I subscribe to an e-mail newsletter called The Toilet Paper, which publishes every five or six days, unless there's a holiday such as Valentine's Day, in which case a special exception is made and a newsletter appears.
It's worth the wait because those behind the newsletter know write well, with subtle humor.
Today's issue was called "Stupid Skool Roolz", about edicts put in place by two states that could very well turn off future teachers from either those states or the profession entirely. The quote in the issue was from English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton:
The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
I've written about Andy Rooney influencing me in my writing by me trying to write exactly like him, finding that I couldn't, and learning what writing style is. I've briefly mentioned Natalie Goldberg, whose books, including Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life, made me excited to write because I could write about anything! I have to write often in order to be effective, like any writer does, but Goldberg showed me the fun in it, the freedom that comes when you go through any topic, any memory, in words. Her living in Taos, New Mexico also likely planted the state in my mind when I was 10 and 11, and that was a process that exploded with The Secret of Everything by Barbara O'Neal, which makes me want to visit New Mexico. But Goldberg started it.
However, teachers on paper only go so far. In 11th grade at Hollywood Hills High School in Hollywood, Florida, I had exactly the kind of teacher Lytton describes in that quote.
Her name was Roberta Little, an English teacher, but one different from what English teachers are generally known for with grading essays to the point of nitpicking and a host of analyses of books and plays that make you wonder if the teacher in front of you actually enjoyed the book or play. Shouldn't they be analyzing dramatic effectiveness or exploring the motives of characters in order to illuminate those not-so-clear parts?
Mrs. Little did all that and much more. I had her for the latter half of 11th grade, and in that one semester, she presented Julius Caesar, A Raisin in the Sun, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, The Glass Menagerie, The Crucible, A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, and Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight!. She showed the 1970 movie version of Julius Caesar (with Jason Robards as a zombielike, utterly passionless Marcus Brutus), the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, A Raisin in the Sun, the Paul Newman-directed version of The Glass Menagerie, starring John Malkovich, Joanne Woodward, Karen Allen, and James Naughton; the 1995 version of The Scarlet Letter, the 1996 version of The Crucible, and, of course, Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight!.
It seems impossible to do all that in one semester, but Mrs. Little knew exactly how to do it: Bring the students along. Seek their opinion about what they believe to be the meaning of a work. Foster conversation that brings even more depth to what's being studied. Find out what they liked and didn't like about it, and never make them feel low about either. Give your own opinion, but don't let it be the word of law in the classroom.
I remember spending a few days in her class going over Faulkner's A Rose for Emily. I don't remember the exact discussion, but I looked at those words, absorbing the dark atmosphere of the short story. I do remember her going over it section by section, exploring motivation, descriptions of settings, character traits, and I learned that every word can be crucial to the telling of a story, and that what one writer sees, another writer may see it differently. In fact, writers beyond what we were reading weren't needed to show that. Just me and my classmates alone were enough to show that each viewpoint differs, and offers something most important to learning about this: There is no one way to interpret a story. It's going to be seen differently by being filtered through varied experiences in one's life. Certainly my classmates sitting behind, in front of, and all around me had not lived the way I lived and could always be counted on to talk about something I hadn't even considered in the story. Mrs. Little always made sure there was time for that kind of discussion. She wanted a symphony of different voices with one story or play in common, and she got it every time.
A teacher like that is also made by their love for the material, and Mrs. Little had that more than any other teacher I had had in any subject. When she was preparing to show Mark Twain Tonight!, I think there was an excerpt of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the way she described Twain's time made me feel like I was there in my imagination, like I could know that river as well as Huck did. When we watched Hal Holbrook in that 1967 TV special, I admittedly laughed when my classmates laughed, not sure where I should laugh, but watching the special over and over again in the years after, even having it now on DVD in my collection, I get the jokes now and I understand Twain quite well, because of Mrs. Little. She made me want to learn more about who Twain was, what he wrote, and why he was justifiably famous.
We spent a week or two reading The Glass Menagerie. She gave out parts to my classmates and I, and then switched them around after a few pages because it was a lot to read. I remember wanting to read Tom, though I don't remember if I did. No matter who read what, this is the reason I want to write my own plays. Mrs. Little didn't suggest that we read with any kind of vocal inflection, though some of my classmates tried it, the more enthusiastic ones. That's not to say that I wasn't enthusiastic about it. I'm an introvert who can be extroverted unassisted, when I feel it, but I like my introverted self best.
I credit some of Mrs. Little's teaching for The Glass Menagerie being my favorite play. We dwelled in that St. Louis apartment for quite some time, and I loved that deep sadness and regret that emanated throughout those rooms, which is a weird thing to say, I know, but being that I find the imperfect nature of things far more fascinating than any pursuit of perfection (safe to say that I don't like Martha Stewart), I loved being in that apartment in my mind, examining what the characters were after, and why Amanda Wingfield kept dwelling on the past, trying to reach for some former glory that she could never have again.
John Malkovich is the other reason The Glass Menagerie is my favorite play. In 10th grade at Flanagan High School in Pembroke Pines, my English showed the 1992 version of Of Mice and Men, which starred Malkovich and Gary Sinise, who also directed. There's that scene where his Lennie towers over Curley, the ranch hand, his hand curled over Curley's hand, nearly breaking it. That angry look that Lennie had in that scene is what made Malkovich one of my favorite actors. I guess it was destined, because when Mom and I went to that summer morning movie program at GCC Coral Square Cinema 8 in 1993, we once came out of the theater that was showing whatever animated or kids movie it was, and the paper marquee in between the two doors outside that theater was for In the Line of Fire, which co-starred John Malkovich as the assassin. I wanted to know what it was about, but since it was rated "R," and I was nine years old, I had no chance of knowing then. I've since found out and Malkovich is just as impressive in that one.
I would like to see The Glass Menagerie on stage, and have seen clips of stage performances on YouTube, but Malkovich's Tom Wingfield is the best to me because here is this man who so clearly wants to see the world, to do something more than just working in a warehouse job, but he feels stymied by his overbearing mother and his need to take care of his emotionally crippled sister Laura, brought on not only by her physical disability, but also Amanda, expecting more and more and more and never letting Laura figure out who she is. Of course, Laura could use a push into figuring it out, but not the way Amanda does it.
Malkovich gets to who Tom is right away with the opening monologue, drinking from a flask and smoking, weighed down so heavily by silent guilt, and his Tom simmers and boils until he can't possibly take it anymore. Would Tom have been better off if he had done like his father, seeming to live a detached existence and then leaving his family behind? Maybe, but being that Tom is also a writer, there are certain things in the soul that tie us down to wherever we are, a need to remain there for whatever may happen, or because that's our specialty in our work. I don't really know. I'm just letting my thoughts flutter. But because of Malkovich, I borrowed often for weekends that videotape of The Glass Menagerie that Mrs. Little used, since she had checked it out of the school library, and I had special permission since my mom worked as an assistant there.
There's no way I can aspire to be Tennessee Williams inasmuch as I can aspire to be Neil Simon. I can't. I'm not either of them. But learning about emotion in a play, about character development, about the devices used in plays, made me want to try writing my own. I want a setting like that St. Louis apartment, but of course a setting filtered through my own experiences. And it's because of Mrs. Little that I think this way, that I embrace creativity and have never let go. It's why I spent $22.98 at Amazon Marketplace for a rare VHS copy of The Glass Menagerie, since it may never come out on DVD. I've been waiting for years.
That tape sits in front of me right now, a symbol of Mrs. Little's continuing influence. I spend time in a lot of places in my head, right now the Fashion Outlets of Las Vegas in Primm, at the Nevada border, but I always remember that classroom, and the discussions, and that sense of being welcome to say whatever was on one's mind about those plays and those stories. One comment could lead to an entirely different discussion about them, and that's what made it worth it. It's why I'm a writer and I never give up, no matter how hard it gets.
Showing posts with label plays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plays. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Outside, In My Head
Rolling the garbage and recycling bins back to the garage yesterday, after the recycling truck lumbered through the neighborhood, there was a slight wind, and I looked around, wondering if Southern California had been better before all this had been built, these houses, these streets, these street lights. Was there more of a sense of adventure on blank hillsides? It felt like the wind was a lament, missing that past, if there was such a past (and some history I've seen of the area suggests that), and mourning a future that can never be. A year after we moved to Southern California, when we were moving from Valencia to Saugus, Dad and I made multiple trips from our old apartment to our new house and back, hauling in boxes that didn't need to be packed in the moving truck. At the intersection before turning right to go up that hill and then back down to Copper Hill (or whatever the name is, since I've only paid attention to such things when I need to take the bus somewhere), I looked to the left and those mountainsides were completely empty. No lights. Then gradually, one housing development popped up, and then three, and then what looked like 40. It's prevalent throughout the region. Build and build some more and build again until you're absolutely sure you can't put another apartment complex in the parking lot of a 7-11. You'll find the past in books, but not in front of you. The museums are tucked away, hidden from view, where they belong.
I didn't begin to think about Las Vegas or Henderson after mulling over all that. In my mind, I went to Baker, to the true beginning of the desert in Southern California, to the Grewal Travel Center, with the gas station out front, the convenience store on one side on the inside, and the small food court on the other side. I thought about that night on the way to Henderson when we found that the food court was closed. Fortunately, we had eaten at Wienerschnitzel in Santa Clarita, and it's lucky we didn't wait until we got to Baker. I'd never seen the place like this, with the counter areas dark, the lighted signs and menu boards turned off. I stared longer than anyone probably should stare at A&W, TCBY, Pizza Hut and Subway signs. Actor/playwright/short story writer Sam Shepard, one of my heroes, has lived in the desert and has it so deeply ingrained in his soul that I thought about him as I looked around, and also thought about the distance outside this food court/convenience store. Who could live in Baker? Who could find enough in the businesses and the landscape to want to live here? This could be where one settles if there's nowhere else to go, but then it has to be a pretty desperate situation.
This is all that Baker is. The 2010 census pegged the population at 735. Those people may have their reasons, and I'd sure like to know what they are. But I never will because I don't think I could stay for that long. I need a library, I need things that I love surrounding me. I love desert landscapes, but give me something more to them. I'm not talking about the overgrowth that Southern California has experienced over the years. A desert town is fine with me if there's a connection there, reasons that a population has to keep its town vibrant. That may not be fair to Baker, because maybe it does have those things that I don't see since I don't hang around long enough. But middle of the evening at 9 p.m., getting out of the car and feeling that fierce chill, like opening a freezer door in the frozen food section at a supermarket and stepping inside, how could anything want to thrive there?
But I still feel something. I don't have the desert experience that Shepard has, that compelled him to also write three masterful short story collections that I go back and forth on buying for my permanent collection, but I want to try it. I want to write a play, and I want to set it in the Grewal Travel Center. I have one character sketched out, and three or four more I don't know well enough yet. You would think that it would be useful to take photos inside the Center, but I haven't for three reasons: One, when I looked around, I wasn't thinking in terms of a play, until I was back in our rented Kia Soul, writing furiously in my composition book. We had to get to Henderson, so I couldn't go back inside to take photos.
Second, Dad's reconsidering his strategies in looking for a job in Las Vegas and Henderson, which may include going back there for a few days while he and Meridith are off for spring break, so he can actually meet people, have them see him face-to-face, instead of seeing about jobs from a distance, which is the way it has to be for now since he's working here. I may get my chance to take photos.
And third, I have the full layout of the Grewal Travel Center in my head. I know where both claw machines are, I know where chips and candy are on the convenience store side, I know that there are two regular restroom stalls in the men's restroom and one handicap stall, and I know that on the food court side, A&W comes first on the far left, TCBY in the middle, Pizza Hut near the far right, and the restrooms are near Pizza Hut and to the left of Subway. I also know that there are those coin-operated machines with stickers and temporary tattoos and other cheap doodads, one next to the food court entrance in the back, facing A&W, and another directly across from A&W. I've not found any stickers I want from either of those, but I like seeing what there is every time.
When I began thinking about writing plays in 2008, I had so many fanciful ideas, and I filled up a folder on this computer with every idea I could think of in 37 Microsoft Word files, believing that one of them had to lead me to fame. They would be filled with such dramatic ideas, and monologues that had the power to keep audiences in rapt attention. I would be lauded for my artistic choices and wordplay that goes down so easy, yet gives audiences a lot to think about.
I was full of shit.
One thing I completely ignored back then was timing. No skilled actor could have memorized the monologues I wrote without fainting from exhaustion. An actor has to breathe and so does the audience, yet the audience still has to be engaged enough to want to know what happens next. There are fellow human beings performing in front of them, completely inhabiting their characters, and the audience needs to relate to them by some glance, some line that rings true, some action that might make them look inward, see themselves in any of the characters on stage. And if a character is pure evil or has bad intentions, there still has to be a glint of humanity there. They can't just be faceless like so many bad guys in an action movie. It works for an action movie. It doesn't work for a play.
After What If They Lived? was published, I took a break from my aspirations of playwriting fame to figure out what book I wanted to write next. With that figured out now, I calmly went back into that "Plays" folder and looked at what I had hurriedly written many times over. I couldn't be doing this because I wanted fame in some artform. It's nice, and so is money, of which I still hope to make a decent amount one day (decent, not obscene), but I have to want to write a play because it defines me, it helps me grow as a writer, and it makes the world seem new to me every day, with something different to explore.
Another idea I've had has been done once or twice before, but not how I've thought of it. I researched it and even bought one of the plays that takes place in the same setting as mine (Three one-act plays, actually, making up an evening of theater) to see how it was done. I wanted my play to be two one-acts, with two different sets of characters: A teenaged boy and girl, and a man and a woman. I wrestled with the timeline and originally decided that they'd be an hour and a half to two hours apart, which wouldn't seem to matter in a play, but where these characters are, it does, since one pair meets at 11 p.m., and another at 1:30 a.m., and the event they're at only happens once a year, and just once for the teenagers.
The major problem I had was my initial insistence that these characters be connected somehow, that the audience finds out through one pair that both pairs are related. I wanted to keep the conversation between one pair mysterious enough that when the other pair talks, the audience puts it together. I don't think there would be gasps throughout the theater. Just murmurs of understanding.
But at what expense to the characters? Would I be spending so much time trying to set up the slight puzzle that I ignore the traits to be established in each character to make the audience want to know more? Would the characters just be puppets to my intentions? That can't happen. If the audience doesn't connect with the characters, that's it. You close after one performance, if you're lucky.
Last week, I figured out what to do. I don't want to spend time creating this puzzle for the audience to gradually figure out. I want to spend time with my characters, getting to know who they are, what they believe, what they want, what they still hope for even as regrets pile up. So now there's only one pair. I won't say which pair because I'm still working this out. But I do know that the first act is set at one of my most favorite places in the world, and the second act is at a place that I don't have quite the huge love for that I do for that first place, but which I admire just the same because without it, that place I hugely love would not exist. Obviously, there won't be faithful sets of either one because that would be insanely expensive, but it will be described enough in the dialogue, and have a few props to represent it, that the audience will get a sense of where they are.
Even without characters fully created, I already have the title of this play. I worry about whether the first part of it sounds sarcastic, but I can only answer that once I start writing this play. I know that it works, though. It covers both acts, the crux of the plot, and even suggests hope where there wouldn't seem to be any in light of years that have passed and disappointments that have been experienced.
In my mind, as I watch the trees rustle from the wind, I'm at both settings for this play, and I'm also thinking about what I can look forward to: Months spent reading two-character plays. I love the thought of it, particularly because I bought a few when I had thought up this play in its previous form. I hadn't opened them then, just stored them away, but I had a good excuse since I was co-writing What If They Lived? at the time. Even while working on my second book, I want to start on this, and try simultaneous writing projects. I'd like to be surrounded by words all the time, and not just by reading.
So maybe Southern California preferring to ignore its past and make a future full of endless housing developments isn't so bad. Until I'm gone from here, it lets me dream widely just by spending a bit of time outside.
I didn't begin to think about Las Vegas or Henderson after mulling over all that. In my mind, I went to Baker, to the true beginning of the desert in Southern California, to the Grewal Travel Center, with the gas station out front, the convenience store on one side on the inside, and the small food court on the other side. I thought about that night on the way to Henderson when we found that the food court was closed. Fortunately, we had eaten at Wienerschnitzel in Santa Clarita, and it's lucky we didn't wait until we got to Baker. I'd never seen the place like this, with the counter areas dark, the lighted signs and menu boards turned off. I stared longer than anyone probably should stare at A&W, TCBY, Pizza Hut and Subway signs. Actor/playwright/short story writer Sam Shepard, one of my heroes, has lived in the desert and has it so deeply ingrained in his soul that I thought about him as I looked around, and also thought about the distance outside this food court/convenience store. Who could live in Baker? Who could find enough in the businesses and the landscape to want to live here? This could be where one settles if there's nowhere else to go, but then it has to be a pretty desperate situation.
This is all that Baker is. The 2010 census pegged the population at 735. Those people may have their reasons, and I'd sure like to know what they are. But I never will because I don't think I could stay for that long. I need a library, I need things that I love surrounding me. I love desert landscapes, but give me something more to them. I'm not talking about the overgrowth that Southern California has experienced over the years. A desert town is fine with me if there's a connection there, reasons that a population has to keep its town vibrant. That may not be fair to Baker, because maybe it does have those things that I don't see since I don't hang around long enough. But middle of the evening at 9 p.m., getting out of the car and feeling that fierce chill, like opening a freezer door in the frozen food section at a supermarket and stepping inside, how could anything want to thrive there?
But I still feel something. I don't have the desert experience that Shepard has, that compelled him to also write three masterful short story collections that I go back and forth on buying for my permanent collection, but I want to try it. I want to write a play, and I want to set it in the Grewal Travel Center. I have one character sketched out, and three or four more I don't know well enough yet. You would think that it would be useful to take photos inside the Center, but I haven't for three reasons: One, when I looked around, I wasn't thinking in terms of a play, until I was back in our rented Kia Soul, writing furiously in my composition book. We had to get to Henderson, so I couldn't go back inside to take photos.
Second, Dad's reconsidering his strategies in looking for a job in Las Vegas and Henderson, which may include going back there for a few days while he and Meridith are off for spring break, so he can actually meet people, have them see him face-to-face, instead of seeing about jobs from a distance, which is the way it has to be for now since he's working here. I may get my chance to take photos.
And third, I have the full layout of the Grewal Travel Center in my head. I know where both claw machines are, I know where chips and candy are on the convenience store side, I know that there are two regular restroom stalls in the men's restroom and one handicap stall, and I know that on the food court side, A&W comes first on the far left, TCBY in the middle, Pizza Hut near the far right, and the restrooms are near Pizza Hut and to the left of Subway. I also know that there are those coin-operated machines with stickers and temporary tattoos and other cheap doodads, one next to the food court entrance in the back, facing A&W, and another directly across from A&W. I've not found any stickers I want from either of those, but I like seeing what there is every time.
When I began thinking about writing plays in 2008, I had so many fanciful ideas, and I filled up a folder on this computer with every idea I could think of in 37 Microsoft Word files, believing that one of them had to lead me to fame. They would be filled with such dramatic ideas, and monologues that had the power to keep audiences in rapt attention. I would be lauded for my artistic choices and wordplay that goes down so easy, yet gives audiences a lot to think about.
I was full of shit.
One thing I completely ignored back then was timing. No skilled actor could have memorized the monologues I wrote without fainting from exhaustion. An actor has to breathe and so does the audience, yet the audience still has to be engaged enough to want to know what happens next. There are fellow human beings performing in front of them, completely inhabiting their characters, and the audience needs to relate to them by some glance, some line that rings true, some action that might make them look inward, see themselves in any of the characters on stage. And if a character is pure evil or has bad intentions, there still has to be a glint of humanity there. They can't just be faceless like so many bad guys in an action movie. It works for an action movie. It doesn't work for a play.
After What If They Lived? was published, I took a break from my aspirations of playwriting fame to figure out what book I wanted to write next. With that figured out now, I calmly went back into that "Plays" folder and looked at what I had hurriedly written many times over. I couldn't be doing this because I wanted fame in some artform. It's nice, and so is money, of which I still hope to make a decent amount one day (decent, not obscene), but I have to want to write a play because it defines me, it helps me grow as a writer, and it makes the world seem new to me every day, with something different to explore.
Another idea I've had has been done once or twice before, but not how I've thought of it. I researched it and even bought one of the plays that takes place in the same setting as mine (Three one-act plays, actually, making up an evening of theater) to see how it was done. I wanted my play to be two one-acts, with two different sets of characters: A teenaged boy and girl, and a man and a woman. I wrestled with the timeline and originally decided that they'd be an hour and a half to two hours apart, which wouldn't seem to matter in a play, but where these characters are, it does, since one pair meets at 11 p.m., and another at 1:30 a.m., and the event they're at only happens once a year, and just once for the teenagers.
The major problem I had was my initial insistence that these characters be connected somehow, that the audience finds out through one pair that both pairs are related. I wanted to keep the conversation between one pair mysterious enough that when the other pair talks, the audience puts it together. I don't think there would be gasps throughout the theater. Just murmurs of understanding.
But at what expense to the characters? Would I be spending so much time trying to set up the slight puzzle that I ignore the traits to be established in each character to make the audience want to know more? Would the characters just be puppets to my intentions? That can't happen. If the audience doesn't connect with the characters, that's it. You close after one performance, if you're lucky.
Last week, I figured out what to do. I don't want to spend time creating this puzzle for the audience to gradually figure out. I want to spend time with my characters, getting to know who they are, what they believe, what they want, what they still hope for even as regrets pile up. So now there's only one pair. I won't say which pair because I'm still working this out. But I do know that the first act is set at one of my most favorite places in the world, and the second act is at a place that I don't have quite the huge love for that I do for that first place, but which I admire just the same because without it, that place I hugely love would not exist. Obviously, there won't be faithful sets of either one because that would be insanely expensive, but it will be described enough in the dialogue, and have a few props to represent it, that the audience will get a sense of where they are.
Even without characters fully created, I already have the title of this play. I worry about whether the first part of it sounds sarcastic, but I can only answer that once I start writing this play. I know that it works, though. It covers both acts, the crux of the plot, and even suggests hope where there wouldn't seem to be any in light of years that have passed and disappointments that have been experienced.
In my mind, as I watch the trees rustle from the wind, I'm at both settings for this play, and I'm also thinking about what I can look forward to: Months spent reading two-character plays. I love the thought of it, particularly because I bought a few when I had thought up this play in its previous form. I hadn't opened them then, just stored them away, but I had a good excuse since I was co-writing What If They Lived? at the time. Even while working on my second book, I want to start on this, and try simultaneous writing projects. I'd like to be surrounded by words all the time, and not just by reading.
So maybe Southern California preferring to ignore its past and make a future full of endless housing developments isn't so bad. Until I'm gone from here, it lets me dream widely just by spending a bit of time outside.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Random Afternoon Notes
Earlier today, I wasn't sure where to start once I logged on. Do I write separate entries about the truly laugh-out-loud books of Celia Rivenbark, the high priestess of Southern humor? Would a "First Lines from Books I Love" entry be valid for Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits, even though I laughed the hardest at a passage toward the end of the book? And what about all the book and DVD mail I got today, stopped up by there being no mail yesterday, hence the deluge? So it seems it would be better to handle all of this like this.
I've read Celia Rivenbark's previous three books, laughed at many, many wicked thoughts of hers, but this, in Belle Weather, about the effects of Ambien usage on others, had me doubled over laughing so hard that I was getting very close to gravity pushing me off the couch:
"I read an interview with a woman who had gained more than 100 pounds by cooking while asleep. Every morning, girlfriend was mystified by the dirty dishes and empty refrigerator.
In the South, we usually just figure that the waterbugs got especially industrious overnight. Those suckers are big. It's not a huge stretch for me to assume that, one night, they'll just walk upstairs and ask me, in waterbug-speak, "Yo, girl, where's the FryDaddy? Me and the kids is hawn-gry!"
This led to starting Rivenbark's You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning, and this story, which speaks to me because of my preference for used books, not only because they're cheaper:
"Perhaps the saddest note that I have received over the years came from Julie Ann, who married a Yankee man a few years ago.
"On Mother's Day, I got to sleep late, which means about ten 'til eight," she wrote. "While I was sleeping, just my Mother's Day luck, my husband, who never does any domestic chores whatsoever, decided to get all aim-high and decided to clean the cast-iron skillet I'd left on top of the stove."
Hons, when I read those words, I had to sit down. Because I knew what was coming.
"This was the cast-iron skillet that I got from my great-aunt Connie Jo for my wedding shower ten years ago. It has been lovingly seasoned over the past ten years, having fried enough bacon to clog the arteries of the entire state of Texas. It has made hundreds of servings of fried okra, cornbread for countless holiday meals, gravies too numerous to mention, and our daughter and I made her very first blackberry cobbler together in this pan. It was seasoned to perfection, a gleaming black bottom that I could see my reflection in."
I poured myself a glass of wine to steady my nerves as I continued reading.
"Do you know what my boneheaded Yankee husband did? He came to me, all proud, saying he 'got my old skillet clean, you know, the one with all the crap on it.'"
Julie Ann said she got a little dizzy at this point.
"You mean my cast-iron skillet? The one I got for our shower? That one?"
Her duh-hubby just grinned, stupid and proud. "That's the one! It took more than an hour, but I got it clean!"
He had assaulted her skillet with a Chore Boy scrubbing pad, stripping off nearly ten years of perfect seasoning.
Julie Ann began to cry, the great heaving sobs of a Southern woman who has married an ignoramus. He brightened and offered to buy her a new skillet.
And that sums up how Southerners view life and love, y'all. New is not better. Shiny is overrated. These are truths we hold dear in the South, where we embrace imperfection for the gift that it is. Y'all can say "amen" now."
The bold emphasis is mine. And though there have been times when I've questioned exactly how Southern I am, having been born in Plantation, Florida, in South Florida, compared to a North Carolinian like Rivenbark and others in Georgia and those states, I believe I am still Southern, just as valid, with my love of grits, growing up saying "Yes'm" and "No'm," and all-you-can eat country-fried steak nights at Po Folks that were around when I was a baby and that I took part in when I was older.
That is also how I view life. When I was 11 and found that three-book Andy Rooney compilation in that thrift store, it wasn't new. It was used. And I didn't mind at all. I just wanted Rooney's words at the time, to learn how he did his life's work, and becoming inspired myself to be a writer. Now, I love used books not only because they're cheaper, but also because they've got history, like dollar bills that pass through many states, though more meaningful with the scrawls on certain pages, notes from loved ones expressing their hope that they enjoy the book. As Anne Brancroft once said, playing Helene Hanff, one of my heroes, in the movie 84 Charing Cross Road: "I love inscriptions on flyleafs and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned and reading passages someone long-gone has called my attention to."
I've seen inscriptions and notes in the used books that have passed through here, that I haven't kept because I didn't feel that they could be part of my permanent collection. But I've never felt that desire to do it. I believe people can do anything they want with books, and certainly the same can be said of mine, but I know what my favorite parts are and where they are in a novel such as This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes. I don't mark up my books because I want those parts to remain part of the entire book. I look forward to them, but they are only one or a few parts of the book. They contribute to something whole. To point them out by pen mark is to lessen the spotlight on everything else in a favorite book.
I would be tempted to do such a thing with Buried in Books: A Reader's Anthology by Julie Rugg, which I received in the mail today. Rugg quotes from various and varied authors on such subjects as "Degrees of bibliomania," "Books' lives," and "'An early taste for reading'." Quotes from books, excerpts, all about the love for reading and the eccentricities that grow from it. To me, happy ones at that.
I will undoubtedly find other books I want to read through these quotes and excerpts, perhaps even quotes to use for the "Quote a Day" part at the top of the freelance writing job newsletter I compile every Sunday through Thursday evening for the following day. But last year, before What If They Lived? was published and I was thinking about what my second book should be, I bought from Staples a pack of legal notepads. I decided to use legal paper because it's what my maternal grandfather used in his practice as a lawyer. Plus, he used a legal pad to write a letter to me when I was a baby and it's one of my most prized posessions (Included in that list is a manual for a United Airlines Boeing 747-100 that one of my campmates gave to me during a weeklong aviation summer camp in 1998 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach). My grandfather, who I never knew a great deal (I was very young), was an admirable man and I want to follow many of his traits. This is one of them.
So when I read Buried in Books, I'll use a legal notepad to jot down titles to look up on Amazon, and page numbers for quotes to reference, to put into a file I keep of quotes to use for that newsletter. I think it's easier that way.
Today's mail was also a combination of books I really want to read, books that are part of the preliminary research I'm doing for my 1930s movie history book, and DVDs I've been anticipating, one well above the others that came.
There was From This Moment On, Shania Twain's autobiography (She's beginning a Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace in December 2012, and Meridith and I want to see her, being that she was a big part of '90s music for us), and The Supreme Court by William H. Rehnquist. Rehnquist explains the history of the Court and its proceedings, which probably haven't changed since 2001, save for Chief Justice John G. Roberts wearing a plain black robe like his colleagues (First among equals, but one vote like the rest of them), whereas Rehnquist wore a robe with four gold bars on each arm.
I also received Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman for the purpose of seeing how MGM is covered here, what details there are. I plan to use The Hollywood Studio System by Douglas Gomery as a reference book for my project since he covers all the studios in the time of the Hollywood Studio System, 1930-1949, and writes about the business side of them as well, though I'm obviously not sure yet how much detail Gomery gives about the inner workings of the studios, the day-to-day business, the activity on the lots. This one stays with me, though.
In DVDs, Travels with My Aunt came!!! And now that leaves Barfly and The Glass Menagerie, directed by Paul Newman, as the only other two movies I want on DVD so badly. In the case of Barfly, a Criterion Collection release, since Warner Bros. released it on DVD in 2002 with a commentary by director Barbet Schroeder, but a few years later it went out of print and prices for available copies were jacked up to $50 and then $100, and I'm hoping this total silence means that there will be a Criterion release one of these days.
As soon as I pulled Travels with My Aunt out of its packaging, I rewound the VHS tape I had bought of it and then put it in its case and into the Goodwill box. I'm thinking of buying the VHS tape of The Glass Menagerie off Amazon so that maybe it'll come to DVD soon. Then I'll have the convenience of not having to rewind a great deal to watch my favorite parts over and over, as it will be when I watch Travels with My Aunt again. And what made me the happiest fan of the movie is that Warner Archive remastered it. I saw a clip on the website and it looked pristine, and I know that will hold true for the entire thing.
Despite being a former film critic, I still have some pull with some DVD labels due to my affiliation with Film Threat, which I don't use that often, only when I really, really want a certain DVD, and ever since I got back to books, that hasn't hit as much anymore. Recently it did, when I found that the Microcinema label was releasing a film of a one-man show starring John Maxwell called "Oh, Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?" Maxwell plays William Faulkner, and I just had to see this, just like with Give 'Em Hell, Harry starring James Whitmore, which I bought from the Goodwill center in Stevenson Ranch for $3 on VHS. For that one, it was also because of my passion for the American presidency, but I'm always fascinated by one-man shows, that one actor stands up on that stage and plays one personality for 90 minutes or so. Laurence Fishburne has done it with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Christopher Plummer has a one-man movie coming out called Barrymore, in which he plays John Barrymore, and the thinking is that since Whitmore got an Oscar nomination for that filmed stage performance as Harry Truman, there might be an attempt to try that with this one. It works for me since I want to write plays, and have thought about the one-man show a few times, and have seen two of them, one with Frank Ferrante as Groucho Marx, and the other with Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, both at the College of the Canyons Performing Arts Center over these years, two of the only worthwhile experiences I've had in Santa Clarita.
And late last week, I found out that Acorn Media was releasing all of their On the Road with Charles Kuralt sets in a package called the Americana Collection, and it was delivered to my front door today. Kuralt is one of my heroes because I have the same curiosity toward life that he has, finding what looks interesting and talking about it. As is said in the copy on the back cover of Set 1 about Kuralt's program: "No topic was too small, no person too insignificant." And I can't wait to watch all of these because in the copy on the back cover of Set 2, it mentions "...the 87-year-old college professor turned janitor who proclaimed, "No honest work is undignified." It ties right into the way I live life, that no one is above me and no one is below me.
I've taken on an unusual small hobby. I Google hotels that my parents and I, or just my parents, have stayed at, such as America's Best Value Inn on Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas, next to Hooters Casino Hotel, and Fiesta Henderson, where my parents stayed for two nights on their latest business trip to Vegas (The business being a job interview for my dad which didn't pan out because they weren't factoring in the decades of experience he had when offering a salary), which they hated because the toilet never stopped (And only on their last night there before moving over to Hampton Inn & Suites also in Henderson did someone come to fix it), and they had a bad digestive experience at the Denny's there. I also look up the Hacienda Hotel and Casino near Boulder City (home to a rock ledge that you can walk on, and in front of you is the most stunning view of the vast desert, an ocean of sand that seems to ripple in almost the same way) and I read the reviews of all these places. I'm not necessarily looking for insight into how good or bad they are, but I like looking for the stories, ascertaining the personalities of the people who wrote the reviews, based on their words.
From that sprung another desire. I get no use out of The Signal in Santa Clarita. I worked for them once, I did my five weeks as interim editor of their weekend Escape section, and I liked putting together a section of a newspaper on my own, but not the stress of it. Since I don't connect to this valley at all, there's no reason for me to read it. So, in anticipation of moving one of these days to Henderson, why not connect to The Henderson Press? When Mom and Dad came home from the most recent trip, they brought me a copy of The Henderson Press, the latest issue then, since they publish every week (at the start, they published every two weeks).
I went to the website last night and found that they have every issue on the website in .pdf files. I've decided that I want to read all 37 issues, even the one that was brought home to me since I remember a few things from it, but not all. I want to learn as much as I can about my future hometown through its newspaper, which is written far better than The Signal. Even some clumsy wording found at the start of an interview in the first issue was no big deal to me because it was genuine. There was no posing as there is here. These writers clearly love their city and that's all that matters to me. I want to feel like I belong somewhere already, and this is a good start. And once we get there, I'll know everything there is to know about Henderson and there won't be a need for any adjustment beyond a physical one. Plus, it'll make the inevitable exploration a lot more fun.
I've read Celia Rivenbark's previous three books, laughed at many, many wicked thoughts of hers, but this, in Belle Weather, about the effects of Ambien usage on others, had me doubled over laughing so hard that I was getting very close to gravity pushing me off the couch:
"I read an interview with a woman who had gained more than 100 pounds by cooking while asleep. Every morning, girlfriend was mystified by the dirty dishes and empty refrigerator.
In the South, we usually just figure that the waterbugs got especially industrious overnight. Those suckers are big. It's not a huge stretch for me to assume that, one night, they'll just walk upstairs and ask me, in waterbug-speak, "Yo, girl, where's the FryDaddy? Me and the kids is hawn-gry!"
This led to starting Rivenbark's You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning, and this story, which speaks to me because of my preference for used books, not only because they're cheaper:
"Perhaps the saddest note that I have received over the years came from Julie Ann, who married a Yankee man a few years ago.
"On Mother's Day, I got to sleep late, which means about ten 'til eight," she wrote. "While I was sleeping, just my Mother's Day luck, my husband, who never does any domestic chores whatsoever, decided to get all aim-high and decided to clean the cast-iron skillet I'd left on top of the stove."
Hons, when I read those words, I had to sit down. Because I knew what was coming.
"This was the cast-iron skillet that I got from my great-aunt Connie Jo for my wedding shower ten years ago. It has been lovingly seasoned over the past ten years, having fried enough bacon to clog the arteries of the entire state of Texas. It has made hundreds of servings of fried okra, cornbread for countless holiday meals, gravies too numerous to mention, and our daughter and I made her very first blackberry cobbler together in this pan. It was seasoned to perfection, a gleaming black bottom that I could see my reflection in."
I poured myself a glass of wine to steady my nerves as I continued reading.
"Do you know what my boneheaded Yankee husband did? He came to me, all proud, saying he 'got my old skillet clean, you know, the one with all the crap on it.'"
Julie Ann said she got a little dizzy at this point.
"You mean my cast-iron skillet? The one I got for our shower? That one?"
Her duh-hubby just grinned, stupid and proud. "That's the one! It took more than an hour, but I got it clean!"
He had assaulted her skillet with a Chore Boy scrubbing pad, stripping off nearly ten years of perfect seasoning.
Julie Ann began to cry, the great heaving sobs of a Southern woman who has married an ignoramus. He brightened and offered to buy her a new skillet.
And that sums up how Southerners view life and love, y'all. New is not better. Shiny is overrated. These are truths we hold dear in the South, where we embrace imperfection for the gift that it is. Y'all can say "amen" now."
The bold emphasis is mine. And though there have been times when I've questioned exactly how Southern I am, having been born in Plantation, Florida, in South Florida, compared to a North Carolinian like Rivenbark and others in Georgia and those states, I believe I am still Southern, just as valid, with my love of grits, growing up saying "Yes'm" and "No'm," and all-you-can eat country-fried steak nights at Po Folks that were around when I was a baby and that I took part in when I was older.
That is also how I view life. When I was 11 and found that three-book Andy Rooney compilation in that thrift store, it wasn't new. It was used. And I didn't mind at all. I just wanted Rooney's words at the time, to learn how he did his life's work, and becoming inspired myself to be a writer. Now, I love used books not only because they're cheaper, but also because they've got history, like dollar bills that pass through many states, though more meaningful with the scrawls on certain pages, notes from loved ones expressing their hope that they enjoy the book. As Anne Brancroft once said, playing Helene Hanff, one of my heroes, in the movie 84 Charing Cross Road: "I love inscriptions on flyleafs and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned and reading passages someone long-gone has called my attention to."
I've seen inscriptions and notes in the used books that have passed through here, that I haven't kept because I didn't feel that they could be part of my permanent collection. But I've never felt that desire to do it. I believe people can do anything they want with books, and certainly the same can be said of mine, but I know what my favorite parts are and where they are in a novel such as This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes. I don't mark up my books because I want those parts to remain part of the entire book. I look forward to them, but they are only one or a few parts of the book. They contribute to something whole. To point them out by pen mark is to lessen the spotlight on everything else in a favorite book.
I would be tempted to do such a thing with Buried in Books: A Reader's Anthology by Julie Rugg, which I received in the mail today. Rugg quotes from various and varied authors on such subjects as "Degrees of bibliomania," "Books' lives," and "'An early taste for reading'." Quotes from books, excerpts, all about the love for reading and the eccentricities that grow from it. To me, happy ones at that.
I will undoubtedly find other books I want to read through these quotes and excerpts, perhaps even quotes to use for the "Quote a Day" part at the top of the freelance writing job newsletter I compile every Sunday through Thursday evening for the following day. But last year, before What If They Lived? was published and I was thinking about what my second book should be, I bought from Staples a pack of legal notepads. I decided to use legal paper because it's what my maternal grandfather used in his practice as a lawyer. Plus, he used a legal pad to write a letter to me when I was a baby and it's one of my most prized posessions (Included in that list is a manual for a United Airlines Boeing 747-100 that one of my campmates gave to me during a weeklong aviation summer camp in 1998 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach). My grandfather, who I never knew a great deal (I was very young), was an admirable man and I want to follow many of his traits. This is one of them.
So when I read Buried in Books, I'll use a legal notepad to jot down titles to look up on Amazon, and page numbers for quotes to reference, to put into a file I keep of quotes to use for that newsletter. I think it's easier that way.
Today's mail was also a combination of books I really want to read, books that are part of the preliminary research I'm doing for my 1930s movie history book, and DVDs I've been anticipating, one well above the others that came.
There was From This Moment On, Shania Twain's autobiography (She's beginning a Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace in December 2012, and Meridith and I want to see her, being that she was a big part of '90s music for us), and The Supreme Court by William H. Rehnquist. Rehnquist explains the history of the Court and its proceedings, which probably haven't changed since 2001, save for Chief Justice John G. Roberts wearing a plain black robe like his colleagues (First among equals, but one vote like the rest of them), whereas Rehnquist wore a robe with four gold bars on each arm.
I also received Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman for the purpose of seeing how MGM is covered here, what details there are. I plan to use The Hollywood Studio System by Douglas Gomery as a reference book for my project since he covers all the studios in the time of the Hollywood Studio System, 1930-1949, and writes about the business side of them as well, though I'm obviously not sure yet how much detail Gomery gives about the inner workings of the studios, the day-to-day business, the activity on the lots. This one stays with me, though.
In DVDs, Travels with My Aunt came!!! And now that leaves Barfly and The Glass Menagerie, directed by Paul Newman, as the only other two movies I want on DVD so badly. In the case of Barfly, a Criterion Collection release, since Warner Bros. released it on DVD in 2002 with a commentary by director Barbet Schroeder, but a few years later it went out of print and prices for available copies were jacked up to $50 and then $100, and I'm hoping this total silence means that there will be a Criterion release one of these days.
As soon as I pulled Travels with My Aunt out of its packaging, I rewound the VHS tape I had bought of it and then put it in its case and into the Goodwill box. I'm thinking of buying the VHS tape of The Glass Menagerie off Amazon so that maybe it'll come to DVD soon. Then I'll have the convenience of not having to rewind a great deal to watch my favorite parts over and over, as it will be when I watch Travels with My Aunt again. And what made me the happiest fan of the movie is that Warner Archive remastered it. I saw a clip on the website and it looked pristine, and I know that will hold true for the entire thing.
Despite being a former film critic, I still have some pull with some DVD labels due to my affiliation with Film Threat, which I don't use that often, only when I really, really want a certain DVD, and ever since I got back to books, that hasn't hit as much anymore. Recently it did, when I found that the Microcinema label was releasing a film of a one-man show starring John Maxwell called "Oh, Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?" Maxwell plays William Faulkner, and I just had to see this, just like with Give 'Em Hell, Harry starring James Whitmore, which I bought from the Goodwill center in Stevenson Ranch for $3 on VHS. For that one, it was also because of my passion for the American presidency, but I'm always fascinated by one-man shows, that one actor stands up on that stage and plays one personality for 90 minutes or so. Laurence Fishburne has done it with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Christopher Plummer has a one-man movie coming out called Barrymore, in which he plays John Barrymore, and the thinking is that since Whitmore got an Oscar nomination for that filmed stage performance as Harry Truman, there might be an attempt to try that with this one. It works for me since I want to write plays, and have thought about the one-man show a few times, and have seen two of them, one with Frank Ferrante as Groucho Marx, and the other with Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, both at the College of the Canyons Performing Arts Center over these years, two of the only worthwhile experiences I've had in Santa Clarita.
And late last week, I found out that Acorn Media was releasing all of their On the Road with Charles Kuralt sets in a package called the Americana Collection, and it was delivered to my front door today. Kuralt is one of my heroes because I have the same curiosity toward life that he has, finding what looks interesting and talking about it. As is said in the copy on the back cover of Set 1 about Kuralt's program: "No topic was too small, no person too insignificant." And I can't wait to watch all of these because in the copy on the back cover of Set 2, it mentions "...the 87-year-old college professor turned janitor who proclaimed, "No honest work is undignified." It ties right into the way I live life, that no one is above me and no one is below me.
I've taken on an unusual small hobby. I Google hotels that my parents and I, or just my parents, have stayed at, such as America's Best Value Inn on Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas, next to Hooters Casino Hotel, and Fiesta Henderson, where my parents stayed for two nights on their latest business trip to Vegas (The business being a job interview for my dad which didn't pan out because they weren't factoring in the decades of experience he had when offering a salary), which they hated because the toilet never stopped (And only on their last night there before moving over to Hampton Inn & Suites also in Henderson did someone come to fix it), and they had a bad digestive experience at the Denny's there. I also look up the Hacienda Hotel and Casino near Boulder City (home to a rock ledge that you can walk on, and in front of you is the most stunning view of the vast desert, an ocean of sand that seems to ripple in almost the same way) and I read the reviews of all these places. I'm not necessarily looking for insight into how good or bad they are, but I like looking for the stories, ascertaining the personalities of the people who wrote the reviews, based on their words.
From that sprung another desire. I get no use out of The Signal in Santa Clarita. I worked for them once, I did my five weeks as interim editor of their weekend Escape section, and I liked putting together a section of a newspaper on my own, but not the stress of it. Since I don't connect to this valley at all, there's no reason for me to read it. So, in anticipation of moving one of these days to Henderson, why not connect to The Henderson Press? When Mom and Dad came home from the most recent trip, they brought me a copy of The Henderson Press, the latest issue then, since they publish every week (at the start, they published every two weeks).
I went to the website last night and found that they have every issue on the website in .pdf files. I've decided that I want to read all 37 issues, even the one that was brought home to me since I remember a few things from it, but not all. I want to learn as much as I can about my future hometown through its newspaper, which is written far better than The Signal. Even some clumsy wording found at the start of an interview in the first issue was no big deal to me because it was genuine. There was no posing as there is here. These writers clearly love their city and that's all that matters to me. I want to feel like I belong somewhere already, and this is a good start. And once we get there, I'll know everything there is to know about Henderson and there won't be a need for any adjustment beyond a physical one. Plus, it'll make the inevitable exploration a lot more fun.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Crunch Time for a Bibliophile
As of today, Saturday, April 23, 2011, I've got six more Saturdays, including today, in which I can check out books from the Valencia library. On June 4, books can no longer be checked out from there, Canyon Country or Newhall, and on June 10, all materials belonging to those three libraries will be due.
Now, I don't know when holds being placed for materials from the other County of Los Angeles libraries will be cut off. I've been lucky because despite declarations that any items put on hold from those libraries have to be picked up from the Castaic library (separate from the three Santa Clarita branches), all the books I've put on hold through the online library catalog have come to Valencia. If this was not meant to happen, I hope they don't correct it. Not yet. I still need these weeks so I can keep bringing in presidential books for research for my second book. I need those books. As I've said before, without the County of Los Angeles libraries, I never would have been able to write my share of What If They Lived?. I don't expect to get through all the books I'd need, but just to get the relatively major ones out of the way and those notes transcribed and saved, so I have it and can be comfortable with either checking out what those three branches have come July 1, or buying for cheap whatever I need off of abebooks.com.
But this also presents a new conundrum. Because though I'm dedicated to getting this research done, to figuring out exactly how I want to cover the material I'm bringing together, there's a play that keeps nagging me. Or maybe two plays. One takes place during Grad Nite at Disneyland (inspired by chaperoning my sister's Grad Nite in 2007), involving two sets of characters at different places in the park during the same hours, and the other takes place just off the lobby at the Grand Californian hotel, at two plush easy chairs, with a small circular table in between them, and a lamp a few inches behind the chair on the left, and a long, horizontal rose-patterned rug. I had my sister take pictures on her phone and e-mail them to me so I get the setting exactly right.
I've already spent time on the Dramatists Play Service website (http://www.dramatists.com/), and spent some money there, ordering those plays that hew fairly closely to what I want to write. I want to see how those playwrights did it, how they staged their plays, how they presented those situations. I want to learn as much as I can from them. At the same time, I've also become very much inspired by the works of Sam Shepard, or rather his prose. About two weeks ago, I checked out as many of his plays as I could find, intending to read them. This week, I've got more presidential books on hold to be picked up, and those are crucial in the face of these dwindling weeks.
But maybe there is a way to still have Shepard's plays, even though I'll likely return them today to pick up the books I need. I'll just put them on hold again after I've returned them and picked up my books on hold, and hope for the best. I should have the same luck next week that I've had this week. With so many people having abandoned the Valencia library in favor of Castaic and other County branches in anticipation of the transfer of control from the County to the City of Santa Clarita (It's a lot emptier on a Saturday than it used to be), there's more space for me.
Oh, one other thing to mention. I hit upon this book in an e-mail I subscribe to containing Washington Post book reviews. It's called Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf. A rather unwieldy title, but important to me because Wulf wrote about the first four presidents' passion for gardening. This is exactly what I'm seeking. It can be done, and so can the aspect of the presidents that I want to write about. I just have to figure out how to do it and I'm sure this book can help in some way. I don't intend to buy it now, since it's just a little too pricey for me after what I've already bought in recent weeks, but I will soon. I want to see how Wulf wrote about Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, and maybe there'll be inspiration in there for me.
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