Fear and Foreboding in White America

What is there to fear or forebode?

Are we not ourselves author of this dilemma?

The collective calls forth conflict

to arms, my brothers, to arms

take up your sword-pen to wage war

against the bullets of rage.

Young men borne of a sorry philosophy and sour sorrow,

inoculated from youth with hatred for the other

How is it those who have sinned the most and suffered least are the more aggrieved?

What good is this pondering meditation from a native son of the American nation still washing the stains of his ancestors sins with words, words, words, when words have become so perverted?

Just asking.

The Affliction of Abiding in Ignorance

"I am like a deaf mute with a message of the utmost importance, addressing someone ignorant of my fantastic language, who must resort to a frightful pantomime of sighs and gestures. Laboriously, I am transcribing reality." --Evan S. Connell, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel.

Where can peace be found when the people are afflicted beyond logic, sense and reason. Passions abide and a cancer has grown within the body politic. It has been with us always and has returned. 

Perhaps with a mind unfettered we can see that there is no us and them, we and they, me or you, no space between I and nothing. 

"It moves and the mind is wont to move: forward or back, to the left, to the right, in the ten directions and to the eight points; and the mind that does not stop at all is called immovable wisdom." - --Takuan Soho, The Unfettered Mind

MARRIAGE PLAY (LOVE AND THEATRE)

I have been wondering who I am of late. I am now a former editor attempting a theatrical comeback after recently retiring from a 30-year career in publishing. Audiobook publishing to be exact. It has been a 34-year absence from the stage for me. Today as I write it is only 11 days until opening night for Edward Albee's Marriage Play. My comeback, of sorts. I am playing Jack, a man in the midst of a middle-aged crisis who has just experienced an epiphany. Type-casting.

My stage career was of little note to anyone else save myself, but it spanned from roughly 1966-1988. I count the years from when my passion for theatre first actualized when I was ten to when it became a longing too burdensome, a love unrequited. It all began in community theater at Camp Darby in Livorno, Italia in the musical Oliver and ended Off-Broadway, a Theatre Row venue on 42nd Street between the 9th and 10th Avenues in NYC.  My last gig was in the title role of Shakespeare's Henry V.

    I turned down a paying gig on Theatre Row, a chance to play James Joyce's character, Stephen Dedalus, to play instead the wordiest motherfucker Shakespeare ever wrote. The play was performed by a company of actors called the New Rude Mechanicals. I did it for free, but that is too long a story for the present time.

    Marriage Play, is a two-person play. Adriane (my wife) will be playing the role of Gillian. "Jack and Gillian, went up the hill etc."

    She was and is an actor as well, but hers has been a more arduous journey than mine. She, like my mother, was discouraged from the pursuit of any acting career by her father, and then later by her colleagues and peers in film and commercial production. "Actors become producers, not the other way round."

    My wife and I first met as extras on the set of Martin Scorcese's short film, "Life Lessons." It was one of three short works that comprised an anthology film, New York Stories. The other segments were directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen.

    I have a letter from Woody, after my one-and-only SAG day player gig wound up on the cutting room floor, but I will leave the telling of the Scorcese episode until a later date.

For tickets click this link: https://Marriage Play_Albee_Tickets

First Satori

My teacher, Basho said:

Begin again

Over and over again

Always a new beginning.

Fear not the flames

Be as the Phoenix”

 

My reply:

I am the last son

of the MacFilidh clan, 

the son of the poet

gone up in flames.

۞        ۞        ۞

What was it I wanted?
to say, to do
now standing at the abyss
to see who, how or what I am?
 
To see the self
touch where the heart resides
And, when fear gathers
Will, the turning of the tide.
 
I sat down
Trying to apprehend the truth of my existence
I sat a lifetime and still the door was closed
 
Knock again.
 
Clever speech is gone
Standing naked to the wind
A fire grows in the belly
a hunger, and a thirst
in search of the bull
no glimpse of eternity?

Speak for no faiths

No ism, no cause, save one

The celebration, the sustenance

And the surrender of life

It is the last hope

To be thrown away

Till tears bitter, bittersweet

joy and sorrow abide

Then speak but one word

 

Love

Now forget this too

It is too much this peace

Too sublime, too clinging

Too late for tears, too soon

We are the dust.

Excerpted from The Phoenix Chronicle (c)1988, 2021 by Joe B. McNeely Jr. 

۞        ۞        ۞

 

Where Is Love OLIVER !

An Actor Unprepared

I was a failure as a professional actor despite being brilliant, brilliant at least in my own mind. What was the hubris? Perhaps the narcissism inherited from or modeled by my mother. Was it an Oedipal desire to please mother by pursuing the path denied to her?

            My first theatrical performance was the annual extravaganza produced by Miss Leadbetter’s Country Day School in Richardson, Texas. I was the lead skunk. Whenever company was over and I was invariably asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I said, “be one of those guys on television who comes out from behind the curtain, sings a song, tells a joke, and sits down on the couch to chat.” Such desire for the limelight from a young boy nicknamed by his father: “Squirrel.” (There’s a story there but not in the foreword).

What I thought was the seed of destiny took root in the fertile soil of the Camp Darby community theatre in the fall of 1968. Within that company of players, I was cast as Oliver, in the musical rendition of Dickens’ classic, Oliver Twist. The story of an orphan boy searching for love. The boy who wanted more. My first incarnation of character and self.
            One night singing Oliver’s solo, “Where is Love?” I had an epiphany, a revelation, so to speak. To set the stage, I was in the actor zone, I was a conduit of lyrics, melody and meaning—it was my “aha” moment. It was a moment of grace, a pure expression of the deep longing that lies within to love and be loved. The audience was hushed and silent as I lingered on the final note.  All were encompassed it seemed by this fleeting moment of beatitude.
            Then the audience applauded. I would say they rose to their feet with a thunderous ovation, but that would be stretching truth too far, literally speaking. Suffice to say, that I was showered with praise and adoration, but it was the moment of grace itself that was the intoxication. For the briefest of time, a moment perhaps, I was suspended in the void between the conscious and the unconscious. I was the character, and the character was me. As a great American playwright wrote of his seafaring youth, his self-portrait in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Edmund, a role I once played well, “I belonged without past or future within peace and unity, a wild joy, within something greater than my own or the life of man. To God if you want to put it that way.”  
            Heady stuff for a runt who cried too much and wet his bed. A boy of small frame, buck-toothed with only an acid tongue for defense—a boy “too smart for his own good” and “a child born angry”.  The latter according to my maternal grandmother, and the former, my mother. 
            When the time was ripe, I proclaimed to my father that I “would make it as an actor, and if not that, be a bum.”  And the latter came close to occurring but for another awakening, the “pesto” insight which I shall recount in full later. The moment I realized I was worse than a bum, I was a waiter, worser than that, I was a catering waiter. I was also a newlywed with a wife ready for child and the clock was ticking. I was never going to be able to provide for a family on an actor's salary. I still have the pay stubs of the meager earnings of my professional acting pursuits. And so, I asked myself a daunting question? What does a thirty-four-year-old actor, barely eking by on simple wages and tips do now? I was self-admitted as being ill-suited for white-collar starch. I was ill-prepared and lacking any skill set with which to enter the "real" world much less command a salary with benefits? A BFA in theatre with a minor in English from the University of Nebraska (Lincoln) and an incomplete master’s degree in acting and directing from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) left me mostly unprepared for success in any business save the one I was then foreswearing.
            To make a long story brief, the answer to my riddle proved to be audiobook publishing.  I learned the business from the ground up, front-to-back, and side to side in the Wild West days of abridged retail audio, circa 1990-2000. And then another 20 years until the industry matured and started making money.

Excerpted from the author preface, An Actor Unprepared (or The Other Editor) (c)2022 by Joe B. McNeely Jr.