BEHIND Mindgames
One of my closest friends in high school in the late ‘60s was passionately interested in World War I Germany, especially the German navy. He and another friend would get together and play one of those boxed games that provided you with a map and small ship tokens and allowed you to reconstruct battles by rolling dice. This was a precursor of the role-playing games of the ‘70s. In fact, John and Larry took the game farther than the makers had envisioned it by taking on the personae of Admiral Graf von Spee and Kaiser Wilhelm II, respectively, and brought many of the rest of us into the role-playing, although we didn’t share the same passion for history. (I was Feld-Marshall General von Hindenburg. But that’s another convoluted story that involves my first completed play and a brush with Gary Sinise, and is covered elsewhere).
Little as I cared for World War I German generals from an historic point of view, I enjoyed playing a part. So it’s no surprise that this interest, combined with my love of science fiction and fantasy (I discovered Tolkien at about the same time), would predispose me toward “Dungeons and Dragons”. Yes, I was one of those people. I played several characters and created my own dungeons and had a ball.
Eventually I left D & D behind, partly because I had outgrown it – I was married now – and partly because, as a Christian, I had begun to view the whole premise with a bit of suspicion. But I was still interested in the concept.
Then the computer games began to really explode, with more realistic animation and programming that would put the player in the middle of the action, and the pencil-and-paper role-playing games began to die out.
It was with this background that I began to imagine a future in which computer programming and role-playing games meshed. I wondered what would happen if one could link the players’ minds directly to one another through a computer to create a kind of waking dream state, a detailed role-playing game as realistic as a nightmare. What would happen if such a scenario were to be taken out of the hands of the technicians and used by one player to attempt to “possess” the mind of another? What if the only way to combat that threat were to be within the parameters of the game itself, with only the slightest help from the outside world?
So was born “Mindgames”.
I was laid off from my factory job during the early writing of the novel, working part time as an Avon representative (and yes, that’s exactly what I mean – I was an “Avon lady”!) One of my customers was Dr. Ann Stroink, one of the top neurosurgeons in the Midwestern United States. I presented my idea to her, and although she readily admitted that this was, indeed, the stuff of science fiction and not science fact, she helped me formulate a way to connect the minds of my players that didn’t stretch the bounds of believability too thin. And although I had taken four years of high school French, another acquaintance, Annie McCarty, who had been born and raised in France, was willing to double-check Reynard de Beaumain’s dialogue and make up my deficiencies.
The concept of characters being trapped in a dream (or otherwise unreal) world and having to work their way out by the "rules" of that world with only minimal help from "outside" is hardly new. I'm more than willing to acknowledge the influence of Philip K. Dick's Ubik.
Normal, Illinois and Illinois State University are real. I’ve lived in Bloomington, Normal’s twin city, since graduating from ISU. Game Designer’s Workshop was a real business. Although it closed down in 1996, it was famous for scores of historical, family and science-fiction boardgames, role-playing games (including “Traveller”, something of a legend among gamers), magazines, books, and even a handful of computer games. (One of my fellow D & D-ers, Lester Smith, worked for GDW for some time). When I finished writing “Mindgames”, I stopped by the offices of GDW to get their permission to use their business. They were pleased to grant it, and were amused at the way I’d destroyed them in the manuscript. Finally, the factory in which the climactic confrontation takes place is the factory in which I work, although it no longer fits the internal description.
BEHIND The Eros Variations
The first time I had to consider homosexuality as something other than the object of various insulting jokes was in college. During my first year there, in 1971, in a psychology lecture, I noticed some guy in the next aisle doodling on his paper. Among his doodles was an ornate “Gay Power”. He noticed me noticing him, and made sure I could see what he was doing. Later, he came on to me directly. As a new Christian, I was confused as to what my reaction should be. I couldn’t mock or insult something that now had a face attached to it, but I also wanted nothing to do with him or his sexual choices (it didn’t help that he was really rather unattractive to boot).
Not long after this, I was in a bathroom stall at the local mall when I realized some guy was hanging around well beyond when he was finished at the sinks. My immediate thought was that he was going to proposition me (I realize now that this was quite an assumption on my part – he could have been waiting to simply rob me, or he could have been delayed by something that had absolutely nothing to do with me). On the spur of the moment, I loudly announced, “If you’re waiting for me to come out, you’re going to have a long wait!”, and he promptly left the bathroom.
Then a high school friend summoned the courage to admit to me that he was gay. Actually, I wasn’t surprised; I’d kind of wondered for some time. But homosexuality was hitting closer to home.
My final wakeup call came in about 1973, though, when I got to know a talented fellow Christian. He was everything I wasn’t – or thought I wasn’t: handsome, athletic, musically gifted, attractive to many girls. I envied him, but kept that to myself.
Then, one weekend, several of us were invited to spend the night at his parents’ house about an hour away. I had trouble getting to sleep, and couldn’t figure out why, until it suddenly hit me – my friend was in the next room, and I was wondering what it would be like to sleep with him.
This realization left me shaken. I’ve since understood that, in this particular case, my desire to have the things he had and was had become a desire to have him. But for the first time I had to admit to myself that I had the potential to have homosexual desires. (Ultimately I had to face a lot of unpleasant realizations about myself, concluding that if God had not gotten a hold on me when He did, I would probably have been bisexual, abused hallucinogens, and either murdered or seriously injured someone in anger. But that comes into another story).
Ironically, years later, after I had lost track of him, I learned that my friend had turned his back on Christianity, had been working as a bartender in a gay bar in Chicago, and had died of AIDS. Had I unconsciously picked up on something? I don’t know. I’m not sure it really matters.
My experiences, however, made me especially sensitive to the ongoing struggle between orthodox Christians and gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals (or GLBT). Usually, even now, the struggle finds its outlet in vicious attacks and bigotry from both directions.
I began to wonder if there were some way that the two opposing camps could be encouraged to understand each other, to see each other as people with faces and lives and hopes and fears and not just as vague targets for epithets or worse. I began to formulate a novel, one that I was almost afraid to write, not only because of the difficulty in finding some kind of middle ground, but because it would be certain to offend many on both sides. But I felt I had to try. And I knew that my protagonist would not be a sympathetic character – he would go through hell, much of it deserved.
So I began writing – and I immediately found myself stumped by something more prosaic. I wanted to cast the novel in some special form, something that would reflect Kelden Scott’s journey. I knew the story would cover about a year in his life, so I immediately thought of dividing it into four sections, one for each season. But that seemed too obvious.
I knew Kelden would be a musician – a concert bassoonist, in fact. So my next thought made perfect sense: cast the novel in the form of a four-movement symphony. I could present the themes and develop them in the first section (or “movement”); I could introduce more conflict and raise it to a fever pitch in the “scherzo”; I could provide more introspection in the third “movement”, and I could then bring it all crashing together in a grand, fugal finale. I decided to call the novel “Symphony on a Theme of Eros”. No – even better: since the novel was exploring the variations on traditional sexual love, why not call it “Variations on a Theme of Eros”? Okay, so the symphonic form and the theme-and-variations form were two very different things, but maybe the music world would forgive me for stretching the point a bit.
Finally, because both the original titles were a bit clumsy, it became simply “The Eros Variations”.
Then I had another idea. I had graduated from ISU with a degree in music composition; why not actually do something with that, and write a real symphony to accompany the novel? This was just as scary as the novel, since I had never finished such a massive composition, but it was also exciting. I began outlining the novel as I began writing the symphony, trying to make the themes of the music reflect the turmoil and tenderness of the plot without actually writing “program” music.
I finished the symphony and the novel at about the same time. The former is atonal and polyrhythmic, but with a strong romantic streak; the latter, while traditional in its approach, is not much more “comfortable” to approach.
And, yes, many of the incidents I experienced in my own journey have found their way into the manuscript.
Behind ALEXANDER
It's hard enough for an adult to hold on to his convictions in the face of skepticism. How much more difficult is it for an adolescent?
Sometimes taking a relatively common situation and casting it in an unusual setting will give a reader a fresh perspective and perhaps a new understanding. Thus I chose to set this painful situation in the world of Greek mythology. Besides, it was fun pulling in references to mythological creatures!
The depiction of Miss Hypaetus, the harpy schoolteacher, was inspired by Piers Anthony's Xanth series.
Behind BOXES
I've worked in a factory since 1977, several of those years as a welder. Rose was also a welder, and a writer. We spent many hours exchanging ideas, and were even going to write a screenplay together. (That project fell through, although I'm still playing around with the idea.)
One day Rose told me of a kind of vision or waking dream she had in which she saw many of her friends, family members, and acquaintances as inhabiting boxes furnished according to how she saw their personalities. She described a couple of them to me, including the man huddled in the corner of the barren room, who was one of our coworkers. The whole concept was fascinating, and became the inspiration for this story.
I wrote the story in such a way that it could be interpreted on four different levels: socially (the restrictions of popular culture), politically (escaping a repressive society), psychologically (the battle of a mind to be free), or spiritually (the search for spiritual meaning). It's probably no secret which of these I favor.
I showed Rose the completed story. When she finished reading, her first comment was, "How did you know?"
"Umm -- know what?" I replied, confused.
"The man in the room with all the books, the one reading and ignoring the woman -- that's my father."
Incidentally, she never told me about either her box or mine.
Behind DANCE
I set three challenges for myself, all at about the same time. This was one of them: to write a story completely without dialogue, exploring the psychological effects of an evocative dance performance on people totally unprepared for that kind of raw emotional power. This has become one of my most successful stories.
For a while, I was involved in a local writers' group founded and directed by a man who had also started a small desktop publishing company, Firefly Press. They published small pamphlets of poetry, mostly by members of the group, and offered them for sale at local coffeehouses for 50 or 75 cents each. When Richard decided he wanted to expand into short stories, he chose "Dance" as his initial offering, followed by "Boxes" (see above), charging a dollar for each pamphlet. Sales were on the honor system -- you took the pamphlet from the display and dropped the money in a box. Naturally, more pamphlets disappeared than were paid for, but no one cared -- we were getting our words out to an audience. However, I did make two dollars in royalties, which means eight people thought my stories worth at least a dollar.
It was for this pamphlet, by the way, that I created the pen-and-ink drawings that accompany the text.
I read "Dance" at a coffeehouse that I managed for a while. A good friend, Mike Hull, who plays and teaches classical and jazz guitar, provided an improvised guitar "soundtrack" to the reading.
Behind I'LL BE THERE
In the early 1970s, I went with a Christian group to evangelize in a small central Illinois town. During a conversation with one of the local high school students, he told us of a young female teacher who got drunk at a homecoming celebration and did a striptease on the football field. The writer in me wondered about her backstory -- what had gone on in her life that had led to that night, and what had happened to her subsequently. Of course, I would never know her specific story. But I could make up my own....
Eventually, I started writing. I chose the point of view of the teacher's young niece, who had once been close to her but who had grown jealous and had secretly wished for her death. When the teacher was eventually killed in a suspicious accident, the niece had to deal with her own guilt over her secret wishes.
Unfortunately, I could never get past the first couple of pages, so I shelved the story.
Then the opportunity arose to write material for a Creative Writers anthology on friendship (see the "Facets of Friendship" section on the "About the Author" page). I returned to my abandoned story, determined to look for a different approach, and decided to look instead at the friendship between the teacher and her niece, how it was damaged, and how it was repaired.
This was the result.
By the way, the story is set in Red Creek, Indiana, the hometown of David Cervenka from The Eros Variations. I didn't realize until too late that in using that setting I had caused a contradiction -- in my novel, David speaks of Red Creek has having only about 500 people and having had to attend high school in nearby Axton (both towns are totally fictional). But the unnamed narrator of "I'll Be There" attends high school in Red Creek. All I can figure is that sometime between when David lived in Red Creek and when the niece lives there, the town has undergone a large enough population increase that they needed their own high school. Lame, perhaps, but not impossible. I hope.
Behind THE LAST DAYS OF JOANNA BROADHURST
This was the second of my three challenges (see "Dance", above). For this one and "The Price of a Marriage" (below) I wanted to take a startling opening line and build from that. For this story, that line was originally, "On the 23rd day of March, 1990, Joanna Broadhurst made temporary history by being named the first person to throw herself down the Randolph Building elevator shaft." That line, as well as the opening paragraph, have since been deleted; I decided that the current opening gets the reader into the action much quicker. In any event, that original opening line told me that this story would require that I treat a potentially tragic occurence with a light touch -- a challenge in itself. And as I got into it, I knew it couldn't have the ending most readers would expect.
Behind LETTERS FROM LUPUS
This one was so much fun! I wanted to rewrite "The Three Little Pigs" from the point of view of the Big Bad Wolf. Okay, not really original -- this is probably one of the most rewritten of all fairy tales. But the angle I wanted to look at was how hate and prejudice can be based on assumptions that may seem perfectly logical at the time, and how bigotry can be a two-way street with victims at either end. The device of the letters allowed me to look into the character we all accept as the villain of the story.
I had the opportunity once to read this story to a group of third-graders (about 9 years old). They might not have "gotten" all the social implications, but they loved it anyway.
This story also found its way into "Facets of Friendship".
Behind OF DOGS AND CONSEQUENCES
The second story written specifically for "Facets of Friendship". This one is based on several true incidents, although cast as fiction. Stewart is loosely based on me (Stephen Michael Larson = Stewart Matthew Lambert), while Matt and Jim are loosely based on my best friends from high school, Mike and John. We did spend one Saturday walking the Illinois Prairie Path from Glen Ellyn to Aurora, although we never encountered any dogs, vicious or otherwise.
The dog is a synthesis of three separate incidents. I ride my bicycle to work every day, year 'round, and have since at least the mid 1980s. One morning a stray dog came charging at me. Not knowing what else to do, I roared at him. He was so startled, he broke off the attack and ran off. Some years later, a friend was telling me of how she was riding her bicycle out in the country when a farm dog came after her out of a field of soybeans. She was able to outride it, and later joked about how she imagined it to have been lounging around the barn, playing solitaire and smoking cigarettes, until she came along to provide some entertainment. The final incident happened to another friend of mine, who was jogging early one morning when he was attacked by a pit bull. He vaulted over a fence into a compost heap, then started mocking the dog. When he was done, he turned to find the owner of the house grinning at him.
Everything came together in this piece, which I hope to make the start of a series of stories about Stewart, all using my own life as a starting place.
Behind THE PRICE OF A MARRIAGE
The third challenge and the second startling opening line (see "Dance" and "The Last Days of Joanna Broadhurst", above). This one, though, while the opening line could take it into the realm of comedy, I sensed had to be treated more seriously. The main challenge once I got into the story was to bring about Margaret's realization of the truth about her marriage and to show how it had deteriorated over the years without making the story too long. The flashbacks seemed the obvious way to go.
Once again I made an oblique connection to my novel The Eros Variations (see "I'll Be There", above). In this case, both the novel and this story are set in Fell Park, and the Blackberry Creek subdivision where Margaret makes her discovery is one in which David Cervenka has done some building. (Could the woman holding the garage sale be living in a Cervenka home? Nah, that would be stretching the coincidences....)
Behind THE SOUL EATERS
This is one of my few overtly Christian stories.
In my fantasy trilogy, The Fire and the Light (which I intend to revise thoroughly one of these days), the main character, Sima, watches in horror and revulsion as his sister, whom he thought dead, appears and performs a crude dance for his best friend, now in the depths of depravity. When Sima tries to turn away, he hears a voice within him say, "Look at her -- but look with my eyes." When he turns back, Sima sees his "sister" revealed as a demonic creature masquerading as her.
Many years later, this scene became the inspiration for this allegory: seeing the outwardly beautiful with the eyes of Christ can reveal the corruption lurking beneath the surface.
Behind TRACK OF THE WOLF
Another echo of high school. Mike ("Of Dogs and Consequences") once told me of a nightmare he had had, in which he was being chased by a pack of invisible dogs. As he ran, he could hear their collars jingling behind him. When he reached the safety of his home, he pulled off his jacket, only to discover that what he had thought was the dogs' collars was actually the jingling of the little chain on the inside of the jacket below the collar. All right, so a little chain used to hang up a jacket would never make that much noise -- but, hey, this was a dream.
I had a feeling I could use that in a story somehow. And, eventually, the jingling of a chain mistken for the collars of a pack of dogs became the echoes of the victim's footsteps mistaken for the paws of a pack of ravenous wolves. After that, the rest of the story poured out.
I revisited the story a few years after the initial writing, expanding the part of Nahim-Tekoa and her history with Ezekial Marcotte and adding the concept of the Wolf Spirit.
Behind THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON
Although this is one of my more autobiographical works, I should make it clear that there is much here that is not autobiographical. I was not an only child (I have three younger siblings); my parents, while not perfect, have always been warm and loving; I never chose the same paths Solomon did. However, like Solomon, science fiction has always been my first love; I was painfully shy in high school; I did try my hand at acting in high school as Officer Brophy in "Arsenic and Old Lace" (as I mentioned in my extended biography); and my first date was exactly the same as Solomon's.
I've always thought of Solomon's life as the way mine could have been, had certain key events and influence been slightly different, just as Kelden Scott in The Eros Variations could also have been me (see "Behind the Novels", above).
The tone of this piece was consciously patterned after "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad, which I read in the late '60s as part of Harlan Ellison's anthology, Dangerous Visions. However, I approached my story from the opposite direction -- while Harrison Wintergreen's life story was a long string of triumphs, Solomon Perry's is a serious of unrelenting failures. If you want to read Spinrad's story, you can find it online here -- although I probably shouldn't encourage anyone to make a direct comparison to a master.
By the way, my high school friends Mike and John (see "Of Dogs and Consequences", above) and I did play briefly with the idea that one of us was in insane god who had created the world as we knew it as a form of self torture. Unfortunately, we could never decided which of us was imagining the others, so we abandoned the idea.
Until this story.
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Behind ALL THAT'S LEFT TO SAY
These are actually lyrics to a song I wrote a few years ago. I usually write the music first, then come up with the words. That usually works pretty well for me; I don't feel I have to twist syntax in order to make it all "fit".
I've never been real comfortable praising God. This may seem surprising coming from a self-confessed evangelical fundamentalist Christian, and I know there are a lot of Christians who will find that statement totally bewildering ("How can you not praise God?"), but the fact is I become self-conscious and tongue-tied when trying to engage in "free-form" praise. And yes, I know the standard answer to that is "You just have to get your mind off your self." But let's face it -- not everything comes easy to everyone. I'm used to carefully choosing words to express just what I want to say, so I get lost in trying to say just the right thing. And -- well, sometimes words of praise are the hardest words to find....
Behind CARNIVAL
Summer, 2005. I'm out jogging around the factory during lunch break. I've been thinking a lot about poetry, since I've been working on a sonnet (see "Two Feathers", below), and the line, "I'll have two scoops of pain in a sugar cone, please" springs to mind. But what do I do with it?
Well, obviously, this is being said by someone who is going through some strong emotional time -- say, the breakup of a relationship. And he's treating the pain as though it were an ice cream cone, embracing it and trying to get as much out of it as he can. Biting off the tip of the cone, and sucking the ice cream through the hole, as kids (and more adults than are willing to admit it) like to do. But how to expand that idea, get more of the relationship into it?
Then it hits me. Continue the contrast between the pain and things that are supposed to be happy and fun. Like a carnival.
From there it was just a matter of not spreading it on too thick.
Behind CHILDREN'S PARK, SOUTH BRONX
A few years ago, I read Jonathon Sokol's Amazing Grace, about the South Bronx section of New York City, considered at the time the economically poorest neighborhood in the United States. One of the stories he told was that of Children's Park. This was an unofficial park, a patch of grass and trees and bushes that had been allowed to grow in a vacant lot between the high-rises, and had been nurtured by the people who lived around it as a place for their children to play in safety. It became a revered location in the neighborhood; even the drug dealers refused to do business in the park so that their "business" would not affect the children at play. As some of the neighborhood residents lost their lives to drugs and guns, teddy bears began appearing in one of the trees in the park.
Eventually, the city found out about this unauthorized haven and tore down the park.
The story of Children's Park haunted me, and I decided to try to write something to reflect some of my feelings.
Behind A CONVERSATION WITH THE MUSE
This was a light piece, written while I was struggling with issues of metaphor and stanzas and form and such in "October Ride" (see below). I needed a break.
Behind IS THIS LOVE?
I drew the picture at the end of the poem in the early '70s, during my freshman year in college. Over 30 years later, I used this picture in a writing challenge at Creative Writers (see the link on my home page): write something out of your usual genre (poets write prose, prose writers write poetry, essayists write fiction, etc.) using the picture for inspiration. To be fair, of course, I had to write something of my own as well.
Behind IT'S ALL IN HOW YOU LOOK AT IT
This is a very early poem, from my college days in the early 1970s. As I've either stated or implied elsewhere, I never did drugs, other than smoking marijuana maybe twice. Still, I had some fun taking a situation with which I was all too familiar and casting it in terms that, perhaps, a hippie out of the '60s might recognize.
A friend borrowed this poem for an English class in which they were analyzing poetry. The class decided that the poet had a unique outlook on life, but that he (or she) felt it necessary to apologize for that outlook.
This is why you should only analyze poetry by dead poets.
Behind LULLABY FOR A SAVIOR
Another set of lyrics.
When my wife and I got married, we each brought several books into our marriage. One of hers, Two From Galilee, by Marjorie Holmes, took a fictional look at the relationship between Mary and Joseph, Jesus' earthly parents. The climax of the novel was, of course, the birth of Jesus. In the book, Mary is watching over her newborn son in the stable and reflecting on all that has happened to her. She shivers as some beams in the stable cast the shadow of a cross across the manger and has a momentary premonition of what will happen in a little more than 30 years.
That passage was the inspiration for this song.
Behind OCTOBER RIDE
I wanted to write something a little more ambitious. Since I enjoy bicycling, I decided to use an autumn morning bicycle ride as a metaphor for a relationship, which was enough of a challenge right there. But then I decided not to identify the nature of the relationship or the sexes of the narrator and the narrator's companion; I wanted to allow the reader to fill those in as he or she saw fit. And I wanted to explore the sensual aspect of the ride and the relationship.
Then I turned the poem over to friends and coworkers and asked them what they thought the sexes of the people involved were and the nature of their relationship. I had just about every combination imaginable, from two guys who just met casually on the ride to a husband and wife / wife and husband to lesbian lovers. My favorite had the narrator as a 15-year-old boy and his companion a woman in her early 20s, with the boy having a crush on the woman and the woman aware of it.
Of course, I had a specific interpretation in mind when I wrote it. But I'm not telling. Why should I spoil your fun?
And I was unaware until much later just how sexual this poem is. Yes, I intended it to be sensual, and there are one or two places where I draw obvious comparisons to sex. But apparently it's much more erotic than I thought. All I can say is, that's not what I intended. Consciously, at least. I think my subconscious needs a good talking-to, though.
This poem was included in the Facets of Friendship anthology.
Behind TWO FEATHERS
We were issued a challenge at Creative Writers: write a sonnet. I took a look at the structure of a sonnet and discovered that there were several ways to approach the form, depending on whether I wanted to write a Shakesperian sonnet or a Petrarchian sonnet or a Miltonian sonnet or a Spenserian sonnet or whatever.
So I said "Nuts!" and decided to cobble together my own Larsonian sonnet. I stuck with the fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (iambic means a weak accent followed by a strong: da - DAH; pentameter means there are five of them in a line: da-DAH da-DAH da-DAH da-DAH da-DAH). Then I applied my own rhyme scheme: ABCACDBEFEDFDF -- that is, line 1 rhymed with line 4 (haze/maze), line 2 rhymed with line 7 (breeze/trees), etc. Finally, I decided the first seven lines would focus on one thought, and the last seven would focus on another thought related to and completing the first, with rhyme "D" tying the two halves together (are you following this? No? Just bear with me).
Almost simultaneously with this, I was looking for my subject. I found it on lunch break while jogging around the factory where I work. It was a warm summer day, and as I rounded a corner, I spotted a pair of pigeon feathers on the pavement, nestled against the wall. That image stuck with me, and I started playing around with it.
This is what emerged.
Behind WINTERSCAPE
This was one of the earliest poems of my mature years, along with "It's All In How You Look At It" (I'd written an elegy on the death of President John F. Kennedy when I was in grade school, and a couple of nonsense poems in high school, but that was about it until college). I've never been totally satisfied with it -- I keep having a niggling suspicion that it's overwritten, but others have assured me it's fine. Still, I've revised it at least three times. I really should just leave it alone, and maybe go on to the other three seasons....
Behind Four Scenes of Christmas
This started life as a short story. "The Xmas Strategy" was written as an entry into a Christmas-themed story contest sponsored by our local paper, The Pantagraph. It won second place in the fiction category. Some time later I decided to rewrite it as the third scene in a collection of four scenes -- or one-act plays -- based on a Christmas theme.
The play has been revised several times, but has not yet been performed. I admit the second scene is a bit harrowing, and not the kind of "feel-good" piece most people seem to want at Christmas. Of course, I can't stop someone from copying the play and performing it themselves. But if you do, at least write me and tell me how it went.
Behind Legacy
One of the things I wanted to do when we joined Eastview Christian Church (see "About the Author") was to get involved in the drama ministry, primarily as a writer. The opportunity arose shortly thereafter to write a play when we decided to inaugurate a "dessert theater", in which we serve desserts and drinks then present a one-act play, all for a single low price. We presented a play in spring, 2005, then another for children the following summer.
In fall, 2005, I offered to help write the spring, 2006 play. We got ahold of a list of sermon topics for the year and saw that the sermon series surrounding our chosen weekend was scheduled to be set around the meaning and significance of the temple furnishings and was to be titled "Antique Furniture". I got together with my two cowriters, Henry Hanson and Amy Randazzo, and started brainstorming. I had had an idea involving a young woman who inherits a desk from her father's estate. She's less than enthusiastic about this, as the desk represents to her all the hours her father spent at it when he could have been spending the time with her. She fails to sell it at a garage sale, then takes it to get it appraised through the "Antiques Roadshow" television program. She discovers that the desk is all but worthless. Then she finds a diary hidden in it, and begins to see the relationship between herself and her father from his point of view.
Henry and Amy were charmed by the idea, so we started writing in late October, setting New Year's Day as the deadline (to allow ourselves plenty of time for casting and rehearsals and set construction and all those other details by March). And we were writing right up to the deadline!
I won't go into all the details of the writing. We spent several meetings establishing our characters and their "back stories" -- the lives they'd led before we see them in the play. (Even though much of what we created for their histories never was put into the script, that approach allowed us to create three-dimensional characters). Then we had to decide how we wanted to handle the "flashbacks", while Tammy is reading Charles' diary. We knew we couldn't just have her read them out loud -- that would get boring very quickly. I originally was thinking of dividing the stage into two parts, with the diary entries being acted out on one half of the stage while Tammy was reading on the other half. Then Henry came up with the idea of videotaping the flashbacks and projecting them on a screen above the stage. We decided to do the flashbacks in black and white to add to the feeling of "history".
Henry, Amy and I pretty much divided the flashbacks between us. Henry did the camping scene and the prom; Amy did the wedding; and I did the recital. We also divided the other diary entries between us. Then we spent several meetings working out details of the different scenes. After each meeting, I would take the notes and tie them together in one "voice". Then we would critique the scene at the next meeting, and start the revisions.
Eventually, we were finished. We held auditions, and started casting. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough people to fill all the roles, so they asked me if I would be willing to take the role of Charles. Mind you, I hadn't acted since high school (once again, see "About the Author"). But I figured, since he would only appear on videotape except for the last couple lines, and since his lines would be put on the soundtrack to the tapes and I had spent several years in radio, I could handle that. Then we decided that it would be easier to have me read the diary entries live, from offstage. Still not a problem.
Then we discovered that the wedding scene video just was not working out. We had taken stills and clips from the actual wedding videos for our "Tammy" and were playing them behind Charles' diary entry, where he writes what he really had wanted to say in his speech at Tammy's wedding. But when we put the two together, the video distracted from the power of the diary entry. So we decided to scrap the video completely and actually bring Charles out on stage in a "live" flashback of him writing the diary. So now I was going to be onstage for a pivotal part!
Long story short: To our relief, it worked, and the play was well received.
A few other notes: In writing the play, I threw in some personal references. For example, Tammy speculates that she could put the desk upstairs in "the yellow room"; the smallest bedroom in our house, painted yellow, was probably once a nursery. Tammy comments, after reading a diary entry dealing with the difficulty of raising children, "Reason 1,672 not to have kids"; this is one of our daughter's favorite comments after seeing "problem" children. Charles refers to his brother, Jim, in one of his diary entries; my own father had a brother named Jim. When Tammy is cleaning up the piles of paper, at one point she dumps a stack into a cardboard box with the comment, "You -- back in your box." This was a favorite saying of a friend in college, which she used when someone was getting on her nerves.
And the final scene is based on an episode of "thirtysomething". In "We'll Meet Again", broadcast in December, 1988, Hope finds a diary from the 1940s, written by a previous owner of their house, and we flash back and forth between scenes from the diary and scenes from the present. At the end, time appears to thin -- or else we see Hope's own thoughts -- and the writer of the diary speaks directly to Hope. I used this device for Charles' last appearance. It worked very well.
As for the performances themselves, our "Tammy" did a phenomonal job, considering that she had to spend much of the last scene in tears. The nights we rehearsed that scene were brutal on her. She also carried most of the entire play. I apologized to her after the first read-through with the full cast when I realized just how much we had written for her, saying, "I didn't realize that we'd pretty much written an extended monologue, with interruptions!"
We taped the performance and put it on DVD. After the cast party, when we watched the DVD -- and, incidentally, relived the whole emotional experience -- I commented, "Next spring, we write a comedy!"
Behind Where's The Ark?
Coming Soon....
Behind Winged
Coming Soon....