Chapter 1, from my book "No Time to say Goodbye: Memoirs of a life in Foster Care.
Behold, I have refined thee, but not with
silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.
-Isaiah 48:10
NO TIME TO SAY GOODBYE.
Chapter One
Do you think, because I am poor,
obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I
have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I am here because I
worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university
that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won’t. At age
fifty-seven, I’m too damned old, and I’d look ridiculous in this crowd. From
where I’m standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two
decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and
gowns.
So I’ll graduate with this class, but I won’t
walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I’ll have the school
send it to my house. I only want to hear
my name called. I’ll imagine what the rest would have been like. When you’ve
had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things.
The ceremony is about to begin. It’s a warm
June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the
dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the
other.
That banging sound.
It’s Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury
cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They
are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the
cold.
They’ve finally come for us, in the dead of
night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.
“They’ll come and get you kids,” she screamed
at us, “and put youse all in an orphanage where you’ll get the beatin’s youse
deserve, and there won’t be no food either.”
That’s why we’re terrified, that’s why we
don’t open the door and that’s how I remember that night. I was six years old
then, one month away from my seventh birthday. My older brother, the
perpetually-worried, white-haired Paulie, was ten. He is my half-brother,
actually, although I have never thought of him that way. He was simply my
brother. My youngest brother, Denny, was six; Maura, the baby, was four; and
Bridget, our auburn-haired leader, my half -sister, was twelve.
We didn’t know where our mother was. The
welfare check, and thank God for it, had arrived, so maybe she was at a gin
mill downtown spending it all, as she had done a few times before. Maybe she’d
met yet another guy, another barfly, who wouldn’t be able to remember our names
because his beer-soaked brain can’t remember anything. We are thankful that
he’ll disappear after the money runs out
or the social worker lady comes around and tells him he has to leave because
the welfare won’t pay for him as well as for us. It snowed that day and after
the snow had finished falling, the temperature dropped and the winds started.
“Maybe she went to Brooklyn,” Paulie said, as
we walked through the snow to the Salvation Army offices one that afternoon
before the cops came for us.
“She didn’t go back to New York,” Bridget
snapped. “She probably just—”
“She always says she gonna leave and go back
home to Brooklyn,” I interrupted.
“Yeah,” Denny chirped, mostly because he was
determined to be taken as our equal in all things, including this conversation.
We walked along in silence for a second,
kicking the freshly fallen snow from our paths, and then Paulie added what we
were all thinking: “Maybe they put her back in Saint Mary’s.”
No one answered him. Instead, we fell into
our own thoughts, recalling how, several times in the past, when too much of
life came at our mother at once, she broke down and lay in bed for weeks in a
dark room, not speaking and barely eating. It was a frightening and disturbing
thing to watch.
“It don’t matter,” Bridget snapped again,
more out of exhaustion than anything else. She was always cranky. The weight of
taking care of us, and of being old well before her time, strained her. “It
don’t matter,” she mumbled.
It didn’t matter that night either, that
awful night, when the cops were at the door and she wasn’t there. We hadn’t
seen our mother for two days, and after that night, we wouldn’t see her for
another two years.
When we returned home that day, the sun had
gone down and it was dark inside the house because we hadn’t paid the light
bill. We never paid the bills, so the lights were almost always off and there
was no heat because we didn’t pay that bill either. And now we needed the heat.
We needed the heat more than we needed the lights. The cold winter winds pushed
up at us from the Atlantic Ocean and down on us from frigid Canada and battered
our part of northwestern Connecticut, shoving freezing drifts of snow against
the paper-thin walls of our ramshackle house and covering our windows in a
thick veneer of silver-colored ice.
The house was built around 1910 by the
factories to house immigrant workers mostly brought in from southern Italy.
These mill houses weren’t built to last. They had no basements; only four
windows, all in the front; and paper-thin walls. Most of the construction was
done with plywood and tarpaper. The interiors were long and narrow and dark.
Bridget turned the gas oven on to keep us
warm. “Youse go get the big mattress and bring it in here by the stove,” she
commanded us. Denny, Paulie, and I went to the bed that was in the cramped
living room and wrestled the stained and dark mattress, with some effort, into
the kitchen. Bridget covered Maura in as many shirts as she could find, in a
vain effort to stop the chills that racked her tiny and frail body and caused
her to shake.
We took great pains to position the hulking
mattress in exactly the right spot by the stove and then slid, fully dressed,
under a pile of dirty sheets, coats, and drapes that w our blanket. We squeezed
close to fend off the cold, the baby in the middle and the older kids at the
ends.
“Move over, ya yutz, ya,” Paulie would say to Denny and me because half of his
butt was hanging out onto the cold linoleum floor. We could toss insults in
Yiddish. We learned them from our mother, whose father was a Jew and who grew
up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York.
I assumed that those words we learned were standard American English, in
wide and constant use across our great land. It wasn’t until I was in my
mid-twenties and moved from the Naugatuck Valley and Connecticut that I came to
understand that most Americans would never utter a sentence like, “You and your
fakakta plans”.
We also spoke with the Waterbury aversion to
the sound of the letter “T,” replacing it with the letter “D,” meaning that
“them, there, those, and these” were pronounced “dem, dere, dose, and dese.” We
were also practitioners of “youse,” the northern working-class equivalent to
“you-all,” as in “Are youse leaving or are youse staying?”
“Move in, ya yutz, ya,” Paulie said again with a laugh, but we didn’t move
because the only place to move was to push Bridget off the mattress, which we
were not about to do because Bridget packed a wallop that could probably put a
grown man down. Then Paulie pushed us, and at the other end of the mattress,
Bridget pushed back with a laugh, and an exaggerated, rear-ends pushing war for
control of the mattress broke out.
Theseus.
Theseus was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. Like Perseus, Cadmus, or Heracles, Theseus battled and overcame foes that were identified with an archaic religious and social order. His role in history has been called "a major cultural transition, like the making of the new Olympia by Hercules."
Theseus was a founding hero for
the Athenians in the same way that Heracles was the founding hero for the
Dorians. The Athenians regarded Theseus as a great reformer; his name comes
from the same root as θεσμός (thesmos), meaning "rule" or "precept".
The myths surrounding Theseus—his journeys, exploits, and friends—have provided
material for fiction throughout the ages.
Theseus was responsible for the
synoikismos ('dwelling together')—the political unification of Attica under
Athens—represented emblematically in his journey of labors, subduing ogres and
monstrous beasts. Because he was the unifying king, Theseus built and occupied
a palace on the fortress of the Acropolis that may have been similar to the
palace that was excavated in Mycenae. Pausanias reports that after the
synoikismos, Theseus established a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos ('Aphrodite of
all the People') and Peitho on the southern slope of the Acropolis.
Plutarch's Life of Theseus (a
literalistic biography) makes use of varying accounts of the death of the
Minotaur, Theseus' escape, and the love of Ariadne for Theseus.]Plutarch's
sources, not all of whose texts have survived independently, included
Pherecydes (mid-fifth century BCE), Demon (c. 400 BCE), Philochorus, and
Cleidemus (both fourth century BCE).[2] As the subject of myth, the existence
of Theseus as a real person has not been proven, but scholars believe that he
may have been alive during the Late Bronze Age possibly as a king in the 8th or
9th century BCE.
Hermann Hesse
“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part
of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to
impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be
communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it,
but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of
pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion
instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to
question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood
whispers to me.”
“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a
little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a
little foolish.”
“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw
into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude
is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the
spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the
midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul
we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it
easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able
to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the
thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his
goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open,
having no goal.”
“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is
not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn
to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and
complement.”
“It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I
must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it
is letting go”
“Without words, without writing and without books there would
be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever
good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and
transform it into something of value.”
“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people
live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”
“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile
without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of
love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful
in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable
from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. ”
“Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the
years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still,
wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars
revolve.”
“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged —
to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life
in its mysterious, innate harmony.”
“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.”
“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to
show us how much we can endure.”
“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that
perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That
is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of
them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path
is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
“I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so
much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become
a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the
greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.”
“It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world,
to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world,
not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the
world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
“There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and
still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk,
so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure
fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is
within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the
apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie
to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not
harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it
storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your
poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy,
the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes,
while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the
mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!”
“Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving
those who destroy them.”
“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure
without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch,
every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness
to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration
of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being
conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the
bad feeling of being used or misused.”
“Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have
the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be
attracted and begins to attract.”
Russian author Venedict Yerofeyev, photo by N. Malysheva
Ruth Moore
16
December 2016
Venedikt Erofeev: The Lost Genius of Soviet Literature
Venedikt
Erofeev’s life, like his writing, is often referred to as a riddle. Yet this
man, who lived a life of vagrancy and drunkenness, is now regarded as the
underground voice of an entire nation: a voice that both celebrated and
lambasted the social inertia of the Soviet system.
Despite
this unpromising start Erofeev was highly talented, possessing an incredibly
quick mind and vivid imagination. He won a place at Moscow State University, an
honor which promised to nurture his prodigious academic talent. This should
have been the fulfillment of all of his youthful ambitions, yet Erofeev felt
stifled. The courses and teachers were restricting. He refused to attend
military training and was thrown out of the faculty. He proceeded to enter a
serious of other higher education establishments only to be again expelled for
‘moral degeneracy’, a buzzword at the time for any individual who seemed to set
themselves at odds with the regimented structures in place to ensure loyalty
and love for the state.
Soviet
reality was in many aspects so absurd that it seems entirely fitting Erofeev’s
carnivalesque prose should sweep around and around in circles of rich dialogue
and rivers of alcohol.There are many who believe that Erofeev’s work is untranslatable,
replete as it is with cultural references to classical poems, the orthodox
faith and slurred streams of consciousness. The prose-poem forges a new
literary style in allowing us to be simultaneously privy to Venichka’s internal
dialogue, the external dialogue of his accompanying passengers and to the
author himself. Indeed you can’t help but remark on the autobiographical
element which runs through the narrative with both protagonist and author
sharing name, profession and drinking habit.
Another
of his works, Walpurgis Night, has since garnered increasing attention both
within Russia and further afield. This is the only play that Erofeev penned to
make it to publication. Now acclaimed as the comic pinnacle of the Brezhnev era
the script showcases Erofeev’s incredible ability to combine despair and
hilarity in one darkly witty microcosm of Soviet society. Microcosm in the
fullest sense of the word; the entire play is set in the claustrophobic
confines of Ward 3, in a hospital for the insane. The main character Gurevich
is an alcoholic who has been confined to the institution for dissident behavior.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Theatre In My Pajamas is looking for multi-act plays for serial readings on Zoom that will be read over multiple weeks from January through March and maybe beyond.
A group that started out as a dozen theatre geeks has grown to a thriving community of nearly 600 members. Since March, we have had readings and open mics of new plays, unrehearsed, and the results have been powerful. Our readings have been ten-minute plays, and they have featured playwrights from Vermont to New Zealand. But we are now ready to grow. Get your pajamas on and send us your work.
***
FAST & FURIOUS FESTIVAL 2021
Spokane Stage Left proudly continues its ONE PAGE play festival running virtually February 27, 2020. We are currently accepting plays for the festival from all over the world. Each play is presented in traditional reader's theater format. It is FREE to submit!
***
This Moment Productions seeks to redefine the way we consume theatre in a changing world. We are seeking submissions that fit the Zoom or online streaming format only. We will produce four, ten minute one acts. Each will stream for two weekends in Spring 2021.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** OVERLOOKED NO MORE - THEATER ***
Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
When Margarita Xirgu met Federico García Lorca in the summer of 1926 at a bar in Madrid, he was a fledgling playwright and a questionable investment for most producers.
But Xirgu, a Catalan actress and director who was also a lesbian and a political radical, was known for her willingness to take risks. She accepted the challenge, and staged Lorca’s “Mariana Pineda” in Barcelona the next year, with costumes by the artist Salvador Dalí.
The play was a hit, and it cemented a friendship between Lorca and Xirgu, who became instrumental in staging and exporting his work in the early years of the 20th century. Lorca went on to become one of Spain’s most admired writers.
More...
***
Anne Crawford Flexner was a successful playwright. Her big hit was the theater and film adaptation of the Alice Hegan Rice novel “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” a tale of urban poverty. She wanted Eleanor to become a writer and supported her research with royalties from “Mrs. Wiggs,” along with additional money she left her when she died in 1955. Eleanor Flexner dedicated “Century of Struggle” to her mother, whose “life was touched at many points by the movement whose history I have tried to record.”
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***
She was a tiny 12-year-old girl with wide, darting eyes and a big headdress, undulating across the stage in the graceful, highly stylized dance of Bali.
Her arms floated and twined, as if they had no bones or joints, as she dipped and rose to the urgent syncopated gongs of a gamelan orchestra.
It was 1952 in New York and the young dancer’s name was Ni Gusti Ayu Raka Rasmi. She had never before left her home village, Peliatan, with its small, mud-walled houses surrounded by bright green rice fields.
Now she was the star of the Bali Dancers, a troupe that had traveled more than 10,000 miles into the alien worlds of the United States and Europe.
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***
For as long as there have been people with disabilities, the able-bodied world has made clear to them, in ways subtle and not-at-all subtle, that it prefers them to be unseen, except for the occasional feel-good photo op, and that it definitely prefers them to be unheard.
Cheryl Marie Wade was having none of that.
Beginning in the mid-1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wade turned her experiences as a woman with severe rheumatoid arthritis into performance poetry, one-woman shows and films that were funny, moving, startling and, above all, unsparing.
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***
“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”
“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”
So begins “Ballad of Birmingham,” a poem inspired by the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.
They were also the first words that the poet, a librarian named Dudley Randall, printed and copyrighted under the name Broadside Press in 1965.
He did it to retain his rights to the poem, which was adapted into a folk song by Jerry Moore.
Randall started the publishing house, which was based in Detroit, with his librarian’s paycheck, and it swiftly became a success, producing dozens of broadsides — a printing style in which just one side of the paper is used — as part of the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of African-American literature, theater, music and other arts.
More...
***
Sissieretta Jones forged an unconventional path to singing opera, becoming the first African-American woman to headline a concert on the main stage of Carnegie Hall, in 1893.
She sang at the White House, toured the nation and the world, and, in a performance at Madison Square Garden, was conducted by the composer Antonin Dvorak.
But there were color lines she never managed to break, like the one that kept the nation’s major opera companies segregated, denying her the chance to perform in fully staged operas.
“They tell me my color is against me,” she once lamented to a reporter from The Detroit Tribune.
When another interviewer suggested that she transform herself with makeup and wigs, she dismissed the idea.
“Try to hide my race and deny my own people?” she responded in the interview, which was published by The San Francisco Call in 1896. “Oh, I would never do that.” She added: “I am proud of belonging to them and would not hide what I am even for an evening.”
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***
The Angel of the Waters alighted in Central Park with more of a thud than a splash.
“All had expected something great, something of angelic power and beauty,” The New York Times wrote of the unveiling of the Bethesda fountain statue on June 1, 1873, “and when a feebly-pretty idealess thing of bronze was revealed the revulsion of feeling was painful.”
“The figure resembles a servant girl executing a polka,” the unnamed reviewer added.
It was an inauspicious debut for the first public art commission ever awarded to a woman in New York City.
But over the decades, as the Angel watched over picnics, parties and wedding proposals, and appeared in movies and television shows as a silent observer of musical numbers and grand romantic moments on the park’s Bethesda Terrace, she became all but synonymous with New York.
Her creator, Emma Stebbins, was the daughter of a wealthy New York banker whose family encouraged her pursuit of art. She enjoyed success from a young age: Her work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and she was nominated in 1842 to be an associate member of the group — the only category open to amateurs. Later, she moved to Rome to study sculpture and fell in love with an American actress, with whom she lived for years.
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