Our Missing Hearts (book)

Pengo's 2022 Summer Book Club

“All the King’s Screenwriters, 1946: A drama of how Fascism might even come to this country.”
- Firesign Theatre, "Dear Friends"

First, a quick update on my health; I’m good. It’s difficult to see out of my left eye, which looks like a disgusting bloody mess, but it feels fine, a little sore for the additional use. A friend came over yesterday and we watched Magnolia. Man, does that thing hit different once your parents are dead.

But, okay. So. On June 24, 2022, the day Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, a playwright on Twitter recommended all those who were moved to write about this disastrous historical event concentrate on the future, not the present. Two wit; write about the effects this will have on people in the future, not about what is happening today.

Which is to say, speculate. Speculative fiction.

Recently, my fourteen year-old niece was reading The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1984 novel that surged with attention after the 2016 election and the Hulu television adaptation that followed. Author Margaret Atwood created an America in the not-too-distant future in which conservative politics and a very real calamity in the human birthrate combine to create a nation where women are regarded primarily as chattel for breeding.

If you could imagine such a thing.

The success of her work, and stories like this, is in its believability. It is grounded in a reality based on laws which have passed, behaviors which have been exhibited, things that have happened.

Dystopian fictions like 1984 (1949, or did I just confuse you) are extreme in their depiction of the future and so lean more into the realm of science fiction, with their guesses at future technologies. As if you can imagine a world where there are screens in every room which watch you just as you watch them, or that screaming at one would be limited to two minutes a day.

With It Can’t Happen Here (1935), novelist Sinclair Lewis set the events of an authoritarian America in his present. With Mussolini’s reign firmly established and Hitler on the ascendant, Lewis sought to shake the United States from the naïve assumption that our democratic systems take care of themselves and that we would never willingly elect a tyrant.

Art: Hartley Lin
The New Yorker, July 31, 2022

Philip Roth put a spin on Lewis’s novel with The Plot Against America (2004), a revisionist history in which the charming hero and Christian Nationalist Charles Lindbergh runs for President in 1940 and wins.

Imagining an alternate Roth family based on his own, this tale centers on an American family that suffers under the Antisemitism which, previous expressed in more subtle and one might say normative manner, is unleashed in naked fury by an American populace emboldened by their new leader.

If you could imagine such a thing.

This summer I had the opportunity to read an ARC (advance review copy) of Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, which will be released in October. As described in advance promotional materials, Ng has created an America which has been “governed by laws written to preserve ‘American culture’ in the wake of years of economic instability and violence.” 

Reading this on the beach in North Carolina the the days immediately following Dobbs v. Jackson, in a season when inflation and gas prices may have more effect at the polls than the daily revelations of just how far our former President went to subvert the 2020 election, her work might also have the more immediate title, It Is Happening Here. Or that it has.

It’s the kind of book I would like to imagine being added to the middle school curriculum of every middle school in the nation, if we weren’t living in a land where the reading lists are currently being culled rather than expanded.

Penguin Random House releases "Our Missing Hearts", a new novel by Celeste Ng, on October 4, 2022.

Process XXVII

NEOMFA Playwrights Festival (2021)

Perhaps this is fortuitous, but this is the week I hit the wall. Maybe it is completion anxiety, or the expectation of great things unsatisfied. I want to leave town. I want to visit England with my family. I want everything unhappy to end.

Play a Day was very challenging this year. The reading was good, but it wasn’t about the reading. I was so busy with other things it felt like a chore, which is a shame.

The playwright’s festival was marred by technical difficulties and to be honest, it filled me with anxiety to be in a public space. The screening was held outdoors, and it was cold.

While I am thrilled about my daughter’s impending high school graduation, I am constantly reminded of everything she did not get to participate in during her senior year.

But, all right. The fiction writing workshop has come to a close. I am working on a half-hour radio drama for craft and theory inspired by the works of Firesign Theatre, that is due Monday. Then I can concentrate entirely on the comic book, which is due the following Tuesday.

And that will be two semesters finished. Classes on Zoom are no longer novel, none of this is. It is convenient, but soul-sucking, and I got a stress headache on Tuesday night trying to look at my screen outdoors, in the good weather.

Speaking of which, some guys have put in a patio. I spent last summer staring at a backyard covered in cardboard (to kill the grass) and I hope this summer will be very different, in so many ways. Last night, we got drinks and attended a movie. In a movie theater, It was weird.

Happy May Day!

Calling All Ears (radio drama)

Fall quarter my sophomore year at Ohio University, our acting professor reached out to my buddies and I about a special project. A class in the RTV building was studying radio drama and they had a special guest, David Ossman.

Most recently Ossman was a producer for various programs on NPR, and PBS voice-over work. We knew him, however, as a member of The Firesign Theatre, that satirical radio comedy troupe of the late 60s-early 70s. We were very excited to get to work with him, and even went to the local record store to pick up copies of their work to bone up before meeting him.

Seriously. We went to the local record store and bought vinyl copies of Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me The Pliers, Everything You Know Is Wrong, I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus, Wait For The Electrician (Or Someone Like Him) and How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All. They were all right there, waiting for us, in the store. Athens!

I was a little bummed out because at the moment my voice was almost destroyed. That quarter part of theater practicum was clearing out the attic space in Kantner Hall decades worth of props and smaller set pieces which had been stored there and largely forgotten about. The entire room had a thick layer of dust and I was surprised to learn the deep gray cement floor was, when vacuumed, actually a pristine white.

The end result of having inhaled so much dust, however, was that I could barely speak. However, one of the scripts we worked on in the radio production class featured an elderly gentleman, and I was able to push through a rather convincing impression of the character of the decrepit manservant Catherwood from The Future Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye, originally performed by (yes, indeed) David Ossman.

David Ossman, left

The technicians learned a lot but we actors did, too, about microphone placement, Foley effects, pacing, the use of music, etc., etc. In one all-too-brief session I learned lessons that we would apply through our time at school, creating radio dramas that Guerrilla Theater would broadcast on WRUW, and that we would employ much later creating radio drama for WCPN.

That was the first time I met David Ossman. The second was when he produced Calling All Ears for WCPN 90.3, which broadcast the night before Thanksgiving, November 27, 1991. Produced in collaboration with Cleveland Public Theatre, the event was held at the Metro Campus of Cuyahoga Community College.

An evening of “live radio theater” the show was to include three winners of a writing competition, though apparently one of them was for some forgotten reason unusable (inappropriate? too complicated?) and so the third piece was one from Ossman’s bag of tricks, Max Morgan: Crime Cabbie. As he explained it, by the 1950s radio drama was on the wane, with every conceivable detective show angle played out, and this was a satire of one of those.

It was thrilling and unnerving was when I discovered I was cast as the bartender Fergus, opposite Ossman himself as Max Morgan! Unfortunately, my twenty-three year-old self worked a little too hard to impress, and as a result I spent much of the performance trying to out-dick the dick, playing a smarmy variation on Nick Danger instead of the role I had been cast as, the easily-impressed sounding board for the actual hero of the story.

Most memorable for me was the large acting company, where I met for the first numerous players who would have a profound effect on my life. Freshly out of school and only recently settled into a daily Cleveland existence, this process introduced me to a large Cleveland theater community -- and we were all so young then, too.


Brian Pedaci, Peggy Sullivan, David Thonnings, Jenny Litt, Lee T. Wilson, Shruti Amin; there were all folks I would play with in the following years. I also made the acquaintance of Dave Caban from WRUW, Karen Schaefer from WCPN, and broadcast project director Jordan Davis.

My favorite piece of the evening was penned by the late Cleveland playwright Aubrey Wertheim. Originally titled Make Way for Dyke-lings, the more radio-friendly Along Party Lines is totally early 90s. Imagine if you will, a pair of suburban teenage girls waiting in the food court at Tower City to meet and see a movie with a pair of strange guys one of them met over a “party line.”

A "party line." Look that up, Millennials. I’ll wait.

The whole thing is crammed with Foley and recorded effects, a vast company of colorful characters, and a surprisingly progressive take on young adult relationships. It also includes my favorite tagline for Tremont, one which I find amusing even today.


The early 90s were a difficult time for Cleveland, the city center continue to be hollowed out, Tower City and the Galleria were already going into decline, the entire nation was in economic doldrums, there was no clear end to our woes. But it was a joyful moment, as a young artist, to meet and collaborate with so many exciting people.

Even so, the attendance that evening was all right, perhaps a hundred people were in the audience for this live event, enough to generate an audible audience response but not a very strong one. Getting people to come downtown, to do absolutely anything, was a difficult challenge at that time.

This past weekend I returned, with my family, to that same venue, the auditorium at the Tri-C Metro Campus, to see my kid perform their first concert with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra, a unique and exceptionally talented ensemble under the direction of Liza Grossman. The place was packed, the room buzzing with excitement. It got me all excited for the holidays.

Get out into the world this season. Enjoy Cleveland. And Happy Thanksgiving!

Peter Bergman

Bozo.

Peter Paul Bergman (November 29, 1939 – March 9, 2012) was born and raised in Shaker Heights. He was a member of the absurdist comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre. Bergman died yesterday due to complications from leukemia. He was 72.

His father, Oscar Bergman, wrote for the Plain Dealer, and during the 1950s he and his wife Rita hosted a local radio program called Breakfast With the Bergmans on WSRS 1490 AM.

From a young age he was a writer of comedy. By the ninth grade he was composing a weekly humor column for the Shaker High newspaper, The High Hatters and later Look and See With Peter B.

His first radio success came as an announcer on the Shaker High intercom radio system, where he once announced that Chinese communists had invaded the school and that all students were to report immediately to a "mandatory voluntary" assembly. Principal Russell H. Rupp was not amused and ended Bergman's high school radio career. Principal Rupp was eventually immortalized as Firesign stalwart Principal Poop.

Russell H. Rupp as Shaker Heights Junior High Principal (1938)

Scene from "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers
Peter Bergman as Mudhead
Phil Proctor as Principal Poop
Today, the Shaker High "Blue Bison" football team plays on Poop Field.

Sources:
FiresignTheatre.com
DangerousMinds.net
Cleveland Memory Project
Cleveland Classic Media
Michael Heaton
Derf

(More on The Firesign Theatre)

Firesign Theatre

I do not hate Monty Python. I hate people who love Monty Python. And by that I mean, I hate people who love Monty Python but don't get Monty Python. There is a generation of twits who believe Monty Python is hilarious because it is absurd. "The Ministry of Funny Walks" is indeed hilarious. But not because it is the Ministry of Funny Walks.

It's the Ministry of Funny Walks. Do you see?

Whatever, what do you know from funny.

So, while Monty Python was skewering British society, The Firesign Theatre was smoking a lot of pot. Oh, and skewering American society.

Formed in the late 1960s, the Firesign Theatre (Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor) created surrealist tableaux of funny, often taking both sides of one LP to tell an extended, dream-like story. When I was a kid, I did not know the extent of their narratives, because the only album we had in the house was a compilation record, Forward Into The Past (released in 1976) which included selections from their previous nine albums, plus difficult to locate comedy singles.

In 1972 they released Dear Friends, a collection of their live radio broadcasts on KPFK in San Francisco. Whereas their produced work is tightly scripted, this program allowed for a certain amount of spontaneity, which on two occasions, got them fired.

Perusing the TV Guide:
BERGMAN: I like to watch that program with my girl.
PROCTOR: You have a girl?
BERGMAN: We'll go into that later.
(nervous laughter)
PROCTOR: You'll go into her later.
(big nervous laughter)

Just in time for the holidays:
"Toad Away"
Recorded December 9, 1970 on KPFK
Fan video by me.
Twenty years ago today, on Wednesday, November 27, 1991 WCPN 90.3 FM presented Calling All Ears, an evening of Live Radio Theater directed by Firesign Theatre alum David Ossman. The event was recorded at the Cuyahoga County College Main Stage Theater on the Metro Campus, and featured original works by Mr. Ossman as well as local playwrights William Borden and Aubrey Wertheim.

David Ossman and ... what the hell am I wearing?
Participating in this program was thrilling; Ossman cast me to play Fergus the bartender against his Maxwell Morgan, Crime Cabby. Unfortunately, it is a little embarrassing to listen to now, as I am trying too hard to match him, tough guy to tough guy, when my job was to be the squirrely sounding-board character. I mean, I was the bartender.

It's like Tom Hanks told me, you don't want to meet your heroes.


Before broadcast, Ossman warms-up the audience with the Firesign classic, "Bozo's Big Bang."
Having graduated from college that spring, this was my first big professional-grade theatrical project in Cleveland. The best thing to come out of Calling All Ears, however, were all the great connections I made with fellow travelers like David Caban, Brian Pedaci, Peggy Sullivan, David Thonnings, and Lee T. Wilson.