The Once-in-a-While
Daily News
1 The other day I began a piece about Martin Luther King, and how his epic work Why We Can't Wait inspired massive changes in education. Particularly interesting was the inclusion of Letter From a Birmingham Jail, which I taught late in my career.
2 I even posted a pdf of it on Facebook for about three seconds when I realized it was January 8, not January 15. How did that happen, you may ask? Well, my excuse is that I was discombobulated.
3 Deadly flooding, constant warnings of possible evacuations, NFL playoffs, and shifts in temperaments on social media kept me up nights worrying, thinking, and sighing.
4 I also remembered that the dream fell into the wrong hands. By the time Why We Can't Wait made it to the national education doorstep, it had taken a wrong turn. It became the much-maligned No Child Left Behind disaster, a Bush-funded abomination that introduced the nation to terms like "ramped up," "rolled out," and other dysfunctional nonsense.
5 I won't go into all that was and was wrong with No Child Left Behind, but it frightened me. My recollection of it was that nobody really knew exactly what it wanted to do, but that it had to be put in place swiftly. Huh? There's a plan. Horrid.
6 It was so bad that it finally got replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2015.
7 There's a reason I decided to retire. Obama gave his farewell speech last night. I had NO idea it was even happening. How discombobulated could a person be? Pretty discombobulated. Great speech, by the way. Makes me cringe to think of where things are now headed. Proud moments by a proud President. History will show that. I don't really know where ESSA is headed, but my guess is that Donald Trump isn't the intended destination. So sad. Here's the skinny on the No Child scam:
8 There was Bush money behind the original NCLB crapola, a horrid concept that began in Colorado. It was sloppy, and it had a clear agenda. It needs to halt now.
9 In all sincerity, I hope this new generation of teachers can grab it by the horns and change it into something that works at their own schools. That's where the power and hope lie. Teaching kids how to beat tests isn't the best of all worlds. It is, in fact, a train wreck. Having a curriculum that covers as much as possible in each subject, on the other hand, does work. Listen:
10 Most teachers are aware of their own students' needs. When I got my credential back in the Stone Age, the "movement" at the time was that teachers should look at the curriculum, and then cover it by teaching things they know and love, and that they are excited about.
11 When teachers become enthused, and share ideas, things strengthen. One of my favorite use of staff meetings was when our English department at Evergreen Valley High School had each teacher present one of their favorite lessons. All teachers have them, and they know that they work, because they DO this for a living. So we decided as a department to present our favorite and most successful lessons. Duh. My colleagues amazed me with their imaginations and with their hands-on success stories. I'd like to share one of my own right here, right now.
12 Every Halloween, I did a mini-unit on ghosts and the supernatural in literature. One of our lit anthologies had a chapter in it dedicated to that genre. The chapter was called The Strange and Eerie in Literature. I loved it. Think of how many pieces of literature have ghosts and spirits in them!
I also brought in the concept of oral tradition, a concept which most of the students already understood. All of this culminated in students having a day or two of ghost stories to share with one another. They could bring any ghost stories, but I encouraged ghost stories that may have happened to them personally, or to a family member. I also encouraged them to bring ghost stories from different cultures. Every culture has its share of ghost stories, so this always became a day to share tales in the dark.
13 I had the added advantage of access to the Theatre at Yerba Buena High School, because I taught drama there. It became easy enough to do an eerie light design, and to usher the students down to the stage using a flashlight. I had a circle of chairs at center stage, but added other areas to sit as well: platforms, mini-stairs, couches, etc. Always a fun day. I found these two photos online; they give a basic idea of what the lighting looked and felt like:
14 When I moved up to Evergreen Valley, a much newer school in the District, it became a little more difficult, because I didn't have any jurisdiction over theatre usage.
15 I started EV as the Activities' Director, teaching a few English classes as well. I had a master key to the entire school, so it was pretty easy to duplicate what I did over at YB. I could easily access the school's theater whenever I wanted, but I also had to consider the teachers who worked in the building, and I had to respect their classes, and their stage. Fortunately, I knew a few of them, and they allowed me access, as long as my students didn't interrupt their classes. So ghost stories. Always an attraction to everyone.
And they were always fun, and WAY interesting!
16 My tradition continued, and I loved doing that unit every single year, for my entire career.
17 I encouraged ghost stories from different cultures, and trust me, there are some scary stories that come to us from all over the world.
18 I had them ask their parents and grandparents if they knew of any stories.
19 This was always done as close to Halloween as I could make it. Theaters are often booked, and often there are shows going up around that time, but I still managed to have those stories going every year, and every year I loved doing them.
20 So to all the teachers and staff out there giving it their all every day, I can offer only this: make it fun. Easy to say, not so easy to do I trust, but make it fun anyway. Your colleagues and your students can still make education a job filled with joy, creativity, and excitement. And that can allow teachers to spread their wings, and to show others exactly how to do it.
21 Don't give up the dream.
22 Moving On, Part One: I've decided to move this nonsense into less political areas, because I think we have WAY too much anger going out there since the election.
23 I don't know about anyone else, but my nerves can't take it anymore.
24 I'm going to try to keep things to myself and not judge.
25 It'll make for a more relaxing go of it. This is more a sidebar than a "Moving On" but it needed to be said. So. Ready for how the ghost stories went down?
26 My tradition of ghost stories during Halloween goes back to my days as a student teacher at Bidwell Junior High School in Chico, California. I didn't have a theater; I had a classroom.
27 I have utterly no other recollection of any of that because I'm officially a geezer who can't remember stuff. I vaguely remember turning the lights out and having the students share stories.
28 I had a few classics in my hip pocket, but we did it just for fun. Listening and speaking have always been part of any English curriculum, so I felt I covered it. I remember the students enjoying it. I decided to keep it, making it the oldest individual tradition of my frabjous career.
29 Moving On, Part Two: Let us go back, then, through the mists of time. When I began my teaching career at YB, I did the ghost unit, which eventually resulted a year or two later in a group of students coming to me claiming they had reached a ghost by using a Ouija board.
30 As a teacher and role model, I scoffed. I had messed with Ouija boards a few times, and always thought they were a tad fake.
31 So with tongue planted firmly in cheek, I said, "Oh, you reached a ghost, huh? What is the ghost's name?"
32 They looked serious and concerned, and one girl said, "No, we DID reach a ghost, a girl named Heidi!"
33 They wanted to know if I would like to "play" with the Ouija board, and again my senses came into play. "I don't think it's a good idea for me to try to conjure spirits in a classroom at a public school. I'll have to take a rain check. And I'd rather not see any Ouija boards appearing in the building, if you don't mind."
34 Words to that effect. Haughty.
35 Well, the best way to get students to do something is to tell them that they can't. Quite soon I would catch the same students messing with Ouija boards any time I wasn't looking.
36 After a bit, I made it clear that if they brought one to school, I was going to take it away. They stopped bringing the boards.
37 But students aren't dumb. Our Theatre always had a stack of manufactured boards sitting out on the edge of the stage so the facility could be used for giving state tests. The boards sat out on the edge of the stage or on a table, and I pretty much ignored them when we weren't doing shows. Sometimes students would sneak out and use them as skim boards. But that was when it was Spring. The testing boards otherwise went ignored, until, of course, I implemented the Ouija ban. So guess what happened?
38 The students soon drew Ouija boards on the boards.
39 Before long I had groups of kids in every nook and cranny of the building giggling and hiding any time I'd come near. There were at least three or four mock Ouija boards in use constantly.
40 I eventually gave up and had further conversations with some of the leaders. "So tell me more about Heidi," I said to no one in particular.
41 "She lived a long time ago, and she often communicates using the numbers one and nine."
42 At the time I knew nothing about numerology, but I tossed it off. Vivid imaginations, I thought.
43 But quite soon, strange things started happening to me. I recall one day just before hopping on to Highway 680 to head home, I thought about Heidi, glanced to my right, and saw a guy wearing a green jersey with the number nine on it. I blinked, got on the freeway and headed home.
44 After that, the same sort of thing happened with more frequency. I recall one afternoon walking through a bookstore
and thinking about Heidi. I looked up to see a table with the novel Heidi, by author Johanna Spyri, prominently displayed. It wasn't with any like-genre books though. Nothing huge, but a coincidence.
45 Coincidences.
46 Before long this pattern repeated. It never freaked me out or anything; in fact, I began to smile each time I would have what I called and still call "Heidi trips."
I recall going over to the teacher's lounge one day, thinking again about Heidi, getting my mail, returning to the building's Piano Lab, and TELLING a few students that I felt I was about to have a Heidi trip. I opened my mail and found a flyer inside. A play version of Heidi was playing at another high school. The students smiled, all ears and braces. Still...
47 I also noticed that quite often when I would walk through the Theatre, I might think of Heidi, and a seat would click. I would stop, and then another seat would click.
48 Of course, that could have simply been the ground settling. Things click all the time. Things go bump in the night. This clicking continued for the remainder of my teaching career, and continues to this very minute.
49 The original students who "reached" Heidi didn't like when I would make a big deal out of these things. They thought I was mocking her, and didn't like her changing to some form of joke.
Allow me to digress here, with a bit of history. We will return to the Heidi trips in good time. It's a fine wine, and worth the wait.
Meanwhile, here go:
50 At one time I wanted to build the drama program, which I had originally called The YB Drama Workshop, because I wanted it to include experimental theatre. My first show, for example was called Silents. It was a salute to the art of silent acting, with a Charlie Chaplin character running through it. I had already directed four shows at Mills High School in Millbrae, my old hometown. I came to Silents via A Chorus Line, where the cast recorded idea sessions on a tape. I had the students exchange ideas on tape.
The challenge was we were to come up with an entire evening of theatre without anyone speaking: all mime. Ultimately, we opened with Styx's The Best of Times from their epic Paradise Theater album playing, a chair an old trunk, and a mirror the only props. I was always fascinated with Charlie Chaplin, because he was one of the first to do it all: he wrote, directed, acted, and scored music for his films, and he invented the now famous little Tramp.
I chose a quiet and creative student, David Espinosa, to play Chaplin in a show I called Silents, which came out of the idea sessions. Here is what the students came up with, and what eventually played for the audience:
A Chaplin character walked on stage holding a red rose, looked around, and wandered off. Cast members then approached the old trunk, taking out hats, scarves, masks and coats, and then they moved to different areas of the stage, all mimes, motionless, and in the moment.
As they entered, their own ideas played through the sound system, accompanied by the music, so the creation of the idea was narrated to the audience as the players played it. I had a slide of Charlie Chaplin blurred out so that it was a light speck on the black proscenium at house right. We used a slide projector out of focus to achieve the effect, but as the scene unfolded, we brought the picture into focus, and a picture of Chaplin slowly materialized, almost ten feet in height, glancing off silently as the actors posed. Here is the picture, albeit a little crooked for the years:
When the music moved to a louder, faster pace, I strobed the stage and had the performers become keystone cops chasing the Chaplin character everywhere: behind flats, in and out of darkness, and just out of reach of the follow spot.
The "cops" eventually bore down on him at center stage, causing him to pose like a kid watching teevee, and he stared straight out to the audience. The cops, with hats, badges and batons, closed in, lifted him up and carried him offstage. As they moved him, he continued to stare straight at the audience, deadpan, grabbing the red rose as they exited. With that, Charlie Chaplin became the first character in a YB Drama Workshop show.
A series of scenes done as mini-silent films followed, all student written. The Y.B. Drama Workshop had introduced itself to the world, as small as both were at the time.
I ended the show with a recitation of Hart Crane's Chaplinesque, read beautifully by a student named Sandra Toole, and the show ended with a lovely exit by the cast to Styx's The Best of Times.
51 Silents was fun and breezy. It was pretty well received by the audience, and made me establish the potential for experimentation on all the shows.
52 I did a couple of other shows, including Philip King's See How They Run, which I was in when I was in high school (I played a Russian spy) and in college, where I played Lionel Toop, the Vicar. This followed with a grudgingly hard show, M*A*S*H*, which fellow director from Oak Grove Gary Berg called "ambitious."
53 I'll come clean here. The script for M*A*S*H* was terrible. I paid for the rights to do it, but watched the film of M*A*S*H* and converted it to the stage. It was a much better script.
54 In theatre, you just don't do that.
55 A few years later I decided to do a show that would again be a series of skits written by students. I called it Biscuits, because it had a lot of roles.
56
57 End of digression. Begin Heidi trips. Wait for it.
58 My brain again goes fuzzy, but I recall that we had lots of great scenes going, but I wanted to have an opening scene that would work. I also had a wonderful student named Paul Long who loved working on the show, helping with everything, and being around making everything work.
59 One day, his mom came into the Theatre asking to talk with me. She was concerned that Paul was spending so much time at the Theatre. She asked me if he had a big part in the Show, and I said, "Well, he plays a huge part in the Show..." and that was enough for her. She thanked me, and departed.
60 Later that day I was talking with Jason Lane, one of my most creative students, and informed him of what had happened. "I need to get Paul into a great scene," I said. Paul was tall and thin. We thought and thought.
61 Jason then said, "Abraham Lincoln."
62 "Abraham Lincoln?" I said.
63 "Paul could be Abraham Lincoln. Did you ever see Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln in Disneyland?" I had.
64 "Let's set it up like that! We could dress Paul as Abraham Lincoln and have it lit similar to Disneyland so when the audience comes in, all they see is Abraham Lincoln staring at them. Then we could have two stagehands come out and pretend they are working on him, tool boxes, that sort of thing.
"We could have a voice come on the microphone saying, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln will begin in five minutes.'
"Then we could have the stagehands say things like, 'FIVE MINUTES??? We can't get this guy working in five minutes!!! Quick, close him up.'
65 I thought maybe the guy could drop his screwdriver, but the point is, they depart leaving Abraham Lincoln. We tossed the idea around with these sorts of ideas: As he stands up, we could have all sorts of things go wrong, with him grabbing his tie, making weird noises, and moving all sorts of crazy ways, and then returning to his stern demeanor. He could even moon-walk off stage to Billy Jean.
66 I loved it. I thought all sorts of ideas on the way home. We could project "The Yerba Buena Drama Workshop presents" on one slide, and "Biscuits" on a second.
67 I got home, and my wife Helene had some comedy show on. I started telling her about the afternoon, went into the kitchen to make some hamburgers, and kept talking her ear off about the day.
68 In the middle of cooking I looked at my teevee.
69 I saw the face of Abraham Lincoln.
70 The camera panned back. It was Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln. Two mechanics stood next to Lincoln, and worked on him.
71 A voice said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln will begin in five minutes."
72 I was astounded! Then the improv guy in me figured it's not THAT far-fetched. I had seen ideas workshopped that had similar things done on comedy shows, so I just wanted to see what sorts of gags they had. One that I particularly liked was when Lincoln sat down, his shoe took off on him, like a little car.
73 We laughed and enjoyed it.
74 They rolled the credits, with cast, crew, grips and all, and as the credits rolled, one of the credits rolled to the name Heidi.
75 No last name.
76
77 When I was editing this, Caitlin was watching an old show called Project Runway. One of the judges was Heidi Klum. The name Heidi came up all day long. Sometimes words they would say would happen right after I typed them here. We got home and put it on again. At one point, my computer slowed down so that I could type only one letter at a time. This sort of stuff has always happened any time I write about Heidi. Coincidence. Coincidence. Coincidence. They happen, but they always increase when I write Heidi stories.
78 Yesterday a good friend of mine, Debbie Allustiarti, posted this incredible guitarist doing an astounding version of...Billy Jean.
79 This morning I had the teevee on, and they talked about a new Martin Scorsese film coming out this week. It is called... Silence.
80 Gottago.
81 Hope you enjoyed this stuff. Always fun.
82 But I gottago.
83 See you again.
84 Live life.
85 Love life.
86 Peace.
2 I even posted a pdf of it on Facebook for about three seconds when I realized it was January 8, not January 15. How did that happen, you may ask? Well, my excuse is that I was discombobulated.
3 Deadly flooding, constant warnings of possible evacuations, NFL playoffs, and shifts in temperaments on social media kept me up nights worrying, thinking, and sighing.
4 I also remembered that the dream fell into the wrong hands. By the time Why We Can't Wait made it to the national education doorstep, it had taken a wrong turn. It became the much-maligned No Child Left Behind disaster, a Bush-funded abomination that introduced the nation to terms like "ramped up," "rolled out," and other dysfunctional nonsense.
5 I won't go into all that was and was wrong with No Child Left Behind, but it frightened me. My recollection of it was that nobody really knew exactly what it wanted to do, but that it had to be put in place swiftly. Huh? There's a plan. Horrid.
6 It was so bad that it finally got replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2015.
7 There's a reason I decided to retire. Obama gave his farewell speech last night. I had NO idea it was even happening. How discombobulated could a person be? Pretty discombobulated. Great speech, by the way. Makes me cringe to think of where things are now headed. Proud moments by a proud President. History will show that. I don't really know where ESSA is headed, but my guess is that Donald Trump isn't the intended destination. So sad. Here's the skinny on the No Child scam:
8 There was Bush money behind the original NCLB crapola, a horrid concept that began in Colorado. It was sloppy, and it had a clear agenda. It needs to halt now.
9 In all sincerity, I hope this new generation of teachers can grab it by the horns and change it into something that works at their own schools. That's where the power and hope lie. Teaching kids how to beat tests isn't the best of all worlds. It is, in fact, a train wreck. Having a curriculum that covers as much as possible in each subject, on the other hand, does work. Listen:
10 Most teachers are aware of their own students' needs. When I got my credential back in the Stone Age, the "movement" at the time was that teachers should look at the curriculum, and then cover it by teaching things they know and love, and that they are excited about.
11 When teachers become enthused, and share ideas, things strengthen. One of my favorite use of staff meetings was when our English department at Evergreen Valley High School had each teacher present one of their favorite lessons. All teachers have them, and they know that they work, because they DO this for a living. So we decided as a department to present our favorite and most successful lessons. Duh. My colleagues amazed me with their imaginations and with their hands-on success stories. I'd like to share one of my own right here, right now.
12 Every Halloween, I did a mini-unit on ghosts and the supernatural in literature. One of our lit anthologies had a chapter in it dedicated to that genre. The chapter was called The Strange and Eerie in Literature. I loved it. Think of how many pieces of literature have ghosts and spirits in them!
I also brought in the concept of oral tradition, a concept which most of the students already understood. All of this culminated in students having a day or two of ghost stories to share with one another. They could bring any ghost stories, but I encouraged ghost stories that may have happened to them personally, or to a family member. I also encouraged them to bring ghost stories from different cultures. Every culture has its share of ghost stories, so this always became a day to share tales in the dark.
13 I had the added advantage of access to the Theatre at Yerba Buena High School, because I taught drama there. It became easy enough to do an eerie light design, and to usher the students down to the stage using a flashlight. I had a circle of chairs at center stage, but added other areas to sit as well: platforms, mini-stairs, couches, etc. Always a fun day. I found these two photos online; they give a basic idea of what the lighting looked and felt like:
The lighting usually had things like shades of green and blue, and I often used a leaf gobo to create a shadowy effect.
15 I started EV as the Activities' Director, teaching a few English classes as well. I had a master key to the entire school, so it was pretty easy to duplicate what I did over at YB. I could easily access the school's theater whenever I wanted, but I also had to consider the teachers who worked in the building, and I had to respect their classes, and their stage. Fortunately, I knew a few of them, and they allowed me access, as long as my students didn't interrupt their classes. So ghost stories. Always an attraction to everyone.
And they were always fun, and WAY interesting!
16 My tradition continued, and I loved doing that unit every single year, for my entire career.
17 I encouraged ghost stories from different cultures, and trust me, there are some scary stories that come to us from all over the world.
18 I had them ask their parents and grandparents if they knew of any stories.
19 This was always done as close to Halloween as I could make it. Theaters are often booked, and often there are shows going up around that time, but I still managed to have those stories going every year, and every year I loved doing them.
20 So to all the teachers and staff out there giving it their all every day, I can offer only this: make it fun. Easy to say, not so easy to do I trust, but make it fun anyway. Your colleagues and your students can still make education a job filled with joy, creativity, and excitement. And that can allow teachers to spread their wings, and to show others exactly how to do it.
21 Don't give up the dream.
22 Moving On, Part One: I've decided to move this nonsense into less political areas, because I think we have WAY too much anger going out there since the election.
23 I don't know about anyone else, but my nerves can't take it anymore.
24 I'm going to try to keep things to myself and not judge.
25 It'll make for a more relaxing go of it. This is more a sidebar than a "Moving On" but it needed to be said. So. Ready for how the ghost stories went down?
27 I have utterly no other recollection of any of that because I'm officially a geezer who can't remember stuff. I vaguely remember turning the lights out and having the students share stories.
28 I had a few classics in my hip pocket, but we did it just for fun. Listening and speaking have always been part of any English curriculum, so I felt I covered it. I remember the students enjoying it. I decided to keep it, making it the oldest individual tradition of my frabjous career.
29 Moving On, Part Two: Let us go back, then, through the mists of time. When I began my teaching career at YB, I did the ghost unit, which eventually resulted a year or two later in a group of students coming to me claiming they had reached a ghost by using a Ouija board.
30 As a teacher and role model, I scoffed. I had messed with Ouija boards a few times, and always thought they were a tad fake.
31 So with tongue planted firmly in cheek, I said, "Oh, you reached a ghost, huh? What is the ghost's name?"
32 They looked serious and concerned, and one girl said, "No, we DID reach a ghost, a girl named Heidi!"
33 They wanted to know if I would like to "play" with the Ouija board, and again my senses came into play. "I don't think it's a good idea for me to try to conjure spirits in a classroom at a public school. I'll have to take a rain check. And I'd rather not see any Ouija boards appearing in the building, if you don't mind."
34 Words to that effect. Haughty.
35 Well, the best way to get students to do something is to tell them that they can't. Quite soon I would catch the same students messing with Ouija boards any time I wasn't looking.
36 After a bit, I made it clear that if they brought one to school, I was going to take it away. They stopped bringing the boards.
37 But students aren't dumb. Our Theatre always had a stack of manufactured boards sitting out on the edge of the stage so the facility could be used for giving state tests. The boards sat out on the edge of the stage or on a table, and I pretty much ignored them when we weren't doing shows. Sometimes students would sneak out and use them as skim boards. But that was when it was Spring. The testing boards otherwise went ignored, until, of course, I implemented the Ouija ban. So guess what happened?
38 The students soon drew Ouija boards on the boards.
39 Before long I had groups of kids in every nook and cranny of the building giggling and hiding any time I'd come near. There were at least three or four mock Ouija boards in use constantly.
40 I eventually gave up and had further conversations with some of the leaders. "So tell me more about Heidi," I said to no one in particular.
41 "She lived a long time ago, and she often communicates using the numbers one and nine."
42 At the time I knew nothing about numerology, but I tossed it off. Vivid imaginations, I thought.
43 But quite soon, strange things started happening to me. I recall one day just before hopping on to Highway 680 to head home, I thought about Heidi, glanced to my right, and saw a guy wearing a green jersey with the number nine on it. I blinked, got on the freeway and headed home.
44 After that, the same sort of thing happened with more frequency. I recall one afternoon walking through a bookstore
and thinking about Heidi. I looked up to see a table with the novel Heidi, by author Johanna Spyri, prominently displayed. It wasn't with any like-genre books though. Nothing huge, but a coincidence.
46 Before long this pattern repeated. It never freaked me out or anything; in fact, I began to smile each time I would have what I called and still call "Heidi trips."
I recall going over to the teacher's lounge one day, thinking again about Heidi, getting my mail, returning to the building's Piano Lab, and TELLING a few students that I felt I was about to have a Heidi trip. I opened my mail and found a flyer inside. A play version of Heidi was playing at another high school. The students smiled, all ears and braces. Still...
47 I also noticed that quite often when I would walk through the Theatre, I might think of Heidi, and a seat would click. I would stop, and then another seat would click.
48 Of course, that could have simply been the ground settling. Things click all the time. Things go bump in the night. This clicking continued for the remainder of my teaching career, and continues to this very minute.
49 The original students who "reached" Heidi didn't like when I would make a big deal out of these things. They thought I was mocking her, and didn't like her changing to some form of joke.
Allow me to digress here, with a bit of history. We will return to the Heidi trips in good time. It's a fine wine, and worth the wait.
Meanwhile, here go:
50 At one time I wanted to build the drama program, which I had originally called The YB Drama Workshop, because I wanted it to include experimental theatre. My first show, for example was called Silents. It was a salute to the art of silent acting, with a Charlie Chaplin character running through it. I had already directed four shows at Mills High School in Millbrae, my old hometown. I came to Silents via A Chorus Line, where the cast recorded idea sessions on a tape. I had the students exchange ideas on tape.
The challenge was we were to come up with an entire evening of theatre without anyone speaking: all mime. Ultimately, we opened with Styx's The Best of Times from their epic Paradise Theater album playing, a chair an old trunk, and a mirror the only props. I was always fascinated with Charlie Chaplin, because he was one of the first to do it all: he wrote, directed, acted, and scored music for his films, and he invented the now famous little Tramp.
I chose a quiet and creative student, David Espinosa, to play Chaplin in a show I called Silents, which came out of the idea sessions. Here is what the students came up with, and what eventually played for the audience:
A Chaplin character walked on stage holding a red rose, looked around, and wandered off. Cast members then approached the old trunk, taking out hats, scarves, masks and coats, and then they moved to different areas of the stage, all mimes, motionless, and in the moment.
As they entered, their own ideas played through the sound system, accompanied by the music, so the creation of the idea was narrated to the audience as the players played it. I had a slide of Charlie Chaplin blurred out so that it was a light speck on the black proscenium at house right. We used a slide projector out of focus to achieve the effect, but as the scene unfolded, we brought the picture into focus, and a picture of Chaplin slowly materialized, almost ten feet in height, glancing off silently as the actors posed. Here is the picture, albeit a little crooked for the years:
When the music moved to a louder, faster pace, I strobed the stage and had the performers become keystone cops chasing the Chaplin character everywhere: behind flats, in and out of darkness, and just out of reach of the follow spot.
The "cops" eventually bore down on him at center stage, causing him to pose like a kid watching teevee, and he stared straight out to the audience. The cops, with hats, badges and batons, closed in, lifted him up and carried him offstage. As they moved him, he continued to stare straight at the audience, deadpan, grabbing the red rose as they exited. With that, Charlie Chaplin became the first character in a YB Drama Workshop show.
A series of scenes done as mini-silent films followed, all student written. The Y.B. Drama Workshop had introduced itself to the world, as small as both were at the time.
I ended the show with a recitation of Hart Crane's Chaplinesque, read beautifully by a student named Sandra Toole, and the show ended with a lovely exit by the cast to Styx's The Best of Times.
51 Silents was fun and breezy. It was pretty well received by the audience, and made me establish the potential for experimentation on all the shows.
52 I did a couple of other shows, including Philip King's See How They Run, which I was in when I was in high school (I played a Russian spy) and in college, where I played Lionel Toop, the Vicar. This followed with a grudgingly hard show, M*A*S*H*, which fellow director from Oak Grove Gary Berg called "ambitious."
53 I'll come clean here. The script for M*A*S*H* was terrible. I paid for the rights to do it, but watched the film of M*A*S*H* and converted it to the stage. It was a much better script.
54 In theatre, you just don't do that.
55 A few years later I decided to do a show that would again be a series of skits written by students. I called it Biscuits, because it had a lot of roles.
56
57 End of digression. Begin Heidi trips. Wait for it.
58 My brain again goes fuzzy, but I recall that we had lots of great scenes going, but I wanted to have an opening scene that would work. I also had a wonderful student named Paul Long who loved working on the show, helping with everything, and being around making everything work.
59 One day, his mom came into the Theatre asking to talk with me. She was concerned that Paul was spending so much time at the Theatre. She asked me if he had a big part in the Show, and I said, "Well, he plays a huge part in the Show..." and that was enough for her. She thanked me, and departed.
60 Later that day I was talking with Jason Lane, one of my most creative students, and informed him of what had happened. "I need to get Paul into a great scene," I said. Paul was tall and thin. We thought and thought.
61 Jason then said, "Abraham Lincoln."
62 "Abraham Lincoln?" I said.
63 "Paul could be Abraham Lincoln. Did you ever see Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln in Disneyland?" I had.
64 "Let's set it up like that! We could dress Paul as Abraham Lincoln and have it lit similar to Disneyland so when the audience comes in, all they see is Abraham Lincoln staring at them. Then we could have two stagehands come out and pretend they are working on him, tool boxes, that sort of thing.
"We could have a voice come on the microphone saying, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln will begin in five minutes.'
"Then we could have the stagehands say things like, 'FIVE MINUTES??? We can't get this guy working in five minutes!!! Quick, close him up.'
65 I thought maybe the guy could drop his screwdriver, but the point is, they depart leaving Abraham Lincoln. We tossed the idea around with these sorts of ideas: As he stands up, we could have all sorts of things go wrong, with him grabbing his tie, making weird noises, and moving all sorts of crazy ways, and then returning to his stern demeanor. He could even moon-walk off stage to Billy Jean.
66 I loved it. I thought all sorts of ideas on the way home. We could project "The Yerba Buena Drama Workshop presents" on one slide, and "Biscuits" on a second.
67 I got home, and my wife Helene had some comedy show on. I started telling her about the afternoon, went into the kitchen to make some hamburgers, and kept talking her ear off about the day.
68 In the middle of cooking I looked at my teevee.
69 I saw the face of Abraham Lincoln.
71 A voice said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln will begin in five minutes."
72 I was astounded! Then the improv guy in me figured it's not THAT far-fetched. I had seen ideas workshopped that had similar things done on comedy shows, so I just wanted to see what sorts of gags they had. One that I particularly liked was when Lincoln sat down, his shoe took off on him, like a little car.
73 We laughed and enjoyed it.
74 They rolled the credits, with cast, crew, grips and all, and as the credits rolled, one of the credits rolled to the name Heidi.
75 No last name.
76
77 When I was editing this, Caitlin was watching an old show called Project Runway. One of the judges was Heidi Klum. The name Heidi came up all day long. Sometimes words they would say would happen right after I typed them here. We got home and put it on again. At one point, my computer slowed down so that I could type only one letter at a time. This sort of stuff has always happened any time I write about Heidi. Coincidence. Coincidence. Coincidence. They happen, but they always increase when I write Heidi stories.
78 Yesterday a good friend of mine, Debbie Allustiarti, posted this incredible guitarist doing an astounding version of...Billy Jean.
79 This morning I had the teevee on, and they talked about a new Martin Scorsese film coming out this week. It is called... Silence.
80 Gottago.
81 Hope you enjoyed this stuff. Always fun.
82 But I gottago.
83 See you again.
84 Live life.
85 Love life.
86 Peace.
~H~
fin.
fin.
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