Category: Life

Oh, you know, the usual…

Labyrinth, 9/11/08

Posted on by Dale

Yesterday, at 6:40 a.m., the paving stones for the labyrinth were delivered. That’s right, just as I stepped out of the shower, our doorbell rang. It seems that the forklift was not going to fit through the carport. Sheesh. We had the guy put it down on the side of the carport, in our neighbor’s yard.

Ginny had been fretting in a negative way since I had told her I’d ordered the stones, and now she fretted about it being in Sue’s yard. Since she enjoys fretting, I helped her by refusing to fill her in with any details about my plans, since each time I tried I was greeted with more negative fretting.

But my plan was to move the stones down to the back yard anyway, no matter where they had been delivered. True, if they’d been put down in the driveway, I actually wouldn’t have had to move them until I was installing them, but no matter.

So when I got home from school, I stripped down for action and got to work. An army of one, I scooped them up six at a time and walked them down the driveway. I had set up the iPhone/speaker combo, so Pandora was giving me the beat with my Tosca channel, and it was one of those fun times when you just sweat and do the work.

Here’s the new pile, down by the house. I figured it would be out of the way of anything we were doing back there until the stones were all installed.

That’s 672 stones, by the way, at 4.4 pounds apiece, which works out to about 3,000 pounds. So yes, I moved a ton and a half of paving stones yesterday afternoon. And yet I am somehow not buff this morning. Maybe it takes a day or two to show up.

My dilemma is now increased multifold: pave the path, or pave the outline? It would be unconscionable for me to pave the path, just in terms of cost. I have no right to spend that kind of money on this project, even spread out over a year or two. But it would be an amazing thing to have done, and to have. If I pave the outline, then I could probably have the whole thing done by the Lichtenbergian annual meeting in December. But then as a matter of aesthetics, what do I do about the path? It’s all scrubby grass and weeds, and I could easily spend half the total cost of paving the path on treating the soil and growing grass.

The other aspect of it, as I laid out a circle of stones in the center last night by candlelight, is just how attractive a path paved by me would be. We’re not talking closely fitted cobblestones here.

So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m going to lay out the center, then lay out a couple of the tight turns, just to see if it would be attractive at all. If not, then I’m going to go with the outline instead.

Discuss.

Labyrinth: the commitment

Posted on by Dale

On Sunday, I got inspired to uncover the walkway I had created right after we added on to the house. The bricks came from an old coal furnace chimney on the back of the house. I’ve edged my herb garden and all of my plantings with this brick, and I probably ought to go in and dig out the rest of it from under the bamboo and use it in the labyrinth itself.

Anyway, over the last 15 years the walkway had gotten grown over with moss and dirt, so I decided on the spur of the moment to try to recover it. It was a lot easier than I thought: all I had to do was pry up each brick, get the moss off of it, put a little dirt back in the base, and reset the bricks. Presto! New walkway.

Today’s big news is that I went to Home Depot and ordered a pallet of the small square pavers to be delivered on Thursday. That’s nearly 700 pieces, over 3,000 pounds. Cost? Who’s counting?

How far will one pallet go? I have no idea. Using my superior math skills, I’m thinking the four-foot circle at the center is about 12-1/2 sq. ft., which means it will take approximately 50 pavers to cover it.

Let ‘s see. Follow this closely:

  • Using my trusty flexible ruler, I discover that the path of my blueprint is app. 138 inches long.
  • With 10 squares to the inch (who uses decimal graph paper??), that’s .33 inches per foot on the blueprint.
  • That means that the 138 inches length on the blueprint is a 418-foot path.
  • It take six pavers for every foot, so that’s 2,509 pavers that I’ll need in the long run.
  • With 672 pieces to the pallet, that’s a little under 4 pallets.

Yep, that’s an expensive proposition. But if I spread it out over a year and a half, let’s say, it’s not too unaffordable. Maybe I need to go online to the Home Depot and do their opinion poll and win the $5,000 gift card.

Meditation: From separation to serenity

Posted on by Dale

One reason I have not been faithful to the “daily meditation” thing is that the meditations in A Quiet Strength are just so sappy. I knew they were, and I figured I would either react to the sentiment therein or just use the title for my own purposes. But the overwhelming blue-ness of it all gets to me.

I know everyone is wondering how much I accomplished on the labyrinth today, and the answer is nothing. Coriolanus rehearsal all morning, of course, and then I got home and realized that there’s nothing more to do until I learn how to lay paving bricks.

Sure, Home Depot has instructions, but they’re mostly for nice, rectangular areas. Plus which, the actual installation, rectangular or not, involves skills and equipment I don’t have yet. One has to excavate the earth to a depth of two and a half inches, how exactly does one do that? The paving stone catalog says you then till the soil to mix in concrete to form a base. I’m not going to do that: too expensive, too permanent. Then everyone agrees you add an inch of sand, pounding into place with a pounder thingie.

I am under no illusion that this is a one, two or even three-day job. This is a year-and-a-half job. Either I pound that sand with a pec-inducing hand pounder, or I find a way to buy or rent a machine to do that. You can see the rental fees mounting up, but buy one? Sheesh.

Then the circularity of the thing. I know I have to buy/rent a bandsaw to cut curved stones. Again, sheesh.

Then there’s the actual purchase of heaven knows how many tons of paving stones. Yes, tons. One pallet of stones will cover 144 square feet, and it weighs over 2,000 pounds. I don’t have the math skills even to estimate how many square feet this thing is. Kevin?

My interior argument is to go ahead and get started, and by October 25, I can play freaking Aufidius with my shirt off. Let’s see if that happens.

So, anyway, today’s meditation.

The gist of the book’s little screed is that we’re all wounded fellows, don’t you know, who have been abandoned or left to die or something, and that if we just stand tall, and I mean that as a Shakespearean pun, so snicker away, we can all avoid the trap of drugs and destructive behavior. Or something.

You see what I mean?

All right, let’s give this a shot. Grown ups, in the Lylesian sense of the word, figure out soon into their adolescence, if not before, that we’re all alone in this together. Further, it does no one any good to bewail our lonely state in the universe. After all, what does the universe care for our wailing?

(Side note: if there is a God, the same applies. What does s/he care for our wailing? Even if she’s an all-loving God, her attitude would have to be like those of us who have slept through our baby’s insistent screams. At some point, God figures, we have to figure out for ourselves how to get through the night.)

Yes, we’re alone, and yes, it hurts. That’s why I have my family, my kitchen, my music, my blog, Lacuna, the Lichtenbergians. That’s why we have Art. We can amuse ourselves with these connections while waiting for the universe to come to our rescue. Which, as grown ups, we know is not going to happen.

So that “serenity” arrived at by the poor hurt creatures in A Quiet Strength should be the natural state for all of us grown up men. It’s false, of course. I don’t think we can ever shake that sense of wanting to be whole with the universe, but as long as we know that we can pass the time with all these distractions, and that that’s what they are, then I think we can figure out how to get through the night.

Now I think I’ll go light a fire in the labyrinth and sip my martini.

Labyrinth, 9/5/08

Posted on by Dale

Here’s a photo of what I’ve laid out this as of afternoon:

It’s nearly 9:00 pm now, and I’m sitting out here by the fire in the center of the labyrinth, candles all round, appropriately new age music playing in the background, margaritas at my elbow. I’m supposedly learning lines, but of course it’s too dark to see anything.

Notice the successive approximations at the entrance at the bottom of the photo. I’m sure there’s some way to make that accurate. I’ve found that the problem is making the center larger than the width of the course of the path. That throws everything else off, which is OK, because I’ve also found that the irregularities of the labyrinth are part of what give it its power. If it were geometrically perfect, it wouldn’t attract us, I don’t think.

The irony of that is that it can be demonstrated (although I can’t find the link) that the entire pattern is a variation of the Greek key (meander) pattern, a purely geometric function if there ever was one. Perhaps there’s something about moving from the paternal grid to the maternal circle that throws everything off.

Now it’s all a matter of deciding how I want to do this. What stones, how well-built, how much money, how much time?

Labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

On Monday, Labor Day, I went to my back yard and began tidying up, cutting down shrubberies and generally just taking a hard look at it. I used to joke that I landscaped nine square feet a year back there, only that was true, not a joke. But since I’m not here during the summer, the back yard has gone if not to ruin at least to deshabille.

Long ago I had nice brick edgings, a brick step path, several little plantings, and a garden bench. Now, most of the bricks are under dirt or moss, the plantings have been swallowed up by ivy, and I’d be afraid to sit on the bench.

Still, it is the navel, as it were, of the Lichtenbergian world, so I’ve been thinking about actually turning it into a kind of place… you know, a place.

I’m thinking I want a labyrinth back there.

No, not a maze. A labyrinth. A maze is a puzzle, involving choice and angst. A labyrinth is a single path that arrives at the center through many twists and turns, but you cannot get lost.

This is a labyrinth, the most basic kind, the classic 7-circuit labyrinth. It is what I will be building in my back yard. It’s a left-handed one, since you turn left upon entering it.

The lore of the labyrinth is long and compelling. I won’t go into it all here, only to say that for me it is very compelling indeed. I have built one three times (which is different than building three labyrinths), and the tattoo on my leg is of a Spanish paleolithic rock-carving of this very pattern.

The three I built were all at my school. The first one was the result of an article I had read in one of my magazines, about how hospitals were having these built into their gardens and that there was some evidence to suggest that patients who trod the labyrinth, rather than just walked for their exercise, recovered more quickly. This seemed to true especially for patients who were recovering from brain injuries.

At the time (the late 90s), Newnan Crossing served a population that required a great deal of remediation. For one of the intersessions we did — we were year-round at the time — I had a math teacher challenge his students to build one of these. We got a $1,000 grant from somewhere, I taught them how to draw, and Home Depot came to the school to show the kids their options for ground cover, materials for outlining the pattern, etc. Teams had to come up with a design and a proposal for materials. The motive was for them to learn their multiplication facts, but we would also end with a labyrinth in our courtyard, and I figured that if our kids walked on this thing, hey, like the brain injury patients, it couldn’t hurt, might help.

Here it is, after the kids helped get all those fence rails into place and we had most of the mulch spread out. It had wide paths so that many kids could play in it at once, and it had straight sides because it was cheaper and easier (as you’ll see in its next incarnation.)

This was set in between the two wings of the school. I was very clever, since we were going to be under construction starting that summer, to check the floorplans and make sure we wouldn’t be caught up in the debris. I got it finished on the Sunday before I drove to GHP that summer.

Foolish man. That very week, the principal was horrified to walk out one morning to see the bulldozers tearing it up. There was a walkway being built across the courtyard that was not in the plans we’d been given.

I waited a couple of years before trying again. This time, my brother-in-law Daniel designed and built a four-foot-tall concrete sundial, and we designed a labyrinth to go around that on the new playground.

Here it is. We got the lawn edgers laid out, and I was only halfway through getting them in the ground before I was told that the sundial was dangerous and had to come out.

We moved it to the front of the school, where it still stands and where I use it in my lessons about shadows and the sun with kindgarteners.

Then I was told I had to move the labyrinth itself because playground equipment was going to go there. Again, I had checked before putting it up there.

So I moved it all back to the courtyard and tried again. I had a webpage on my site where I listed the times I would be working on it, and that information went home in the school newsletter, but I never had any help on this version. (Three dads were magnificent in getting the sundial up and going.)

I finally got it done and was waiting for some funding from the PTO for mulch, since I had basically paid for the rest of it myself. Somehow, that was snafu’d as well, and I got home from GHP several summers ago to find it gone. “It was an eyesore and might have been in the way if we had to work on the drains,” it was claimed, even though the butterfly garden on the other end of the courtyard was in total disarray and completely blocked access to the courtyard, and parents came in and put new mulch in the butterfly garden at the same time my labyrinth was being removed. Needless to say, I have not done a great deal of volunteer work for my school since then.

So, it’s been a couple of years since I built one of these, and like the pangs of childbirth, one forgets how much work it is.

This afternoon I laid out my stakes and string and got half of the pattern spray painted onto the ground. I’ll complete the bottom half tomorrow. It was very pleasant: I brought my living room speaker out, plugged my iPhone directly into it, and had Pandora play my New Age station while I worked. I’ve begun placing neat candle holders around the yard, and I lit those as it got dark. Finally, I just lit the fire and imagined the yard as the space I would like for it to be. It’s going to be a haven.

And since I know you’re going to ask, here’s my tattoo:

At the beach

Posted on by Dale

Here we are at the beach. Ahhhhhh…..

We’ve been looking for reading sunglasses but have been so far unsuccessful. Meanwhile, there’s a brand of boogie board the name of which has appealed to me. So until further notice, my nickname shall be “Slick Lizard.”

Frabjous Day!

Posted on by Dale

Yes, yes, I know I haven’t written in weeks. It’s not that I’ve been busy, it’s that I’ve had nothing to say. I haven’t worked on any music since April, the news about Stephen not returning to GHP threw me for a loop, so sue me, and the meeting with Lee Johnson was interesting and fun but inconclusive, whatever that means, and most of my creative energy has gone into things that are better published over on lichtenbergian.org or lacunagroup.org. And there’s my annual early May funk, which on other blogs perhaps might be worth a whole week’s worth of posts, but I don’t presume that my irrational tailspins are of any interest, not even to me.

I might have written about Jeff and Marc and Grayson working on “What a Wonderful Bird the Frog Are” for the Masterworks Chorale concert tonight. I guess it’s important, since it’s the first time a choral piece of mine has ever had an actual performance, but really, “Frog Song”? It has a lot to recommend it (here are the score [pdf] and an mp3), but it’s hardly William Blake. They’re accompanying the chorus with “something percussive in nature,” which in their case means rubber mallets on a chest of drawers. If we can work out the finer points of the comedy before tonight, it should be quite amusing.

Anyway…

Today is the first, and only, day I have off between postplanning and GHP. I awoke early and got straight to my first task: cleaning my study and the stairs leading up to it. That’s mostly so I can drag down all the stuff I need to pack without tripping over crap.

Much of the stuff I’m straightening and tidying are not in point of fact mine. They belong to another person who lives in this house who, when faced with mounds of clutter, often buys containers in which to put said clutter and then puts the containers up in my study. So I was picking up all the family photos, framed, that have somehow escaped their containers when the interior decorator and this other person were scouring the house for stuff to redecorate the den with, when I came across this little black file box.

Since all this is in an area of my study that I don’t often go, mostly because of the mess but also because I don’t use the resources on those shelves very much, I hadn’t really paid attention to this box. I thought it was the old GHP box that my predecessor in the assistant director position had passed off to me. I haven’t used the box in years, as my systems and forms rapidly outgrew the box. (I will pass off a huge tub to the next person.)

As I looked at it, thinking I might actually be able to toss the contents, since I haven’t looked inside it for eight years, I also was getting some cognitive dissonance vibes: I remembered the box as being in another location, and I knew it didn’t have this translucent “pencil box” thing going on in the lid. What was in this box?

It wasn’t the old GHP stuff. It was the box I used to organize the score pages of Figaro for copying/collating for the cast. I had utterly forgotten about it. It was a thing of beauty: about a hundred file folders, the sturdy brown kind, each with a label printed out from a database I had created specifically for the purpose, showing the act, scene, the page numbers in the score, the number of copies I needed of those pages, and a check-box listing of the cast with who needed those pages. The file folders marched in even, unbroken thirds: left, center, right. Even I was impressed as I gazed upon it.

And in the translucent pencil box? A pencil, it looked like, and a sticky note pad. I opened it up.

It was not a sticky note pad. It was a cassette tape. With a shock, I realized what I had found.

It was Aces & Eights.

I hesitate even to write about this, since I’ve had very bad luck recently when I disparage anything. The internets is a creepy kind of magical place, and I just know if I write about this work, the original author is going to sense a disturbance in the Force and come looking for me. So, please, original author, who I am not going to name, thank you, just know that your work has given me untold hours of joy. In its own way.

Many many years ago, I hosted a theatre chat room on American Online called The Stage Door. We met every Monday night from 8:00-12:00 EST, and talked about theatre in our lives. Participants were many and varied: teens who would squeal about Rent, community types like me, professionals at many levels. We had actors, techies, lighting designers, musicians, directors. It was a fun time. That’s where I met Noah, who hosts all my websites. I met BrnySmurf, who yes, voiced Brainy Smurf and is now a casting director in LA. (He’s the smartass med student in the opening scene of Young Frankenstein.) Another regular was the music director of Guys & Dolls. Nicky Silver popped in every now and then, chatting about the woes of trying to find a gorgeous man who could act for Food Chain. (Silver, we finally did that show here. You owe me an autographed copy.) Steven Weber came barreling through one night, totally pumped up about the work he’d done on that day’s shoot of Jeffrey. Ah, the days when AOL was actually a community.

We also had a fair number of playwrights, and whenever they found I was the artistic director of NCTC, they’d ask if we took scripts. I always said yes. I guess those scripts are still down at the theatre. One or two of them were really interesting and we should have done them, at least in the Second Season venue.

So one night, a girl in the room realizes that I’m open to receiving scripts, and she enthuses about her boyfriend’s musical. Can she send me their tape? Certainly, says I. A couple of days later, I get Aces & Eights: a musical play about Wild Bill Hickok.

Oh my. I think many of you who read this blog have actually heard the tape, so you’ll know what I mean when I say that the contents of that tape were the most appalling collection of songs ever written. In listening to it in my van, I actually had to pull off the road a couple of times because I was gasping for breath. Yes, it is that bad.

I was supposed to return the tape, but I never did. I couldn’t. Here was the world’s worst musical, in my hands. How could I give that up? Fortunately, I never heard from the girl or her author/composer/lyricist boyfriend again. (Given my luck with this kind of post recently, I bet I do now. Pace, guys. You’re just going to have to forgive me.)

One can always forgive the clunky synthesized sound, at least I hope we can always do that, and I know that if I tried to record William Blake’s Inn singlehandedly with maybe Marc and Ginny and Mary Frances, that our end result might not sound any better than this. However, technical quality is not the issue. Artistic quality, alas, is.

Melody? Not so much, and he must have planned for Wild Bill to be played by Mandy Patinkin, since the vocal range on many of the songs forced him down an octave mid-phrase. Accompaniment? Leaden, or ear-grindingly repetitious. Lyrics? This is where the creator really shines. You have never heard such ghastly stuff in your life: sledgehammer rhymes, inapposite images, abandoned scansion, you name it, he kills it. Dead. Over and over and over.

After listening to it for a while, it was no longer funny. We all know what it takes to create something, anything, and even my sympathies were engaged. For a while. Then it became funny again, and it remains so to this day. I would bring it to rehearsals at the theatre at that point just before we’d begin running the show, when everything is falling apart and everyone wants to quit, and I’d play it just to remind everybody that no matter how bad we think things are going, we are not as talentless as these people.

In the creator’s defense, I have to agree with Grayson, who commented one day as we got out of the van: “He actually has a good idea, and all the songs are exactly where they need to be and are about the right thing in the script. It’s just that he’s no good. If he were talented, it would be a great show.” The great Lichtenbergian fear, indeed.

It must have been a couple of years ago that I decided I needed to transfer it to CD so that it wouldn’t be lost forever. But then, horrors!, I couldn’t find it. I thought I could remember putting it somewhere for safekeeping, but it wasn’t any of the places I would have chosen for that purpose. It was gone. I truly grieved. Aces & Eights held a special place in my life, and I was distraught thinking I’d never have it again. Worst of all, I’ve had to rely on my own work for bottom-of-the-barrel comparisons, and you know how depressing that is. (Viz., IV. Lento)

So every May, when I printed out my packing list for GHP (another database… stop laughing at me), there would be Aces & Eights on the list to pack, to get the VSU media people to transfer it for me, and I’d make another half-hearted attempt to locate it, but in vain.

Until today! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

I am chortling in my joy.

Is it just me?

Posted on by Dale

Those of you who have been following my drag career will be pleased to hear that I won the “Miss-ter Relay” competition at the Relay for Life this past Friday. I was attired as Lucille Ball and did her Vitameatvegamin routine as I rounded the track collecting donations. I came up with $900, so I was the winner. Lots of good clean homoskittish fun. Photos as soon as I get any.

(Those of you who donated at my Relay for Life page will receive photos of me directing car riders traffic in my Utilikilt as soon as I receive those. It was a good day for men in skirts.)

Now here’s what occurred to me yesterday after I arose from my bed at 2:00 in the afternoon. This year was my second year representing Newnan Crossing Elementary school in the Miss-ter Relay thing. Last year I made my infamous Bjork swan dress; this year I was Lucille Ball. If I ever get stuck for an idea, I have my old NCTC drag ball murder mystery dinner gown, and I could be Mae West.

Here’s my point. All the other guys were essentially burlesque: big boobs (I actually had none), trash talk, mincing falsetto. That never occurred to me. I picked real women, strong, talented women, and went with that.

Do not get me wrong: the burlesque thing, although it is clearly at some level misogynistic, doesn’t bother me, and certainly the men doing it were doing it out of a commitment to raise money for people they loved. (I shared my makeup remover with a fellow drag queen in the restrooms and heard all about his mother and his girlfriend’s father.) If anyone was offbase, it was me with my attempt to portray a woman of genius with any degree of verisimilitude. (I was getting ready to let loose with Lucy’s trademark waaaah when I lost, only to have to think fast when I won.)

Is it my theatre background, that I’m looking for a character to portray? I don’t know. Maybe next year I’ll have to do the burlesque thing and see what it’s like, to see if it feels as if I’m lowering myself.

STARS and time

Posted on by Dale

Last night was the 50th State STAR Student Banquet. I had spent the day as chair of the committee interviewing the eighteen region STAR Students and then having to select the “top” student and the runner-up.

As you can imagine, this is not easy. Brilliant, accomplished, articulate, self-aware, self-confident, and funny, they were all just amazing kids. However, under a system I’ve perfected over the last 20 years of doing this, we reached consensus in not too long a time, and Allen Page of Brookstone is our 2008 State STAR Student; Maylene Xie of Parkview is our runner-up. Incredible kids.

Five or six of the candidates were GHP alums, and it’s always interesting to watch their reaction when they come into the room. They’re fairly sure they’ve seen me before, and they think it might have been at GHP. I was told that I was practically the whole topic of conversation at one lunch table, and indeed as we got up from lunch, I was positively identified as “the kilt guy” and/or “the English country dance guy.” Yes, I said, otherwise known as the assistant program director.

At my lunch table, topics were more varied. GHP came up, but only because none my companions had been participants and they all agreed how incredibly left out they felt when GHPers ran into each other. I noted that at least they, the non-GHPers, were in the vast majority.

I also asked them about their worst teacher, and was regaled with truly horrific stories: the AP teachers who would run errands into town during class; the football coaches who discussed world history not once; and my favorite, the teacher who, after placing Slovakia on the coast and Slovenia next to the Czech Republic (and being queried about that by the STAR at my table), explained petulantly that yes, Czechoslovakia had split up, but then Slovakia had moved. And then refused to be corrected further, even when faced with printed research into the matter.

So here we are at the 50th anniversary of the STAR program. Twenty-five years ago, Barbara Ellen Petzen was named State STAR Student, and as a consequence, I was State STAR Teacher. Today, after the committee made our pick, I went back up to my room in the downtown Hilton to chill until the reception and the banquet. I looked out my window on the 22nd floor and saw with a shock that one block away was the Sheraton, where the banquet had been held in 1983. I could not resist. I went downstairs and walked over to the Sheraton.

As I approached, I recognized the whole layout: the circular entrance drive, the lower entrance where we loaded up the STAR Tour bus for an eight-day tour of the state (which we no longer do because of the expense and time). However, when I entered the lobby, it was as I suspected: the whole place has been renovated beyond recognition. The little bar where Ginny and I and Bobby Petzen celebrated before going our separate ways was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t even try going up to find the ballroom where Barbara was announced the top student in the state; I just walked back to the Hilton.

Tempus fugit, and that’s no lie.

Day 47

Posted on by Dale

Happy Shakespeare’s birthday!

I directed the first Shakespeare in Newnan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1978. I directed the last, The Taming of the Shrew, in 1999.

I say “last,” but that’s just a bitter, depressed guess: the Newnan Theatre Company has been served eviction papers from the building, they haven’t paid the rent in over a year, and the board has voted to vacate. My understanding is that they intend to go on, somehow, but I know no details.

This has disturbed me a lot more than I thought it would, and more than I think it should. I guess I have enough vanity to be disappointed that something I spent nearly 30 years of my life building should come unravelled within five years of my leaving it, and leaving it on sound footing, I might add.

We had money in the bank, full houses, and a growing subscribers list. We had a Main Stage season, the Second Season, and the children’s season, and a teen season. We performed more than 40 weekends out of the year. There simply were no more weekends in the year to squeeze in another show.

We did Shakespeare. We did musicals. We encouraged new works. We experimented with new forms and approaches. We built our costumes and sets. We designed our costumes and sets. We trained people in all the crafts of theatre. We did theatre, not put on plays.

Ah well, easy come, easy go. I may have more to say later, over at lichtenbergian.org.