Children at the Brink

I was running with the wind again. Headed north with Lacey riding shotgun. We had dinner in Ashland Saturday night. Sunday stopped in Eugene for breakfast. I’d been the producer of the street performing program at the Eugene Celebration for a bunch of years. Downtown Eugene has gone from bad to worse in the last few years.

After breakfast north to Portland and stopped to have a visit with one of my oldest friends. He’s holed up on the Northeast side just off Sandy. My friend likes to think outside the box, he prefers to live outside the box, and working from this scaffolding makes a curiosity, a kind of unbridled romp far from the familiar fields.

Evening shared more time with a husband, wife and their two teen daughters. On my way to see our youngest now at Seattle University it was like a taste of warm ups for what was about to come.

The progressive teen of the Pacific Northwest is a roving Burning Man Festival. They are playful souls. They bet with imagination. They read books, good reads.

They recycle. They eat good food. They like to juggle. They draw. They hook up and get tight with their sweethearts. They know that authenticity is the coin of the realm.

These are the souls we are handing our world off to. They are good loving people. They love the world they’ve been born into. The same as you and the same as me, and they want to do, to do whatever it takes, to turn the world around.

The obstructive class of status quo types that have the world by the throat… they will always want just one more bite of the apple, make one more close, one more deal, one more day before they let go.

My bet is with these feisty types up in this corner of the country. Come high tide, black ice, or snow storm they’re going to try to steer away from the catastrophe.

If you hadn’t noticed, Scientific America published a story this week. The article was unequivocal. Climate change is irreversible. The world is going to get much hotter. An extinction event could be baked into the cake.

We apparently can’t help ourselves. We can’t fix every problem. We can’t win every war. There are things beyond our reach. So, when was it we gave up and became fashionable not to try?

 

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Eternity Ringing in my Ears

My 1967 Ford pickup truck was home. It took some practice to get the kinks out. Simplicity was the key. When I got the truck it had a V-8 and when I finished it had an inline 6 cylinder 240 cubic inch motor.

Matched weighted forged pistons, steel timing gears, special camshaft profile, roller rockers, balanced the rods, and tweaked the one barrel carburetor. I got 20 miles to the gallon. Smoothest engine I ever made.

Much of what I did to the motor comes standard now. I didn’t get roller lifters. Instead I opted for special hydraulic lifters matched to perform with the roller rockers. I might well have seen 22 miles per gallon with the roller lifters had I installed them.

Got rid of the points and added an electronic ignition system. I bought the rig in 1976. When I was done I donated the engine to a Ford Bronco restoration shop. The 240 was a prize.

 

I’d swapped out the 8 for the 6 and ran it around for a few months prior to rebuilding it. Ran fair enough, but I knew I could do better. I’d had the truck now for some years. It was about 1983. I had put about 300,000 miles on the rig touring as I had across the United States.

After jerking the engine and tearing her down, sending her out to the machine shop, ordering all the trick parts, getting her back and then painstakingly reassembling the engine back together I was ready to start the motor for her first try.

It was like an out of body experience. The motor purred. Gone were the rumbles and shakes. The motor had come to me speaking in broken English whereas now it was fluent, in fact perhaps mellifluous: to my ear Shakespearean.

I ran north to south. The Ford took me as far as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and as far south as Bahia de Los Angeles in Baja, California, Mexico. She’d taken me east to Key West three times, New York twice, and Boston once.

I’ve slept around as they say. Finest neighborhoods I could find, or sometimes not, sometimes I’d just sleep where I was, wherever that was, however that looked.

Never put much stock in wanting my rig to draw attention. Curtains sealed out any light my reading lamp might make. Once I was in back on my bunk nobody gave the rig a second thought. You want to be invisible.

On my way to 500,000 miles I’d put something like ten coast to coast tours on this old truck. I spent the better part of a decade living in her, half those years non-stop, twenty-four-seven-sixty-months-straight-during one stretch.

 

I went over Rabbit Ears Pass on my way to Durango, Colorado in 30 below zero one night; had to chain up for that one. Not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but was a nominee.

Life was all about the show. I played dates town to town. Between dates was whatever I wanted it to be. I’d usually stock up the rig with food and then the real art was to know what dirt track to turn down.

If I had a few days I could write, read and workout. It wasn’t anything special. Many of my performing friends did much the same. It was good and still is.

Have a home now, but I still own a pickup truck, still get out on the road, and still pull off and take a dirt track now and then out fifty miles to nowhere pull over and spend a few days with eternity ringing in my ears.

 

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Coming Homing, Gardening as Show Stopper

Dom and Jane live in Wooloweyah, Australia. I booted my Google Earth program and took a look.

Dom elects to put as much distance between the world’s troubles and his home as space will allow.

Yamba, the nearest town is a tourist destination located just north of Dom’s village. I’ve known Dom for his work as a street act. He’s moved on from vaudeville style street shows into music.

Dom now prefers the easy rhythms of music to the comic timed one-liners. Belting out those punch lines can test the diaphragm and weary the vocal chords.

Sitting back and allowing the music to pull folk in is preferable to leaning against the flow and trying to stop the world in its tracks. Street energy is dynamic. The street show is executed by force of will. Will is often mind, and mind is more often than not wit, and wit is what we can say about the present moment that rings true.

The most truthful thing to be said about this last truth is that it isn’t always true, but it is more true than not, and demands a performers most strenuous effort. A street show is always a trial by jury.

I’ve had the privilege of the company of some of Hollywood and Broadway’s most celebrated talents. One Christmas with Bea Arthur, dinners with Bill T Jones, out for drinks with Norman Mailer, backstage with Leon Redbone, Chris LeDoux, and Stan Getz.

Leon Redbone in case you might wonder is a charming and generous man. He was always playing another odd tune on his portable, always eager to ask me to listen, tell him what I thought.

Packing up and loading out and jumping to the next date Mr. Redbone lamented that all he really wanted to do was wrap up the tour go home and garden.

Moments are driven not just by the times we live in, but by the simplicity our souls seek. Fame and fortune have little currency in this realm. This is the place where our pristine parts of self are allowed space to influence our most authentic choices, a moment when we choose non-action, non-doing. It is restoration, it is revelation. It is home.

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When Comedy Goes for Help

Make them laugh, make them laugh..

 

Today I’ll harvest sage wisdom from two comic minds. One is a silent clown, the second a gypsy magician.

The silent act has spent much of the past few decades doing cabaret inEuropewhen he wasn’t doing odd arena style opening work for major musical acts. The magician by contrast has played everything from children’s cartoon show feature, to authoring of the Klutz Book of Magic, from large venue stage shows to very intimate venues where he roves the crowd performing close up.

Having blended my life from all show business, on stage, full time, 300-500 shows per year, into part show business full time novelist, completing a novel about every 21 months, and presenting some 100-150 shows per year, my comic muscle remains in shape while the minds and imaginations of my two associates remain honed and their instinct for what is funny sharp.

Literary fiction is a realm with a different set of rules than the set that comes with a variety show stage act. There is an intersection, a place where they overlap, and one can inform the other. The secret is to know not just what to do (entertainer) but knowing something about how to do it (author.)

Still, in developing the outline to Hot Spring Honeymoon what I have is now a set of potentials. My friends are relentless imaginations. The silent clown is ever obsessed with any slight, least, moment he can exploit for his own mirth making purposes. He is granular, sees the world through a lens that is of its own kind.

The magician is different still. He is concerned with illusion, trickery, surprise and revelation. It isn’t what the performer sees from stage, but what his audience sees, and as an illusionist first and funny guy second, he understands the intermediation that good narrative demands.

Both know situations that are inherently funny offer a power that a singular funny line does not. They have a nose for circumstance, have strengthened their instincts to respond to opportunities.

I will go with a hundred ideas and return with a thousand. A few of these ideas will be worth their weight in fools gold. We write alone at a desk. We write what we know. Pieces of what we come to know have been generously donated to us. Sometimes it comes as a gift from the well seasoned comic minds of veteran showmen.

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Change of Heart

Adrift in a sea of change....

It has been time to suck it up. You know the way. You get up earlier. You try harder. You mean to apply yourself. Eat better. Drink more water. Review the plan and then work it. More important try to enjoy it.

Having now had a good stint at doing necessary tasks I can put my shoulder into the next items on the list. I keep a list now. It was a less common habit in previous suck it up chapters of my life. There is nothing quite like the thrill of being reminded by your own list of what a good or dreadful idea you had.

Affirmations are everywhere. For one thing I am happy to eat an apple just now. Perfect! Having just completed my second long fiction project I was heartened to read that the next thing to do ought to be something different. Just buckle up into that desk chair and put that imagination into gear and if you were driving slow and carefully this time go fast and carelessly.

There is nothing quite like being your own obstacle and it has been my great fortune and curse to be unable to stop myself. I’m speaking of writers block. It isn’t to be confused with the pain we go through to write well.

Sucking it up is approached from the best and worst directions. You try and close in on the one thing. You’ve got to try and not try. You have to guard against flab. You must have the courage to poke your deepest weaknesses. Great! Just what I want to do.

I’ve been annoyed today by a formatting dysfunction. I haven’t lost any time, yet! I’ll try it again. I’m busy right now. It was on my list. Post something for the holidays. Get with it Smith. I’m entering the dangerous sink where like most of you two days will be used for ritual. I’m grateful. I need the break. A good sucking it up comes into better view alongside a good patch of sloth and excess time at the table where I’ll put the sucking it up into some kind of jujitsu reverse gear. Merry Christmas…….

 

Free to Play the Game

Couple of Old Dogs Caught in the Act

To celebrate the first day of the rest of my life I had oatmeal. For dessert I took my supplements and finally to get the start of the day off to a rollicking hilarious start I just completed ninety minutes on my recumbent bike.

Add to my writing chores I also continue to perform. The show is mix of circus arts stunts, most of it juggling, some interactive audience material, and then the odd nut of this or bolt of that. It isn’t just standing up in front of an audience.

Three shows per day are physically and mentally challenging. It is fascinating how some days our mouth just doesn’t work. We can’t get the words out. We blow the rhythm. When we improvise in a situation our inventions can land with a dull thud.

For the longest time it seems static. It seems that who we appear to be on stage is much the same as the person we were last week, two months ago, or even two decades ago. I think where things get tricky is when our act is derived from a point of view that might be entirely against what we might really seem to be. Power solo juggling acts often are too often based upon wise-cracking, smart aleck, juvenile points of view. There is nothing wrong with that! But, it will only get you to that same place and it will take you no further.

There/Then Here/Now Where does the time go?

That’s what all this oatmeal eating is about. It is about doing what is necessary to stay in the game, to remain on stage, in front of audiences. But, performing isn’t art unless you act like it is and do something about it. What we can do is keep our minds open to not just what we’ve been, but what we are. Vaudeville is legend for trapping an entertainer in the act. It becomes a straightjacket that they cannot escape from.

Flying a plane is a skill taught by a teacher. Creating a show is an accident, a coincidence, a lark that lands on a good idea that is played out over time. Then, one day we reckon with the reality we are at an entirely new circumstance and that if we want to treat ourselves to the full thrilling creative ride that is a life in the creative arts that we must shed our skin, climb out of whatever and all of what we’ve done and begin again.

Most of what stops most of the people I know from remaining on stage is created out of the fear of letting go of who they were. As the lyric in the song says, “The road gets rougher, it’s lonelier and its tougher…”

BANKRUPT HEART 

“So, Mike, tell me when was the last time you were talked down off of a limb you climbed out on, you know what I mean? According to my understanding on these matters, a man has to do what’s in here,” Nick pointed to his temple, “and down there,” he pointed somewhere south of his belt buckle, “they both get to have a say so, they get to speak their piece about what a man has to do, and then, once its settled, just let the chips fall where they may.”

            “You know, Nick, I’d say of all the men I’ve counseled, Ry is among a handful that has never needed any coaching. Of course, he wasn’t in circulation, and even since he has been back out, he hasn’t been able to jump off that bridge, at least not yet.”

            “Well, I’d say the time has arrived. And this could be it.” Nick said. “Now, the only question that I see remaining to be answered is, if our friend here has the god-given courage to act upon the truth running through his veins. And I don’t mean tomorrow, or two weeks from now, I mean right here, tonight, at the reception.”

                        

 

 

Even When I Look Back I Still Don’t Get It…

Looking too good….

I’m not sure when it happened. I think they slipped them into a five pack. I’m talking about my polka dot bikini briefs. I don’t think I was brought up to accept things like this.  I do remember when men’s fine clothing consisted of such things as: gabardine, linen, silk, and merino wool. Now things are manufactured in some space age chemically treated for higher performance fabric and desecrated with the companies logo emblazoned across the garment.

I’m just grateful to have enough hair to still be in the game. I still have options. Compared to the world wide financial crisis I understand it is a minor thing, but didn’t someone say it was the little things that count?

Background Singers in Costume....

So far today thehigh   pointis that I ate my oatmeal, took my supplements, and got a good 90 minutes done of the exercise bike. I’ll hobble through the rest of the day remembering when I could basically eat anything as compared to now when I’m reduced to eating almost nothing.

I had a drinking problem and that is now cured. I’m drinking a lot more water. Someplace in all the advice books and columns I’ve read it said that it would be good for me. I think when you read that something is good for you and then you try it and it isn’t as good for you as the things you do that aren’t good for you that you wonder who rigged this game?

But, these are things that keep us going isn’t it? We are shocked to learn that managing ourselves is like a magic act. We find out we never are quite sure where our enthusiasm has gone for the doing the right thing. It just completely vanishes. It’s not like all of us are out to do the wrong thing. Most of us are prone to just not doing the best thing of all.

I'm on the outside looking in....I wanna be, I wanna be back on the inside....

There is still so much I’d like to know, and when compared with how much I still want to forget it isn’t really much of a contest. Someone said I don’t have that many regrets because I’ve never really been honest with myself. I can’t say for sure if I agree with that or not.

I’m still struggling with the fundamental truths of life. Things like why did these five sailors find Sunshine performing dog so captivating? How come when I tell someone I was a member of a show that presented tightrope walking they don’t believe me? Or, that I got to meet Little Anthony and when I told him I played the ukulele he winced. And finally who thought bringing me all the way to Japan only to stage my juggling act at the World Exposition should be done in front of a bright pink parade float? Perhaps the biggest and most perplexing question of all is what kind of man goes all the way to Japan and decides to go public wearing a neck scarf, leg warmers and polka dot shorts as a costume?

Men in tights or The Royal Lichtenstein Quarter-Ring Sidewalk Circus Your choice, what will it be?

I’m trying to get my affairs in order. According to the calendar I should have been grown up by now. I’ve been advised not to hold my breath. My astrologer told me today would be a good day to buy sox. Wish me luck…

Polka Dots are Protected Speech...

“Rosalind’s two-tone magenta beaded dress was dramatic. Where she was buxom and bursting were sewn fine beads and sequins, bejeweling her natural endowment. The skintight floor length dress was slit up the side of her leg well above her knee. She was a woman with a forceful full figure accentuated ever the more by a petite waistline. Rosalind oozed bare legs and sculpted broad shoulders. She was a celestial apparition of unblemished, tanned, ambrosial skin swaddled in a veneer, a gift wrapping. Rosalind was an unfettered tantalization, a provocation, a bombshell, rare was the man with the puckish virtuosity to join the quest to puzzle out her surrender to their libidinous call.”

Bankrupt Heart Copyright © 2011 by Dana Smith

Classic Street Theater

The Classic Chicken on the Head

I studied Shakespeare. I was a ballet dancer. I started out working in theater. I was trained in the classics, at least to the extent that my brain would permit prior to my stomach starting to bellyache about it. Aristotle, Plato, and later Cervantes I discovered had discovered most of what I was discovering.

I learned that Sinatra learned his phrasing technique from Tommy Dorsey and no doubt Dorsey got his training in jazz while studying classical music. Modern art is the result of classical art. Classical art at one time was the contemporary art of the day. There is nothing new under the sun and we really have to constantly reinvent ourselves even if we want to remain stuck right where we are.

Street theater is nearly as old as the oldest profession in the world. In the 1960’s when street theater re-launched its product line, entertainment headed back out onto the sidewalks and public spaces where it could escape from the suffocating conventions of legitimate theater. We were free, and then we were not free. Besides passing the hat more than a few acts began studying commedia del arte in Blue Lake, California. Next, a group of silent clowns began imitating Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. It was all so predictable.

Try this One....

Then, someone dug up this old world word “busker” and that pretty much was it. It was no use by the middle 80’s we simply called ourselves New Vaudeville.

All my renegade friends gave up. They got health insurance, signed up for credit cards, got a mortgage, married, had kids and decided to be happy. It was like really? They still did shows, but now they were paying their bills and doing things like staying home and watching a movie with the wife and kids.

That's what it looks like when a busker gets into hot water

I decided to hike into the mountains along a trail and take a dip in a wild hot spring, just like the ancients back in the day, before this whole Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian thing got out of hand. Next thing I know after a long soak in the middle of the wilds ofBritish Columbiamy guide into the wilderness takes me down along a rock wall along the edge of an ancient lake where he directs me to look at a four thousand year old petroglyphic depiction of people enjoying a good soak in the hot spring!

People the world over are all looking for something new. They want a new relationship. They want a new car, new job, a new place to live, and some even want a new way of life. Then, they get it and just like that turns out in the end to be part of the same old thing. It’s like a broken record, like computers were supposed to make our life easier, and then the thing crashes and for four hours you’re standing around while a technician untangles the mess you’ve made of the time you were supposed to have saved that has now been lost. And this all happened because you thought that this time it would be different. It’s enough to drive a man to drink, but I’ve heard that won’t do you any good, you’ll just end up right back where you started.

BANKRUPT HEART THE SECOND NOVEL

“Nothing was going to stop me from sailing, not a storm, not money, nothing… not even Jackie.” Lenny shook his head and rolled his eyes as if to say: ‘what was I thinking?’ “I determined a long time ago I was going to go sailing, go cruising, the whole thing. Then, while I was preparing my boat, Jackie and I hooked up, had fun, it was great. Then next thing I know, we’re a couple. I’m not going sailing; we’re going sailing. No doubt, only way it could go.”

“And then she gives up. Can’t take it. Can’t do it…”

“I don’t know,” There was regret in Lenny’s voice, “five years, thousands of open ocean miles later, whatever I thought was going to happen never did.”

Bankrupt Heart Copyright © 2011 by Dana Smith

Before We Leave this Earth

There is no giving, there is just this human doing we are all part of...

I was at the Roberto Cruz Branch Library inSan Joselast night. It is out onAlum Rock RdinEast San Jose. This side of town is the other side of town. The library was a newer facility. Next door was an independent gas station. It had the dilapidated look nailed. I wouldn’t change a thing if this was the look I was going for

You should get out more. This is my advice. I was alone so I gave this sage wise guidance to myself. One of the wonders of the world is a river. Looking down over a footbridge into the crystal clear cool waters spawns joy.

Last night a gathered audience of children, mothers, fathers, neighbors and friends joined me for a show. The audience was quiet. The children were well behaved. At first shy, but they got where I was coming from and began to open up. They began to believe in themselves, to gain confidence, and see their own natural goodness.

Always beneath the actual presentation is the invisible subtext, the vibe, how it is going, who is in and who is out, what is connecting and what is not. Shows can go off the rails or they can slowly build momentum. This increase is the result of something happening between the performer and the audience.

I get the best feeling from a simple library program. I get this feeling when the audience opens their hearts to what I am trying to do and join me, trust me. They trust a graying husband, father and grandfather. They believe me when I tell them for my finale I will reveal the secret to having a happy life while here on earth. I give children a chance to try things, and they believe me when I tell them that if they try as hard as they can that there is no limit to what they can accomplish, that they can trust this and know this, and believe this.

Mothers and fathers are at the library to help their children learn to read. They know for their children to have any chance in this world they will need to get an education. I come by and do a show and encourage children to believe in themselves.

I loaded out. Spoke to the children who wanted to talk after the show. Put my equipment in my truck. I turned on the radio. The Los Angeles Police Department had surrounded the Occupy LA encampment. I listened while a talk radio host described our government’s decision to remove the protestors who they claimed were unlawfully assembled. Our compact between the government and its citizens is in tatters. I know we can do better, some among us have. For all of us, or at least my version of all of us is the great vast majority of the middle class of us need to build a bridge to a better tomorrow. I saw that better future running like pure clear spirit in the hearts of the children I was with last night.  It is so simple. We need to reach with our hearts hand and do what we can to help these new souls up….

 

The Land Yacht… When Dreams were Big and Fuel was Still Cheap

Road Dog Deluxe

I found my Streamliner in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the ultimate. I mean it was the full fantasy. In 1974 I was on the back lot at Circus Vargas. We had jumped over from St. Louisto see the show in Springfield, Missouri. They’d come off a mud lot and the trucks and trailers that arrived had been pulled off the last lot with tractors. Most rigs had buried their axles at the hubs into the mud. The center ring circus stars were the backstage mechanics who had to pull repack the bearings on their trucks and trailers between shows while preparing to jump to the next stop.

The new acts traveled in whatever they could scratch up. The families who had spent their lives in circus, the families that had come from families that had spent their lives in circus traveled in a rather distinctive manner. They pulled Airstream trailers with these massive Cadillac’s. These were the 500 cubic inch motors of this era.

Most circus shows worked east of the Mississippi and for good reason. West of there were mountains. West of there were long distances between towns. West of there were small populations. It was hard to scuff up enough people to make a show worthwhile.

Pulling an Airstream with a Cadillac on flat ground was not too hard on equipment. You don’t break down as often. You don’t fry transmissions. Motors don’t give it up going over a mountain pass.

I had plenty of years to consider how I wanted to do it. Dodge king cab diesel pickup truck with dual rear wheels was off the shelf perfect. Streamliner travel trailer looked good on her bumper. I already owned a proper towing hitch.

Big Bad Dodge Pulling a Classic...take that Shakespeare

She served me well while I owned her. Wasn’t a long affair, but it was a grand and elegant stop along the road called life.

Sold her to a collector out of Austin, Texas, he took ownership in Tucson, Arizona. When I bought the Dodge diesel was still under one dollar and fifty and when I sold her a gallon was running five bucks! Pretty much ended the heavy duty era of my touring life. I tried holding on for a spell, but unless it was a high dollar multiple week contract the trailer couldn’t come, didn’t pencil out.

Still it isn’t like I had to have that setup for the rest of my life. It wasn’t like I was going to need to vow devotion to a trailer. She came, did her little dance in my life, and at the right moment she departed, and a time and place of my choosing. Wasn’t more than six months later that I swapped out my Dodge Cummins Diesel for a Toyota Tacoma. Six diesel turbo powered cylinders for four naturally aspirated combustion chambers.

As a fellow performer reminded me once, “It isn’t what you have, it’s what you can tell someone you had.” So, there you go. If you’ve been thinking about running the highway with a rig and trailer like this I’d be careful. Be sure you know how far and how often you’ll need to pull her somewhere. Rig like this will eat you out of house and home in this day and age…

BANKRUPT HEART                THE SECOND NOVEL

Ry turned down the alley. He walked out onto the pier. There were fishing boats, some worn by work, others painted fresh. There were Purse Seiners and Long Liners mixed together with commercial sports fishermen boats. Across the way near the warehouse, the bigger vessels in the fleet were tied up at the docks. He counted two trollers. The next one looked like a Gillnetter and last, a ship built for fishing far offshore. Ry leaned on the rail. Tied up below was a Monterey Fisherman, a capable sea-going vessel. It was not big. Time had taken its toll. Hard for a one-man show to make a go of fishing.  Ry knew a few who still tried. Hard to make ends meet. Fuel bill, cost of bait, cost of ice, and a slim catch could eat up a man’s profits. A few seasons of that and a fisherman has no choice but to throw in the towel. Ry inhaled. The sea air was ripe with salt, the stink of fish, and a wisp of diesel fumes. Scoma’s, one of the oldest fish joints in the wharf, was set back out here above the bay water on the piers.