It always begins

Posted on by Dale

Here I am in Valdosta, prepping for the 2008 Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. It is always a very strange mise en scene: I arrive, alone in the dorm, with three other administrators, who are in other dorms. The campus is nearly empty between semesters; the very sidewalks have an unreal quality, as if carved out of someone’s imagination for the occasion and witnessed by me in some kind of hallucination.

It is my job to begin the incantations to bring this place to life, to begin generating the lists and pieces of paper and keys and classrooms and bedtime stories that make it possible for this place to rise from the haze of the Valdosta heat every June.

I have a script I follow: over the years I have put together a step-by-step How to Start GHP kind of document. I have come to rely on it and am consequently startled by some of the steps. Because I’ve written them into a document, a booke of magyck, I don’t have to remember them, and sometimes I don’t.

My competence is comforting to me. A couple of years ago I found myself in charge of the keys to the classrooms. They were just handed to me, in a tangled mess from previous years, and I had to hammer out the truth of who needed what and what we had to give them and what we had to squeeze from Key Services. In accordance with the Lyles Theorem of Process Development, it is the third summer of my being in charge and I have perfected it. Tonight I hit a button in my database, printed out a sheet of paper for each instructor, and pulled keys from this super-organized key box I made them buy me last summer.

What took me weeks of agony the first summer was done, and accurately, in about 40 minutes. I have two people who need completely new sets of keys, but I know who they are and what they need. By the time they get here tomorrow, their keys will already have been requested.

There are always glitches, of course. This year it’s the fact that VSU’s semester just ended on Friday, so they’re scrambling nobly to switch our classrooms out from their rows of desks to our tables and chairs, and to deliver the hundreds of boxes of stuff to all the rooms. My problem is that the sixteen or so crates of stuff for the faculty dorm have not been delivered. I usually am through unpacking all of that by now. However, that’s kind of minor. I can work around not having my office supplies for the most part, although I wish I had my bathmat and my martini glasses. Let’s get our priorities straight here!

I’ve even had time to exercise, if you can call a brisk stroll around the Magic Square exercise. No time to work on anybody’s music, of course. That probably is not going to happen until next week, after I get the minors sorted out on Thursday.

Tomorrow the faculty arrives. Sunday the kids arrive. And so it begins again.

Thoughts

Posted on by Dale

It’s Sunday night, June 1. I have packed my worldly possessions for the Great Trek south tomorrow morning, I’ve cooked a nice meal for my family, and now I sit in my backyard by the fire, blogging and thinking.

I’m alone, because it is 9:00 and I fear it is too late to call anyone to see if they’d like to come sit and drink with me. I know that’s wrong. I know at least one Lichtenbergian is sitting at home, wondering if there is fire and drink to be had anywhere in the Society, but I fear rejection. Sorry, guys.

I’ve watched Patagonia go up in flames, I may have mentioned that I weeded a couple hundred books from my collection at school: 25-year-old treatises on various countries that were above K-5 reading level anyway, and now wood is joining the fire.

Brief interlude, in which I have gone across the street because the neighbor lady’s young dog has been hit by a car. It is dead. Grayson and I have dug a grave for the poor thing, after assuring its owner that it is actually dead. I had just actually met the dog this afternoon, although it has been living there for at least a month after having taken up with the neighbor. Bless everyone’s heart. It is something of a mystery to put a still-warm being into a bag.

I have a new blog to read, World on Ice, written by my old friend Robyn Ice, an attorney in NYC. It was she who, years ago in the UGA costume shop, who first figured out there was something between Miss Henninger and myself and who asked about the nature of that relationship. I told her I was not sure what Miss Henninger felt, but I was certain that she was The One. “Then go and get her,” Robyn said. And so I did.

Robyn’s still-young blog sounds just like her: literate, warm, charming, witty. So far, it seems to be a lot about the great mysteries of being a Grown-Up. How did we get here, and how do we keep fooling the rest of the world?

I was going to bid on another Utilikilt on Ebay, but I missed it in being called to deal with the dog. Oh well. I should know by now that I should just order a new one and be done with it. (Although the model I was bidding on does not seem to be available right now from utilikilts.com.)

As I try to seal off my life here and get out of town for the summer, Jeff Bishop has written me asking me to contribute heavily to his article about the history of musicals in Newnan. I don’t like musicals. That’s why we did them only every other year, and why we never did the Top 10. But I’ll write something nice for public consumption.

Yes, I’m rambling, but it’s been a long day and I am coming to a point.

Here’s the point: tomorrow I drive to Valdosta to perform my duties as the assistant program director for the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. All the data we have indicates that we are not bragging when we joke that we’re the best summer gifted experience around. If we’re the best in the U.S., then more than likely we’re the best in the world. And I’m the person with the most direct influence on what goes on in the classroom. I love this.

So other than working from 6:00 a.m. until 11:30 p.m. for six weeks, what do I hope to accomplish? Here’s a list:

  • Write two or three more songs for Day in the Moonlight.
  • Revamp “Sir Christémas” to include tabor and crotales along with organ.
  • Revamp my old handbell arrangment of “Come, Jeannette, Isabela” for the Welcome Christmas competition. It dawned on me to try to reverse the instrumentation: rather than handbell choir and soprano solo, turn the handbells into wordless voices and the soprano into French horn, the required accompaniment this year. It could work.
  • Take another look at IV. Lento. Since my work with Craig, I’ve actually had a couple of insights. So far it’s all mental. Let’s see if I can turn them into reality.
  • Take a poke at my suite for double bass.

And of course there’s the Lichtenbergian/Lacuna production of Coriolanus. So far, so interesting.

Does anyone have anything else they’d like me to work on?

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.

A step forward?

Posted on by Dale

Next Thursday, May 15, I’ll be heading down to LaGrange to meet with Lee Johnson, composer. He was recommended by Jeff Baxter as a potential instructor for me, and he’s agreed to meet with me and discuss it. I’m taking the score to IV. Lento with me to amuse him.

In other news, last night I received an offer that was very difficult to turn down: the opportunity to collaborate on a musical version of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, Dracula, for performance this Halloween in Grantville or environs. Because of my longstanding commitment to A Day in the Moonlight, I felt I had to decline. But you can understand how tempting it was, from so many perspectives.

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.

Why is this?

Posted on by Dale

In Indiana — stop me if you’ve heard this one — a congressional candidate recently attended a meeting of the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP), where he made a speech. The occasion was the 119th birthday of Adolf Hitler. There was a large portrait of the man, a Nazi flag, and everyone in photos of the event was wearing a swastika armband.

The candidate later defended himself on his website by describing the speech as:

my attempt to raise awareness of how the great porn dragon inspires Jews into pornography and prostitution and then, like the snake he is, turns the public against the Jews.

Well.

I’ll link to the site where I read this in a moment, but first a thought experiment: with which of the two major political parties in this nation is Mr. Zirkle affiliated?

That didn’t take long, did it? My thesis today is: why the hell didn’t it take you long? Yes, there are loonies on both sides of the spectrum, we all know that, but why is it that this particularly nasty kind of loony gravitates to this one party?

To be fair, the state party is horrified and trying desperately to disconnect themselves from Mr. Zirkle, but I think the question still stands, and I think the party needs to do some soul searching: why is it that racist, anti-worker, anti-poor, anti-women, anti-gay candidates automatically affiliate themselves with this party, and not with their rivals?

Perhaps more germane to the party bigwigs is the question: why would most citizens assume that this is the case?

I think this question needs to be asked particularly by those whose first reaction would be, well, now, that’s not necessarily the case.

Go read about it here.

45 days

Posted on by Dale

I don’t even know how to begin this post. I thought about something like, “You know why George Lichtenberg gives up on his symphony?” or something about the number of days left in the countdown, but I’m not up to being clever.

Stephen Czarkowksi, GHP’s fabulous string teacher/orchestral conductor, who requested I write this piece, will not be returning this summer, having other opportunities he should not pass up. There is no reason for me to keep working on Symphony in G major.

I’ve just been kind of numb, kind of nauseated, since this afternoon when I got Stephen’s email. This is a huge disappointment for me, needless to say, and coming on the heels of the news about the theatre losing the building, I’ve been thrown for a loop.

Oh well, easy come, easy go. I can at least get back to work on A Day in the Moonlight, I guess.

46 days: III. Allegro gracioso

Posted on by Dale

As far as I can tell, it’s finished. I mean, it needs cymbals here and there and I wish Finale would simply crash a cymbal when I click a note into the score but it won’t so there you are. And it’s still not being at all subtle or even appropriate with the dynamics. But I think it’s done.

The last time you heard it was on 4/3/08.

Here’s III. Allegro gracioso, finished. I think you will be surprised. And hopefully pleased.

Next: IV. Lento. This time I mean business.