Get Off Your Ass (with poem)

What: Theatrical program for a limited run of Tongues by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, with insert poem by yours truly.

Cost/Value: $4 to see the show, the cost of a sandwich at Baggins. 

The story, as I recall: Being part of a theater troupe was the closest thing I've ever come to being a pirate: driven far and hard by blackhearted cap'ns, living rough among scurvy crewmates for low wages and long nights, cramped in dank, nasty vessels cast upon maps of imagination, we chased selfish, criminal dreams of easy plenty and starred infamy that, according to legend, lay somewhere beyond the horizon. 

The treasure was all ours, too, if we'd only take the demented risk. 

Not to judge, but if you call yourself a thespian and your experience was nothing like mine, you missed out. Depending on the mood, I suppose other extended metaphors might come to mind as I remember that life--rag-and-bone shops where the used shit of our lives gets sold for pennies, insane asylums run by the inmates, etc. etc., but pirates will do for this one.  

Despite what you might imagine, culture wasn't exactly rare and running scared in Tucson in the 1990s. My first month in town, I learned the map of Tucson easily by plotting out islands of cultural solace: The Loft Cinema, on 5th Street before it moved to Speedway, Zia Records, which I'd later manage in Phoenix, and the various used and new bookstores where I mainlined transgressive entertainments on student's wages. The local theatre scene, fed generously by the University of Arizona's fine drama program, was a distant country cousin of what I imagined "the life" in New York City to be like, a sort of I-met-Woody-Allen-at-the-bistro-and-he-loves-my-writing fantasia that I chased for several years before retiring for a life of medical benefits and upwardly mobile recompense for an education and reasonable aspirations. 

AKA Theatre and other black box theaters dotted the local map, run as described above, no more or less rare, I suppose, from the denizens of other similar theatres around the world where this perennially dying art form still thrives in respective economies of class and local concern for the arts. 

To put this production of Tongues in that context, you'd also have to imagine that other recent productions would have included works by Bertolt Brecht, María Irene Fornés, 

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Caryl Churchill alongside lesser-known contemporaries and local writers. Sometime after one of those headliners, then, our little troupe would have been a late-night attraction.

While AKA hosted Tongues, this was actually a production of GOYA, a loosely considered collective, less a formal movement than the intention of one, the result of collective creative will energized by ideas and youthful desire to shine. GOYA stood for Get Off Your Ass, a "forum for artists interested in multi-media collaboration," which meant "go see a play and we'll give you a free poem," pretty much. But we tried.

Well, they did. I'm among a very fortunate few who, through the vagaries of geography and timing, studied theater arts under Marie Kerwin, who ran the Moon Valley High School program, not as an after-school nursery for misfits and imaginative children, but as a serious, semi-professional dramatic arts academy. As a public school educator, she had no business doing that, but thank god she did. It was magical, the closest thing to Hogwarts I've ever experienced. But even then, I was always a loiterer in the wings, drawn to the indiscreet backstage treats far more than the dogged discipline of being a talent on stage or off. When GOYA launched, nothing had changed: I wrote a few things and dreamed, but my partners--the actors, the production consultant--were far more serious about getting on that boat and sailing for the high seas, which they did. They were the real theatrical artists, powerhouses of energy and creativity who settled on Tongues, a two-man piece for voice and percussion, as the perfect showpiece for their livid energies. It was their ship, and I was happy to be a castaway.   

The poem included is bad beat poetry with socialist overtones, a humanist peaen to depravity, my melieu in those days, although I still like the refrain of "My mouth is no comedian"--it has a dumb fatalism that even a salty old pirate could appreciate.
  
Why did I keep it? It's an obvious keepsake. Although not my inaugural publication--we'll look at that one some other time--I'm proud to have been bonus content for a good night at the theater. 

Item 3: A collection of concert tickets from the 1980s/1990s.

I Smoked for Michael Dukakis

What: An empty pack of Campaign 88 Dukakis for President King Size Filters. 

Cost/Value: $2.15 retail, roughly twice what a pack of Camels cost. One eBay lot of Dukakis and Bush packs sold for $22.99 a few years ago.

The story, as I recall: I smoked every last one of them. 

In 1988, I was wayward in every sense of the term. No permanent address or fixed direction in life, my friends and girlfriends itinerant and unreliable, I was absent from both college and career and ready to join the circus or go be a poet somewhere that would have me.

My only reliable assets were delusions of beatnik grandeur and an uncritical curiosity that should have killed me before my 20th birthday. My role models were Lou Reed and Hunter S. Thompson, both of whom I revered as self-exiled, fellow abominations of middle class America. I, too, felt sick and dirty, more dead than alive, and yearned to escape my bourgeois heritage then grow up to taunt it for making me. Or something.

I wanted to know everything, but was confused how one did that, know everything. Like all my heroes, I devoured books and lyrics and poems and art and films out of psychic self defense. Every new name was a feast for the imagination--Celine, Dos Passos, O'Keeffe, Ginsberg, Godard, Artaud, Coltrane, Van, Patti. There was so much to ingest, yet I was paradoxically terrified of starving. 

It should have been clear to me that I swung hard left politically, what with all the liberals and punks and counterculture heroes in my music collection. (I mean, come on! I owned three Billy Bragg albums and a Phil Ochs tape!) But at 19, I was unstaked, so my politics were elusive at best, enigmatic at worst. That year alone saw me renounce my membership in the Republican Party, a youthful indiscretion attributable to an adjacent membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints (some other time, dear, curious reader), in favor of a flirtation with the Socialist Party by way of Fred Hampton, the murdered Black Panther, and John Reed, the harassed chronicler of Red October. 

The renunciation occurred inside a North Phoenix DMV teeming with rednecks at a time when gun racks were as common a sight as, well, rednecks in North Phoenix. The clerk who took my voter registration card did so reluctantly after discovering I had written "Communist" in the box for party affiliation, whereupon she announced that SHE was never going to sign it officially, whereupon her supervisor told her she had to because I was free to be a Communist, whereupon several people standing around the counter looked at me and began asking if I'd rather go live in Russia, whereupon I made a commie-shaped hole in the door and escaped before I could find out what it's like to get my ass kicked in a parking lot of a government building. Needless to say I was not then nor was I ever an actual Communist, but I was listening to a lot of punk (by way of the Velvets and Talking Heads and Television) and felt inspired to do something wicked and monstrous to... the US government, I suppose, for being all governmenty and wrong. 

The hard shift into liberal politics began with Hunter S. Thompson. Being politically dyslexic, I didn't realize Thompson was Libertarian. His writings were attractive to me initially because of his quasi-association with beatniks, which I gleaned from reading Hell's Angels and, in much more detail, The Great Shark Hunt, the latter on permanent check-out renewal to me from the Phoenix College Library. By the time I finished it, I was certain I was a Democrat because I hated Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, detested the police state that America was becoming, favored free living and doing what I wanted over not favoring those things, and had a general sense that the free-loving hippies, though full of shit generally, were more correct in world-view than the flat-topped Conservative gargoyles lurking in the frames of Ralph Steadman's monstrous illustrations. Truth be told, I found preppy girls slightly cuter than the tangled, bedangled hippie girls I'd come across, but that's another thing altogether. This is about smokes.

The smokes, then.

Late Summer, Arizona State University campus, meeting a friend who had gone through the rigamarole of actually applying and getting financing for a state university and then actually attending. By then, the Democrats had selected Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis as their candidate to run against Vice President George Bush. They were both dweeby but I hadn't lived long enough yet to see politicians as anything but that, so I had no sense that voters occasionally get a candidate they are passionate about, a Kennedy, say, or a Clinton. 

On the table for the Democrats, alongside xeroxed policy documents and charity paperbacks for sale, were several packs of Dukakis for President cigarettes. They were ridiculous, tasted and smelled like shit, although nothing like the Dukakis campaign itself, but he was my candidate, so I bought a pack and smoked his cigarettes, not Bush's cigarettes, and wallowed in a cloud of hope for few more months until my first Election Day came around that November. Of course, my guy lost that year and faded into the type of anonymity failed candidates can only dream about these days, and I carried the dread of all Democrats with me as we swirled inexorably towards the Gulf War, which I protested the next year as a newly attitudinal, firmly leftist, campus "radical" at the University of Arizona. By the time Bill Clinton came along, campaign cigarettes were passe and so was George Bush, and I'd discovered that a political conscience was only as good as the country that didn't kill you over it.  

Why did I keep it? God knows, other than my love of the absurd. It's a piece of history now.

Item 2: A theatrical program. in which artistes start a theatre troupe!

Memories Can't Wait

God knows why, but I'm opening the boxes at last. So much kept inside. 

Things. They are varied: letters from people I barely remember and some I can't forget, scribbled reminders to do something or go somewhere, notes of love and termination, dispatches from the culture wars, even a set of Jesus pencil toppers, one for each of my mortal sins, all kept in decorative Lebkuchen chests that may as well be buried alongside me in the end since they're unlikely to survive on their own. 

The rules of keepage are simple: everything kept was important in the moment, and in that moment it was kept. My m.o. is to remember why. 

Item 1: An empty pack of smokes from 1988. Stay tuned.