The Once-in-a-While
Daily News
1 Whew. Got this thing started Monday night at 11:59 p.m.
2 At exactly midnight the spacing got all haunted, as though I had just interrupted the meaning of life.
3 I wrote the usual heading, but when I jumped to item one, above, I entered an alternate universe.
4 Grammarly simultaneously caught up and pursued me like a puppy in a futuristic dimension.
5 I tried saying my name backward like Mr. Mxyzptlk did in the DC Superman comics. I needed to get back to my own dimension.
6 He looks different these days, by the way. Mxyz, that is, my term. I like the old skool Mxyz, seen with Bat-Mite in the episode below. It was never established that Bat-Mite came from the 5th Dimension, so that one is anyone's guess. Mr. Mxyzptlk was a magical sprite from the 5th Dimension who loved coming to Earth in the 3rd Dimension and causing Superman fits through magical practical and impractical jokes. His only weakness was saying his own name backward. If Superman could make him do this, he would watch Mr. Mxyz get hurled back to the 5th Dimension.
Old Mxyz and Bat-Mite.
New Mxyz, a bit too serious and old to be
considered "that pesky pixie from the 5th Dimension."
considered "that pesky pixie from the 5th Dimension."
7 Moving On, Part One: I have a few fun coincidences I'd like to share if you are of a right mind, some old, others not so old.
8 To begin then: a quick backstory: A while back I became irritated with applying for things I wanted to buy online, and then going through the process of passwords and name-games.
9 You know the drill. You want to have, say, Sugar Pops delivered weekly to your door, but they insist that you must provide a username AND a password. But they want a capital letter, nine other characters, an upper-case letter, a lower-case letter, and a name no right-thinking person would use. That sort of stuff.
Sidebar: Sugar Pops didn't do this, by the way. They are a fictitious example, so I do not mean in any way to disparage their fine products.
10 Anyway, I found that coming up with unique protective usernames and passwords to be both repetitive and tedious. Too much like work, if you ask me. So at times, I threw variations of Mr. Mxyzptlk out there as a password, and I would always break through. It became a magic word that worked positively for me, but negatively for poor Mr. Mxyz, who clearly hated home!
Sidebar: Sugar Pops didn't do this, by the way. They are a fictitious example, so I do not mean in any way to disparage their fine products.
11 Moving On, Part Two: Last week, right before her first day teaching at a new school, my daughter Nicole discovered that her cell phone stopped making sounds. It also had lots of baby pics of Li'l Jack, his first birthday in particular. She was a wreck. It needed repair. Or something.
12 It was tough enough trying to move up here and into a new school, but a broken cell phone had to be fixed, and fixed fast. That was something on which we all agreed. We thought of going to the ATT store right around the block, but I suggested the Apple Store out at the Arden Garden Farden Mall, about a twenty-minute drive.
13 It was mobbed, but the place was great. They couldn't fix the phone but managed to transfer info to a new one. It just took time to load. I decided to hike the length of the mall to log some walking miles, and after three trips to Macy's and back, I returned to the Apple Store. They were finished, and there was relief everywhere.
14 We decided to head right upstairs to the strategically located Disney Store. The minute we walked in, When You Wish Upon a Star played delicately in the background. It was like being in Disneyland. Everything morphed into laughter and giggles.
15 The music then changed to Mary Poppins tunes. I loved it. I walked through the place in an absolute Disney daze.
16 Then something struck me, just as something struck me when I began writing all this folderol. I noticed a small sign to my right, and up. Here is a picture of the sign:
17
This is in the Disney Store at the Arden Mall
in Sacramento. I took this picture on Saturday.
in Sacramento. I took this picture on Saturday.
18 That was the only thing in the Disney Store that wasn't remotely Disney. It jumped out at me, I swear to you. That name has helped me enter worlds I never knew I could enter.
19 That, my friends, is the spirit of the sprite if, you ask me.
20 Moving On, Part the Thoid: I've mentioned Heidi Trips a few times over the years. It's a long, long story, but Heidi was/is a ghost that purportedly haunted the Yerba Buena High School Theatre when I taught there years ago.
21 I used to have my classes go into the Theatre and tell ghost stories on Halloween. I would light the place down and put chairs in a circle at center stage, just to create the mood. I was a reasonably good light designer, so it always looked pretty spooky. The kids loved it. Well, most of them. One day a bunch of students came in and insisted that they had reached a ghost in the Theatre. Her name was Heidi.
22 I was young and sarcastic, and I rolled my eyes at all of this. "A ghost. In the Theatre. And what is this ghost's name?" I asked.
23 "Her name is Heidi!" They chortled. "We first reached a ghost named Jo-Jo, and he brought her to us." Words to that effect, of course.
24 I laughed it off. They continued to add still more nonsense.
"She is especially mindful of the numbers one and nine!" they said. I didn't believe it then, but I did store it in the back of my mind. Perhaps I should have taken them a bit more seriously.
25 It didn't take long before I noticed things beginning to happen to me. For example, one afternoon I was on my way home from work, and the entire Heidi/Ones/Nines things popped into my mind. I was on King road, about to enter the freeway when the whole Heidi thing dominated my thoughts. At that very moment, I looked to my right and saw a guy walking down the street wearing a jersey with the number nine on it. I looked back up and smiled. "Hmmpf. Heidi!" I thought to myself. "Heidi. What a crock!" I shook it off as mere coincidence.
26 It didn't take long for those sorts of things to happen with more and more frequency. They were particularly strong through the month of October, what with Halloween and tricks and treats and all, or any time I would be going through moments of extreme stress, or extreme joy. If Heidi was a ghost, she was a good ghost. I affectionately referred to those moments as "Heidi Trips," a term of considerable endearment. I still refer to them as "Heidi Trips." For the record, Heidi also solves problems, but more on that in a minute.
27 Somewhere in all of this, Abraham Lincoln entered the picture. So did the Titanic. And now, Mr. Mxyzptlk. Abraham Lincoln, because one day I was talking with a really creative student with whom I am still in contact, Jason Lane, about Disneyland's Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, an animatronic show featuring our sixteenth President. We talked of how it would lend itself to a great skit. We talked and laughed. We planned on doing a student-written show called Biscuits (because it would have a lot of roles) and we already had a few skits the students had workshopped earlier in the year. The trouble was, we needed a GREAT scene to begin the show. It had to begin with a bang. We also had a taller student, Paul Long, who loved the Theatre a bunch. With proper makeup, he would make a perfect Lincoln.
28 I don't recall if it was me or Jason who suggested that perhaps we could begin the entire show with the animatronic Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair when the audience came in. That alone would be weird. We bounced some ideas around. Here are a few:
A couple of stagehands could pretend to be working on the thing when an announcer would say politely over the loudspeaker, "Ladies and gentlemen, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln will begin in five minutes!"
One of the stagehands could panic, and through conversation, let us know that he dropped his screwdriver down Lincoln's back area, implying a loose wire, or some form of animatronic disconnect.
From there, we could have Lincoln stand dignified and address the audience politely with a noble introductory, but within seconds, begin squawking like a chicken, or doing other idiotic moves, and then returning to his dignified manner.
29 We thought of having him moonwalk offstage to Michael Jackson's Billy Jean, and then project slides on the back wall, "The Yerba Buena Drama Workshop Proudly Presents" followed by "Biscuits." It was brilliant. I couldn't wait to get home and tell Helene. When I arrived home, she had some comedy show on, and I went into the kitchen to make some burgers. As I cooked, I heard her laughing, so I went into the living room to see what was happening. I was laughing, and then I looked at the TV screen.
30 There, staring back at me, was the face of Abraham Lincoln. Two guys were working on him.
You get the drift.
I was actually mad. "Oh, man!" I hollered. "Now we can't use that in the show; people will think we plagiarized it!" I was fuming, but eventually calmed down and enjoyed the skit. As the credits rolled to the end, I glanced down the way you do, and saw something that looked like "Creative Consultant" under which was the name "Heidi." No last name.
31 For the record, improvisational ideas can be similar, given any topic, but still: that one frightened me. Lincoln alone was often a scary historical figure to me, especially since he was assassinated. This began a lifetime of incredible coincidences. It was the first of many to come. We all have them, but it was at that moment I really began taking stock.
32 I'm certain I could get people from the social media to confirm a lot of what came to be known as The Heidi Chronicles, but I never was able to put all of the tales online. For one thing, some people got pretty scared, especially when we were planning on doing Hello, Dolly a few years later. I had written the company that handled the show for royalties and all that good stuff, but it had been delayed a bit. Some guy on the phone told me it would be fine, that we could start rehearsing without the rights.
33 I had even picked the cast and told them to come down to the Theatre on Saturday so we could get a jump on the show. I had already built the base of the Vandergelder store, including the area where the cans would explode and all of that.
34 I found out that morning that we couldn't do Dolly, that someone else was doing it nearby, and we'd have to go fish.
34 The kids came in, and as they came in, I told them that we couldn't do the show. They were crushed.
35 A whole bunch of them went home, pretty disappointed that there would be no Spring musical, but a small group stayed to help me strike what there was of the set.
36 We sat at center stage, and someone asked if we could write our own show. I was not that excited about it, but told them we could go into the back band room, where there were some scripts left in there from a Mr. Johnson, when they evidently had a drama class. There were box loads, so we sat among the tubas and instrument cases and read scripts.
37 Someone was laughing at a script. I can't remember who, but it was the script of a play called Lenny, written by one Julian Barry. It was REALLY weird, but experimental and cool, in my eyes. It began with some leader who was yelling things to a Greek chorus, and their response to everything he said was this: "Yadda yadda yadda yadda!"
38 So this small group sat in that room reading the script, and then using mallets, drums, cellos, music cases, and cymbals to create an awesome cacophony of sound. We were laughing and giggling the entire time. I told them about Biscuits, and so we decided to make a show using this chorus as humorous intervals for transitions from scene to scene.
39 Unrelated to all of this, I had earlier in the week gone to the library to read about the Titanic. When I was a kid, my parents kept a book around that was all about the Titanic, but I realized I knew little about it. The story fascinated me. So I checked out a bunch of books, and got to reading.
40 This was a year or so before James Cameron brought it to the wide screen. I read everything I could read, including a book that contained first-hand accounts by the survivors.
41 I also remembered that Paul Kantner and Grace Slick had created an experimental song called Titanic, a song that simulated the sinking of the great ship. It was on an obscure album called Sunfighter. Being a San Francisco-born kid, I loved the entire San Francisco psychedelic music scene, and I particularly liked experimental pieces. Here it is:
20 Moving On, Part the Thoid: I've mentioned Heidi Trips a few times over the years. It's a long, long story, but Heidi was/is a ghost that purportedly haunted the Yerba Buena High School Theatre when I taught there years ago.
21 I used to have my classes go into the Theatre and tell ghost stories on Halloween. I would light the place down and put chairs in a circle at center stage, just to create the mood. I was a reasonably good light designer, so it always looked pretty spooky. The kids loved it. Well, most of them. One day a bunch of students came in and insisted that they had reached a ghost in the Theatre. Her name was Heidi.
22 I was young and sarcastic, and I rolled my eyes at all of this. "A ghost. In the Theatre. And what is this ghost's name?" I asked.
23 "Her name is Heidi!" They chortled. "We first reached a ghost named Jo-Jo, and he brought her to us." Words to that effect, of course.
24 I laughed it off. They continued to add still more nonsense.
"She is especially mindful of the numbers one and nine!" they said. I didn't believe it then, but I did store it in the back of my mind. Perhaps I should have taken them a bit more seriously.
25 It didn't take long before I noticed things beginning to happen to me. For example, one afternoon I was on my way home from work, and the entire Heidi/Ones/Nines things popped into my mind. I was on King road, about to enter the freeway when the whole Heidi thing dominated my thoughts. At that very moment, I looked to my right and saw a guy walking down the street wearing a jersey with the number nine on it. I looked back up and smiled. "Hmmpf. Heidi!" I thought to myself. "Heidi. What a crock!" I shook it off as mere coincidence.
Shirley Temple as Heidi, 1937.
26 It didn't take long for those sorts of things to happen with more and more frequency. They were particularly strong through the month of October, what with Halloween and tricks and treats and all, or any time I would be going through moments of extreme stress, or extreme joy. If Heidi was a ghost, she was a good ghost. I affectionately referred to those moments as "Heidi Trips," a term of considerable endearment. I still refer to them as "Heidi Trips." For the record, Heidi also solves problems, but more on that in a minute.
27 Somewhere in all of this, Abraham Lincoln entered the picture. So did the Titanic. And now, Mr. Mxyzptlk. Abraham Lincoln, because one day I was talking with a really creative student with whom I am still in contact, Jason Lane, about Disneyland's Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, an animatronic show featuring our sixteenth President. We talked of how it would lend itself to a great skit. We talked and laughed. We planned on doing a student-written show called Biscuits (because it would have a lot of roles) and we already had a few skits the students had workshopped earlier in the year. The trouble was, we needed a GREAT scene to begin the show. It had to begin with a bang. We also had a taller student, Paul Long, who loved the Theatre a bunch. With proper makeup, he would make a perfect Lincoln.
28 I don't recall if it was me or Jason who suggested that perhaps we could begin the entire show with the animatronic Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair when the audience came in. That alone would be weird. We bounced some ideas around. Here are a few:
A couple of stagehands could pretend to be working on the thing when an announcer would say politely over the loudspeaker, "Ladies and gentlemen, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln will begin in five minutes!"
One of the stagehands could panic, and through conversation, let us know that he dropped his screwdriver down Lincoln's back area, implying a loose wire, or some form of animatronic disconnect.
From there, we could have Lincoln stand dignified and address the audience politely with a noble introductory, but within seconds, begin squawking like a chicken, or doing other idiotic moves, and then returning to his dignified manner.
29 We thought of having him moonwalk offstage to Michael Jackson's Billy Jean, and then project slides on the back wall, "The Yerba Buena Drama Workshop Proudly Presents" followed by "Biscuits." It was brilliant. I couldn't wait to get home and tell Helene. When I arrived home, she had some comedy show on, and I went into the kitchen to make some burgers. As I cooked, I heard her laughing, so I went into the living room to see what was happening. I was laughing, and then I looked at the TV screen.
30 There, staring back at me, was the face of Abraham Lincoln. Two guys were working on him.
You get the drift.
I was actually mad. "Oh, man!" I hollered. "Now we can't use that in the show; people will think we plagiarized it!" I was fuming, but eventually calmed down and enjoyed the skit. As the credits rolled to the end, I glanced down the way you do, and saw something that looked like "Creative Consultant" under which was the name "Heidi." No last name.
Honest Abe.
32 I'm certain I could get people from the social media to confirm a lot of what came to be known as The Heidi Chronicles, but I never was able to put all of the tales online. For one thing, some people got pretty scared, especially when we were planning on doing Hello, Dolly a few years later. I had written the company that handled the show for royalties and all that good stuff, but it had been delayed a bit. Some guy on the phone told me it would be fine, that we could start rehearsing without the rights.
33 I had even picked the cast and told them to come down to the Theatre on Saturday so we could get a jump on the show. I had already built the base of the Vandergelder store, including the area where the cans would explode and all of that.
34 I found out that morning that we couldn't do Dolly, that someone else was doing it nearby, and we'd have to go fish.
34 The kids came in, and as they came in, I told them that we couldn't do the show. They were crushed.
35 A whole bunch of them went home, pretty disappointed that there would be no Spring musical, but a small group stayed to help me strike what there was of the set.
36 We sat at center stage, and someone asked if we could write our own show. I was not that excited about it, but told them we could go into the back band room, where there were some scripts left in there from a Mr. Johnson, when they evidently had a drama class. There were box loads, so we sat among the tubas and instrument cases and read scripts.
Script of Lenny.
37 Someone was laughing at a script. I can't remember who, but it was the script of a play called Lenny, written by one Julian Barry. It was REALLY weird, but experimental and cool, in my eyes. It began with some leader who was yelling things to a Greek chorus, and their response to everything he said was this: "Yadda yadda yadda yadda!"
38 So this small group sat in that room reading the script, and then using mallets, drums, cellos, music cases, and cymbals to create an awesome cacophony of sound. We were laughing and giggling the entire time. I told them about Biscuits, and so we decided to make a show using this chorus as humorous intervals for transitions from scene to scene.
39 Unrelated to all of this, I had earlier in the week gone to the library to read about the Titanic. When I was a kid, my parents kept a book around that was all about the Titanic, but I realized I knew little about it. The story fascinated me. So I checked out a bunch of books, and got to reading.
40 This was a year or so before James Cameron brought it to the wide screen. I read everything I could read, including a book that contained first-hand accounts by the survivors.
41 I also remembered that Paul Kantner and Grace Slick had created an experimental song called Titanic, a song that simulated the sinking of the great ship. It was on an obscure album called Sunfighter. Being a San Francisco-born kid, I loved the entire San Francisco psychedelic music scene, and I particularly liked experimental pieces. Here it is:
Sunfighter.
42 We decided to take the idea of the Greek chorus and write a night of scenes using bits and pieces of Lenny to transition from scene to scene. The students wore all black, with white masks. At one point, Alicia Mendeke, our principal, came in and asked what we were up to. I told her we were working on a student-written show. She asked what the title was and I said without hesitation, "Ship of Fools." To this day I don't know how that title came to me.
43 The first part of the show consisted of pretty normal stuff, fun skits, goofiness, beginning with the Chorus, whom I called The Tribe, running through the Theatre yelling,
"Yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda!"
And we included bits and pieces from Lenny, just for fun.
44 When I wrote the script, I used an old Apple IIE computer and used it for a spell check. When the word "Yadda" popped up, it gave me several alternate words, including Audi, and
Heidi. Heidi solves problems. Exhibit A.
45 For the Titanic scene, I had the lights black out completely. I used a dark blue cyc and two overhead projectors, different lighting gels set on each, and cardboard with tiny pinholes to create an immense star effect on the back wall, eerily like the stars seen in Cameron's film. The Starship music mixed with a tape recording I made using several mics positioned on the inside of a piano. A few of us were messing around with soft mallets, guitar pics, and light percussion. We recorded about an hour of really ghostly sounds. We then mixed the Kantner//Slick music with those sounds. The effect worked amazingly well.
46 As the scene opened, the tribe came out and positioned themselves at various levels on the stage. They held candles. Curtains implied a ship, as did small platforms and stairs.
47 Each student played the part of a survivor, with dialogue directly from the library book of which I spoke.
48 And each time the scene played, the Theatre would turn cold, almost freezing. The left house quadrant seats would click, first one or two, then six or seven, then a bunch of them as the scene would reach its climax, and then they would slow back down to six or seven, one or two, and then none.
49 Every rehearsal. Every show.
50 I've had and continue to have Heidi trips to this day. We watched Bachelor in Paradise just last night. It had a guy named Jo Jo in it. Might have been a gal.
51 I enjoy old movies, and the other night we watched a Cary Grant/Shirley Temple movie called The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. I instantly looked up information on Shirley Temple. It never occurred to me that she had the same first name as my Mom, but that's an easy coincidence. She also played Heidi in the 1937 film of the same name. More interesting to me, however, was her father's name.
52 It was George Francis Temple. Her brother's name was George Francis Temple, Jr. I never knew that. I found that out this past Sunday.
53 My name is George Francis Harrington II, and was named after my Uncle Bud, who went missing in action in World War II.
54 I've many more Heidi Trips, too many to list here. I will say this: The entire time I wrote this, my computer kept skipping around, jumping fonts, telling me, "Oh, snap...," that irritating thing with the dinosaur, and at one time it completely froze.
55 So I'd better go before all of this vanishes on me.
56 Every single time I try to tell the Heidi stories, this sort of stuff happens. My phone just darkened.
57 No lie.
58 And now it blacked out.
59 I gottago.
60 This was fun, I swear to you; this was fun to write.
61 See you again.
62 Have a GREAT day.
63 Live life.
64 Love life.
65 Peace.
43 The first part of the show consisted of pretty normal stuff, fun skits, goofiness, beginning with the Chorus, whom I called The Tribe, running through the Theatre yelling,
"Yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda!"
And we included bits and pieces from Lenny, just for fun.
44 When I wrote the script, I used an old Apple IIE computer and used it for a spell check. When the word "Yadda" popped up, it gave me several alternate words, including Audi, and
Heidi. Heidi solves problems. Exhibit A.
45 For the Titanic scene, I had the lights black out completely. I used a dark blue cyc and two overhead projectors, different lighting gels set on each, and cardboard with tiny pinholes to create an immense star effect on the back wall, eerily like the stars seen in Cameron's film. The Starship music mixed with a tape recording I made using several mics positioned on the inside of a piano. A few of us were messing around with soft mallets, guitar pics, and light percussion. We recorded about an hour of really ghostly sounds. We then mixed the Kantner//Slick music with those sounds. The effect worked amazingly well.
46 As the scene opened, the tribe came out and positioned themselves at various levels on the stage. They held candles. Curtains implied a ship, as did small platforms and stairs.
47 Each student played the part of a survivor, with dialogue directly from the library book of which I spoke.
48 And each time the scene played, the Theatre would turn cold, almost freezing. The left house quadrant seats would click, first one or two, then six or seven, then a bunch of them as the scene would reach its climax, and then they would slow back down to six or seven, one or two, and then none.
49 Every rehearsal. Every show.
50 I've had and continue to have Heidi trips to this day. We watched Bachelor in Paradise just last night. It had a guy named Jo Jo in it. Might have been a gal.
51 I enjoy old movies, and the other night we watched a Cary Grant/Shirley Temple movie called The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. I instantly looked up information on Shirley Temple. It never occurred to me that she had the same first name as my Mom, but that's an easy coincidence. She also played Heidi in the 1937 film of the same name. More interesting to me, however, was her father's name.
52 It was George Francis Temple. Her brother's name was George Francis Temple, Jr. I never knew that. I found that out this past Sunday.
53 My name is George Francis Harrington II, and was named after my Uncle Bud, who went missing in action in World War II.
54 I've many more Heidi Trips, too many to list here. I will say this: The entire time I wrote this, my computer kept skipping around, jumping fonts, telling me, "Oh, snap...," that irritating thing with the dinosaur, and at one time it completely froze.
55 So I'd better go before all of this vanishes on me.
56 Every single time I try to tell the Heidi stories, this sort of stuff happens. My phone just darkened.
57 No lie.
58 And now it blacked out.
59 I gottago.
60 This was fun, I swear to you; this was fun to write.
61 See you again.
62 Have a GREAT day.
63 Live life.
64 Love life.
65 Peace.
fin.
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