Staying sane while working a steady-eddy phone job requires periodic full-body immersion in art, but petty-betty phone jobs don't provide the kind of money needed to buy theatre tickets or pay for expensive museum admissions. So like any starving artist in desperate need of art, I do what is necessary to throw myself onto or into the nearest art island/slagheap/ burning bush (or swamp).
I volunteer.

This week, I hustled over to SF to serve as a volunteer usher at Forum,  Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' experimental theatre venue. I wanted to see  Eiko & Koma's Fragile,  originally produced  as a gallery installation for the Walker Art Center but then recreated as a more formal performance piece together with SF's own Kronos Quartet. It was, I thought, just the thing to take my mind away from surveys and chitter-chatter, maybe push me into the light  . . . or bury me in dark. Either way,  I was ready -- I thought -- to sit quietly for four hours as the two of them lay naked barely moving, caught inside haunting bells mixed with the lapsed strings of the Kronos Quartet.

I would sit -- I thought -- as silently, as still as their unclothed bodies dusted with white rice powder and bits of leaves and feathers. I would be as naked as they, my mind my spirit as stripped as motionless, lying on mounded dirt, while the Kronos played. 

Either I was caught thinking (again) or I should stop already with all this thinking.

I didn't know that my volunteer gig would remove me from the performance space, abandon me to the narrow space of an organized past. I did not know I would  not be asked to seat the audience and then left to my own devices within in the womb of the performance space as expected. I was surprised and a bit chagrined that I was instead positioned as a "guard" of the 'archives,' asked to stand in a back corner behind the impervious black curtain separating the stage from an artificial yet "upfront" backstage where a suspended oversized rack holding costumes from past performances swayed above a floor littered with snapshots from past performances.

Nostalgia gone wild.

I was supposed to keep folks from walking away with the photos, from grabbing the costumes unceremoniously, from sneaking into the  dark unexplored space behind the stage. Control the crowd. But I was alone in that corner. I was expected to guard the past, but, of course, no one was interested in visiting the past. 

No one cared to dive headfirst into the sensuous floor to ceiling cascade of fiber, string, and paper that had been essential to the set of a previous performance. No one reached out to grab the over-sized kimonos, the faux bearskin wraps, or the silky scarlet camisole suspended above the hundreds of photos scattered about the floor. No one knelt to peer at those snapshots or picked them up to hold them closer to the light.

No one wandered into the corral of the past.  The audience was dutiful and respectful. The door opened. The door closed. They walked in, turned left, sat down, and stayed neatly folded onto the benches inside the curtained performance space.

The musicians played. The bells tolled. The two naked dusted bodies curled and uncurled, and I, guard of the past, stayed in my corner, leaning on myself,  splashed color, dim light, and violins, stretched past fragile.

I make a lousy guard -- not really my nature to guard things -- but in this case I was a ridiculous guard, a Beckettian guard, waiting for waiting, standing inside of standing, leaning on nothing.

I was extraneous.

I would like to believe that the audience was more focused on the present and thus ignored the carefully collected past, hanging  unceremoniously off to the side.

I went out this morning in search of December trees. Autumn is an extended season here in the bay area. By early December trees are still fully garbed in red and gold. I found some bright red trees just beginning to lose their leaves, but what I didn't expect to find and did were angels.

Angels guarding graves. Stone angels. Marble angels. Angels with one arm up, the other down. Angels holding roses, books, garlands of flowers and fruit. Angels with aprons overflowing with stone flowers or trailing grape vines. Angels dressed in free-flowing robes, and angels with bare chests and muscled legs. Angels looking downward while gesturing  toward blue skies. Angels stepping out.

On our way from the Post Office, somehow Mr. E and I ended up walking across the lush lawns and rolling hills of St.Mary's cemetery off Pleasant Valley Road just north of Piedmont. This is an older cemetery -- many buried here were born in the 19th century, some here in CA, many in Ireland -- and quiet. We were alone, my little dog and I, wandering about the graves. Mr. E sniffed about hoping to find a ball or a stick; I walked carefully, offering respect to those who lie beneath the grass, protected by these carefully carved angels, barefoot on stone, too heavy to fly but  lifted above the grass and mud below.

I'm a creature of the sea -- more a fan of mermaids than angels -- but I love that humans imagine otherworldly creatures looking much like themselves but with great wings that can carry them above clouds, past  stars and out into the deep vastness of space past asteroids and cold dead planets so unlike our verdant breathing laughing paradise.

What do these angels have to say to the universe? Do they whisper color, breathe out butterflies and hummingbirds, scatter autumn leaves across the Milky Way? Or when they fly do they leave trails of memories, great piles of jumbled words in their wake?

I like to imagine all those years of void between the earth and Jupiter as not gaspingly empty after all but delicately constructed of zillions of small memories snipped from billions of lives that are no longer remembered here on earth. Stretched between this moon and that asteroid would be the smooth feel of an apple picked green from a tree long gone wild attached to the surprise of grapes squeezed from their skin and then spot glued to the bright green of new grass on  a raw patch of land in some 19th century industrial zone, which might in turn  link tenuously to a baby's first cry or a hand waving good-by diffused in the scent of baking bread  or the aroma of burning plastic. No one would think such attachments strange. After all, every little bit, every scrap, every dust bunny  is necessary when constructing an infinite void of muchness.

If these angels were to leave their perches and fly from earth into the void, it is lovely to imagine them pushing memory before them with every beat of their wings and dragging behind them long diaphanous trails of scents and sounds, all that has been felt or heard or seen in a lifetime, expanding and even creating the universe as they fly.

Why not imagine our universe as a 'muchness' rather than a 'nothingness', the vastness of space thick with the language of life . . . all of life, its agonies, its simple boredom, and its beauties.

Maybe I'm just recalling the end of Tony Kushner's Angels in America when Harper, the straight wife of a gay man, leans her head against a plane window, and speaking as much to herself as to anyone, says:

When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

The net of Indra, the flight of angels, the Rapture. All imagined events designed to organize the chaos of the human world, describe as real the painful progress of a building expanding universe, dreaming ahead and leaving nothing behind. The trees switch from green to red to black; the sky bleeds through, and those of us below keep walking, endlessly walking.

Last evening I had the good fortune to serve as an usher at SF's Yerba Buena Novellus Theatre for Krissy Keefer's Dance Brigade who offered its audience a most dynamic performance that left us all feeling grateful, giddy with hope and good humor. They will be performing again this evening (Nov 19) and tomorrow afternoon. Show up! The tickets are free. You heard that right, free,  passed out on the day of the concerts. Reservations are recommended (general admission), call 415-273-4633, especially after last nights remarkable performance.

I urge you to participate in this wonderful and joyful community event that discusses through art, dance, and sharp humor both our contemporary troubles and the joyful spirit of community that sustains us all. I might even venture to suggest that it might be life-changing. It was  -- in a way -- for me.  I don't ordinarily discuss the many events I attend around town, but I am happy to mention this exuberant performance, hoping that others will attend. I also want to make note of an odd event that happened to me last evening, how the kindness of a stranger renewed my faith in human beings and made me aware that a seamless transference of positive energies that can happen if one remains open, aware, and available to the currents of the universe.

I lost my cellphone, dropped it somewhere in theatre, sometime during the 2 hour performance.

When I realized it was gone, my heart sank. I had bought my smartphone for very little money and as I have had it for almost three years, it is now chock full of notes, photos, addresses etc. I  can't afford to buy a new phone at today's prices, didn't want to start again, reviewing plans, phones etc. I didn't expect to get it back; folks are being mugged these days for their cellphones, but when I got home, I called  my phone and surprisingly a young woman answered; Shawn said  she had found my phone and would return it.

After hanging up the phone, I thought what might I give this kind stranger in return for her kindness. I closed my eyes and saw this beautiful dress, made for me in Yola, Nigeria (pictured). There was something in this young woman's voice that made me think -- this dress is not for me; it is hers. To make a long story short, this morning I walked down to the West Oakland Bart, dress in hand, and met Shawn. One look told me that the dress would indeed look better on her than on me, and when I asked her if she might accept it, she smiled and told me that she was a member of Oakland's dynamic collective  Sistahs of the Drum, a group that performs contemporary spirit through and within traditional West African rhythms. They perform always in West African Dress. I didn't know that before meeting her; our conversation had been brief, limited to time and place.

How happy I am that this dress, lovingly and carefully made in Nigeria, that I carried back to San Francisco only to hang unused for years in my closet had finally found its rightful home.

The kindness of strangers.

Friday afternoon, as I turned my car down 14th St in front of Frank Ogawa Plaza, two motorcycles cops pulled across the intersection closing down the street. In front of me were masses of peaceful protesters walking towards Clay Street, and as my car was alone, the only non-official car on the block, I did what any sensible person lassoed by police barricades would do. I pulled over to the curb, parked and walked over to the plaza where a few folk not marching were milling about the pitched tents and the neat piles of posters and placards of Occupy Oakland.

 
One of the first things I noticed were large chalk drawings on the sidewalks, each one illustrating either some disturbing aspect of contemporary American life or more hopeful suggestions for positive change.

A large and somewhat unsettling drawing caught my eye. Below the scrawled letters “Dying for Education,” was the image of  corpse, dead eyes staring blankly skyward, a bullet wound in his chest. Above the “Dying for Education" sign were multiple portraits of young soldiers, all bloodied and blinded.

Everyone knows that too many young Americans who cannot afford to pay the expensive tuition now demanded by public Universities join the military, believing they will avoid the suffocating burden of loans assumed by fellow students and that their tuition will be paid when and if they leave the battlefields alive. Sadly, too many die before they attend their first class, and those who survive are, as the drawing suggests,  so badly wounded emotionally and physically that  education can no longer serve as the lifeboat they once imagined it might be.

Education should not be so expensive that students must either go to war or into deep debt to pay for it. If the federal government were to subsidize education, not war, then without becoming enslaved to war or debt, American students might gain the knowledge needed to contribute positively to a peaceful and productive future.

The OCCUPY movement asks legislators to think responsibly and discover ways of revising national expenditures so that we might recover our economy and our democracy. We might, for example, again consider Roosevelt's very 'educational' 3Rs:

Relief. Recovery. Reform.

Forgiving student loans would both provide Relief and Recovery. Two locks freed with one key. Millions of recent and long past graduates are currently saddled with student loans greater than most mortgages, and that overwhelming debt prevents them from starting business, buying houses or cars. To forgive those loans would provide immediate relief, and as these citizens would then have more disposable income, such forgiveness would immediately contribute to needed economic recovery. Money previously paid only to banks to cover exorbitant interest on crushing debt would become available to be spent in the community.

Banks were bailed out; bail out students. No one should have to risk death to gain an education, and there is no question that a strong nation needs its people educated.

It doesn't take a genius to notice that Reform of institutional and corporate worlds is necessary if we are to relieve the suffering of the unemployed and the underemployed and recover our democracy. The time has come for US citizens to stand together and demand accountability  for the military industrial complex. This drawing, pictured at the right, reminds us of just how much we have let slide. Blackwater, a shadow army created by the Bush Administration, operating both abroad and here on US soil, is representative of the dangerous continued privatization of institutions that in a democracy should remain accountable, regulated  and public. We know of Blackwater's activities in Iraq, but many do not know that heavily armed Blackwater mercenaries zoomed about New Orleans after Katrina, looking for  'criminals,'  answering to no elected or appointed agency of the law. We do not need private mercenary armies occupying our country. We, the citizens, we the people, must occupy our communities, our land, our democracy.

After the swelling crowd of peaceful walkers turned up Clay St, I was allowed to move my car and did. Later that evening, long after dark, I was checking the local news and discovered that earlier around noon the 91st homicide of the year had happened only blocks from my house. Again, a 20-year-old man was shot dead, this time on 11th St at Willow.

Vigilantes with guns are always egregious and dangerous.

Rest in Peace, Occupy your Dreams.

Every movement, including the OCCUPY movement, needs powerful graphic representation, a symbol that can visually communicate swiftly and articulately just what that movement has to say.

Sugar Bunni, a Bay Area performance artist, has I think created a symbol that sums up just what that 1% who hold most of the wealth in the US think about the rest of us.

The Street  was cheerful Saturday, and after walking about the neighborhood, I came home and jotted these notes:

Everyone I meet smiles. A middle-aged black man greets me, passes, and then looking back over his shoulder, tips his head to one side, waves his hand at the house transforming across the street, begins to speak but stops.

Forgive me, he says. I am confused this morning.  

Oh, it is a good day, I say.  Yes, it is.

 His Yes, it is echoes mine but it is his smile that lands on the sidewalk, near the telephone pole spiky with staples and a new flyer advertising the August Wilson play to be performed this weekend and next in the backyard of the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement.  Two people with a tiny dog stop to chat, and a man with a Chihuahua in his arms happily sets his dog on the sidewalk so that he and Earnest can play for a bit. How light the air feels -- as if all negativity just blew clean away overnight. I am waiting for stars to fall or butterflies to rise in great clouds. The joy in the air is palpable, but I have no idea from where it drifts, but I don’t care about where. It is here.

Maybe all the renovation going on is making folks hopeful. The large Victorian next to the Community Center now sits on a brand new foundation, and seeing it with its new strong footing and its surrounding buildings (three) undergoing equally complete renovations is thrilling. Something exciting and exceedingly hopeful is happening here. Perhaps soon, it will provide gracious homes for for five or even six families with a spacious yard for gardens. Or perhaps it will become a school or an arts center or a medical clinic . . . maybe the yard will not be just a parking lot, but will be home to rose bushes and fruit trees, beds for vegetables.

It's hopeful . . . And the whimsical little house down the block looks cheerful with its new foundation and brand-new cedar shingles . . .

Later, after a sleepy day of ordinary things, I walked down to the Prescott-Joseph Center and into the vast backyard where a stage has been built under soaring oaks with giant palms as a back drop. This is the Thea Bowman Memorial Theatre, home of the Lower Bottom Players, and the scene for tonight’s performance of Gem of the Ocean, August Wilson’s last play, but the chronological first of his Pittsburgh series. The audience arrived slowly – few neighborhood folk, which is disappointing . . . mostly young folk who arrive by car from elsewhere and parked nearby. After the double shooting last month, few people walk these streets after 10 pm, but I will walk anywhere anytime for theatre, especially for this performance, featuring Ayodele Nzinga as Ester Tyler and Stuart Hall as Solly. I feel enthusiastic about being there and hope only that I will be warm enough. The man taking tickets points to a pile of freshly washed moving blankets, suggests I take one, but I am certain I will be warm enough, but then as the light dims, the temperature drops rapidly, I wonder if my sweater and jacket will keep me warm.

The play itself warmed me. I was so happy to be sitting under foggy skies, watching these accomplished actors perform August Wilson’s last play, both powerful and tender, calling out to all who see it to discard any need to place blame on others for past or present actions but to instead to look to the self, to descend to the ‘city of bones’ and find there compassion for those who have gone before, compassion that can be used to direct one’s footsteps in this world.

Hang on to the boat, pay your passage to the city of bones, and remember all you see there. The head bones, the leg bones, the fingers that beckon, and those who wander with tongues of fire.