Oct
15
2013
Sep
18
2013
Seat 26E
Nice thing about long flights: sometimes you sit next to a 74 year-old man who just drove 52 hours straight, transporting horses cross country (“you don’t stop when you’re carrying horses, just for gas and maybe a sandwich for the road”) who’s now flying to Lihue to see his childhood friend — with whom he rode horses when they were young boys — probably for the last time, because the friend has cancer. He tells you he has three raccoons (two of whom are blind), a parrot, three cockatiel, and a few more you can’t remember. And he makes you laugh and smile the whole time, and you wish your journey together didn’t have to end so soon.
Sep
7
2013
Girlfriends
I had dinner with a girlfriend the other night. She and I have a few things in common: We share the same birthday. We’re both writers. We’re both lefties. We’ve both had a shitty past few years. And we’re both getting it together now and feeling good. It was a great seeing her. She was radiant.
After we parted, I took Picard out for his evening constitutional. It was pretty late on a weeknight in the mission district of San Francisco, the only people out seemed to be twenty-somethings weaving their way home from the bars. I saw two young women walking toward me. They were adorable, holding hands, engrossed in a quiet conversation. It felt tender and sweet and intimate. I don’t know if they were lovers or just friends and it didn’t matter; what mattered is you could see there was love between them. It was pure. I was sort of swept away by them.
There were also two young men walking just ahead of me, also, I’m guessing, twenty-something. They were not adorable, just average looking. Maybe less than. Doughy guys. All beer, no gym. Nothing about them was notable, until we they passed the girlfriends — who were too engrossed in their own conversation, their own reality, to notice the guys noticing them. This must have upset the guys, because when we passed, one said to the other, “Probably fourteen year old lesbians.” At that moment, the only thing notable about them was that they were dicks.
I don’t know if they were annoyed that the girls they were noticing didn’t notice them back — and thus they had to cut them down (in their mind), or offer the only “logical” explanation, “The must be lesbians, why else wouldn’t they look at us?”
I do know that it pissed me off. I was caught up in my own “version” of these girlfriends, and these mooks came along and polluted my perfect stolen voyeuristic moment. I didn’t want the moment to end on that note. So I took the moment back. I went after the girlfriends. I… had no idea what I was going to say, I just knew I wanted to remember that walk in a lovely way, not focusing on the snarky lads with mean things to say about people who they’ve never met and are minding their own business.
I chatted the girlfriends up (Picard is a great ice breaker when I want to approach a stranger). They were indeed tipsy. They were a little bitchy when I asked to take a picture. But then I said the magic words, because when I told them I’m a writer, they instantly warmed up to me (as usual, Picard had already won them over) and wouldn’t stop talking. The only thing that could have made the encounter more perfect is if my own girlfriend from dinner were still with me for this encounter. That might have been like entering a lovely parallel universe, encountering these younger versions of ourselves (one blond, one brunette) out lighting up the night; still unacquainted with disappointment, but yet to learn that girlfriends only get better with age.
Sep
3
2013
Going Underground: In Praise of Basements
A new environment has the power to change not just what we see, but how we see.
I like basements. I love basements, places where I feel oddly at home. And happy.
We had a basement once, when I was seven, when my parents rented a house for one year in Middletown, New Jersey. Since we were staying only a year, and it was the first time I’d lived in a house that was neither, A) my family’s home prior to my birth, nor B) brand new, we being the first and only occupants; this house didn’t feel like ours. It was someone else’s choice of wallpaper, someone else’s choice of carpet… someone else’s home. But it did have a basement. I’d never seen one before — it was like a secret room!
Only one item was in that Middletown basement when we arrived: a cardboard house. It was gender-neutral, so any child could make it whatever he or she wished. I would play for hours there, in that cardboard house, that kind of play that happens deep within a child’s imagination; existing only in that moment, living in a world completely invisible to everyone else. But it is real.
That was the first (and only) time growing up that we were surrounded by forest (prior to that, it was either the streets of Brooklyn or the desert of Las Vegas). Flora, flora everywhere! The Garden State. I learned to figure skate on the frozen Navesink River. When it snowed, we slid down the street (a slight hill) on sleds, and our father took us to chop down our own Christmas tree. It was all pretty magical stuff to a seven year-old, right down to the hours I passed in the basement.
We moved back to Las Vegas the following summer, where I remained until high school graduation. At seventeen, I couldn’t get out of that town fast enough, get back to the east coast, where naturally I’d decided to go to college. Because I had an opportunity to fly back on a family friend’s private plane, I arrived in New York a full month before classes were to begin, and stayed with my father at his sister Helen’s house in Bayside, Queens (he and my mother had divorced the year before, and being Greeks, family always lives with family). A month is a long time to live with your overly-protective Greek father and his widowed sister in a town where you know no one (and have no car), so I went around visiting relatives: one grandmother, five aunts, five uncles, and ten cousins.
With Georgia and her boys and my brothers in front of Caesars Palace. It’s changed since then.
I made my way to the family home of Georgia, my father’s first cousin, and her family. They had come to see us in Las Vegas years earlier (that’s them, in the photo on the right), and I really liked them. They were a fun family. And calm, compared to the most of the Greek relatives.
Naturally, I stayed in their basement (which I’d decided were indigenous to New Jersey). Theirs was very different than our basement in Middletown ten years earlier: it was their game room, with a pool table, concert and sports memorabilia on the walls, and a vinyl collection that would make Cameron Crowe cringe with envy. It was my last stop before moving into the dorm, so Georgia took me to buy towels and beddings and clothes for an East Coast winter. After shopping, I’d disappear into the basement and get lost in those records, discovering new artists and their stories, new worlds within those songs –while I was eagerly counting down the days until I was to go off and discover a whole new world myself at SUNY Stony Brook. It was another magical time.
I write this from yet another basement, this one on the west coast, as I dogsit for my beau’s sister in Seattle. This basement, as you can see in the above picture, is also surrounded by lush greenery outside. Inside, hundreds of movies. It’s their movie room. The beau… it’s still a fairly new relationship, less than a year. I moved back to Las Vegas — none of the lush greenery I love so there — to be with him. So it’s an exciting time, another new beginning. And though I’m welcome to stay in the master bedroom while his sister and family are away, I prefer the basement. It just feels right. These basements are the waiting rooms for life’s next chapter. They’re a place where I naturally, optimistically, look forward to What’s Next — which has been harder and harder for me to do as I’ve gotten older. With age comes the ice cold water realization of What’s Not Next — which I’ve been focusing on too much as of late. It’s much better to focus on not only What’s Next, but What’s Right Here, Right Now.
This “naturally, optimistically” part of my brain is still there — it wasn’t just part of me at seven or seventeen — but it’s gotten very little airtime of late, this basement has made me realize. So I’ll be tapping into it now more and more now. Because having a What’s Next is an important aspect of feeling alive, for me. Here in this basement, I see nothing but a life of unlimited adventure awaiting me. It’s not the adventure I expected — but isn’t that exactly what adventure is? Not to mention, what’s Right Here, Right Now is pretty darn good!
Today’s “basement.”
I’ll create a What’s Next environment (without the basement, which is architecturally impossible in our second-story condo) when I return to Vegas. Armed with only my imagination, I once turned a cardboard house in a cement-floored Middletown basement into a log castle with a fireplace high on a cliff, waves crashing against the rocks below. I’m curious to see what my view will be out the window at my desk.
Jul
7
2013
The Old Man On The Park Bench. North Beach, 1993.
The closest I’ll come to time travel and meeting myself 20 years ago
I recently moved. While unpacking, I found something I’d written twenty years ago. I’d forgotten about the essay, and about the encounter that inspired it; that is, until I reread it; then it all flooded back — like when someone shows you a photo of yourself taken years ago that you don’t recall being taken.
In this story, I was the girl in the red beret. I don’t know why I wrote it in the voice of the old man, but it’s obvious that even then, twenty years ago, my elderly father’s mortality was very much on my mind. When my brothers and I reunited to be with him for the final month of his life in 2007, I had no intention of writing a play, “It Is What It Is,” inspired by that experience. But that play is also about long buried memories we rediscover when we read something written at a certain time in the past, and about how — even in our most meaningless texts — we are in a way choosing what we document in our lives every day. Which is not entirely unlike me rediscovering this essay now, twenty years after it was written. Here it is:
NORTH BEACH, WEDNESDAY, 1993
This is the only time of the day that this street, this neighborhood, looks the way it used to. Except for the cars passing by… the cars are different. I don’t notice them much. Usually, they’re just in the background.
I remember when I was young and every morning I’d see the old Italian men in the neighborhood sitting here on this same bench I’m sitting on now, talking to each other in Italian. I never paid much attention to them. I mean, I noticed them, as they fed the pigeons. But I guess I thought of them like I thought of the benches, the pigeons, and the statues: all part of the park itself. I thought they’d be there forever and I thought I’d be young forever too.
I never thought I’d be an old man, like a child never thinks he’ll be anything but a child. But these things happen and we don’t even think about it until it’s long since happened. Then we realize the loss of time… at least, I do. Somehow I think that if I’d thought of it then, of growing old, I could have prevented it. Like I could have taken control. Instead, no! Time took control. I stopped paying attention to it and it got the upper hand and it beat me.
I noticed some young men standing on the corner as I walked past them earlier – Christ, they probably thought I hobbled past them. Which, I did. I do. I do hobble now. It felt good so to sit down on this here bench. God, how good it felt to sit. Tired after three blocks, mostly downhill. When I was the young man standing on the corner, I pitied the old men. But I never thought I could turn into one of then, any more than I thought I could turn into a bench or a pigeon or a statue.
Do the young men pity me now? How can they not? They don’t see I’m the same as them. I once was them, as they will one day be me.
I don’t understand it, how I still think exactly the same as I did when I was young – yet to others, I look so different. So old. They think I was always old, with nothing to do but count the days. At least that’s what I used to think of the old men when I was young. Those old men are all long dead by now.
I like it here in the morning, once I sit down. It’s quiet, just a few people on their way to work. There’ll be a lot of people on their way to work in an hour or so, then it changes. It’ll be rushed. Now, it’s new; it feels new and fresh and very peaceful. And I’m part of it. The sun’s not out yet. I mean it’s risen, but it’s still so hazy and foggy, you can’t even see it. Every day starts out overcast here, and I like that. But usually the sun eventually burns through. Then the people don’t wear their coats and hats. I like seeing people in coats and hats. People used to always wear hats. Now they can’t be bothered, only when it’s cold out. But here in the early morning, they wear them, and the scene looks like it used to look years ago. The brighter the coats and hats, the better!
Like this gal passing by right now. What a cutie! She’s wearing a red beret, like mine (though mine’s gray). She’s wearing a matching red raincoat with little blond curls and big brown eyes peeking out from under the beret. Can’t see much of her body under that coat, but she’s not skinny – and I like that! I always liked women’s bodies to look like women’s bodies. I used to love big tits. Still do. I just haven’t had my hands on some in too long to remember. My wife’s were big. Still are. But they’ve changed. When we were young, they stood up and saluted, like they were as glad to see me as I was to see them. Now they hang low, staring at the ground whenever I’m around. Guess I’m not such a sight anymore, either.
The cutie in the red beret is still standing on the corner, so close I could poke her with my cane. The light turned green and she didn’t cross; she just stood there, staring. At me. I look up and catch her eye and she looks off a little to the left, I think she’s embarrassed. I give the kid a break and stop looking at her. But I can still see her and she’s staring at me again, just standing there looking very sad. I’m kinda enjoying all this attention. No young lady has looked at me in who-knows-how-long. But she’s not looking at me the way I used to be looked at by the ladies, the way I’d give one of my few remaining years to be looked at again: a look of desire, a look with sex written all over it.
Instead, she looks at me sadly. She pities me, as I used to pity the old men. I bet I remind her of a grandfather. A dead grandfather. I don’t want to be her dead grandfather.
She looks down at her feet for a few seconds. It almost seems, for an instant, that she might come over here. But no, this time the light turns green, ad she walks away, waiting for everyone else to step off the curb first. Did you see that, Charlie? She looked over her shoulder at me for a final glance! Ciao, Bella.
I feel like I was mean to her. I could have said Hello. She was thinking, she wanted to say something to me… maybe something she didn’t get to say to her dead grandfather. She was too scared. You know what? I was too scared to say anything, too.
Here comes Pete now. Better move this newspaper so he’ll have room to sit – Christ, he moves slower than I do. I hope I don’t look like that when I walk. You go play with the other pigeons now, Charlie. Go see if you can get a little action with that cute little white one over there. She’s been watching you this whole time. Don’t blow this opportunity…
Jul
4
2013
FLASHBACK: 2004
One day in August:
Hair and makeup for film shoot, Come Fly With Ne Nude
TV interview for Fringe Festival Play, in which we portray the characters (Dom Casual & Bella Hagen) we portray in the film we are shooting of the same name
Shoot film scene where we are being interviewed on television
Nap
Hit the stage
Later that week…Win Best of Fringe
Yes, it was a very good summer indeed!
Jul
4
2013
If you’re also wide awake at 4:36am, and want something to put you to sleep…
… sorry, I got nuthin’.
But if it’s riveting reading material you crave, look no further. aMios has posted all of the short plays I’ve written for its Shotz! series on their website! Look for me, Diane Karagienakos. Or just click on my name to the left.
Shotz! Six plays. Five minutes each. Three themes. One night only. Called “A theatrical time bomb” by the New York Times. On the first Monday of every month (or two), aMios’ actors present spontaneous, hilarious and sometimes heart-warming plays. Written and rehearsed within a month, performed with high-energy fearlessness. aMios has been brewing fresh plays in NYC since 2009 and in San Francisco since 2012.
aMios (which stands for “…art and music in our souls.” – Oscar Wilde) was founded in 2009 by graduates of the National Theatre Conservatory. aMios is a process-driven company that relies on each artist involved by engaging them in a way that allows them to fully realize their work immediately. The writers are given themes and a specified time to write. The directors and actors are given a specified amount of time to stage the work. Then we produce their work. The end result is inspired, personal, organic and surprising. Every performance is different. Each show, a fresh start.
Jul
4
2013
Get Off My Chest! Episode 5 – Vacillating Into Summer
NOTE: I AM ATTEMPTING TO POST THIS AT 4:28 AM, AND HAVING SOME DIFFICULTY. TO SEE PAUL’S ORIGINAL POST, WHERE YOU CAN ENJOY THE FABU SPOTIFY SUMMER SOUNDTRACK HE COMPILED, PLEASE CLICK ON PAUL PEARSON’S BLOG.
Enough has changed in the ongoing internet adventures of Paul and Diane that now we need a completely new intro. Up until November 2012, Paul Pearson and Diane Karagienakos had been longtime internet friends who had never actually met each other. As Paul was crossing through San Francisco last year, he, Diane and her dog Picard finally had a dinner in person, managing to keep the invasive paparazzi at bay. Since then, Diane’s moved to the Los Angeles area, Paul’s still in Seattle (for the moment), and they both still own computers. So they’re restarting their acclaimed internet conversation series Get Off My Chest! with a long treatise about summer. It was supposed to be a good-time, Beach Boys pre-Pet Sounds, sumptuous celebration of the season, which it still is, but with a couple of meaningful, reflective and bittersweet reflections middle-aged people like Diane and Paul are prone to having from time to time. Also, you Spotify users will dig the themed playlist at the bottom of this article. Enjoy.
Paul: ‘Aight. We have a topic? I forgot the topic.
Diane: SUMMER, Paul. The topic is summer. Sheesh!
Paul: Summer. Ah, that’s right. I forgot about summer because I’m up here in Seattle, it’s June 19, and it’s freaking overcast with a very light drizzle. Summer.
Diane: (announcing what music she’s playing) Starting with the Spinners’ “One Of a Kind,” summer 1973. Annual roadtrip with our visiting grandmother. This time to Oceanside, CA! My brothers fished.
Paul: Ahhh, the Spinners. One of my all time favorites. So, how are you enjoying the summer in L.A., which I understand has been going on since February?
Diane: I got here the first day of May, and I have to say — it feels like a childhood summer! As you know I’ve been in San Francisco most of 23 years. Which rates right up there with Seattle in terms of summer hotspots. So in preparation — which I’m glad one of us did! — I made a list of all the things summer meant to me: as a kid, adolescent, etc. Do you have any off the top of your head?
Paul: Summers in Sacramento are often unforgivably hot. Both of the houses my family lived in Sacto had swimming pools. Including this freaky Grecian-style swimming pool with a dark-blue bottom, so it retained heat. I made a lot of tents in the backyard, too.
Diane: New track: “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” Alice Cooper, summer 1973. I’m realizing I’ve got many songs from that summer. I think it was the year, I was 9, when I realized there was an adult world other than that of my parents. AM radio was a portal to this other world that excited me so.
Paul: AM radio! You know, I’ve been working on the second chapter of “My Life In Music,” and it’s all about Top 40 AM radio of the ’70s. It was much maligned, but I have very, very fond memories of KFRC in San Francisco, and KNDE in Sacto. That era of pop radio was truly desegregated. If a country song was the most popular in the nation, Top 40 radio played it. If an R&B song was #1, they’d play that too. So yeah, a big memory of my summers is walking down the street where I lived in Vacaville, CA and hearing all these radios.
Diane: You’re right! Mac Davis, Charlie Rich, Olivia Newton-John were all country, and they became top 40 stars, as did Al Green & a whole slew of R&B stars.
So my list: Summer has meant — at various ages growing up — freedom, transition, optimism, adventure, discovery, and Jerry Fucking Lewis. I grew up in Vegas, and that guy and that telethon herealded the end of all of the above, and the return to conformity, authority, alarm clocks, homework deadlines, and the preempted broadcast of Wonderful World of Disney and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on that Sunday night. All to watch that screaming crazed sweaty creepy man demand you send more money to his kids, fuck kids with any other disease. He was the face of the end summer.
Sorry, I clearly still have Jerry Lewis issues.
Paul: You know I played on a Jerry Lewis telethon once? Not the actual, Jerry Lewis telethon, with him, but I played at the local station that was broadcasting it. They cut away every hour to the local channel, and I played on that segment.
As a Jehovah’s Witness kid, summer also meant going door-to-door all damn summer long, and heading to Reno for district conventions. It was also when I introduced myself to Johnny Carson and David Letterman, ’cause I got to stay up late.
Diane: Yup, Johnny Carson, summer 1974. Also the summer my mother — god bless her — took me & my brothers to see Blazing Saddles at the drive-In. I brought my Panasonic tape recorder. I still have every word of that movie memorized.
Paul: Blazing Saddles. Yes. That was a very important film.
Diane: Summers have become just another season. I wonder if you, being a parent are able to appreciate summer (in its most fabled definition) by proxy through your children. Do you have a big Slip-n-Slide in the back yard?
Paul: We have a deck, not an actual backyard, but yes, it’s full of summer toys and aquatic-based apparatuses. And a big-ass gas grill. That’s when I truly get down with the summer thing, when I’m grilling something. It’s that moment I feel I have mastered my masculinity, when I am standing over a rack of ribs, divining smoke with my spatula. Then I have a Sex And The City marathon. As for living vicariously through my kids – yeah, sorta, I suppose. But I do that all year long, really.
Diane: Man is to barbecue what Cro-Magnon was to Wooly Mammoth. That’s what I always say. What really stands out, regarding childhood summer, for me are those above-mentioned road trips: five of us in a car for two or three weeks. No one had smart phones to drown out the present company. We fought. We made up games in the car (often utilizing the cassette recorder), we sang (at least I did, to the AM radio). I can remember what I saw out a window when listening to Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against The World” and the Stylistics’ “You Make Me Feel Brand New” — I don’t remember where exactly I was, but I remember the weather, and the scenery, of those moments. And who I was with. I’m so glad I didn’t have a smartphone as a kid. I fear all my memories would be of texting!
Paul: The summer of 1983 was probably the most important summer of my childhood. It was the first summer after I’d quit the JW’s. I got a job as rehearsal pianist for a high school summer stock theater group in Sacramento, Musical Comedy Workshop. To my utter shock I also landed the lead in Oklahoma! That summer I made a whole bunch of new friends. They were arty. They listened to old David Bowie! And they accepted me, for some reason. If I hadn’t had them during the transition, I’m not sure what would have happened to me.
Diane: I love that you had that experience. I had a similar “finding my tribe” time when I arrived at the campus of SUNY Stony Brook in 1981.
As I got older, summer became this big transitory time: 6th grade center (back in the days of integration) to junior high (I believe we now call it middle school), junior high to senior high. And with that came pubescent curiosity: about booze and drugs and sex and of course, rock and roll!
I came up with a timetable. My first experience with each of these happened during a summer. Coincidence? I think not!
Rock and roll: First concert, Frampton, 1977
Alcohol: first beer, Lowenbrau, 1978
Drugs: first joint, 1979
Sex: First time, 1980
You’d almost think I planned it.
Paul: My first rock and roll concert was in the summer of ’82, I believe. The Police and Santana. As for alcohol and sex I think I took care of all those in ’84. Probably drugs too. I was coping with my Orwellian fears.
Diane: The Police! wish I’d seen them. And I’m glad you had a chance to catch up on the sex & drugs tip most expeditiously.
Paul: Scheduling’s important. You know, for a long time, I had this fear of August.
Diane: Fear of August? Because it meant school started soon?
Paul: For about 10 or 12 years straight, some cataclysmic event would always happen in August. I called it Augustpanik. One of my girlfriends took it awfully personally, even though it had nothing to do with her. The summer of 1995, especially August, was fuckin’ abominable.
Diane: What was the timeframe of your Augustpanik?
Paul: I would say Augustpanik ran between… I’d estimate it as having started in 1987, and I stopped being superstitious about it around 2004.
Diane: Another thing that was Pure Summer: The Olympics!
Paul: You know, I never really watched the Olympics all that much. I was all about baseball though. One thing I resented about being raised a JW was that I wasn’t allowed to participate in sports, including little league baseball, which happened every summer a few blocks from my house.
Diane: I grew up in a very athletic household (I skated & did gymnastics, two older hockey-playing brothers). I saw every ABC Wide World Of Sports from 1972-1980, I’m pretty sure. My first Olympics was 1972: Olga Korbut vs. Kathy Rigby, Edwin Moses, Mark Spitz. And then… the hostage situation. I was way too young to understand what was happening. But I knew, at age 8, that when the perenially chipper Jim McKay said, “They’re all gone,” I understood for the first time that really bad things happen in the world.
You’re my second male friend who grew up JW — and took a while to dust it off. I’m glad you both did.
Paul: The first news story I remember was when Nixon resigned (in August!) in 1974. I was on vacation with my family in Billings, Montana. My dad was doing a real estate seminar at the university there, so we drove through Yellowstone to get there. Saw Old Faithful. And Nixon quit.
Diane: That’s so funny, I was on one of our August Road Trips: hockey camp for the boys, Penticton, Canada, when the news broke!
Back to summer: It was so built up. Nine months of looking forward to it, then boom, it was over. A lot of schools now are year-round. I wonder if that sort of diminishes the true power & meaning of summer to kids today. It was almost mythical: Summer. I swear, I suppose it’s because I was in San Francisco for summer 1990-2012 (minus the time I was overseas 1998-2000), but I have zero summer associations. It’s starting to make sense now, why I left (San Francisco).
Paul: So how has the transition from San Francisco faux summers to Los Angeles summers gone for you? Although, technically, it just started today.
Diane: It’s a lot of factors — this chapter of my life will be called “Next time I ask the universe for an adventure, remember to be more specific!” But the fact that all of this has happened during summer just makes it feel like summer 1973 (if only the soundtrack were so great). Being in a new place where it’s sunny, having the freedom to not work during this transition, not knowing what’s next in adventure… All those words that I use for summers past, I’m so happy to feel them again. I’m sure much of has to do with my own mindset and leaving behind a situation in which I stayed far too long (I’m fucking loyal to a fault). Not sure I’d feel this way if I’d moved to North Dakota, but right now, I’m a walking Joni Mitchell song, right down to the white gauze swimsuit cover I’m walking around in!
I need to get out more in L.A. proper to get a “summer vibe” on the streets. But all the people I’m hanging with are all sharing this — it’s hard for a non-earthbiscuit like myself to find words for it, this — time in life. A lot of people I’m encountering, grounded people, are feeling really optimistic here! I didn’t find much of that in SF, I’ll be honest.
Paul: Optimism. I love optimism. I moved to L.A. in the summer of ’95, which as I mentioned was the absolute fucking worst year of my life. I wasn’t very happy having to leave the Northwest for L.A. All sorts of shit happened that summer that should not have happened.
Diane: So what’s the story? Gonna give sunny L.A. another go?
Paul: I’m not sure this is breaking news for everyone, but there is an extremely strong chance I’ll be moving to L.A. in the future for work, unless something fairly dramatic happens. And the last couple of times I’ve been in L.A. I’ve really enjoyed myself. So it’s the exact opposite of the ’95 move. I’m actually looking forward to moving to L.A. If it happens. There are still milestones that have to be hit, but as of now the going understanding is that we’re headed down to L.A. But no timetable yet. The first time I was there I was not really one of the party people.
Diane: I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. Even where I’m staying most days, Valencia (long story), it’s so laid-back and green (for a desert) and pedestrian/bike friendly. People are nice. After 23 years in gray and damp cities (San Francisco, London), I’m liking this. There will come a time when this too shall pass, but it is a great summer. I suspect there’s no official end of summer — for adults — in Southern California. You can take your time and come back, if you want. I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years.
Paul: I would probably be much more grounded than I was the first time I lived in L.A.
Diane: I’m not letting you off the hook, music man. Some of your most emblematic songs of summer, and why.
Paul: Well, I’m not sure they were summer songs, but back when we were talking about AM radio, the songs I recall the most were “Do It Again” by Steely Dan and “Everybody Plays the Fool” by the Main Ingredient. During the Summer of Crap in 1995, there was this great station in L.A., KACE, that played R&B oldies. Great, great station. Missed. Basically anything soul-related is in my summer memories. “Love Train” by the O’Jays, “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder, all Spinners songs. Hall & Oates.
Diane: I love that you mention “Everybody Plays the Fool” by the Main Ingredient. I recently took a roadtrip to San Francisco with a male friend. That song came on, and he knew every second, every phrase and pause. I’m familiar with the song, but was never compelled as a kid to memorize it. I realized that day that that was a boy song!
Paul: Yeah, I would always hear that little “flute” introduction coming from the radios in the streets. That was the first notion of “hooks” that I ever heard.
(We broke it off here, because this was happening at the exact moment James Gandolfini’s death was announced. We picked it up the next Tuesday:)
Diane: Okay, I’m just sitting here organizing nutritional supplements (seriously).
Paul: In what order? Alphabetically?
Diane: It’s complicated.
Paul: I won’t pry. So, I definitely have a worst summer on record, and maybe a best. Do you have specific favorite and least favorite summers on record?
Diane: Fave: two, 1973 and 2004.
Paul: What was good about 2004?
Diane: I’ll go into detail in a moment. And add 1983 to the “Best” list.
Trying to think of the worst… There are a few that tie for “Meh,” but worst… There was definitely a period of bad summers, 1984, ’85, ’86, right after my mom died December of ’83. My eating disorder returned with a vengeance. Music started getting cheesy. I was young and beautiful and supposed to be happily dancing to drum beat music. Instead, I was destroying myself and hoping I wouldn’t wake up (I could never kill myself, because I wouldn’t do that to my father), but I seriously went to sleep each night wishing it was the last.
What made 2004 good… I was 40. I’d spent part of the prior year writing and performing a stage show (first time onstage) and it was taking off! We got into the Fringe Festival that summer and won Best Of Fringe. At the same time, I was directing and producing my first feature film. I’m really good at creating community, and I have to say, we had the greatest cast andcrew, most of whom I met because of the project (the film and stage show both titled Come Fly With Me Nude). I was living my dream surrounded by wonderful, good, talented people! I was working so hard I lost 20 pounds in two months — there was a lot of dancing in the show — so I looked better at 40 than I have since that summer of 1983, before my mother died.
1983 I was thin for the first time since puberty, I was in love for the first time with someone who’s still a great friend. My brother was engaged to a Greek woman who was the big sister I always wanted. Everyone was happy and the music was great! Can’t separate a summer from its music!
And you? Let’s hear your best-of/worst-of stories. And I hope yours aren’t as tied in to your weight as mine are!
Paul: Let’s kill off the ghosts of 1995 first. I moved down to L.A. with my then-wife. Things had been going bad for awhile. There were tons of things going on with her that I was never told about. I’d caught her in a pretty massive lie, which was constructed to conceal the fact that she was seeing a guy she was… well, to be honest, we still don’t know what she was doing with him. It has never been fully explained to me.
Anyway, for some reason, in August she brought him down to L.A. “with his girlfriend” and she kicked me out of the house. So I spent that month on the road. I had very few friends down there because I’d just moved. I stayed in a motel in Long Beach, camped in Lake Arrowhead, finally came back to stay in a cheap motel in Beverly Hills (no lie).
I was in Pasadena with the one friend I did have there, eating tacos in the street, when I was assaulted by a guy who was apparently being initiated into a gang. He struck me in my left eye with brass knuckles. I still have the scar. So, yeah, ’95 would be my worst summer. But you know, I was pretty stupid to put up with it.
Diane: Okay, the brass knuckles bit sucks. But that sounds to me like one of those summers (mine would be ’92) when you get so lost, you’re so raw, those experiences just lead to such searching and growth when you look back. I know I’m just even more open to new things and a “what the fuck” attitude, that when I look back, I feel like it ultimately really formed me. I always think those are probably the periods in artists’ lives from where comes the best work, when you’re stuck questioning life.
Paul: Yeah. I don’t like to revisit that particular summer (’95) too often. I’m sure it probably shaped a lot of stuff. What was infuriating about it was that it proved that my first impression of my ex-wife, which wasn’t positive, turned out to be dead-on. I have always mistrusted my first instincts, and I have no idea why.
On the other hand, going through the bad things that happened in the past is not usually an enjoyable thing for me. I don’t want to hang around those ghosts and shake my fist demanding justice. And I don’t even know her these days, maybe she’s changed and has taken a full accounting of herself. I just haven’t heard about it, and I don’t really care. That’s that.
1983 was probably the best summer. 2002 was great. That was the summer I started to come out of a very long-lasting shell. I was in Olympia and was trying a new approach to life.
Diane: Why was your ’83 so great? At the risk of projecting, I’m totally expecting music to play a part in your answer.
Paul: The establishment of a core of friends that probably, in the long term, saved my life. Yes, music was part of it. I had no idea anybody else thought I was a good singer. It woke me up to a lot of things. 2002 was a lot like ’83. I’d made a relatively new core of friends in Oly, started getting involved in musical projects again.
Diane: Self discovery! I had that moment at 40, which is an age most women dread — and I think being that age gave me the wisdom to appreciate it all the more.
Paul: Most men dread it too. I wasn’t really paying attention when it happened to me.
Hey, this is supposed to be about summer! When’d we get all self-examinatory and shit? (Although I think this is a perfectly good direction to go in.)
Diane: I know I’m miserable without that element in my life, which is sort-of what’s great about being in L.A. now, since the main reason for this move was to take the writing projects to the next level. Many of my friends here are S.F. expat actors/filmmakers who moved for the same reason, so we’re all feeding off each other’s creative energy. It’s an exciting time. The fact that I get to wear actual summery dresses (try doing that in the summer in San Francisco) just makes me feel all the more upbeat and carefree. It sounds so fluffy… but I’m enjoying fluffy right now. After 20+ years under the cold, damp, gray blanket that is summer in San Francisco, I feel like I am Joni Mitchell, and I do want to live in Laurel Canyon. I’m fixated on Laurel Canyon.
Paul: Yeah, this summer — well, so far, it’s not even a week in the books yet — is going to be interesting. I’m terribly busy already. Kind of re-emerging in a way. I heard from some astrology types that Neptune’s going to be retrograde in some house of mine for awhile, so that means I’m going to be working on some issues of personal definition. Who I am, what I can do, where my potential’s at, etc. I nodded my head as if to understand.
Diane: That’s right, you’re still in the midst of a transition yourself! I arrived here April 30, so that’s officially when summer began for me. “I nodded my head as if to understand.” Heh heh heh.
Paul: I’m still in transition but it’s not 100% where I’ll be yet.
Diane: This is my transition’s transition. The transition itself began in 2007, when death, divorce, and unemployment all struck within months of each other. Summer, of course.
Paul: This summer should accelerate the transition that’s been going on since… well, August of last year according to me, but October if you’re talking about my career. Frankly I’m not sure when I haven’t been in transition over the last 14 years. ’98 may have been the last time I’ve felt truly settled for a spell. I mean, some things are settled. Family and relationships, that’s settled. That turned out fine. My family’s just waiting on me, really.
What do you want to see come out of this summer?
Diane: Hmmm… The one thing I know for sure is I do want this state of mind, this calm, this openness to trust life, to last. I feel fearless, for the first time in a long time. I am a feather in the wind and right now it’s perfect.
Out of this summer: eventually I want to be settled (somewhat) somewhere. Even if that means I just buy a car and find some sort of existence on the road for a while. I was so tied to a place, my apartment in San Francisco for so long… I loved it in the fact that I’m a momma bear and love having a place for all my orphan friends to gather on holidays or just whenever I feel like cooking and having a dance party after. Again with the community.
I want an agent. A manager. I want to be bicoastal. I want to see my projects find the audience they deserve. That’s what I want to see come out of this move. It just may take longer than a summer.
Paul: I’d like to be a part of something. I’d like to get a sense that I’m contributing what I can to some sort of community or work effort. I’m finding my way back to what it is that I do best, which is essentially covering music. Or performing music, or helping other musicians define themselves. Now that I’m in a position to work in the music realm again, as opposed to having been sort of stranded in a position only peripherally connected to music for most of the last six years, I want to get back to the side of the music where I do my best work. And get paid. Yeah, definitely want to include getting paid for it. And create something. I don’t know, anything. Things are slowly coming together.
Diane: Since I’ve been here, I’ve spent a lot of time writing, marketing and fundraising materials for dog causes, like Rocket Dog Rescue and Paws LA. And I’ll be starting up the LA branch of aMios, a theatre company based in NYC now also in San Francisco (I write for their bi-monthly Shotz short play program).
So I guess we want a lot of the same things — the community, getting paid, being on the creative side. I’m just grateful that I have a strong creative side, though it took me a while to truly embrace it. I think that if I’d had that in my life when my mother died, I might have weathered that period differently, perhaps less self-destructively. Who knows?
Paul: Well, if I do wind up down there anytime soon, let me know what I can do to help. I got software and stuff. And the will to live.
Diane: Come here and be the musical director for my theatre company. In addition to your other projects! Peal Pearson and The World’s Most Controversial Band!
Paul: Deal. Do you have any square dances? I’m all do-si-do in that bitch!
Diane: I’m getting some ideas… See, collaboration! I love it!
Paul: I’ll start designing the T-shirts right now!
Diane: Well, you’ve inspired me to set some definite goals this summer (besides just “tan legs”). I’m even more excited! Thank you.
Paul: You’re welcome, and me too. I’m going to start taking notes.
Diane: Cool. Time for a refreshing lemonade!
Mar
2
2013
I am “Divorced With Dog”
Concept for a web series,where
“Sex and the City” meets “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.”
For everyone who’s single, but not without a best friend.
Darian is reconstructing a life after divorce. When she rescues pup Picard, she finds herself getting some unexpected lessons — and finding adventure — in the darndest places.
It all started with this:
http://youtu.be/rCF7Dnov8vA
For more Divorced With Dog, check out the blog: www.doggiedoo.org, and don’t forget to Like their Facebook page!
Mar
2
2013
An introduction to the serial “The Saga of Gray & Nameless”
As you might have guessed by their names, days were pretty dull for Gray & Nameless before they met. But together, they’ve found that every day can provide lots of opportunities to learn, to be of service, AND to have exciting adventures! They demonstrate that everyone who applies themselves, no matter how different they are from the pack (even 1″ rubber pit bulls!) should be accepted, treated with dignity, and given a chance to prove their value to society.
The Saga Of Gray & Nameless” looks at our society from the perspective of two 1″ pit bulls. They live in the same world we do, and face the same responsibilities and challenges that we face. But for them, even the most mundane task — like dropping a letter in a mailbox — can pose a difficult and dangerous situation. Yet their enthusiasm to accomplish each and every goal remains undeterred.
In addition the their daily pupdates and mini puptales, there is the series of stories (suitable for kids of all ages). Follow their saga on their own site, www.grayandnameless.com, and if you’re on Facebook, click here to visit their page. Become a fan and view their photo albums to see their full (yet ongoing) story.
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