowd suggestions and reactions, removes a sense of detachment, of disbelief. Watching Who’s Line Is It Anyway is impressive, and you get a sense that the folks in front of the camera are quick witted, yet commercial breaks remind you that you’re suspending your disbelief, that the final edit might have cut around all the times actors guffawed, all the times bits went pear shaped, every time the audience might have yawned or gags have bombed. The live show is live, and while not everything works, the mistakes can add value and challenge, all about the strengths and quality elements of the players.

Since then I’ve learned that the sketch comedy I enjoyed as a youth of the Upright Citizen’s Brigade is a result of an improv group of the same name, and some of the same members, like Amy Poehler. Second City spawned Colbert, Tina Fey, and dozens of others peppered throughout Canadian and US television productions. SCTV, SNL, Vacant Lot, The State, Exit 57, Strangers with Candy, both versions of Who’s Line is it Anyway, the Drew Cary Show, Parks & Recreation, 32 Rock, and dozens of other programs have their roots in improv troops and companies in NYC, Chicago, Toronto, LA, and even Vancouver, where both Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie have roots, and both helped found the company that today owns and operates the Improv Centre and local incarnation of Theater Sports. And that teached the course my wife has enrolled me into.

As a kid I used to watch SNL every Saturday night on a tiny black and white TV I’d pulled into bed with me on my bottom bunk of the bunk bed I shared with my brother. While my brother snored away overhead I watched and listened as the Dennis Miller era cast rambled through skits and sketches, thinking to myself that someday my cadre of extras rolls in all the high school productions would set me up on the long road to playing the stage of SNL. Sure, I wasn’t funny yet, or particularly good looking. I didn’t even have a menagerie of goofy slapstick characters to fall back on when bully push came to grumpy audience shove. What I did have was a penchant for pretending to be shot by heavy gauge firearms (I’d also wanted to be a Hollywood stunt man), and a deep affinity for absurdest comedy. Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, Richard Pryer, even Bill Cosby, all the people whose records I’d listened too over and over that one long, lovely summer in Pennsylvania between 6^th and 7^th grade, when I also read all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries while hidden away in my hay bale fort in the rafters of the cattle barn, and when the local library had no reservations about lending out an unfiltered selection of comedy records to a kid with an ample appetite for the art form.

Call it mid-life crisis, call it a need for affirmation, or at least confirmation, that I did the right thing becoming a game designer instead of learning to play the banjo and tie balloon animals and regale audiences with anecdotes about being clever, crafty, or an affable idiot. Perhaps it’s just a hope for conquering the social awkwardness I have with speaking in front of people, especially when they aren’t strangers or obliged to be polite due to my being their manager.

Perhaps it’s just for the hell of it, to maybe learn something and have fun along the way. Frankly, that’s enough, and so far, learned quite a bit, and now allow me to share some of the better baubles of brilliance with you.

The First Day of Class

Pearce Visser has been an actor and improvisational comedian for over twenty years, heralding back to his university years in Alberta. I recognize him from nearly every Theater Sports show I’ve ever attended, immediately filling me with both confidence that he knows his stuff and dread that I will never be able to live up to the bar his performances I’ve seen have set.

Pearce began by stating his expectations: for us to be kids, to play, and to reach for pure creativity.

Improv is something that can be used every day, not just about making up crap, it’s about confidence. And building the confidence to make up crap. Improv is about guts and balls.

One of people’s biggest fears is public speaking. Having people look directly at you is inherently predatory. Improv in the face of that attention is something somewhat spiritual – humanistic. Improv is inherently about accepting, making offerings, sharing. Improv is about bending, flowing, and adapting. Improv is about collaboratively telling a good story, being engaged, listening, sharing, and asking for details. Improv is about becoming an active, engaged listener. Improv is about not judging.

The first day of improv class would be about mentally exhausting, and despite breaks and lunch, despite being able to duck out for the bathroom without hand raising whenever you need, the exercises and attempts of day one to teach everyone to override their logic and let their creativity flow would be exhausting. We’d be warned.

Improve is about improvement. Commit to the exercise because you must have commitment to create something meaningful and entertaining from improv. Standing around shuffling your feet and having your hands half hanging out of your pockets, unless part of an intentional character, is half-assed. If you can’t commit to a character on stage among your fellow actors, why would an audience bother to commit to believing your character from off stage? If anything, you need to over sell the character your creating / embodying / choosing.

You must flow back and forth with the audience. They know you’re making it up. Most people in the audience want you to succeed, and moreover, to entertain them.

The audience projects onto you, asks you questions. What’s he going to do? What would I do in this situation? What is or will be the gag or punch line or twist?

The audience is adapting with each new bit of detail, information, and will interpret what’s happening on the fly. Your actions define who you are as a character / entity on stage, and as such everything must be clear. Vague elements or characterizations or premises can’t be built on.

In improv, things change and move. Things get reinterpreted. Things may even seem insane or stupid to the casual observer, yet there is a method to the madness.

You must commit or risk losing your connection with the audience and scene. If committed, you won’t fail, further, you likely can’t fail because the audience is right there in it with you no matter how absurd your scene or situation is becoming. The audience wants to see you really try, and if you commit you can’t fail, because instead of worrying about failure, realize mistakes add humor. Commit and don’t worry or judge. Just take the punch and keep going.

Rules of Comedy:

Recognition – things the audience identify with will build empathy, empathy will get the laugh
Surprise – something no one would have thought of
Repetition – introduce something, repeat it so the audience picks up on a pattern, and repeat it again for a laugh, or deviate from expectation for surprise to get a laugh
A lot of fear works into comedy – surprise to relief to release
Laughter is a very powerful tool

Terms:

Blocking – refusing an offer or suggestion from others
Wimping – accepting offers and then failing to do anything with them
Corpsing – breaking character to laugh or react outside the character your committed too
Gregarious – living in a group, or flock; being a joiner without adding contrast or conflict to a scene

We’re all different levels and background. Improv helps to break down barriers and build camaraderie as though going through hell together.

Rules of the class include getting called on any lack of commitment and called on blocking others. Blocking is refusing to accept suggestions or offers from others. The biggest rule of improv is to accept, to never block others, to condition yourself to not block as a reflex. You must remove your bubble, refuse to say no, not have any negative bubble around yourself others’ ideas might bounce off of and fail to flourish or be facilitated.

Further, don’t try to control reality. Say yes to offers from others, to their suggestions and ideas, and allow for emergence and spontaneous absurdity. Allow your role to change if someone endows you with a new role; though be aware that by endowing someone else with a new role you may catch them off guard and force / compel them to discard something they might have just worked up in the wings before stepping into the fray on stage. If endowed, have to let the role go and take on role from others.

In our normal lives we need to be logical constantly. Being creative? Not so much. For improv, let creativity guide us.

In improv, as well as being committed to character, we must tune in and stay on scene.

Pearce encouraged us to look up Doug Henning for some educational examples. He then moved the class into games and exercises.

Zoom – Screech – Zap: A warm up game to get the blood flowing. A person says “Zoom!” to the person next to him, that person passes the “Zoom!” on around the circle of people by turning to the next person and saying “Zoom!” and so on. The “Zoom!” passes around the circle unhendered until someone responds to the person telling them “Zoom!” with “Screech!”, where upon the person that said “Zoom!” now has to reverse the flow and turn to the person on their other side and say “Zoom!”, and the direction of flow has now been officially reversed. To add another layer, anyone at any time upon receiving a “Zoom!” may lock eyes with anyone in the circle and send the love their way with a “Zap!” accompanied by a point, hand slap, or both. At that point the recipient of the “Zap!” can chose to send a “Zoom!” to either direction by turning to the person on either side of them, or reject the “Zap!” with a “Screech!” and force the initiating “Zap!” sender to pick a new target.

Knee Slap – Clap – Snap: An associative word game wherein you have to coordinate slapping your knees, clapping, then snapping one hand, and then the other, with listening to what the person before you said and timing your response to that with your finger snaps. So when the person before you says, “Thunder Struck!” while snapping once to each word; you then have top slap your knees, clap, and associate a new word to add to the last word said by the person before you, such as, “Struck Gold!” snapping once to each word. Definitely harder than it sounds.

Johnson File: Split the group into two lines. A person from one line steps forward and offers up the “Johnson File”. A person from the other line steps forward and accepts, creating a characterization the first person must then adapt too. Each recipient tries to receive the file differently, and in so doing afford a context and role for the person offering the file beyond simply offering up a folder with a name on it. After this each person goes to the back of the opposite line that they might cycle through both roles afforded by the exercise at least once.

Bring Bring: Two lines again. First person says, “Bring! Bring!” emulating a phone ringing. Second person answers with apparent caller ID, and identifies the caller. First person must adopt the role prescribed to them, and suggest what they might be calling about. Second person responds to the suggestion without blocking. At least, that’s how I remember it, should’ve written down more details. Notes on this exercise were to remain accepting and be precise, not add on a bunch of extraneous detail that’s difficult to convey or support within the scene.

Experts: Groups of four, two as audience and two as experts. Audience suggests a topic, and the experts must riff on that topic as experts for a little while, making offers to one another to grow and develop the topic without blocking or stepping out of area of expertise. Of our four people, I first was part of the audience while two fellows waxed on eloquently about the evolution of hair, from its emergence as a evolutionary armor against small animals in the 40’s, particularly on our heads since we all walked on our hands then, to the later development of balding as a result of our walking on our feet and no longer needed that defense against brush birds and thicket squirrels. Next up, my partner and I received the topic of juice, something fortunately we both happen to be experts on, and we discussed and reminisced jovially with our studio audience about the discovery of juice as the inexhaustible fuel source of the future, and the variances of results versus fuel sources, from the disappointing side effects of lettuce extracts to the explosive results of creaming beans. A real hoot had by all.

Tableau Game: Two groups again. One person from a group begins making a sound and motion that suits the theme Pearce gave, such as angry or sleepy or gleeful. Once set, that person must continue to repeat this sound and motion until the whole team has joined in. One by one each member of the group joins the machine, each with a unique complimentary sound and motion that adds to and builds on the overall machine, attempting to create a range of elevations, pitches, and stage depths to organically create a holistic mechanization.

Misname Things Game: This is a solo exercise wherein each person walks around the stage and auditorium space pointing to things and identifying them incorrectly. For instance, point at a light fixture and declare it an elephant tusk with the certainty of an enlightened anthropologist. Harder than it sounds, and definitely begins to grate on a person’s natural predisposition towards being logical and cognitively buttoned down.

What Are You Doing?: Pair off into two person teams. One person begins doing a mime and sound FX as though perhaps shooting hoops or beachcombing for coins, and the second person asks what they’re doing. This is the tricky part. The first person then makes something up that is completely not what they are miming, like shaving cats or gelding giraffes, and the second person begins doing that. Then the first person asks the second person what they’re doing, and the second person says something new, like rolling dough or hitchhiking with aliens, and the first person adopts that behavior through mime. Essentially the exercise is about accepting suggestions and assigning / endowing behaviors / roles. It’s definitely a fun and extremely physical, game!

My notes mention a Brainwashing game as well; however it clearly worked, as I cannot recall what the rules of that were. I do remember we did a couple small group exercises with word association variations, most difficult being the one where one person faces a firing squad of three and has to respond with the first word to come to mind to each of people in the firing squad, an interesting dynamic that proved easier for the people that didn’t have to work to have words ready when their turns came around.

Summary notes at the end of the day were…

Three aspects of a scene are:

Character
Environment
Plot

Don’t be afraid to make a mistake, and if you choose to draw attention to it, nurture it and allow it to blossom, may well become one of the best parts of the show simply because it wasn’t planned and got a chance to creatively evolve.

Ran. Ran so far away. Couldn't get away.

2011-08-11T23:25:00.000-07:00

245

My first experience with running at any notable length would be gym class in seventh grade at the Washington College Academy. We ran laps around the basketball court’s defining lines in the gymnasium, standard stuff for any gym class, really. Sneakers padding, slapping, and squealing against that polished and buffed wooden floor as a couple dozen kids from the diminutive seventh and eighth grade classes combined into a seething mass of kids from different walks of life joined under one banner of general misery.

Except for Charles Kennedy. Lap after lap, he high kneed his way through the mandatory mile as though nothing in the world, nigh, the universe mattered more.

Alow me to pause and afford you, dearest reader, with some back story on Charles Kennedy, not all of it flattering, though much of it why I considered him a friend, even if he were someone unable to form or reciprocate similar sentiments.

I met Charles during the summer between fourth and fifth grade, we attended the same camp, a special project camp to be sure, yet a summer camp all the same. I’d been seeing counselors at the Watauga Behavioral Health Services to work on decrypting, deconstructing, and ultimately defusing my behavioral and emotional issues. A couple IQ tests discerned I might just be something other than an idiot after all, though quite what was anyone’s guess.

All ages of folks walk into Watauga Behavioral Health Services for help, and sitting in the lobby while my Mom talked to kindly women often casting strangely sympathetic or sorrowful expressions my way allowed me to overhear a lot of the troubles that ailed others far older than my Mom or me, especially from the staff of orderlies and nurses at the station near the door. Apparently people got to live there full time inside those powder blue walls and halls, a color that remains one of my favorites, and I wondered then as I swung my feet over the flecked Formica tiles that my reception chair elevated me up above what things might be like to live in such a place.

Not knowing then that part of my Mother’s urgency about places like this came from her own mother spending time in one, and not electively. Found that family fact out later, strains of crazy run in the family, and judging by the full measure of my spontaneous outbreaks of rage and fury, might well have found purchase in my gallon drunk from the gene pool.

Not knowing any of that I sat swinging my feet listening to each weeks gossip about the residents sequestered in the many floors overhead. I’d look up at the ceiling, bangs falling back out of my face, squinting as though I might somehow see what these people were up too, and imagining that I could. The guy that each week required new solutions for helping him resist the temptation to shove his metal cutlery into the wall sockets. The lady with the penchant for furs that kept making faux fur shawls with rolls of toilet paper and bathrobe ties. The guy that inadvertently yelled bad words during conversation, then sobbed uncontrollably until someone gave him some Kool-Aide. Sugary fruit flavors will soothe most ills I could think of then.

So being a member had it’s privileges, and on my birthday that summer I woke to find far less presents than I probably expected and a single envelope containing a card with a picture of the forest as I’d come to appreciate a real forest looks like from the many Ranger Rick magazines I’d read from the subscriptions my Grandma C. and her sisters sent over our childhood years, that and Highlights with those tantalizing pictures for words puzzles. Inside the card, a simple printed note declaring that I would be heading off to summer camp, when and where, followed by a note in my Mom’s handwriting wishing me a happy birthday, love Mom & Dad. I looked up from the card at my parents, my expression largely somewhere between perplexed and utterly neutral, while their expectant smiles grew strained as they waited a response. When I nearly exploded with enthusiastic glee, their smiles widened into the real, non-coached variety, and a couple weeks later I was on a short bus to the camp of crazy kids.

If you didn’t know the pedigree of the attendees, the summer camp would be largely the same as any other in the Appalachian Mountains and the rest of the woody hippy bush spread across the crux of where Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas meet like the smooching siblings they are. All the normal summer camp archetypes were there; the no neck Neanderthal lads shaving off beards before breakfast and puberty, the shy reclusive bug eaters, the nerds, geeks, jocks, richies, and every shade of archetype and kid camp filmic cliché Earnest Goes to Camp, Psychonauts, and the Meatballs series would have you believe. What you might not expect were kids with disabilities, physical or mental. While the physical ones minimally mingled with the rest of us, the Booby Hatch never closed or segregated otherwise. Down syndrome, fire bug, autism, anger management issues, lecherous kin survivalist, dropped baby syndrome, recovering Kool-Aid clown style red-lipper; come one come all.

And somewhere in that wondrous madness I met Charles Kennedy. Shy, stuttering, socially awkward, and terrified of his own shadow. When I saw Crispin Glover in Back to the Future, I wondered what Charles might be up too in life. When I met Crispin Glover in person, I hoped Charles found as good an outlet for addressing his own social incapacities.

In school I’d already drawn the attention of pretty much ever bully could heed the call by that age. Something about the weird kid in the back of the room, too desperate for friends, for validation from others, wide open target for the weak minded, mean spirited, and the conveniently cruel. Add to that my impotent rage anger management issues and I’d shone like a beacon in the night for the creeps and crawlers of the secondary school set.

And while I never stood up to much of anyone in school, perhaps for fear of lasting repercussions, I had little qualm about standing up to bullies at summer camp. Maybe it was that chance to work from a clean slate, be someone without precedent or history, though I doubt that, considering the bullies started after I changed schools the first time, became the new kid, and failed to make the most of that like the downtrodden in films seem to always manage too. Not that Twilight or Heathers remotely reflects life, rather just wistfully reflects upon it. More likely my bravado came from an immediate refusal to let some punks ruin my vacation. Sometimes rash acts stem from stimulus that simple, a refusal to accept corruption of an experience I felt I’d earned and arrived fully entitled to enjoy.

True, the brute I talked out of beating me up for yanking his pants off in the deep end of the pool probably should have hit me. I’d been imitating the other boys more comfortable with swimming, the ones also not in water wings, the others that could leap fearlessly from the high dive and cannonball into the midst of unwary swimmers down below. The ones that could hold their breath and skim along beneath the surface, the ones that accepted me as one of their own when I demonstrated that I could, too. Learning to swim through being tossed into Watauga Lake in an adult size life jacket to fend for myself had some perks, after all. My confidence in an enclosed body of water knew few bounds, pardon the pun. I recall feeling amazed and a touch superior upon seeing all those kids my age and older that were clinging to inflatable rafts, wore water wings, or life vests better suited to youthful frames than that behemoth I’d first been cast to the tides like Moses in. I felt the same way seeing all those young men leap into the pool a couple days into the Navy during the mandatory aquatic proficiency test.

A mandatory test for a branch of military based around a presumption of the life aquatic. About every third person reluctantly jumped in when told to by the commanding officer, and with varying degrees of struggle or concession, dropped to the bottom and had to be prodded with a long pole that the swimming impaired could use to cling to and be dragged out or manage to clamber up and climb out of the massive indoor pool with. The rest of us tread water for ten minutes, then swam by any means possible to the distant far end and back, then tread water some more. I elected to conserve energy since no time limits for the swim had been mentioned, and I’d clued in that instructions were very literal in bootcamp, things were said or left unsaid deliberately. When I’d passed the test and climbed with unasked for burly Navy SEAL assistance one armed fishing technique assistance out of the pool, my Chief quietly said I wound be one of the few with the right instincts to survive a sinking ship. One of the best, and strangest, compliments I’ve ever received.

So a couple armchair bullies tried to poke some fun at scrawny, wire thin, big headed, coke bottle glasses wearing Charles Kennedy and I intervened. Not that I was a lot beefier, not by much, however I made up for that with showmanship, and the bullies pissed off and didn’t return. From then on when not separated by mandate, as we were from different bunk houses, Charles and I were generally in near vicinity to one another, and I kept an eye out for anyone picking at him.

To say we were buddies would be inaccurate to some degree, because Charles had some issues that might have been a highly functional version of autism. He didn’t connect to folks, tended to take what they said with some confusion, or very literally, and shied away quickly as though fearing a smack. Clearly Charles had been bullied a lot through his young life, and having an inability to read people seemed to exasperate the problem. We were friends in that he recognized me and relaxed, knew I wasn’t there to hit him, and when I gave him instructions like stay put or get back from that running car, no ill consequences befell him and he lived to see another day without bruise or blemish.

Another kid I met and played with a lot during camp looked a lot like a young Kevin McDonald with glasses, named Jeff.

When I arrived at Washington College Academy and once classes began I soon discovered that in the class a year ahead of me was Charles Kennedy. A year later, when I moved from seventh to eighth grade, Charles’s younger brother Paul began at the school, and we got to be great pals, even after Paul took his youth group leader’s warnings a little too seriously and convinced me to help him burn all his Marvel comic books in a pit in the dirt at the back end of his parent’s property in Jonesboro one fine late spring night. Charles and Paul’s father did restoration architecture around Easter Tennessee, particularly around Jonesboro where he’d been buying up a lot of the more noteworthy historical properties. Paul assured me his family is a branch off the same tree as JFK and Arnie’s ex. Never know who you’ll bump into when you shake a tree in one of the original 13 colonies.

I also discovered as classes began at Washington College Academy that Jeff also attended, a couple years ahead of me and the person to introduce me to Kitty Pryde and Lockheed and the alien Brood through the pages of the X-Men comics he’d been purchasing with his modest earnings helping his dad with yard work and the like. Like me, his parents also gained his admittance into the expensive school through working for it. The maintained grounds and filled in when the dorms needed house mothers on short notice. Jeff had convinced himself if he squint his eyes hard enough, scrunched his forehead fervently enough, he could teleport. I didn’t help, trying to be nice while watching him lock up for five minutes at a time, then assuring him I’d been hanging around wondering where he’d gone only to see him reappear in front of me again five minutes later. Did my heart good to see him dance and exclaim how he’d proven it could be done, hoping no one else could hear him and ruin his teacup temporal victory.

Charles played the pipe organ. He played it with nearly mechanical precision, and is the only kid I’ve ever met with a functional pipe organ salvaged from a tiny Southern Baptist church somewhere that’d failed to floss sufficient flocks to keep the chapel open for business. He played for the big church downtown on Saturdays and Sundays, always arrived on time, and would become agitated to the point of aggression if anyone tried to mess with his regular schedule. When I saw Rainman, I thought of Charles.

During my seventh grade year the school sent out a short, brown bus driven by the history and civics teacher to collect the kids bussing in from Johnson City, Jonesboro, and anywhere in between. Two of the kids that bullied me most were on that bus every morning. So was Charles. No one said anything when Charles started showing up in class with bruises until I saw the ones on his ribs as he changed shirts in the locker room before gym class. I said something to every adult I could find. Those bruises weren’t from home, or from abusive parents. There were from the boys that could simply stand next to Charles in the locker room for half a minute and Charles would sit there, slumped, shoulders drawn in, and begin to pee.

I’d begun trying to write stories around that time, and as the bullies turned more and more in my direction, especially after Charles’s parents pulled him out of school, and some of those stories entailed gaining super powers that would allow me to right the wrongs and punish the wicked, in particular on behemoth slack jawed idiot problem kid that had ended up at WCA because his parents paid away their problems and after Junior had been expelled from all the local public schools and failed a couple grades besides. I believe what got me expelled when my history teacher, the same one that later went to jail for molesting boys, confiscated my journal story notebook during a quiz, read it, photocopied it, gave the copies to the school’s president, the same guy that embezzled funds, bankrupt the school, and fled for the Caymans a few years later. Apparently repaying all those swirlies and locker room humiliations with the punitive application of a plunger equals a call to the parents and a week’s suspension, followed by watching my tearful, white faced Mother purge every poster, magazine, and cassette she could find from the tiny room I shared with my brother. She never found my Motley Crue or Ratt tapes, but all those Def Leppard posters, gone. The three hard won Heavy Metal issues? Gone. Judy Blume’s Forever? Gone forever.

Right around my week of home imprisonment, the short brown bus pulled up to school with a spider web crack in the wide back window. Chares had a concussion, and an ambulance came for him. Junior claimed Charles had done it all on his own. DeAngelo seconded that though I believe DeAngelo, the “good cop” of the two bully’s Abbott & Costello act turned Junior in as soon as his ass hit the hardwood of the chair facing the school president, the same guy that had given me a week’s exile only days earlier.

Charles returned to school a few days later, though he never rode the short bus again. Junior got a week suspension, ironically the same amount of time I got for wanting him worked over with a fictional plunger wielding super power. And that’s about when running laps in gym class took on a new dimension.

Charles could run fast, old man style cotton shorts flapping against his corn stalk thighs as his knees shot up to about even with his waist line. The day he first lapped Junior we saw Junior’s power begin to slip. The day he lapped Junior twice we knew Charles had stuck gold. And whether for my loathing of Junior or my admiration of Charles, I began trying to keep up. After a couple weeks of this I also lapped Junior, and laughed at him as I did so, despite the obvious risk of repercussion in the locker room thereafter. I took to grabbing my things and running across the parking lot to the classroom building to change, I knew a bathroom down by the band room where the high school age drummer kid practiced none of the other kids seemed to know about, smelled like mothballs but had a lock on the door.

The behemoth of a gym teacher, a guy named Mr. Matthews with horror stories of playing soccer back in his military heyday were players’ cleats were circles of leather punched onto tacks that players would pull off so that they could gouge opponents kneecaps off on the field. Mr. Matthews caught on quickly to the shift in power happening between the bullied and the bullies, at least in the gym. He stopped indulging all DeAngelo’s whiny protests about needing a special cloth under his hair to protect his jerry curls while he did sit ups. He began goading Junior to hurry up, calling out the fact that the brute was being lapped by kids his breaking wind could knock over.

And then Mr. Mathews showed up with a stop watch and a decree. The laps would equal a mile, and would be timed, and anyone failing to beat the federally mandated mile time minimum per their gender would be forced to do extra exercises to help strengthen them up to run all that much faster the next time. Charles always won and always had the fastest time. What surprises everyone is that I almost always came in second, and often by only a few seconds.

I began practicing on my own, running a circuit of farm roads that formed approximately a mile if you ran intersection to intersection to intersection to home again. I recall leaving to run, and arriving home panting, and hearing my Dad ask what I’d done, and I told him I’d run the mile. He looked at me with feigned disbelief and said that I surely must be pulling his leg, no one runs that fast. While I had to pause and decide whether he honestly doubted me or had an intention of giving me praise by pulling my leg, I realized that I needed to overcome my distrustful nature and appreciate that to that point in our oft strained relationship, that comment turned out to be one of the nicest things my Dad had ever said to me. I’d accomplished something. Nothing Forest Gump, sure, but for this troubled teen, definitely something somewhat constructive. I could run, could temporarily forget worry and obligation and things to be angry at, and focus on trying to reach the end, to not stop, to not let anyone see me falter.

And all these years later, I’m freshly rediscovering the attraction to the run. Thanks to my running buddies at work, I’m now running two or three times a week. Certainly a far cry from the six minute something mile I used to manage in seventh and eighth grade, yet still feels pretty good to manage a four and a half minute kilometer after needing more than five minutes for each of the five kilometers that had preceded it.

It’s been a skittish start, a couple 5k event runs last year that I didn’t prepare or train for, and went into with too much gusto, burning out quickly and struggling to finish. My colleague cohorts are compelling me to pace myself, to stretch appropriately, and with the mighty power of positive peer pressure, to preserver through the intermittent walls of doubt, pain, heavy breathing, or other barriers real and more often than not imagined.

And I have to think Charles would be proud, in his way, because while my so called bullies now are age and professional accountability and all the awesome responsibilities of family, his example is readily apparent as I rediscover just how much I love to run, and how much more able a good run leaves me towards dealing productively with almost anything. Beating back your inner doubts and demons is pretty ravishingly refreshing, after all.

Eight Legs to Better Tickle You With... Pt 2

2011-08-09T23:13:00.000-07:00

246

Spiders sit somewhere on the list of public enemy pests for most folks I know. Vile creatures readily met with disdain, fear, even malice. Yet it’s hard not to marvel at the complexity of their webs when not walking face first through one.

Webs that span impressively, almost defiantly, across meters of open air between trees or across paths running down along the gap between inner city town houses. Webs crisscrossing the sky high above amid the tropical trees of Jamaica or rounding the corners of barn windows across the Midwest. The sorts of constructions one could believe might save certain pensive pet pigs or keep the air clear of gnats, flies, and mischievous malevolent mosquitoes. The sorts of webs that perhaps inspired lace, corsets, and Goth music. The sorts of tensile constructs that inspired tension bridges and Renzo Piano’s German Youth House.

I once had several glass fish tanks, the result of a passing interest in raising rodents and lizards, and crickets to feed the latter. One afternoon I discovered a terrifying orange and yellow tiger striped, big bodied, prickly bristled long black legged beauty lounging on my window sill, perhaps watching me try to match socks dug up from the clutter around my Kentucky college days off campus rented room; perhaps just enjoying the breeze on a humidly sunny late spring afternoon. I noticed her and figured she’s move on of her own accord, thinking that all spiders must understand the rule: stay outside and be left alone, come inside and take your chances against brooms, toilet paper, bug spray, and flushing toilets. Surely spider young learn that simple rule set before leaving the egg clutch, that basic principle of cohabitation with man.

After a bit of kerfuffle around the ol’ boarding house rental room, I found two socks similar enough in texture and pattern to approximate kissing cousins and donned them with the anticipation then donning some shoes. I noticed then the sharply defined shape of my eight legged voyeur silhouetted against the soon setting sun. I have no idea why or how I ascertained that she might want accommodations, or that the arachnid’s gender was that of a female, though that guess proved true later on when the egg sack arrived.

I sat an empty aquarium down at the base of the window, lined it up beneath the sill, and put a couple sci-fi toys inside for good measure, an Air Command carapace of purple and pink on one end, something from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the other, something with a spring loaded gun that shot plastic discs adorned with pizza stickers on one side.

I went out for the evening, the spider fell out of my head, and I got home to late to care that a big tiger spider might be roaming around the jungles of my room somewhere. Next morning as I rose like the dead with nothing on but kissing cousin socks, I noticed that the tigress had indeed taken up residence inside the glass box, further, had spun a small, cozy web between the toys standing tall at either end of the 20 gallon enclosure. I stared at the web for a while, appreciative smile spreading across my mug, noting that the spider had found a hollow on the side of the Air Command carapace where diminutive plastic figures once stood to nestle down and nap after a hard night’s weaving. Now a bit more concerned about the tigress claiming additional turf beyond the confines of the glass case, I located a screen top for the case and laid it on top gently. I next set out like Renfield to catch some fat juicy flies lest her heiness go for want in her new crib. Fortunately that time of year in Kentucky has ample flies that still haven’t quite yet shaken off the transition of spring into summer, as easy to catch with a Kleenex as glimpses of disheveled freshmen with haywire hair crossing campus on a Saturday morning, shoulders slumped and eyes on the ground, smells of strangers on their fingertips and clothes.

I lift the lid and dropped each fly in, watched them drop to the bottom with a tiny, stunned thud. After a moment they’d twitch to life as though startled by unexpected news and scuttle around the bottom of the tank, perhaps disoriented to be walking on a horizontal window. After a moment or two more, the fly would take flight, and after a couple bounces against the sides of the tank, would cross the space where the web had been strung.

The tigress might have appeared of repose and lounging, yet scarcely had a fly’s thin wing plucked a strand of web before the spider, a blur of yellow and orange, had the fly spinning from a strand, wrapping it up as though to preserve it for a trip down the Nile, and tucked the cocooned package into a corner like tiny, strange fruit, presumably for snack at some later time or date.

After three flies had become dangling jewels, foodie footballs, I left the tank alone and head off for showering, classes, the usual stuff and circumstance of those days. Days when I made extra money painting patterns on fabric grids for an embroidery shop catering to ladies who lunched, golfed, or enjoyed Kentucky university basketball. Those days when Lisa would drive down from Cincinnati to help paint some of those patterns so we could go out guilt free, her glinting braces helping her look enviably under aged.

Those days when Steve lived downstairs with his two cats, one of them an amateur spelunker that had to be pulled from the heating ducts after removing a segment of ceiling to reach the source of the sound we’d all been hearing cry from the vents in the big house’s many bathrooms. When pulling a trapped and terrified cat from tin pipes, be sure to do so from an uphill direction, or a lot more will be pouring out into your waiting arms than just a fearful feline.

Those days when Joe lived across the hall and kept his door locked so that no one could put Wham into his boom box and turn it on while he tried to sleep in after a long night trying to convince a colleague from Ramsey’s restaurant and I that we would never be Kid & Play, 3^rd Bass, or EMPD, no matter how many words I could rhyme with Chalk.

The afternoon of the first day of the tigress’s residency in my room, I picked up a bag of live crickets from the local pet shop and let them loose in the tank. Not sure if spiders generally eat crickets, but this little lady knew how to improvise, and crickets really are woefully oblivious, much like hamsters, those furry little bite sized chicken McNuggets of the wilds of nature. Young crickets would stream one after another up to and over the lip of the hollow full of spider, never to be seen again but for the occasional detached, still flexing leg.

Over the following weeks I woke each day to new webs in the tank, new patterns and forms, almost as though the spider were trying to maximize coverage and efficiency, think and rethink her process, adapting to a space that was low and horizontal versus the sorts of open spaces amidst the brush and trees spiders like her typically roost in. I should have documented the patterns and forms, drawn them or photographed them, as every day they were different. And as long as there were crickets, a few flies, and the occasional moth, she seemed content, and grew bigger, not a lot, but easily doubled her size over the couple months she stayed with me. From the size of a raison to that of a grape. A green one. Seedless. You know the sort.

I had the lid up one afternoon to drop in more crickets when a yellow jacket flew past my head, over my shoulder, and straight into the tank. Alarmed, I thought to reach in and try to get the yellow jacket out before it stung my eight legged roommate, however before I could attempt such folly she was on the case. Moving with speed and stunning dexterity, she lassoed one of the yellow jacket’s legs and set it dangling and spinning like a tequila scented piñata filled with lemon shot candies, dodging the flailing stinger as she worked, draping and tangling the spinning bug until only the head and stinger were left exposed, and then she travelled around and bit the poor bastard on the nape of the neck. The stinger stabbed the air one last, final time, and went still, poetic and tragic and worthy of applause like a well done salsa dance, all roses and calve spasm stamping, frothing at the hem line, swirling for what’s not yours but mine.

After a couple months, a few added toys, and a veritable army of slain crickets, I noticed the egg sack in the corner of the aquarium. And shortly after, I noticed that the tigress seemed utterly apathetic about the food scurrying around in the tank. If we learned nothing else from Charlotte’s Web, we learned that egg sacks can spawn dozens, if not hundreds, of offspring. Not eager to host a convention of tiny, cannibalistic arachnids in my diminutive quarters, I carefully extracted the sack by its connecting threads of spider silk and moved it outside to a sheltered spot beneath one of the sideboards of the house, protected from rain, direct sunshine, and passing crows. Next, I moved the tigress atop her Air Command throne out into the bushes beside the house, near her offspring and shaded by the loose branches of the bush. I gently jammed the toy into a crook of the plant and wiggled it to make sure it would remain stuck firm, beached in the breech of the bush. She barely moved during the whole relocation process, a sure sign she’d be passing on soon.

I checked the spot for a couple days after that, and on the third day she’d gone. Passed away in the hollow on the chassis of a pink and purple toy. Shaded by brambles and branches, surrounded by a cadre of other breeds of spider and those that would feed them.

I’ve had my share of scares with spiders, like the canopy of black widows I discovered overhead in the outhouse I’d been told was safe to use, just never look up. Or the massive wolf spider that lived under my parent’s book shelves in the house behind the kitchen at Washington College Academy, the spider that had figured out if it lie flat on the darker patches of the mottled shag carpet in the house it could remain nearly invisible until someone were about to step on it and forced it to move and give away its position, much to the distress of anyone around. How about the time I picked up a wooden tomato stake for my Dad in the garden behind that house across the highway from Milligan College, picked it up by one end and saw a black widow begin to lower herself downwards from the middle as though I’d interrupted her nap? I recall I jumped up and down on the grass where she’d landed until even the grass gave up the ghost and dissolved into a greasy smear flecked with tiny spider juices.

How about the cane spiders on the tropical coast of Hawaii’s big island? I still regret killing the one I discovered in my beach house bedroom when I turned on the light one evening. I hadn’t learned until later that as big and scary looking as these beauties are, they’re actually very tame, unlike the local 10 inch centipedes. Fortunately no one did anything to harm the even larger one we discovered outside, though many pictures were taken. She’d been guarding her egg nest, another good thing to replace the one I’d sadly misunderstood, let fear get the best of me, and popped like a grape. A purple one. Seedy. You know the type.

The closet office I worked in managing the Drexel in Bexley, Columbus, Ohio had a minor infestation of spiders, and no number of ones I Scotch taped to the wall as warning to others seemed to deter them from dangling down in front of me as I counted out the night’s earnings and proceeds.

When Lisa and I rent a basement suite / floor of a house in Eugene, our entrance faced a concrete retaining wall and the bottom of a flight of concrete stairs that ran up the front of the structure off to the left. The banister at the top of the retaining wall had been overgrown with a thick, luscious mane of ivy type vines and leaves, plants that dangled down to only a couple feet from the ground outside our big glass front door.

There are several things to note about living in a basement suite, things you should consider before taking up residence in one. You’ll get to know all about how water works, particularly the drainage of it, and how easy it is for a drainage pipe to get clogged up with leaves outside your front door, leading to water creeping in from outside and slowly following the grouted grooves between the clay tiles of your living room floor bound for anything absorbent like the oceans into the viaducts of Venice. Another thing to know is that you get very familiar with all the local fauna, from the raccoon family living in the clump of trees in the back yard that come out at night to rummage the compost heap or try to catch the goldfish in the brick pond in the back yard to the myriad of beetles, bugs, millipedes, and of course spiders that wander in off the street.

The mane of ivy-esque dangling vine foliage outside the front door became a particularly harrowing educational experience. First we discovered as the weather warmed that we’d need a broom handle sitting by the door to clear away fresh webs each morning to ascent the stairs to ground level. Next we noticed how many spiders lived in the vines. And for all we could see, there turned out to be hundreds more. How did we discover that, you might ask?

Pesticides. Bug sprays. The noxious semi-liquid stuff that smells of formaldehyde and has clear warnings forbidding use in enclosed spaces lest lungs bleed and eyes shrivel into wasabi peas.

After feeling woefully outnumbered by the bugs and their friends, we went to the Target and procured the strongest stuff we could find, the stuff that guaranteed to drop dead ants, wasps, and most importantly, spiders.

Sure, we’d tried cohabitation. We’d cut the busy mane back. We’d used the broom to clear a path. We’d even tried closing our eyes and ignoring the thousands of eyes watching us from the plants. A sort of hide under the covers and monsters will never hurt you approach that ended after we discovered more and more of the spinsters finding perches inside the low ceilinged suite.

So we turned to chemistry, tied a bandana around my face and pushed sunglasses over my eyes and set to spraying my loathe juices all over that luscious green canopy pouring down the wall opposite our front door.

When the first couple spiders dropped from the brush, some death spasming as they still dangled from their escape strands, others hitting the ground and crawling, dragging themselves, crumpling tragically as only spiders can, I felt saddened, yet triumphant as well. And then more dropped. And more. And more. Dozens and dozens of a myriad shapes and sizes, a plethora of pesticide death penalties imposed in minutes, and my sense of triumph faded just as quickly, replaced with abject horror, and sense that like Mario discovering a brick that will keep spawning coins if you keep jumping your head into it, I might have just found a way to inadvertently harvest more negative spider kharma than I would know what to do with. Me, the guy that so carefully saved the tigress’s egg sack and gave her a peaceful place to pass. Me, the person that almost always adhered to the rule of spiders outside, no care, but spiders inside, beware.

Outside the front door, in the stairwell, this had to be a gray area if there ever were one. The spiders I’d been euthanizing there were technically outside, however directly in the path of our only thoroughfare for entering and exiting our rented residence. A sort of Gaza Strip of contested territory, as only a week passed before we would sense we needed to spray again, as the wholesale vacancy left by the former arachnid residents proved irresistible to whole new bevies of spider populace, new breeds moved in to replace the dead, bigger and grizzlier than the last. The weekly sprays were something like a demented Suess poem as there can be no other kind:

     There were spiders of raspberry red and spiders of blueberry blue,
     There were spiders summarily dead and that left behind me and you.
     There were spiders big and spiders quite small,
     There were spiders fat and spiders quite tall.
     There were spiders with starts and stripes, and spiders with coats of fur,
     There were spiders to startle a thousand Miss Muffets, that’s for sure!

And after at least a half dozen emptied cans of bug spray over as many weeks, the tides of spiders dwindled, perhaps enough spray lacquer dried to create a repellent buffer zone to dissuade any further breeds move in. Leaving me to live with the knowledge that in as many weeks I had also managed to elevate my spider killing score from low double digits into the thousands. I felt an Oppenheimer quote coming on as I stood looking at the piles of dead spiders around my feet. I did not feel proud, or victorious. Just sad, and eager to find higher ground as soon as the upstairs floor became available so that we’d never have to spray anything on any critter ever again.

I felt a deeper aversion to spiders after that, perhaps fearing karma, or stories of the brown recluse native to the North West. One way to confront this fear was to embrace it, or at least, an abstraction of it. Monstrous abstractions, point of fact.

Years after the Eugene Oregon Spider Genocide and a move to Vancouver, BC, Canada; I convinced my friend and former roommate to confront her fear of spiders with a therapeutic double dose of cinematic spider fun. After months of needling her, I finally convinced Celine to come over for a double feature of Arachnophobia and Eight Legged Freaks, with the scarier film first to get it out of the way and enjoy some goofy absurdity after.

Celine, a strong willed trooper if ever there were one, made it through Arachnophobia and survived to tell the tale. There were celebrations, high fives all around. She’d confront her fear and looked forward to telling her folks back in France of her personal victory and achievement. One film down, the harder one at that, and one more to go. All easy cruise smooth sailing on from here. Celine excused herself to the powder room to do whatever girls do for so long in there with the fan on. And that’s when I got busy.

What Celine didn’t readily remember is that over the past couple Halloweens I’d discovered that a Pharmacy chain called Shoppers Drug Mart carries really good props for the hallowed holiday, in particular rather large scale rubber latex, foam filled, inner wire armature boned arachnids. I have a tarantula that spans about a meter across I’ve affectionately named George Lucas and another more spindly sort of spider that chose to remain nameless and crouches about a foot and a half tall on its thin, spike bristled legs.

While Celine freshened up, I placed one of the spiders on the back of the couch, roughly framing where she’d sit when she resumed her seat. I dimmed the lights and cued up the next feature. I refilled the chip bowl and fetched a couple more beverages from the fridge.

She took her seat on the couch and completely didn’t notice the over-sized spiders on the back of the couch. Whether my comments about the movie being ready to go and likely very silly what with giant spiders and all had worked to distract her, I can only but guess. Must have worked, she plopped down and didn’t notice a thing. The film had been on about 20 minutes or so, long enough I’d decided she’d never notice the additions to the sofa, when she looked towards her right shoulder, perhaps waved her hair over and her hand brushed against one of George’s rubbery legs, and she whirled, screeched, saw the second spider; and teleported a few feet away.

She’d met George before and had heard of the other one I’d gotten a year later, so her fear evaporated in seconds, replaced by a rage that transcended English into a French string of very strong yet strangely enticing expressions of outrage. It’s true, everything just sounds sexier when said in French. A couple punches in the arm later, and make no mistake, Celine is strong like monkey, the faux spiders were relocated away from Celine lest they end up thrown overboard from my 19^th floor balcony, and on with Eight Legged Freaks we went. If killing thousands of real spiders didn’t earn me bad spider karma, teasing a close friend with ample arachnophobia probably did.

Eight Legs to Better Tickle You With... Pt 1

2011-08-03T00:13:00.000-07:00

247

My relationship with the spider (Araneae) species has a lot of ups and downs. It’s a lovingly hypocritical relationship that both inspires my aesthetic whims and plumbs many of my darkest, twitchiest fears.

Walk through a web, sputter and wave and look around frantically for the construction crew, a small price to pay for living among trees and what slivers of nature manage to wriggle out from between the row houses and flip cribs in Strathcona. Watch as the annually inconsistent weather favors different breeds of bugs and subsequently the spiders that would eat them. Last year a multifaceted myriad of large bodied beauties preying on gnats and moths, this year a bevy of tiny orange silk spinners spanning surprising stretches with slim strands while aiming to lasso miniature horse flies the long, damp refusal of the climate to acknowledge summer has empowered. Couple years ago long, delicate weavers ensnared butterflies, replaced later in the season by burly black and tan post show bruisers looking for opportunities around the buffet the night lights bring to the board on the front porch.

First spider I remember really seeing close up and at any length had long, hair thin legs that tickled as it walked by and brushed the country boy off white skin of a country lad scuttling around in the pine nettles and fairy dust of a state park by a picnic table on weekend early enough in summer to need a corduroy jacket and floppy patchwork denim hat. I also remember that trip as the first time on my watch that my bio-Dad saved gas by setting his VW van into neutral and turning off the engine to let the thing coast all the way back down Bays Mountain from the park and nearby planetarium.

I had watched the granddaddy longlegs with intent curiosity, the tiny dot of a body suspended in the middle of such fine legs that nearly vanished when the spider crest the table top and crossed in front of the sunlight filtering like kisses from a deity through the leaves overhead. Scanning around beneath the benches and along the concrete struts supporting the bench planks and well weathered wooden table top, I found more, spiders seemed to fade into view from the surface of the concrete, as though seeing one gave me the secret key unlocking discovery of a whole civilization dwelling invisibly in plain sight. The patterns on the concrete weren’t cracks and pits, and as I paused to watch or blow a bit of breeze with a silent awed whistle, spiders would spring to life and hasten to move on, a pretty magical thing and initially not creepy at all, just something new to watch and wonder about. I left the encounter with no ill will towards spiders, just a sense that granddaddy longlegs were pretty cool and vaguely reminded me of an eyeball robot I’d seen once on the Johnny Quest cartoon once.

A short while later, couple months or more, I ran face first into a web for the first time and formed an entirely new opinion of spiders, albeit judging from the dark, spinning, leg waggling blob that dropped down just in front of my left eye, presumably letting himself down from the wreckage of his former home now entangled in my 70’s era mousy brown madly mish-mashed mane.

Let me explain something about my hair. Stayed blonde for a long time, turned brown with age, eventually skipped black and went straight to silver, though that’s decades later.

My Dad once said that he’d taken me as a young kid to a cow pasture to see the dairy cows, and that he’d shown me a cow lick and warned me not to lick it. According the his recount, I asked what the cowlick tastes like, and he said salty. So when he turned away, I ran over and licked the cowlick. And just so happened a big old Bessie, too old to see very well, shambled up, pooping at the same time as cows are apt to do, particularly elderly ones, and not seeing so well the mistook my round head for the salt lick and licked me a good three or four times before my Dad could see my plight and shoo old Bessie away long enough to pull me clear of her huge, agile tongue. According to him, the hair with multiple crowns a Korean hairdresser I went to once considered akin to that of a husky and likely a gift from aliens, is simply the fate of a naughty boy trying to taste a cowlick and getting licked instead.

I recall seeing that fat little spider with the flailing legs dangling right in front of my eye and no matter how much I scrunched up my eyes and squealed falsetto and shook my head furiously, when I’d stop and slowly, cautiously open my eye he’d still be swaying there, looking back at me, clearly in just as much shock as I was. Eventually I swat him away and discovered that doing so would simply transfer him to dangling from my finger, as stubborn as a summertime booger, no amount of flapping jazz hands seemed to fling the fellow free.

So I ran to find Mom.

Growing up in Eastern Tennessee meant growing up with ticks, fleas, lice, and chiggers.

Ticks came with worry about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, something kids all thought turned you into polka dots, or Lyme disease, which I believed as a child to be “Limestone Decease” enough to burst into tears when learning my family intended to move from Telford to Limestone, as I felt sure there would be no refuge for me from that cursed tick disease in the town the disease had been named after! After playing outside you would pat down your legs and arms to check for lumps that might flap like old scabs, could be a tick, or could just be an old scab. Last you’d check your hair, and inevitably if I got a tick, somehow, that’s where it would be, and then off I’d go to find my Mom or parental unit to burn it off with a cigarette and pluck it clear with a pair of tweezers. You had to be careful about getting the head first and not squeezing the body, didn’t want the head breaking off and burrowing in, and didn’t want backwash out of the tick’s body squeezing back into you.

Fleas and lice were same as anywhere, no more or less than anywhere. Fortunate to encounter minimal fleas in my childhood, unavoidable in warm climates with outdoor pets and 70’s shag carpet. Lice missed me all together, though got my sister when she was in elementary school years later in Kentucky. Mom had always been quick to discourage me from trying on other kid’s hats or using other people’s combs or hairbrushes, and even today I’m reluctant to try on hats in stores or buy hair care tools not blister packed and marked with something medical looking enough to believe the packaging environment had been a sterile environment. Have I ever mentioned I’m a bit of a mysophobe as well?

Chiggers got me, though. A teacher spot me scratching and sent me to the principle who sent me to the nurse. Not sure why that order had been followed, perhaps she thought I’d been clowning, not sure, just remember the principle, a man I knew all too well, lifting my shirts and scrutinizing all the red bumps on my pot belly, dots I actually hadn’t noticed myself until just then, though reminded me of how the kindergarten staff had established that I’d contracted chickenpox using much the same technique. Sent home and salved with harsh smelling ointments, my Mom told me what chiggers were and I knew I really wanted to move out of the South. Also called berry bugs and micro-ticks, they drop eggs in your skin that cause the itchy red bumps as their offspring use your flesh for fine dining.

Vancouver has bed bugs in many of the older apartment buildings, a thought that instantly makes me itch and squirm, because bed bugs and chiggers are distant kissing cousins, and that’s enough to send me packing, for sure.

Spiders though, that’s a whole other thing. More on that tomorrow.

A Day to Reflect & Remember

2011-07-11T23:01:00.000-07:00

248

Today is a sad day, a day to stop and reflect, ruminate and remember.

My Grandmother Merle McCracken Ellis passed away today, this morning, her grown children nearby there in Tennessee, so far away from us, from having the chance to introduce Otis to her. Someday I’ll introduce him to her stories, as we will for all our elders that can’t be around to meet him in person.

When we met Grandmother not too long after my Mom and Dad began dating; I took to calling her "Mike's Mom", slurring it all together into one word, which my brother took to actually be one word, as natural as Ravioli or Snoopy birthday cake. She smiled and indulged us for a couple weeks before introducing herself as Grandmother. And though with no small effort my brother and I were able to adjust to a more suitable title, today of all days I'm a kid again meeting her afresh and thinking how lucky we must be to have Mike's Mom in our lives, because she made us feel welcome, appreciated, and at home.

This is additionally poignant as Grandmother Ellis is the last of my grandparents to pass away. Grandma Christy passed last year, last of all her sisters that I miss as well. Over the years my Grandma & Grandpa Van Dussen, my God Grandparents Arlene and Vernon Howe, Granny McCracken and Granny Lou, and adopted elders Grandma Dawsey and Mr. Richard C. Shacklett have all transcended, have shuffled of this mortal coil.

Not a single passing has made adapting easier, or diminished the nagging ache, that feeling of a thousand things still left unsaid. I watched as my sisters dug up and posted old family pictures to Facebook and feel their loss, a sense of it, though they were always understandably closer to her, and their grief all the more gripping. I wish I could reach through the distance and hug all of my family, or be hugged by them, all of the above. We all have pursued our various grand adventures, and the sad byproduct is distance, physical and emotional, a disconnection of the day to day, lost track of one another’s minutia.

Upon a time I couldn’t wait to have more room, not be cramped up in the back seat with my siblings for epic road trips to Grandmother’s house, or Pete & Elaine’s, to Greg & Jackie’s, or on up to Grandma & Grandpa’s place in Canada. Right about now I’d trade all my Legos for a couple weeks to revisit all those places, in particular the people that have since moved on to greener pastures no frequent flyer miles can ever connect you too for a stopover visit.

To ride bouncily along with my Grandpa in his yearly painted red hardtop jeep down the pioneer trail he’d kept cleared, giant mosquitoes dancing against the windshield.

To have a heaping bowl of Apple Jacks and talk about baseball while my Granda Christy washes dishes wearing only a bra, or go with Helen and May and Kate to get burgers with coleslaw and chopped up boiled peanuts on them from the drive in place where wheeled warrior waitresses deliver to your car directly. And an ice cream cake that one fine birthday, first and finest I’ve ever tasted. And the softball mitt I still have safely stored to someday pass on to Otis.

To beg Grandmother Ellis for more left over Bisquick sausage balls or rice and hamburger cabbage rolls before running outside to play with my Dad’s Marx Civil War figures from his childhood in the flowerbed, stealing the occasionally sour purple grape from the grape vine overgrowing one side of the screened in back porch with the trunk thick as a man’s leg.

To walk the white fluffy dog around the neighborhood with Vernon Howe after a day of watching him water ski from the back of the boat his wife Arlene expertly drove. To go with Arlene to see live performances of Godspell and see Clint Eastwood in a crime thriller projected on a small screen in a church basement.

To listen to stories about snapping the fishery photo that got Dick Shacklett into Life magazine as he tunes up with his band of buddies for a living room jam session of old time classics.

To sit in Granny Lou’s rail tie log cabin eating blackberry cobbler and warming my feet by the wood burning stove in compact the kitchen.

To roam around Granny McCracken’s rooms and yard meeting step-cousins and wondering how much that pointy metal clock in the green hued living room must weight.

To see another movie or enjoy a dinner out with Grandma Dawsey, or just sit with her and her children and their children and enjoy some BBQ and the sound of the breeze in the trees.

A toast to the elders I miss, the patron saints of my family unit. You have my respect, love, and admiration. You’ve given me stories to tell and helped to shape what is good about the person I am, or when at my best can strive to be. I wish I had known all of you better, had been more able to pause from the distractions of youth to absorb more, ask more, listen more. At least some of who you were managed to get through to me via osmosis, make lasting impressions that will help guild my patience as a new parent, and give legends to paint across the sky for Otis some fine afternoon as we dally on the gentle slope of a riverbank as the clouds pass by and the breeze gossips amongst the willows.

Grandma McCracken Ellis in 1949 in Japan w. my Dad

The Fine Art of Block Parties

2011-07-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

249

Neighborhood block parties can be amazing things. Especially if you’ve have the misfortune of seeing one go sideways before contributing to one that goes better than planned.

While still living in Cincinnati and working at the drive in, Lisa Marie, Jeff Ware, a real life clone of Blair from Facts of Life named Christie, and I shared a house in a blue collar / industrial neighborhood so rough around the edges to even warrant an Irish beer & shot bar. One day we walked up to our front door to discover an announcement of a block party printed with black toner at the local Kinko’s onto bright pink paper. I recall looking up and down the block and wondering aloud who else would be there other than us, the occupants of the only house on the visible block sandwiched between warehouses and foreclosures like Paper Street in Fight Club.

Didn’t have to wait long to find out, the block party would happen the impending Saturday, meaning, three of the four occupants of the house would miss it since we all worked for either the Oakley Drive In or the second run discount theater downtown, and the fourth wouldn’t be caught dead rubbing elbows with the blue collar locals.

Fate intervened somehow and we all three found ourselves home that fine Saturday night, too white and chicken shit to venture off the porch, though we waved a plenty as we sucked back our cans of beer and hibachi BBQ burgers by the bun load. We watched with bemused amazement as entire families manifest from seemingly thin air to hobnob, flirt, cavort, kid swap, grill, spoon, feed, drink, and be generally merry. Suddenly we were surrounded by our neighbors, proof that we reside inside an actual neighborhood. And for a few naïve moments we drank the Kool-Aide and thought about how exciting Halloween would be, handing out candies to all the best double headed denizens welfare leveraging might beget. England calls folks like our newly discovered neighbors that fine, Sunkist advertisement sparkly day, “Chavs.” We simply called them surprising, and until the sun went down, sort of neat. The sun did eventually go down, the kids were whisked off to bed, and that’s when the real fun began.

Honestly, no idea when the tide turned. We were chatting amongst ourselves, thrilled to have an evening off from our respective theaters, and drunk on life, or at least, crap canned beer, meat sweats creeping in from the opulent paddies Jeff’d composed. We were practically glowing, hell, maybe Lisa and I might’ve even gotten cuddly and forget all about that epic fight Lisa and I had had the week before, the one that ended with having to replace a pane in the window of our second story bedroom on the same day I found out my Grandfather had passed. Don’t dramatically throw combat boots around in a tiny room full of pane glass windows, by the way, sort of a Goth equivalent to billiard balls in Fabergé houses, really.

One moment, Lisa is letting me pat her knee, the next minute we’re cowering inside watching events unfold through parted blinds while giving a 911 phone operator updates with hushed, frantic voices lest the idiot maniacs hear us while two burly drunk white trash women pulled one another’s tube tops off as they beat and tackled and tussled until eventually one windsock chested stallionette is pounding the others forehead concave against the top of the three steps that lead up and over the one meter retaining wall holding our lawn from spilling out across the sidewalk.

Trying to deconstruct the events that lead up to the unsavory version of a cat-fight, we recalled someone loaning or discovering they’d loaned someone else their motorcycle to try out, and by “try out” I mean try to drive as fast as possible through the throng of people assembled in the street outside our house, a street supposedly closed to traffic to accommodate this civic event, as though they were the road warrior mutants in Weird Science intend on kicking over grills, women, and fatties like points were being tabulated by hidden Japanese TV hosts, Beat Takashi and subsequently Spike TV included.

So then the group consensus is that the women fighting we either for their men’s honor or to fight as surrogates for their saddle rides because if the men were to actually fight they’d get thrown back into the pen for parole violation. Just a layman’s guess, though. Maybe these ladies just needed to throw down the way football hooligans and broke nail hairdressers do.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and imagine my reservations when I see black toner copies on bright pink paper posted to the phone poles and sides of electrical boxes in our neighborhood announcing the Union Street, Strathcona block party. Visions of succor sluts danced in my head. Thankfully Lindz had more faith in our neighbors, and glad she did. Because at the time we were just considering moving into the neighborhood, and just then making an offer to buy a home. The block party would happen in early July, while should we buy the home, we’d take possession in August. In a way, the block party became a sort of litmus test for our neighborhood. And despite the neighborhood’s proximity to all the problems that plague Hastings, that block party gave us hope, moreover made us excited to become a part of the Strathcona neighborhood.

This year is our fifth Union Street block party, with a nifty change of musical acts that brought the event even closer to home, as the Hard Working Minors from previous years featured Rob who is a long time acquaintance from the Dog House for most of the designers on Scarface; The World is Yours, however the replacement band, a rockabilly ensemble, featured Ian “Buddy” McNeil of the Stingin’ Hornets and GI Blues and Pointed Sticks, the same cat that helmed the rockabilly band that played Lindz and mine’s wedding on the porch and lawn of Stanley’s in the midst of Stanley Park back when.

True, the follow up band clearly aimed to appease the hipsters newly discovering the cinema that my high school years enjoyed. That’s OK, this old timer needed to be in bed by now anyway.

This year one of the neighbors spent the day roasting a lamb for the party. In past years various neighbors have done as much to ensure there is food, drink, and entertainment for all comers, local and passing through alike.

True, some cyclists look less than favorably on the fact that a one block chunk of their bike route has been diverted that a neighborhood might take a moment for the neighbors to get to know one another a bit better, or a better all over again, a year after the last grand block party. The bikers that get pissy or try to bike through a crowd of revelers and their children despite the warning tape or on hand presence of off duty firefighters, police men, and their “Get to Know Us” task forces, really should stop and realize that the world is around them, and despite their sense of self entitlement, the world will always win out sooner or later. Meaning if you hit my kid with your bike, I will do my best to tear off your tube top and turn your forehead concave against my front steps.

The fire department and some years the police department as well send cars and staff with ample items of interest to entertain the kids and inform the adults as to what is how is why. My favorite part of all this is twofold.

First part is seeing the kids go insane, and as much learn that as base and face value, firemen and cops are really there to help, serve, and protect as best as they are able as human beings. And I love that.

Second part is seeing the Suicide Girls mud leagues appeal to a whole other element of authority of fire, rescue, and security. And this year the firemen were prepared, for the gaggle of Australian tattooed girls wearing fire helmets and snapping pictures of one another all over the massive fire engine, the fire chief had a roll of temporary Vancouver Fire and Rescue tattoos to hand out. I really, really loved that.

I’ll add pictures to spice this up when time allows. For now, use your imagination, and visualize a block of city core neighborhood filled with dozens of families, children, friends, people from adjacent streets, all getting along, finding common ground, trying one another's pot luck contributions, bringing enough beer or wine or sangria to share with the rest of the class, and overall having a great time that winds out well after midnight. That is one of the many reasons I love my hood. And the bar I now will subsequently set for any neighborhood I would consider moving to hereafter.

For sure Strathcona has problems, like the riffraff that wander in and try to do dumb shit from Hastings, like the B&E cowboy in the news lately, or the prostitutes using the swing area by the elementary school as a deflowering station on weekends. All the more reason for a neighborhood to know its collective parts, I suppose.

I’ll take a flawed neighborhood of acquaintances over a lock down gated community of strangers any day.

East Tennessee gets snow

2011-06-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

250

East Tennessee gets snow. I don’t mean “gets” the way characters in Semlia, Sense of Snow get snow as an entity with seventeen names just describing the nuances of how it drifts up against the side of a doublewide. I mean quantity, knee deep and hiding all sorts of matter under foot. Might not be for long, couple weeks at the most most years. Certainly not the sort of snow that hides cars in Alberta or buries businesses in Newfoundland. Just enough to give meaning to songs that also mention roasting nuts and nose nipping.

Enough for bus drivers to call in sick and schools to close and sleds to come out from metal sheds or from behind wood piles. Just enough for seasons to have meaning, for scarves and corduroy pants over ill fitting hand me down long johns. Just enough to make snow midgets and try to pee your name on the back sides of them when no one had an eye on you.

East Tennessee got enough snow to leave my Mom and I stranded inside an Oregon green Ford pick ‘em up truck at the elbow bend valley between one ice slicked hill and another, sitting there as other cars came sliding down from one way or another, some of them bouncing off us, others slipping past into another stranded vehicle as though the gods were playing shuffle board.

East Tennessee got enough snow the founders of Washington College Academy, back when the institution had in mind to serve as a preparatory school for young women of means, saw fit to have an annual holiday season fund raising event called, ever so aptly, the Christmas Dinners. A full week that felt like a fortnight of frolicking frocked maidens and fine frilly gentlemen singing, dancing, and all the while serving the hundred or so place & plate purchasing patrons.

Each year the event roped every student into a role, older students taking on coveted roles as entertainers, MCs, or head maitre d', while younger students were left to menial tasks like taking coats, delivering food, and bussing tables before subsequent courses. Anyone else worked in the kitchen, the set up crew, or the cleanup crew.

I served two tours through the WCA Christmas Dinners event. Perhaps because my parents ran the kitchen, or because only one costume fit me, I ended up as a step ‘n fetch food delivery and plate clearing boy wonder. Each table had up to eight people at it, not unlike a wedding arrangement really, and mule packing food to those tables meant two to three kids multi-plating to a table at the same time, or clearing with client permission but of course for each course without crashing into one another or dropping anything. Child labor at it’s finest.

The plates entres were served on were custom made each year, the school’s emblem, ensignia, and details about the event year were printed and glazed over on each plate. After the dinner course the plates were rushed to the dishwashing room for clean up, towel dried, and wrapped up to give each attendee a keepsake other that their prospective gluttonous indigestion and heartburn.

Drop a plate, or chip one during process, and there were spares. At least, on the first couple nights. Good thing we got better at our roles, because by the last night, we were struggling to even have enough plates to serve everyone, let along give them something to go home with. Strange thing, one year there had been an excess of plates, currogated cardboard boxes and boxes of them, perhaps interest had been low that particular year, maybe not enough snow frame the mood, or perhaps someone had overestimated breakages. Good thing, regardless, because worst to worst, some folks took ten year old plates home for keepsakes. Never heard that anyone had ever complained, yet still you’d think someone in charge would’ve realized not dating the plates might be a good idea regardless. Oh wait, the guy in charge ended up going to jail for embezzling enough to leave the school bankrupt. Nevermind.

I served food to folks, then hid away until summoned to clear. I cleared and delivered the next round, then hid away again upstairs until summoned to repeat my duties. The expansive dining room where the guests were fed normally served as the school dining room for all the students that lived on campus in one of the two dorms and weren’t bussed in on the short brown bus from Johnson City and surrounding areas, or that drove in themselves. On the far end of campus sat the newer red brick boys dorm, newer meaning 50’s as was evidenced by the bomb shelter full of non-perishable government tins of saltines under the back stairs a kid named Jeff and I found one day while trying to work off our indentured education dues. Amazing how crisp and salty those vacuum sealed saltines were after all those years, and the hiss the coppery tin canister made when we opened it with a screwdriver and the prongs on the back of a hammer.

The dining room and industrial kitchen my parents ran those two years sat at the bottom of the far older red brick girl’s dorm. That dorm at the other end of campus, slightly downslope from the administration building with the haunted gymnasium. Behind the dorm and kitchen, across a small delivery lot accessible by a winding single lane road sat a diminutive two story house that came with the job of running that kitchen. A house with a single, windowless, yellow tiled bathroom fit for construction workers, no bath, tiled shower, perpetually moist like a failed meat locker, and with luminescent mushrooms growing from the grout.

My parents shared the job of running the kitchen, and there generally wasn’t a lot of overlap where both were present in the place. During the Christmas Dinners, though, both were on hand from dawn to the wee hours of the night trying to ensure everything elapsed as should. I wonder if running a set menu that expansive with children for staff for a week were more difficult than all the work they did running Parson’s Table back in Jonesboro. I suspect with the exception of the night ZZ Top rent our Parson’s Table, WCA’s event easily eclipsed the difficulties they’d previously encountered. Imagine that Food Network show about the Meal Impossible. Now magnify that across a week of daily events. Amazing to me no one died, on either end of the edible experience.

Worst that happened other than 2^nd degree burns and a few cuts would have to be the girl among the throng of juniors and seniors handing out coats and wishing everyone safe travels at the end of the evening who would laugh uncontrollably at the mention or very thought of the word “toenails” like some warped merger of Manchurian Candidate and Pontypool. So of course one of the boys began mentioning toenails repeatedly as he handed out coats and helped elderly women put them on, “My your nails look great, ma’am, bet your toenails must be wonderful to see!” And while the flattered ladies blushed behind their Tennessee Dixie rouge as best as their thin blood would allow, the girl clenched her fist and tried to keep her composure while her Pavlovian reflexes tickled her fancy like a rapid onset of rabies. She wavered, rippled, smiled like a bear trap, and she held coats handed to her to disperse like a robot. She didn’t laugh, however a puddle began to grow around her feet, hidden from the general public by the frilly hem of her voluptuous layered gown.

East Tennessee gets snow.

Sister Envy

2011-06-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

251

So once upon a time I called my sister the “B” word, the one that rhymes with stitch, witch, itch, birch, and butch. I felt instantly bad after the word escaped my mouth, the first and as far as I can recall only time I have ever used an expletive towards a sibling. Not counting “dumb ass” thought even that was rare.

I’d love to make excuses and claim the use of the “B” word, the one that sounds a bit like pitch, switch, and snitch came completely from warranted grounds, or when discussing mongrel husbandry. Unfortunately, I must disclose that the utterance spew forth like so much flu season punch as a brilliant display of older sibling breakdown. My sister, eight years younger biologically and 28 years older intellectually, had by her ‘tweens sorted out how to push my buttons and that particular afternoon had elected to phone long distance collect with a bootleg Chinese scratch off phone card.

And I had things on my mind, as most emotionally challenged artistically moody and dramatic 17 year olds seem prone to embellish. Such woes, such concerns, such weight on my tilt head defeat bowed world weary black sweater from Lazarus dept. store shoulders. And then my little sister did what all little sisters of the world should do. She called my meandering morose shenanigans for what they were, pose prose, and giggled for the absurdity of it all..

No one knows you like your family does, especially how to flatten your personas like closing a pop-up book, pressing the fairies of your flights of whimsy flat between colorful cardstock pages. And while she might have been intending some levity at my expense, she meant no real ill will. If anything, she’d chiefly wanted some attention in our household of distracted, preoccupied peoples and denizens. Mom and Dad were busy teaching, studying, grading, and caring for three kids when the children weren’t at school or I wasn’t out working at the mall. We lived like associates of Nemo in a narrow townhouse apartment midway down a row of identical facades, and the upstairs hallway between the three bedrooms and single bathroom often had the elbow dodging urgency of a San Francisco streetcar, the frenetic scoot and shove of a waiter’s station as the line plates overdue orders. Sooner or later the tarmac would heat up enough for a tie to hiss and pop, for a gasket too blow.

Don’t remember what exactly set me off, maybe she’d giggled too loud, maybe she’d mentioned my black sweater had faded a bit gray in the wash. Maybe she’d just stepped on a toe in passing, called me a jerk for saying no about something, or to something, or replying no to her asking about inquiring as to something. I honestly have no idea. All I know like Soul Coughing sang that a name burned the air like the names of candy bars, my vulgar utterance soured the air and left me immediately resourceful, wishing I could turn back the sands of time and these days of our lives to retract my statement and not make that particular impression on my little sister.

Even more so now. Not the insult as much as the fact that little could be farther from the truth, and I’ve never really made an effort to say so.

My sister is in her thirties now, and has a family of her own on the distant Isle of Britannia, or whatever England calls itself when it’s in a playful mood. She’s a heavyweight with the University of Manchester, and has had some sense of what she wanted to do with her life for as long as I can remember.

I recall her mentioning wanting to move to the Queen’s country and marrying up a fine blue blood during one of those holiday breaks when I came to visit the family out where they’d moved too in tornado alley, Missouri. True, I might have manufactured that memory to support my thesis, just bear with me.

My sister has confidence, I am insecure as the day is daunting. I have ambitions while my sister actually has a plan. I have a family now, a wife and child. Guess who had that sorted first? I adore zombie films, though invariably Jennifer and her handsome husband Neil have seen another five or six films I’d not even heard of yet. If it pleases the court, allow me to present Exhibit A: Black Sheep, Dead Set, Flight of the Living Dead, Night of the Living Dorks, and Doghouse.

I still don’t have a license to drive; my sister has been driving legally since high school. Of course, I’ve also never t-boned a parked Mercedes with my parent’s brand new Taurus. I took eons to sort out colleges and majors therein. My sister graduated early, with honors, and with a job lined up to go to immediately thereafter. Did I mention she wrecked my parent’s brand new car while in college? Just checking, as these details matter.

I know how to press play on a cassette deck, my sister knows how to play the cello. Both she and my brother had that skill covered. Skipped the firstborn offspring with me, clearly. My sister knows how to talk with my parents almost every day, despite the time difference, let alone the differences with accents. I barely manage to check in quarterly. My sister knows how to live in Europe. I’ve been there once or twice.

One of the things I missed out on is growing up with my sister. With almost a decade between us and the family move without me to Missouri while I finished my last year of high school, I missed out on my sister’s growth from a surly ‘tween into the woman, mother, and wife she is today.

That said, I’m glad to know her as I do, and proud to be her sibling. And after all this time, to say sorry for ever calling her the ‘B” word.

Love you, sis!