Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (15 page)

Over the years, he continued to call upon me for my mulish abilities, at one point hiring my classmate Mike Flanigan (another Pilotus) and myself to move him and Alice to their new home in beautiful Mendocino, California. We drove the moving truck whilst Shozo and Alice drove their minivan. Filling a truck with scenery, a false world, and driving it to a new place to re-create that world anew was an act I was quite familiar with, but the notion of making that transition in real life was still quite an adventure to my way of thinking. Shozo had a real sense of the swashbuckler about him, albeit a relatively small, graceful version. A published master of several Zen disciplines, such as Kabuki theater and dance, ikebana (flower arrangement),
sumi-e
(black ink painting), Zen meditation, and the tea ceremony, Shozo had spent the year of 1981 touring the American Southwest in a van, painting the landscapes for his
sumi-e
book. Pretty badass. By the time I was twenty-three, he had taken me to Japan, Hungary, Cyprus, London, and California and had gotten me paid for most of it!

Foust, Flanigan, and I were never the leads in his shows, as there were more beautiful actors who were better dancers, but we were dependable, so he kept us around the most. We would be called upon for comic relief. In between long, elegiac sequences of shifting light and undulating, colorful dances in museum-quality traditional costumes of Shozo’s design, we would run onto the stage, fall down, then run off. There’s room for everyone.

My favorite rule from Sensei was “Always maintain the attitude of a student.” When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in, as that person will wake up every day wondering when someone is going to throw a parade in their honor for being so smart. As human beings, we, by the definition of our very natures, can never be perfect. This means that as long as we are alive and kicking, we can be improving ourselves. No matter our age, if we always have a project to which we can apply ourselves, then we will wake up every day with an objective, something productive to get done. This allows us to go to bed at night in the peaceful knowledge that we have done some good, gained some achievement, however small. Having ears for this lesson has been one of the luckiest pieces of listening I’ve done, because it has led to my woodworking discipline, one of the greatest joys of my life.

There were less refined lessons in Shozo’s textbook as well. Visiting Cyprus with a professional tour of
Kabuki Achilles
, we young men were housed at one point in an ancient monastery in the mountain village of Kalopanayiotis. After a week or so, Shozo looked in on us and noticed that the bathroom was in a state of dishevelment much as one might have expected from six young drunk men sharing one bathroom. We were thoroughly humiliated when our sensei came fuming out of the facilities, severely admonishing us for our slobbery. “And not just here!” he said, lecturing us. “Any bathroom you ever use, if there is a mess, it does not even matter if you made the mess. The next person to use the room will
think
you made the mess. What if your mother was coming to use this bathroom?” Heavy, heavy, deep shit, and true. I have never been in a messy restroom since without thinking of that day. His mentality then further ties me directly to the Wendell Berry of it all, for if we think of others in our fastidiousness or lack thereof around the toilet, how can we not extrapolate that notion into how we are leaving the rest of the world for the others who will come to use it after us?

His most all-encompassing bit of erudition is perhaps found in the Zen koan “The way of the arts is the way of the Buddha.” According to Sato-sensei, Buddhist teachings tell us that we must strive to return to the purity of the day we were born. In the performing arts, the visual arts, as well as the martial arts, when you are completely focused on your art, you are in that pure state. Therefore “the passage”; “the way of creating art” is the same as “the way of the Buddha.” I love the focus that this sensibility places on the importance of one’s art in regards to a person’s inner journey as opposed to all of the attention paid today to the exterior effects of artistic performance.

Like Robin McFarquhar, Shozo Sato–sensei continues to be an important influence in my life, so it seems like they’re getting the pretty short end of the stick: I took their classes, I graduated, and now they have to continue to teach me? Whatever the case, they seem to persevere without complaint, which is, I suppose, the teacher’s lot. When Megan and I were married in our backyard, Shozo performed a tea ceremony for us as part of the proceedings, a rite which felt profoundly more sacred than the recitation of any corresponding Western religious dogma. Our marriage is ten years strong as of this writing, so I guess that hearty bowl of green tea was a pretty good batch.

I have been lucky enough to see and do a great deal in my forty-two years of life, but I have not discovered a greater treasure than a good teacher. My only hope is that I can begin to repay them by passing their lessons along to anybody with their ears on right.

Make a Goddamn Gift

This chapter hopes to serve as a gentle reminder to myself and all the rest of us to make our gift-giving opportunities in life count. To my way of thinking, the tradition of giving and receiving gifts has been all but ruined by the general prosperity and largesse that we enjoy in America and much of the world today, in effect devaluing the very value and meaning of gifts themselves. The circumstance that makes us so soft as a society is to be found in our complete achievement of personal comfort. The vast majority of our nation’s people can buy pretty much anything they need. Not anything they want, necessarily, but anything they
need
to achieve a satisfactory degree of creature comfort. Clothing, water, shoes, shelter, food. Beer, throwing stars, charcoal, Doritos, diapers, iPhone apps. The staples.

We’re all complicit here, holding hands, or linking arms, rather, so we can look at Twitter whilst huddled together in our handbasket, barreling straight to hell. To wit: If you had the sand to suggest to me that I lower the window of my vehicle by the method of the downright cardiovascular exercise of pumping a window crank lever around in circles, literally moving the window with my mechanical exertions, I’d pitch a fit that you could hear for a country mile. Holy good Christ, we have made things so goddamn easy for ourselves! Finding our schedules relieved of so many of the tedious household tasks that wore our parents’ fingerprints off, we find ourselves with a surplus of spare time on our fleshy hands. One might proffer the suggestion that we exploit that bonus time to do something like build a canoe, or at least haul one to the creek and paddle it, reveling in the birdsong and whitetail deer that come right down on the creek banks to eat gummy bears straight from our hands. But then, one might easily argue that such an activity would require some energy, some gumption, or, god forfend, some work! Wouldn’t it be easier, one might continue, to remain inside upon our pillowy duffs, lollygagging in regal comfort? It’s a short fall from making that choice to finding oneself online. Shopping. And hey, buying things is fun!

We love to buy presents for our children, our friends, and our neighbors. In America, there really is a lot of time to kill with all kinds of noble pastimes like shopping, and, when you get right down to it, perhaps there is a recipient even more deserving of treats than those aforementioned beneficiaries. I do believe that, as a group, we have determined that we most prefer buying gifts for
ourselves
. Objects are just so easy to come by. Michael Pollan puts out a new book? Boom, preordered it on Amazon. We can buy ourselves gifts before the ink is even dry on the pages there in the book machine. Once upon a time for me, something commensurate with a Michael Pollan book or a new Tom Waits record would have been the prize of my year, were I to find it waiting under my Christmas tree or unwrap it upon my birthday. I also used to thrill at receiving necessary items as presents, like simple socks or work gloves. Nowadays I have too many gloves. Because I have purchased leather gloves online that appeared to be a good deal, or just because I liked their look. Their nice cut. Well-shaped fingers. Add to Shopping Cart. Click to Complete Order. Here they come.

Prosperity is a good thing, right? Having too many gloves is a state of affairs preferable to working one’s hands raw, yes? Absolutely it is. No question. But for me, “too many gloves” is symptomatic of a larger deficit that I don’t feel good about. Because I find that the greater the ease with which such bounty is purchased, at least in my case, the less the significance the giving of it contains. This is why I try harder at gifts.

My first line of offense against this sort of apathy is simply understanding the impact of a little time spent. Even merely writing out a thoughtful/funny card goes a lot further toward signaling your affection than a “cute top” purchased from that popular garment-shopping website. Not only is it apparent that you took the time to select your words and commit them to cardstock, but by gifting a poem or a joke or a few verses of your own, you force the reader to pause in his/her rhythm and consider what you were trying to accomplish when you scribbled those words. That transaction between the two of you is the gift. In it resides a ceremony rife with tradition that outstrips in my estimation a great many retail goods. Short on words? Draw a flower. Draw a frog. Draw some tits (always hilarious). Add a triangular bush below them for a bona-fide slam-dunk. PS: Cards don’t have to be your conventional folded thin cardboard or paper. Unlikely objects add a flavor of whimsy that scores a lot of points. A two-by-four. A pair of underwear. A piece of fabric or leather. Go nuts.

When people admonish me for making Megan a card, I say to them, “You make a goddamn card for your significant other! Go to your printer. There’s paper in there. Locate it and pull out a few sheets (in case of mistakes). Fold one in half and draw a heart on the front. Open it up and write
I LOVE YOU
on the inside. Sign your name. You will get kissed—big time. You want the bonus round? Go outside and find a tiny piece of nature, a twig, a leaf, a pebble, a shell. A chrysalis if you’re really gifted. Adhere your artifact inside the heart and then get stretched out, because you’re going for a ride to the realm of coitus.”

Once you’ve mastered the card, take it up a notch to handmade gifts. Ho-ho! You think you like the card-fueled oral pleasurings you’re receiving now? Just wait until he/she gets a load of the scarf you have knit for him/her! That won’t be the only load exchanged that night. Making gifts is also a great way to perpetuate a hobby in a productive way, and a solid hobby can keep you out of the hair of your significant other. What do you know? That’s another gift!

Don’t have the time/budget/inclination to take up woodworking or chandlery or glassblowing? No sweat. Step up to some tasty papier-mâché. I have used this childhood art-class technique more times than I can count (well, actually, no, probably just seventeen times) in my theater work, and it is super fun EVERY TIME. You make just enough of a mess to know that you’ve achieved something, and you could potentially end up with a sculpted masterpiece. Something I love to do as a character actor is to craft my own facial prosthetics for the stage, which is a fancy way of saying that I like to make funny noses. If you cast your face in plaster and then sculpt your new features in clay upon that plaster version of your face, then your noses or chins or devil horns will fit you perfectly, providing countless hours of hijinks!

Other fun objects to immortalize in paper and glue are the breasts and the penis. If/when you replicate your virile member, or really any body part, it is key to coat the area with petroleum jelly to prevent an intensely painful (hair) removal once the papier-mâché is dry. In the case of a penis casting, one obviously needs to maintain an erection until the glue sets up, which can take several minutes (I’ve read), so be prepared to sustain an atmosphere of arousal for the necessary duration. Once you have achieved crafting a successful facsimile, you can also elongate the shaft of said manhood by sculpting an extra couple of inches in clay, then adding more papier-mâché to the extra length (I’ve also read). When you are happy with your product, you might wonder what the hell you’re supposed to do with a papier-mâché version of your rig. Well, I’ll tell you. Create a waterproof seal on the inside of the paper dick with epoxy or spar varnish. Glue the base of the shaft to a flat rock or piece of wood to create a strong, heavy foundation. Gently cut in a urethra (pee hole) with a sharp knife and paint to taste. Fill partway with water, insert a nice daisy or tea rose, and you have a darling bud vase!

No matter how you decide to spend a little more time on your gestures of giving, the point is just quite simply that you do. You don’t have to give a person a papier-mâché penis vase to get a reaction, but you won’t be sorry if you do.

Kabuki Farmboy Takes Chicago

A
s is only proper, my years in college saw me undergo a drastic personal transformation, as well as participate in a larger group consummation with those several champions who were to form the Defiant Theatre. Our sage Robin McFarquhar has since asserted that, in the twenty years since our matriculation, he has never seen another band of students with such an unquenchable work ethic, willing to stay up all night regularly to fulfill our artistic missions of mischief and beauty. I am very grateful to hear that I, once again, was in the right place and time to be valued by these peers, despite my relative inexperience onstage. Joe Foust and Christopher Johnson, destined to become Defiant’s first artistic director, spearheaded production teams to create pageants of theater both challenging and hilarious.

A ragtag team of puckish miscreants coalesced, membership in which required only an adherence to our collective taste and the willingness to work one’s fingers to the bone. The original gangsters were Johnson and Foust, Darren Critz, Chris Kantowicz, Jen Cotteleer, Rich Norwood, Kara Loquist, Richard Ragsdale, and myself, soon to be joined by Michelle “PeePee” Primeaux, Tatro, Emil Boulos, Andrew Leman, Linda Gillum, Rob Kimmel, Lisa Rothschiller, Jim Slonina, Sean Sinitski, Will Schutz, Barb and Chris Thometz, and many others as the years rolled past. We capering fools were drawn inexorably together to weave shows of intelligence and silliness in a way that thrilled us and fed us completely. Joe’s was my favorite brain, wickedly clever and funny for days. A naturally magnanimous leader, he had such a great sensibility for utilizing old-school theatrical conventions in a completely fresh way to incite mirth in any audience. He also wielded a fresh perspective that made him a wonderful and sensitive leader, which I have since learned is exactly the type of person in whose service I thrive.

Late one stormy night, properly buzzed, we all convened on our Nevada Street porch, festooned with fairy lights, incense, and candles, to draw up the first charter of our artistic collective, with plans to move our efforts to Chicago and thereby take over the known universe. The swollen sky hinted at great portent. We signed our names to the magnificent parchment in fire, jam, and absinthe. Lightning crashed, the four winds howled, shrieked, and yee-hawed, neighborhood mothers shuddered in their sleep, and the frilly little gillyflowers in the south meadows wilted and shed their pretty petals. The Defiant Theatre was born.

As daunting as this transition seemed, we had found pockets of encouragement when we had previously visited the city of big shoulders—we’d taken group trips to see plays at the Goodman Theatre, which had been very inspiring. It was there I first witnessed a great Chicago character actor named Steve Pickering, who was a big, thick Juggernaut sort of a guy. I saw him assay some unlikely roles for a guy built like a small tractor, such as Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet
and Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. In the opening moments of this particular production, Steve/Puck rappelled in from the lighting grid above in commando gear. There was a park bench center stage, which he examined, and then, brandishing a can of spray paint, administered the word
fuck
onto the bench. He furtively glanced about for passersby, and then he turned around and transformed the
F
into a
P
. Puck. This was my kind of guy! After years of being surrounded by more classically thin and frail theater gents, I was very exhilarated to see a guy who was a little more stout (like myself) getting cast in these plum roles. Having had some trouble getting cast thus far, I was reassured by Steve’s success that Chicago might just have some goodness in store for me.

Fortunately, just as we moved up to the city in the fall of 1993, Wisdom Bridge Theatre, where my sensei, Shozo, had produced earlier award-winning Kabuki shows over many years, like
Kabuki Othello
, was doing a revival of one of his biggest previous hits,
Kabuki
Medea
, starring a couple of Chicago theater luminaries, Henry Godinez and Barbara Robertson, as Jason and Medea. Lo and behold, we three or four Defiant youngsters were just moving to town with more recent Kabuki training than anyone in the city of Chicago, if not the nation (not a lot of Kabuki training going on outside of Shozo’s classroom). Thus, as if his training and generosity to date weren’t enough, Shozo then handed us our first paychecks in our professional lives as well. Now that’s a teacher.

A select portion of our Defiant number had already been fortunate enough to participate in a couple of productions of
Kabuki Achilles
, having toured Japan, Hungary, and Cyprus, as well as performing it professionally outside of Philadelphia at the estimable People’s Light & Theatre Company for several months. Shozo’s bread and butter was adapting Greek and Shakespearean tragedies into the traditional Kabuki style. The epic story lines and larger-than-life emotional arcs lend themselves perfectly to the spectacularly presentational style of Kabuki, which we studied diligently for years under our sensei. Imagine Hector and Achilles in samurai armor, fighting it out with
katana
(samurai swords). Amazing.

Amongst the Defiant tribe, this experience resulted in a communal company reverence for the tried-and-true conventions of Kabuki theater, which we did not hesitate to later exploit in our own plays. Conventions like the
koken
, who are basically stagehands, technically visible but clad in full black robes and sheer black hoods that render them “invisible” to the audience.
Koken
will scurry across the stage in a sort of ducklike squat-walk to assist the actors in some sort of action. For example, if the character of Medea is getting ready to, say, transform into a demon and kill her children, the
koken
will come zipping out and trick her wig and kimono, whereupon they will turn into flames as if by magic. They’ll simultaneously slash some streaks of red and black makeup onto her face while handing her a dagger, so that in a moment’s time she is transformed from a beautiful woman into a hideous, bloodthirsty she-monster. Because of their all-black garb, the
koken
disappear into the black stage, so that the transformation appears to be happening as if by magic. These tricks were developed three hundred years ago, incorporating no technology beyond string and paint. Liking that price point, we immediately borrowed the
koken
, as well as a general sensibility of grandeur, from Kabuki and inserted them into our own Defiant productions. We created a tonal goulash kind of like a Shakespearean tragedy as writ by Tex Avery and Mel Brooks.

My good fortune kept on rolling. The stage manager of
Kabuki Medea
was doing
Richard II
next at the Goodman and they needed a fight captain, so, knowing that I had a penchant for the stage combat, she fortuitously hooked me into that gig. The fight captain is a member of the cast who is in charge of maintaining the choreography throughout the run of the show and helping to train the actors who need help with their technique. If they had been looking for anything like a good actor, I would not have gotten the nod, but they fortunately just needed a guy handy with the slapstick. To my delight, the former P(f)uck Steve Pickering was also cast in
Richard II
, as one of the main combatants, so we got to work together almost as soon as I had landed in Chicago. The cherry on top of this excellent pastry was that Robin McFarquhar had been hired up from Champaign to choreograph the fights! Christ, could I have gotten any luckier? My first two pro gigs in Chicago were with my two greatest teachers, Shozo and Robin!

Pickering took a bit of a shine to me and enlisted me to work on
The Old Man and the Sea
with him at the Next Theatre, in a nifty adaptation of Hemingway’s classic story with four dancers and some puppets, which were my department. I did the man-of-war bird and the marlin as articulated puppets that could flap and fly for their moments in the spotlight. The four dancers, with masks and a small boat, performed movements that accompanied the words of the piece, describing the action and the sea and other elements with their beautifully effective progressions. I also choreographed quarterstaff fights between the old man and the marlin, then the sharks. This was awesome, at least at first. I had immediately hooked up with my hero, Pickering, and he rewarded me with a fine lesson: Nobody could do what the Defiant Theatre did. Working with Steve was mostly fun, but he was a self-proclaimed benign dictator. Since gigs like these paid little to nothing, there was no apparent reason to continue a collaboration that was not nearly as satisfying as that with my own company. I am terribly grateful for the time I got to spend with Pickering, and for the lessons I took away from his example, but from then on, I would focus my free work upon the Defiant stage.

Speaking of, we established our company quickly and we found a great little niche audience. Everyone in the company was making a meager income by whatever means we could scare up, but we were all very satisfied to have the opportunity to make some great theater. I could afford cigarettes, coffee, burritos, beer, and weed. I wanted for nothing, and I was making theater sixteen hours a day.

I was lucky that my day job was also working in theaters as a carpenter, especially compared to many of the company members who had temp jobs in offices or other equally depressing grinds. There was one slow winter, however, that saw a few of us reduced to this quasi-telemarketing job set up by another charismatic Kabuki alumnus named Goldberg (our actual Achilles). The job was to sit in a cubicle and call cardiologists on the phone to ask them to review a new perfusion catheter that they had been utilizing. Adding to the bizarre flavor of the experience was the fact that the company had located its offices directly over the Fulton Street fish market, so this “cool” brick warehouse office absolutely reeked of fish. Anyway, a perfusion catheter is a tiny balloon that is threaded into blood vessels around the heart. If memory serves, they would insert it down in the thigh, I suppose utilizing the femoral artery, and snake this catheter up into blocked regions around the actual heart, whereupon the balloon would be inflated, effectively opening up the blockage. How crazy is that shit? And how bizarre for a bunch of barely employed actors to sit around discussing it over the phone with these surgeons who utilized the technology every day.

The upshot of that tedious gig was that we fired up a fun competition going amongst a few of us wage slaves. One chap would go into the bathroom, right there at the side of the room, and commit the sin of Onan (beat off), then, upon exiting, he would strike the glass light sconce on the wall next to the bathroom door with the eraser end of his pencil, which would cause it to ring like the bell at a boxing match, signifying a tally of exactly one successfully blown load. We would all keep score, each adding to his/her total at every possible opportunity throughout the day, until at the end of an eight-hour shift, the winner would be feted with beers by the other participants. One of my cronies, whom we’ll call Richard Krishna, and I were usually vying for the title, and I believe my record for sconce-dings in a day of work was no less than nine. You see, no matter how dreary your job, ways can be found of passing the time productively.

* * *

A
t Defiant, we prided ourselves on building our sets and props for next to no budget, often from scraps we would collect in the fruitful alleyways of Chicago. I was the technical director, or “TD,” which simply means I had all the tools. We depended heavily upon each company member to come out and help with each build, but there were a few core stalwarts who brought most of the magic home. Joe Foust could literally make anything out of gaffer’s tape, a condition born of necessity, but I was to learn later how valuable our poverty actually was to our creativity. Bigger theaters with a healthy budget could do things like drive a motorcycle onto the stage or build an entire two-story house set, whereas we would have to make our motorcycle or our two-story house out of refrigerator boxes and egg cartons. The amazing thing I learned was that audiences enjoyed ours more. If a crowd witnessed an actual motorcycle rev and roll onstage, that’s a neat spectacle, which then immediately fades, as in, “Oh. Wow. A real motorcycle,” and then it’s over, the exceptional but momentary delight of seeing an unexpected but recognizable quantity. But when an audience has to buy into whatever illusion you’ve created, say, a motorcycle made out of two people with some mailing tubes and two umbrellas, then they experience the delight of creating the object together
with
the performers, in the imagination. That’s more fun and abiding for them, because they are part of the transaction, as opposed to just sitting and coldly observing. An audience loves to have a hand in making the magic real, which is what I think should be connoted by the term an “engaging” piece of theater. Our shows were just plain really fun and, in one way, the greatest work of my life. The group of artists and the freedom that we had at the time allowed us to create and perform pieces unhindered by obligations, financial or otherwise. An artist cannot do his/her best work unless he/she feels the necessary freedom to do so. For me, this freedom culminated in Defiant’s third season, particularly in our production of
Ubu Raw
.

What is considered by history to be the first absurdist play,
Ubu Roi
, or
Ubu the King
, was written in France in the late nineteenth century by a gassy guy named Alfred Jarry. Our original translation, penned by Foust and Ragsdale, was called
Kabuki Ubu Raw
. In both cases, it’s a sort of filthy
Macbeth
story. Jarry initially wrote it as a puppet show making fun of his science teacher. When first produced in Paris, Pa Ubu entered and proclaimed his first line,
“Merde!”
(“Shit!”). The theater rioted at the profanity and they shut the show down. There’s a lot of innuendo, like, “By my green candle!” which, considered nothing short of pornographic at the time, is now completely tame. But more on
Ubu Raw
later.