Nick Rahall, D-WV:
“Climate change — to deny it exists, to just put your head in the sand and, ‘oh no, it doesn’t exist, what are you talking about,’ is about like standing on the floor of Macy’s during the month of December and claiming Santa Claus doesn’t exist.”
(Thanks to Coyote Blog.)
Since I seem to have rebooted this blog — nobody is more astonished about this than me — I thought I would take you along as the third Winston book creeps along to its 2012 launch. Don’t bother buckling your seat belts: It’s going to be a slow, smooth ride.
I submitted the third book on August 3rd. Almost exactly one month later, I heard back from my editor that Putnam would “definitely want to publish this.” Hurray and whew! (Just because I thought it would pass the test didn’t mean I knew it would pass the test.) And now, four days ago, I received the manuscript back with lots and lots and LOTS of editorial notes.
I would take a picture, but there is nothing to take a picture of. For the first two books, I received in the mail my original manuscript, with lots of handwritten changes to the text. Longer questions were put on post-its; my first book came back loaded with them. I loved receiving the physical manuscript in the mail — I enjoyed being part of an author/editor tradition that had lasted a century or more. But apparently I had only caught the tail end of that era: This time around the manuscript arrived electronically, with notes added via Microsoft Word’s “comments” function, and all of my editor’s notes inserted with the Markup tool. Far more sensible, you have to admit: It’s cheaper for Putnam, and greener all around. But I’ll miss getting that mass of papers, and combing through them while sitting in bed, pencil in hand.
So what notes did I get back on Winston 3? Well, there are a lot of adults in this story, and maybe the book could work just as well without one of them. There’s one character in particular who might get tossed. I’d rather not do that, but I’m thinking about it. Another solution might be to burnish this guy’s personality a little — right now he’s a little too much on the quiet and calm side, and I think he’s getting lost in the shuffle.
There are also two little kids in this book, and they don’t seem to be fitting into the storyline as well as I had hoped. (My editor didn’t even believe they would be there.) They’re vital to the plot, so I can’t remove them, but I need to do a better job rationalizing their presence. I’ve got a couple of ideas on how to do this.
And then there’s the matter of what this book is about — the theme, if you will. The first book was about brother and sister relationships (kinda; it wasn’t the most well-developed theme in the world). The second book was about good sportsmanship and the fine line between cheating and aggressive play. In this third book… well, I don’t want to give it away, but it too has a theme, and right now it’s coming across as a little too adult-centric. Winston’s a little young to be having a midlife crisis, but here and there in Winston 3, that seems to be what is happening. Must fix.
Beyond that, there’s 1.2 million little tweaks to the text — word choices questioned, adverbs deleted, paragraphs highlighted and tagged with a one-word note: “Tighten.” If things run to form, I’ll agree with 95% of my editor’s changes and push back on the rest. One hears now and again of contentious author/editor relationships, but thankfully Susan and I get along pretty well, and have now for… geez, five years goes by quickly.
So I’ve got a few weeks, maybe even a month, to get all my rewrites together. So far I’ve only concentrated on the small edits. After I get through those, then next weekend I’ll crack my knuckles and whack away at these not-quite-there characters, and after that I can figure out how to get the theme where it should be. I enjoy this process, if for no other reason than at the end of it, my book will be much, much better.
First: I’ve been scouring the Web for other blog posts about Otherworld, and you know what? Fantasy writers REALLY like the name “Otherworld.” It’s like the default name for any unnamed world. There must be a hundred different people using the term. Very aggravating. Reminds me of the time I was trying to find an old colleague of mine who shared a name with a very famous CEO. Some days a Google search just doesn’t cut it.
I keep meaning to post pics of Maggie, our new dog (seven months old now), but so far we’ve only taken two or three decent shots. She’s 99% black, deep black, and when she’s curled up on the floor she might be a dog or she might an oil spill. And when she’s not curled up on the floor, she is in constant motion. We’ve been trying to train her… kind of, sort of. We have obedience classes on Saturday mornings, but naturally one has to work with a dog throughout the week, and naturally we do not. I am aware that we are wasting our time with these classes, and I am further aware that we are going to regret not taking this obedience thing seriously while she’s still a pup. But there are only so many hours in the day.
And yet we always do find time to take Maggie to the dog run. Five days a week we’re there, easily. And on the remaining days our neighbor brings her dog Murphy over for playdates. (He’s a month older and the same ink black.) You might think we have our priorities backwards, putting playtime above training time, but if you think that, it’s because you do not have a puppy. Nothing, I mean nothing is more important than getting an energetic dog good and tired by the end of the day. We know when she flops by the front door, unable to so much as retreive a chew toy, that we have done our job well. A dog like that is not interested in rooting around in the garbage or chewing the sofa leg or exploring the cat’s litter box.
My town has a big, wonderful fenced-in dog run. Maggie is very popular there, with dogs and dog owners alike — when she runs in, it’s like Norm entering Cheers. Most of the dog owners are considerate and knowledgable, too. I’ve only seen one real dogfight, and there have only been a few problems with unneutered, overly aggressive dogs with tiresome owners who never accept a modicum of responsibility. I had one jackass inform me after I scooped Maggie up and away from his yapping, nipping hound that the animosity between the dogs had been “mutual.” (He speaks dog, evidently.)
Still, we’ve got to get back to the training. Right now she can sit, and she can even stay if you have a stopwatch that measures to the hundredth of the second. Come is nowhere to be found, and that one is the ENTIRE POINT of the dog training classes, so I am correct to be chagrined. Well, maybe this afternoon we’ll get a session in… before Murphy comes over to do the real work of knocking my dog right the heck out.
Homeschooling Diary:
Reading: Humphrey is done! On to Frindle. Still reading Bridge of Terabithia at night. I’ve had a couple of people say to me, “Uh, you know how Terabithia ends, right?” And I do not. Color me terrified, but we’re nonetheless plowing ahead.
Writing: Yes.
Math: More word problems, more review of the basic four functions. I thought we’d be speeding through fractions by now, but that is not to be.
Science: Gravity. That was Lea’s idea. She wants to design and live in a house that is free of gravity so she can float around. The many books we have are not supporting this idea much.
History: More explorers. Lea doesn’t believe in the Fountain of Youth and thinks Ponce de Leon is a ninny. But we did get to correct some misassumptions about certain vocabulary words. Asked to define “island,” Lea said it was a small piece of land surrounded entirely with sand. So… close!
Video Games: We’ve been working our way through Sam & Max, and the other day Lea solved a puzzle way before I did. How awesome is that?
I admit it. I do what they say you are not supposed to do: I check my Amazon ratings every day. Sometimes more frequently than that, if things are slow. I have developed a sense of what the “right” rating should be. If my books are in that range (generally 40,000 to 125,000), then all is well. If they exceed those expectations, then great! And if they fall short, well, it’s no big deal — I don’t live or die by those fluctuating numbers — but I admit I am 1% more irked than I might otherwise be.
I came back from my weekend excursion to find that somebody, somewhere, had instituted a Winston Breen boycott. 400,000?! What the? No way!
The rating has since recovered, but it was down there in the doldrums through Sunday and for most of yesterday, and I was indeed 1% more irked. Maybe even more than 1%.
Until the letter arrived.
I don’t get a lot of reader mail. A couple of e-mails a month, and maybe the odd handwritten letter sent to my publisher, which generally gets forwarded to me six months later. When the kids do write, they are charming and funny and enthusiastic, and they often send me puzzles and riddles. Never before, though, have I received something like this:
Yes, that is a picture of a board game that Michael, a sixth-grader in New Hampshire, was inspired to make after reading The Potato Chip Puzzles. The game follows the plot of the book: You move your game piece around the board to six different locations. At each location, you solve a puzzle (drawn from a stack of Puzzle Cards), earning a puzzle piece if you get it right. Meanwhile, there are also Chance Cards which represent the actions of the saboteur — just like the characters in the book, you might lose a turn to a Back Tire Wedgie.
The student and his teacher sent me some pics, and also threw in a few cards. The Puzzle Cards show a wide range of puzzle types — I’ve got eyeball benders here, and wacky rhyming phrases, and a word ladder.
In short: WOW! Thanks, Michael! You totally made my day.
It’s a wonderful time for people who like a good story. Books have never before been available in so many different formats. Besides your plain ordinary hardcovers and paperbacks, there are audio books, there are electronic books available for a confounding array of e-readers. There is the real-life storytelling of This American Life, or The Moth.
And for the lucky people who discover Otherworld and summon up the courage to attend for a weekend, there is storytelling at its most immersive. In Otherworld, you do not sit back and listen to a good story. The story is performed for you, and you interact with it. Instead of turning pages, you are finding treasure in the woods, and solving riddles, and defeating villains.
You will likely have one of two reactions to this notion of “immersive storytelling”: 1) Cool! Or 2) That sounds utterly ridiculous.
I myself was firmly in the second camp. Running around in costumes waving foam swords at people pretending to be monsters? You have got to be kidding me. Am I a child? No. I’m a grown man in my 40s. Sure, I played Dungeons and Dragons all through my childhood and straight into college, but it was never “escapist” entertainment for me—no more than any other game I enjoyed. I never had any desire to climb permanently out of this world and go live in an imaginary one.
And, furthermore, at Otherworld you stay in a cabin with the other adventurers in your “party.” More specifically, you stay in an unheated cabin with no electricity and with bathrooms a walk away through the freezing nighttime air. I believe they call this “camping,” but I am not sure because the very idea of it is foreign to my experience.
My friend Lance attended Otherworld some years ago and has volunteered to help run the thing every year since, and now and again he mentions it to friends and tries to get them to go. I’ve spent the last few years ignoring him. This year, though, I found myself thinking about it. And what I thought was: When Lance participated in Otherworld, it was with other people I know, all of whom really enjoyed it… and several of whom are by no means the type to go roaming around the woods waving foam swords. So maybe there is something to this.
And I also thought: Twenty years ago when I was young man, I would have brushed aside all concerns and jumped at this with no forethought at all, purely for the experience of the thing. So what if it’s silly and so what if there is bound to be some discomfort from the camping? It would be an adventure, and I would come back with a story to tell. When had I become this person who leaped away from oddball opportunities, instead of toward them?
So I signed up for Otherworld.
This past weekend was the event itself. I drove up there with two graduate students from Yale who needed a lift, and tried to ignore my nervousness. I think even my twenty-year-old self would have been having some serious second thoughts. Lance had friends beside him when he attended Otherworld years ago. I was flying solo. I would be thrown in with a party of other adventurers—all of them complete strangers—and I would have to spend the entire weekend with these people, even sleeping in the same unheated, unlit cabin with them. My God, what was I thinking? As we drove to the campsite, my brain rapidly counted up the number of ways that things could go wrong, and stopped when it reached a million.
The story of Otherworld takes its cues from generations of fantasy-adventure novels and role-playing games. (Although when I signed up, the registration coordinator took pains to assure me that Otherworld was not a traditional LARP—a live-action role-playing game, a genre apparently known for its detailed and arcane rules.) Participants are asked to choose from a number of familiar character types. I gave it some thought and decided to be a rogue, which is a polite way of saying “thief.” I named myself Kelp, after Andy Kelp, one of the merry modern thieves in Donald Westlake’s “Dortmunder” novels.
When we arrived, there was quite a lot of chaos in the basement of the campground’s main building. Naturally, some of the participants were dressed in elaborate costumes. I had previously perused a variety of Renaissance Web sites and had blanched at the prices, so I went a simpler route, wearing some black chinos and a green long-sleeved pullover. I augmented this with a vest from Otherworld’s own stock of costume pieces, and grabbed a thick sweater as well, in preparation for the cold.
Soon I had met the other members of my adventuring party, and it was quite a disparate group. Allow me a moment to introduce them all…
- Russ, 50 years old, is an engineer, specializing in making big things safer. He has worked for the military; he has worked on the Space Shuttle. He’s a bearded gentle bear of a man, who had come to join us as “Tao,” a cleric.
- John was “Marin,” our mage, and his costume made my costume want to crawl into a hole. He wore a flowing black cape with a blood-red liner, under which was an all-black outfit augmented with all kinds of jewelry and magical bric-a-brac… basically, he looked ready to cast a fireball at a moment’s notice. His long black hair completed the look—here before us was Marilyn Manson’s more good-natured younger brother. In real life, John is a technician working on the factory floor at Proctor & Gamble.
- Allison had arrived with John. She is a dark-haired, elfishly pretty young woman in her early thirties, and in real life she is a microbiologist with a Ph.D. In Otherworld she was a ranger named “Quinn,” and she too had an amazing costume of greens and browns she had constructed herself, possibly out of various animal parts.
- Rounding out the party were two dewy-cute college kids from the University of Vermont, Kelsey and Andrew. She’s a French major, he’s in Comp Sci. Kelsey, who couldn’t possibly weigh 120 pounds soaking wet, became our Paladin, “Luna.” Andrew chose to be a bard, and he gave his character the unlikely name of “Pants.” (Not that I, “Kelp,” was in a position to poke fun at him.)
Joining us throughout the weekend was a staff member named Susan, who was assigned to be our guide—no, sorry, our companion. It was her job to make sure we didn’t go too far astray as we wandered through the story we would help to tell.
And here I have to stop and think about how to proceed. It’s funny—I’ll talk about movies or TV shows on this blog, and toss out a Spoiler Alert like a small dog biscuit, and that is supposed to be sufficient to get you to avert your eyes, if that is your choice. Here we have a story that almost none of you will ever choose to experience, that I can spoil up and down, and that even if I told you everything I experienced, that would only be a fraction of what went on at Otherworld… and yet to go down that path seems more than wrong. Telling you the secrets of Otherworld would be a betrayal.
Some of it you can guess, if you have ever been exposed to the fantasy-adventure genre. My fellow adventurers and I came to the village of World’s End, the setting of Otherworld, on a particular quest, in search of a magic item which was desperately needed at home. It took about an hour on the first full day for that quest to spread out like a Chinese fan into a whole array of complications and subplots. There was a tricky riddle we had to solve. We had to hike through gorgeous woodlands in search of a gypsy camp, where we bartered for a needed item. Villains were revealed; good guys needed to be saved; monsters were fought and defeated. You know the drill.
Except you don’t know the drill because none of that really gets to the heart of what Otherworld is about.
Let me take a step back and approach this from a different angle.
All stories have a structure—a beginning, middle, and an end. Some of the best stories play very cleverly with that structure. (Think of the back-and-forth timejumping in Pulp Fiction, or Memento.) Stories, and particularly fantasy stories, also need to take place in a particular setting, ideally with lots of juicy details. This “worldbuilding” is (I have found) a very challenging enterprise.
In terms of both structure and setting, Otherworld is a masterpiece. For one weekend each year, Kristi Hayes and her staff of eighty plunk down a vibrant, bustling community in the middle of a 4-H camp. The attention to detail is staggering. There are stores, there is an economy, there are royal leaders and drunken fools. Indeed, adventuring participants (only 48 of them, remember) meet literally hundreds of different characters in World’s End, each one with their own background and motivations, all of them bouncing off each other like ping-pong balls in one of those Lotto machines. The characters are brought to life by exactly zero professional actors, but they are all so well-drawn that this hardly matters. These people—computer programmers, technicians, accountants, teachers, students—make acting look easy. They probably do not even think of what they are doing as acting; they are simply helping to tell a story. There may be a lesson there for actors.
And the story they tell is mind-boggling in its complexity. Each six-person party is the star of its own plotline, but those plotlines—and the stories of the various people in the village—weave together in unexpected and dazzling ways… and often resolve with an emotional resonance that is deeply human. I didn’t go to this event to be moved, dammit, but I was, several times.
On top of all that—on top of creating heaven knows how many characters and weaving them all together into an epic story that takes a full weekend to tell, and which no one person can experience fully—you have the more pragmatic problems of sets, costumes, lighting, props… and here, too, Otherworld amazes. More than amazes, when you realize that all of this stuff was loaded in from somewhere far away, set up temporarily for your benefit, and will be gone again tomorrow.
And yes, and yes, the camping was, for this middle-aged man, no fun at all. It will be a long time before you see me again in an unheated, unwired rustic cabin in the woods. (Thankfully, you can only participate once in Otherworld. If I could go back, I might have to.) The first night I literally did not sleep for even a minute. The second night I bailed out of the story early—missing out on some amazing things—and headed off to bed, chiefly because I was bone-exhausted and secondly because I wanted to get a head start on the snorers in my midst.
But that downside barely registers—the memories of those cold nights are buried somewhere underneath all the wonderful things my party and I accomplished over the course of two days. We solved that tricky riddle, by gum, and all six of us contributed to its dissection. We stared in bafflement at a physical challenge that at first glance seemed impossible… and then figured out how to do it. It was slow going, and required intense concentration and cooperation, and before we started I had a very clear thought: I am not going to be able to do this. No freaking way. But there was no choice but to do it, and so, supported by my teammates, I did.
We watched each others’ backs. We saved each others’ lives, more times than I can count. Really? No, not really. But in the context of the story we were living through, it was real enough.
There’s something else about stories, something far more elemental than any discussion of structure or setting: Stories have to exist for a reason. English teachers generally approach this concept with the opening salvo, “What is the author trying to say…?” Otherworld wears its theme on its sleeve, and that is why I can reveal it here when I was so circumspect about plot details. Heck, it’s right in the introductory materials they send you weeks before the event begins. Otherworld is about becoming a more heroic version of yourself.
This seems, at first, like an unlikely proposition. I wasn’t even all that interested in being a hero. I read the background of my character and my party’s quest, and found it, frankly, silly—we were off pursuing a vision that someone saw in a dream. I decided that my rogue would also find it silly. Kelp would be a true rogue — out for himself, willing to go along with the group because he might pick up some interesting treasure along the way.
This bad attitude melted the instant the curtain was thrown back and we entered the candlelit tavern in World’s End. By the end of the weekend, we had saved a life, brought justice to the unfairly accused, and helped a young woman move from suffering to healing. And I wondered how I could have possibly dreamed that I might play my role as a selfish cynic. No. It’s impossible to imagine any participant keeping that facade for long. The problems and villains of Otherworld are fantastical, but for one weekend they also seem perfectly real. And the whole idea of Otherworld is that you can be the person who, with your valued friends, stands up and sets things right.
Here is more information about Otherworld.
In the very good book Homeschooling for Dummies — yes, you better BELIEVE we bought it — the first chapter after the introduction is called, “Addressing the Buzzword: Socialization.” We are informed that every homeschooling naysayer will reach first for the following argument: That your homeschooled child will not have had the advantages of mixing with other children, and thus when he or she goes out into the world, it will be with the manners of a poorly trained chimpanzee.
It takes about five seconds of research to see that this is not so. (My friend Julia is a member of the Facebook group “I was homeschooled and I have your social skills right here.”) As homeschooling becomes more popular (or more necessary), options for kids together become more prevalent. For our part, my wife and I discovered a large group of homeschooled kids that meets once a week at a community center not too far away. Yesterday was Lea’s first time there. She was very excited to be “the new girl.”
She came home looking pissed off, saying, “I am never going back there.” My wife just shook her head.
It started off well — Lea found a couple of kids her age or younger to play with. But by the end, bigger kids had taken Lea’s shoes and were playing monkey in the middle with them. They had also taken Lea’s soccer ball — which was fine, actually; she had brought it to share — but were playing an over-the-top dodgeball game with it. The parents of these kids, like far too many parents, did not utter a single disciplinary word.
Even after ten years, my wife and I remain astonished that such parents exist. But they more than exist — they’re the majority: Parents who never reprimand their children in public, and possibly never reprimand their children, period. These people are a bafflement to me. Janinne and I, we raise our voices, we express anger, we make it NICE AND CLEAR when our kids have stepped over the line. So many parents sit on the playground bench, reading a book and barely looking up while their child hits another child over the head with that child’s own shoes. It makes us crazy.
Well. Maybe we’ll go back to that local homeschool group and maybe we won’t. There are others around. And even if not, Lea was on the phone with her BFF for an hour last evening, so I’m still not worried much about our daughter’s social skills.
The diary:
Reading: Humphrey, the Never-Ending Saga
Language: A bunch of homonyms worksheets that gave her no trouble at all
Math: More word problems. Turns out she only struggles with subtraction word problems; multiplication and division she breezes right through. Weird, right? Wouldn’t you have thought it would be the other way ’round?
History: Christopher Columbus, of course.
Yesterday:
Reading: More Humphrey. My wife and Lea can take 45 minutes to get through a chapter because they stop constantly to discuss vocabulary and concepts that Lea does not know. (Yesterday it was revealed that Lea had never heard the term “engagement ring.”)
Math: Word problems involving subtraction. A whole lot of trouble.
Daddy’s lunchtime: No reading, no poems, no math. Instead we worked on more origami together. Here’s a tip: Before you try teaching a child how to do something, know how to do it yourself. I thought we discover together how to make origami swans and cranes. In reality, it was me flipping back and forth in our not-very-clear book, trying to understand what the author meant with these arrows and dotted lines, while Lea drew pictures. Not our most productive hour.
A bunch more books came in the mail yesterday, so Social Studies is about to ramp up big time. You can only imagine how excited Lea is about that.
I did not belong there. My interest in theater was vague; my talent at theater was non-existent. But everybody needs a home when they are away from home, and for me during my college years it was the theater department at SUNY-Albany. From my sophomore year onward, I was in a classroom, or I was in my apartment, or I was in the computer center. But mostly I was in the Red Lounge on the second floor of the Performing Arts Center.
Now I read that SUNY-Albany is cutting several departments, theater among them. Naturally, I am not overjoyed at this. I’m sure somebody out there has already started the letter-writing campaign, has gotten the petition rolling, is making angry phone calls to heaven-knows-who. Maybe it will work. It probably won’t. So instead, a brief remembrance.
I was there from 1986-1990. I stumbled impulsively into an audition for Biloxi Blues and landed a major part. I was pretty bad in the role, but most people either didn’t notice or didn’t care. My head was shaved practically bald for the part, so for weeks afterward I was easily identifiable around campus, and I enjoyed a strange never-before-experienced sensation that I later discovered was called popularity. Complete strangers started up conversations with me, told me how much they enjoyed the show. If anything unites theater people, it is a hunger for applause. I had gotten a big taste and wanted more.
So I became a theater minor. I took Acting with a succession of teachers, learning frightfully little. I remember being drilled in the Meisner technique of repeating the same observation back and forth a hundred times, and thinking, this has got to be someone’s idea of a joke. I preferred the other two classes in the required threesome, Voice and Movement. The former was taught by Bill Leone, and the latter by Constance Valice Hill, and both of them knew their stuff, and I’m only sorry now that I was too young to really learn from them. Voice in particular. After every school visit I do — four or five hours of non-stop talking, most of it at full volume — I wish myself back in time to Bill’s class, so that I might pick up some knowledge this time around. Bill was a decent actor and a good teacher, stuck with a lot of kids who had no idea what he was talking about. During a two-week span where he tried to coax actual Shakespeare out of us — we all had to do the muse of fire speech — I’m surprised he didn’t simply stand up and walk out of the room, never to return.
Although, Bill was also responsible for the most surreal experience of my college career. He decided to hold optional Saturday morning classes, and thirty of us showed up that first Saturday for an audition. We were not asked to prepare a monologue; we were given no script to read cold. Instead we did an “emotional exercise”: Bill put two chairs in the center of the room, facing each other. We were directed to come up and sit in one of the chairs. In the other chair we were supposed to imagine somebody with whom we had unfinished business. “And finish it,” Bill said. He moved to a corner to sit and watch.
I am not sure what Bill was expecting to happen, but it’s a fair bet that he got more than he bargained for. The first person started crying about thirty seconds after she sat down in the chair. That set the tone for the morning. When the second person sat down and also started crying, the roller coaster was away and could not be called back. One at a time we sat down and ripped our own hearts out. Kids who had taken theater as a goof, with no intention of ever seriously revealing themselves emotionally, were now talking to dead relatives, past loves, old friends. We didn’t “tear up.” We weren’t “emotionally moved.” By the time the last of us had gone, all thirty of us were sobbing openly. If the Moonies had set up shop outside the Performing Arts Center that day, they would have had any number of new recruits. Bill had the stunned look of someone who had gone to light a cigarette and had accidentally burned down an entire city block.
I don’t think stuff like that happened in SUNYA’s much-lauded business school.
A college theater department is destined to put on some bad plays — that is what it is there to do. But we also put on some very good ones. I fell in love with Eric Overmeyer’s language-soaked play On the Verge, and Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. The Diviners, to my astonishment, made me weep. I ran costumes for Desire Under The Elms and props for ‘Night Mother. This latter job was no job at all, since all the props were onstage at the opening curtain; I just had to put them away afterwards. So I sat backstage in a dressing room and read a book, and waited for my cue that the play was almost over. Which is to say, the gunshot. That play has lost some of its emotional punch for me, naturally.
The PAC had a symbiotic relationship with the local professional theater, Capital Rep, Bruce Bouchard, artistic director and all-around ball-o’-fire. I took classes with Bruce and his wife Kate, and saw productions big and small at his theater, many of them very fondly remembered. When I read these plays now, it is those productions I see in my head: Glengarry Glen Ross, The Immigrant, Voice of the Prairie, Private Lives, and Round and Round the Garden, my first introduction to the wonders of Alan Ayckbourn.
And yes, there was my own play. Twenty years later, I remember everything about the experience — the auditions, the rehearsals, the busy hive of the tech run. And the performances, of course. When playwrights dream, they dream of the kind of night I had the very first time my work was presented in public. We sold out our small theater both nights, something student productions never did; the second night, we had to make an impromptu standing room. The energy in the room was such that it never occured to me that the play might not work, that people might not laugh. And I was right not to entertain such doubts, because we killed it on those two nights in March 1990. My love/hate relationship with that play has been well covered on this blog. The love part comes from my memories of that weekend, one of the finest of my life.
What else? Only that in that time period, 1986 to 1990, the unheralded SUNYA theater department had a strange ripple of success. Stephen Adly Guirgis has become a celebrated playwright; he’s also the co-head of the LAByrinth Theater, which SUNYA alum John Ortiz helped to found. Tammy Smith Drygas is a successful casting agent. Glenn Fleshler is a busy actor, about to be in The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino. You’ve seen DB Woodside on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer — man, did my jaw drop to the floor the first time his name came up on the screen — and 24.
There’s a letter going around from a fellow named John Knapp, which indicates that the death of the PAC has been a slow, agonizing one. I’m sorry to hear it, and I wish all the staff well. The department is being kept on some kind of life support until its last graduates emerge in 2012. I hope the remaining students are able to wring every last second of hanging out in the second floor lounge.
I’m sure you’ve all heard now of the firefighters who let a house in Tennessee burn down because its owner had not paid a $75 yearly fee. My reaction to this was, I am sure, pretty much the same as yours: Those firemen are not fit to wear the uniform.
After reading more about the situation, that’s still my opinion.
The house that burned down was not within the area normally protected by the South Fulton, TN, fire department. If this latest fire had occurred some time ago, the firefighters who stood by to watch it burn would not have responded at all — it was simply outside their jurisdiction. But apparently there was a fire back then and the South Fulton firefighters felt bad that they hadn’t been able to help. So they offered to expand their service via an opt-in program: Pay $75 a year, and you’ll be under the South Fulton fire department’s umbrella.
An ideal setup? Mmm, no. But better than not having a fire department available at all.
(I wonder if the $75 was proposed as a tax that would allow the firemen to expand their range, and that tax was voted down. I have no idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me.)
One way or the other, though, the area around South Fulton wound up with its opt-in program, and it is now clear why that was never going to work. Free riders would assume that if enough of their neighbors paid the fee, they would be protected as well. That cracked logic all but forces the firefighters to conclude: Hey, if we put out this free rider’s fire, then we will have to put out every free rider’s fire, and if people learn that, then everyone will become a free rider. Then we’ll wind up protecting an area greater than we are supposed to, without getting the financial resouces to make that work.
I’ll say it again: The firemen should have put out that free riders’ fire. Then they should marched over to town hall and said, this opt-in thing is not working. Either everyone outside of town pays the $75 — i.e., a tax — or we have to pull back our jurisdiction to the city limits.
NOWHERE in this story, by the way, do I see anything about the dangers of privatization. The firefighters weren’t trying to make a profit with their $75 out-of-towners’ charge. They simply thought it was a good idea to use their resources to the benefit of those who had paid for them. I find a great deal of fault in their logic, but the story in all doesn’t sway me much from my small-l libertarianism. A privately owned fire company might or might not have put out that fire gratis — as the municipal fire company should have — and then gone back to rethink their business model. This story doesn’t present lessons about the free market or the evils of capitalism; it presents lessons about only one thing: Not thinking straight when a fire is burning.
Modern times
The Puzzling World of Winston Breen is now available as an e-book. Took us long enough, didn’t it?