Category: Family

Earlier entry explained

September 5, 2005 /

Almost my entire extended family on my mom’s side–the Dixons & Company–went to the Ohio Renaissance Festival as a crew of pirates, in full costume and character. There were forty-one of us. Some of the grownups started drinking at nine in the morning. The Dixons don’t actually drink very often, but when we do we are Catholic about it.

They knew we were coming, but I don’t think they were quite prepared.

There was a lot of shouting and ARRing and attempting to sing shanties to which we had managed to learn about one line each. The first of many attempts to break into song came as we crossed under the portcullis to enter the festival proper, and it went like this:

“Well the ship set sail with a lusty crew

ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL

The hmm a grr and rum da dum

ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL

And they all got something mumble barnacles

ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL

ROLL, ME HEARTIES, ROLL

What’s the one about the cabin boy? Let’s sing that one.”

I am not kidding when I say costume and character, either. We all had handmade outfits courtesy of my aunt Lea and my cousin Jerusha, plus jewelry, flintlocks and cutlasses. Sneakers were not permitted. We were the crew and wench-brigade of the Slime Dragon, under command of Cap’n–no, Adm’ral!–Lice. When Queen Elizabeth I made a personal visit that afternoon, she was quite impressed with our display of fealty.

There were vague-but-fervent plots of mutiny and assassination all day, but–just like with real pirates–it’s tough to stay on track with drunk ringleaders. It was like the world’s least-organized LARP. I just tried to keep afresh of the prevailing wind, and I gave some money to the poor stage juggler after he endured a good deal of the crew yelling that wasn’t handling enough blades.

It should be noted that this was not a spontaneous occurrence. In addition to an extraordinary amount of planning and effort by my uncle Jeff’s family, we have a shared pirate-story canon as documented by multiple home movies dating back to the late Sixties. Though those scurvy dogs were also led by a Cap’n Lice, yesterday’s crew was missing several key members and had gained a number of new ones. It also seemed to be rooted in a different time and place. Perhaps this (sea-based) Cap’n Lice was an ancestor of the later lake-based one?

Anybody who wonders why I became a drama major and a role-playing nerd doesn’t have far to look for an explanation. The same goes for my fervent belief in art as commons and shared creativity. And pirates. My family is amazing.

September 5, 2005 /

My family is crazydrunkawesome.

Mom: “Do you think Maria would have been okay today, if she had come?”

Me: “I don’t know. It was pretty dusty and hot out there… she gets sunburned easily. And I’m sure the air was full of pollen.”

Mom: “That’s not what I meant.”

Me: “I know.”

August 24, 2005 /

I just said goodbye to Ian. He’s going to work for a month in Utah before heading on to Los Angeles. He beat me to Louisville, and now he’s going to beat me to California. He’s been taller than me for as long as I can remember.

Ian’s got a new used truck and everything he owns is in its bed. He’s let his hair get too long because he thinks it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Last night was the biggest Tuesday Night Basketball I think we’ve ever had–everyone showed for a sendoff to its lynchpin. We ordered so much food and Lisa made a cake. We played games.

Sometimes I wonder how much I damaged Ian, growing up, by expecting him to be my peer and treating him like an inferior. Then I realize I’m assigning myself too much influence. Ian’s his own man, smart and ethical and a past master of all the social skills with which I still grapple; he didn’t need me to teach him about jokes or girls or writing code.

Ian will say his Saint Michaels. He’ll be fine.

Because I don’t post lyrics at the end anymore

August 21, 2005 /

I wish I felt more authentic about liking Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Basically the whole interweb told me they were good, then Maria told me I’d like them, then Ian played me the CD, and everyone was right. It was like being spoonfed. I wish I’d never heard of them until I heard them. I wish I’d walked in halfway through their set opening for somebody else and they’d started “Me and Mia,” and there’d be sweat spraying off me, pain in my ears, the way I used to dance before I worried about my spine.

July 13, 2005 /

Mom’s safely in London, doing everything. Apparently a mild bombing isn’t enough to shut down anything cool. She saw Brian Dennehy in Death of a Salesman. Live. My mother has seen Brian Dennehy on stage and I haven’t!

July 8, 2005 /

Today’s Hitherby Dragon, The Land Where Suffering Is Remembered, is one of the best I can remember. It reminds me of a story we used to listen to in the car all the time, about frogs and a witch and three dogs and grains of magic corn. My mother knows a magic trick, which she used when telling this story aloud, to make a glass of milk turn blood-red.

My mother is flying to London now, with my great-aunt and -uncle and her best friend. Be safe, Mom.

Epiphany Meal #2

July 7, 2005 /

Yesterday my sister Caitlan arrived in Cincinnati, home safe from a three-week (I think) trip to Greece and Italy. Caitlan sucks. But actually she rules.

Before we let her sleep, my family went to dinner at Le Relais, where Ian’s roommate Jesse is a chef. Jesse had arranged a “tasting” for us, which was pretty cool–we got VIP treatment at what is widely considered the best restaurant in Louisville, if not Kentucky.

I was expecting a selection of small courses, which is kind of what we got, only there were six courses plus dessert, and even with small portions that was still a tremendous amount of food. Every bite was incredible. Duck breast and paté with whole-grain dijon, pan-seared sea scallops and hyacinth bulbs (!), medium-rare fillet in veal reduction sauce, five kinds of cheese and pistachio pound cake with saffron ice cream. And I don’t even like cheese! My favorite was the pan-fried red grouper in lobster stock reduction, which was like eating butter if butter was a fish.

Like the first Epiphany Meal, I felt a bit transformed afterward (and not just because I could barely move). I never really knew I liked French food. Maybe it would have been better for my waistline if I still didn’t.

July 7, 2005 /

NOT COOL. My mom is supposed to leave for London tomorrow. That is quite enough with the bombing.

Only two fatalities so far, but as of this morning there were still people trapped underground.

Update 1046 hrs: Thirty-three.

Update 1329 hrs: Thirty-seven.

Toward Transparency

June 29, 2005 /

Writing transparently is hard–harder, I’ve discovered, than just relaxing copyright or creating collaboratively. Most of the time I still can’t bring myself to do it.

Most writers don’t even consider transparency an option; for that matter, neither do most readers–witness spoiler space. There’s a very strong trend in Western culture toward the idea that a) all good stories must have mysteries revealed within them and b) to reveal such mysteries to someone else when that someone hasn’t read the whole thing is taboo. Mentioning that it’s a sled, for example, is synonymous with “ruining” the relevant work.

But it wasn’t always so, and it isn’t always now.

British playwright (producer, director, agit-prop rabble-rouser) John McGrath, in his classic theater text A Good Night Out, makes the point that such authorial sleigh-of-hand is unnecessary: it’s a device we’ve come to expect because it’s valuable in making a certain segment of your audience feel their expensive education is worthwhile.

Go ahead, try to think of the last movie, TV show or novel you watched or read that didn’t feel the need to hand you a Shocking Twist in its third act. Police procedurals and courtroom dramas are desperate for this, as are reality shows. Sitcoms depend on inducing revelation in both audiences and characters within the show. I think it’s impossible to find a modern horror movie that is not also a mystery–to the point where some such movies now add a third pseudoconclusion to fake out the people who were prepared for the second one.

I submit to you that this is weak and unnecessary writing.

By now you probably have thought of a story you know without a big revelation, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, or the second. My own exemplar is The Laramie Project, and it was Dr. Tony Haigh’s commentary on my Drama senior statement two years ago that made me understand why it was different. I talked a lot about our production of Laramie in my speech, and Tony came up to me afterwards–only a little drunk–to say “I hope you learn to write with that same transparency.”

I was like “oh, I don’t?” and then “Oh. I don’t.”

So there’s transparency in what you’re writing, which makes it stronger by eliminating the weakness of Shocking Twist gimmickry. And then there’s transparency in creative process, which not even McGrath proposed, but which the concept of open source has made a sudden possibility.

What if you let your readers see the story developing as you come up with it? Anathema. Scandal. They’ll realize it didn’t just burst from your forehead! They’ll see the stupid things you did in drafts. They’ll know about the Shocking Twist. There won’t be any anticipation, any hunger! So let’s print our script on copy-proof red paper and post guards around the soundstage; let’s pollute the rumor mills and drop hints without context in our blogs. As Zed Lopez points out, it’s hard to imagine a writer letting you see his or her process the way some painters do.

I submit to you that these are weak and unnecessary choices.

Which isn’t to say I do it well, or at all. Like I said, it’s hard. But I don’t believe that hiding information makes it more valuable in a positive way, and I’m going to try letting go of that. I’m not going to talk about the process of every story I write here, because it would be boring, but I’m going to try not to be coy about where they’re going.