Process XVII

"Hello, Cleveland."
Alters #4
(Aftershock Comics, 2017)

We’re reading the Paul Jenkins/Leila Leiz comic Alters for class this week, the third notable comic to take place in Cleveland, Ohio, after American Splendor and Howard the Duck. It is also notable in that the protagonist is a trans woman superhero, named Chalice.

Last week we took in the Iceman comics which delved into his life as a gay man, which was queer as in strange (as they say.) It is often an odd fit when an long-established character is rewritten to have a sexual orientation contrary to previous expectations.

So, yeah. We’ve moved onto queer superheroes. When I was a teenager, reading X-Men was in its full flower, working as an aggressively overwrought metaphor for any marginalized group. This came to its obvious conclusion in the X2 when (coincidentally) Bobby “Iceman” Drake reveals to his parents as being a mutant. The metaphor is played for comedy.

His mother asks, “Have you tried ... not being a mutant?”

In the Iceman comics he has to come out to them a second time, this time as gay. No more symbolism, this is attempting to reflect the real life experience.

Alters had the advantage of starting fresh, a new “universe” with a different power dynamic between superpowered humans, which I enjoyed more. In spite of its unique and sympathetic protagonist, and leans harder into the lives of marginalized people - not only trans, but disabled, homeless, people of color - it still falls into a several traps, including a queer-coded arch villain and the cringey depiction of a single black mother anmed Sharise.

Is she realistic, are there people like Sharise? I guess. But knowing it comes from the mind of a white, male writer, the situation and vernacular were a little difficult to take.

And then there’s the Cleveland thing. Just as Steve Gerber, who never visited Cleveland, chose our hometown as the setting for the adventures of Howard the Duck, the British-born Jenkins made this Chalice’s home without really knowing anything about it. Where the hell is “the city center”? The least bit of research could have made it more believable. As it is, Cleveland is simply a stand-in for “Not New York.”

As for me, I am spending this weekend creating a twelve-panel comic adapted from my short play The Negative Zone, which takes place in a comic book shop in the mid 1980s.

Top Ten Moments of 2019

At the devastating conclusion of 2016, I pointed up ten moments from the year which made it worth living, because there needs to be something. The past few months have been spent coping with great anxiety over my mother’s health, and there is yet much to remember and to celebrate about 2019.

1. "Spamilton"

The girl and I went to the Hanna the day after New Year’s to enjoy Gerard Alessandrini’s parody of Hamilton, which was delightful in its low-budget aesthetic, fast pace and cheap jokes. If you aim at a king you must kill him, and it was the versatile comic abilities of the performers which kept us in stitches.

Though my daughter got all the Hamilton references, I did have to help her out a little with the more obscure musical theater references. And by obscure I mean Liza. The kids don’t know Liza.

2. "Witness for the Prosecution"

There are a few non-speaking roles in Agatha Christie’s courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution and I was asked by Great Lakes Theater to appear as a barrister for a small number of student matinee performances, the very first of which was for an audience of mostly middle school students.

They sat surprisingly silent throughout this sixty-six year-old drama, and we were all shocked and delighted when the place erupted during the final five minutes as Christie revealed first the first verdict, then one twist upon another. It was a unique experience you can only get from live theater.


3. “Awareness” (short film)

This spring I had the privilege of mentoring a New East Tech High School student in creating a public health play script. Actually, it was originally slated to be a live performance, then the screenplay for a short film. The student is a poet, with a great sense of style and humor, and mostly I shared with her what I saw, what I felt was missing, which moments were better reported and which dramatized.

Checking in every other week, she wrote very fast (and on her phone, no less) arranged table readings with her classmate and oversaw the production of the final video product.

4. Melissa & Patrick’s Wedding

My wife and I attended a stunning destination wedding in New Orleans, which was delightful and romantic in so many ways. We once visited the Crescent City together, over twenty years ago, and there is no one I would rather travel with, she is my soulmate in tourism. Also, it was a delight to participate in a richly fantastic Millennial nuptial composed of so many of my theater and actor-teacher colleagues.

5. Women’s World Cup

For feminists (and those who love them) it has been the best of times, the worst of times. But the best moments can be spectacular, like Megan Rapinoe and the utter dominance of Team USA in the Women’s World Cup. You could catch us most matches at a huge, full table at Heights Grill, people by members of the high school team, their coaches and families.

And you would know us by my wife’s mauve do.

6. College Visits

Twice this summer I joined the girl in investigating colleges and universities, first in NYC and then in Providence. It was a joy, stealing this opportunity to spend one-on-one time with my daughter in new places, trying new restaurants, watching her take extensive notes on what she’s discovered.

7. School of Rock presents "American Idiot"

My son was introduced to Green Day early and they are the bedrock of his rock and roll education. I took him to see the Broadway tour of American Idiot at the Palace Theatre when he was nine, and the Beck Center production a year later (Beck’s was better) and when he was cast in the American Idiot show at his chapter of School of Rock I may have been more excited than he was.

8. Crossing the City

I have run from my house to my parents house a few times, at least once each time I have trained for a marathon. This year I did it twice, the second time with my son. He was riding, I was running. It was a hot day, the last ten miles were grueling (much like the race itself) but having the opportunity to share the experience, the city, my training, four hours together making our way from Cleveland Heights to Lakewood, we had an adventure.

9. Mike Doughty plays "Ruby Vroom"

I’m not actually the kind of father who pushes his artistic interests onto his children. No, really. But we have also exposed them to an awful lot of what we like, which is nearly everything. So I believe they have come to their tastes organically.

Making her mark at the Smiling Skull Saloon.

Having said that, the boy has also been a huge Soul Coughing fan and when Mike Doughty announced he was touring the twenty-fifth anniversary of their first album Ruby Vroom I thought that was a father-son experience not to be missed.

Falling as it did this fall in the midst of great emotional turmoil, listening to Doughty and his band conduct a faithful recreation of the album live was surprisingly affecting to me, a stark reminder of my young adulthood. I may have cried (I didn’t actually cry.)

10. Christmas in Athens

It’s been hard. It continues to be hard. But I am so grateful to my brother Henrik for returning from England -- for the second time in two months -- so that one of mother’s boys were home for the holiday, affording me this opportunity to be with Toni’s family in Athens, if only for a couple days.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, best wishes for the New Roaring Twenties.

And Then You Die (revisited)

James Rankin as Pengo

Monday night, a small gathering joined me at my house for an informal reading of And The You Die (How I Ran a Marathon in 26.2 Years). This is the monodrama I wrote ten years ago, took the New York Fringe, and revised for a run of performances at Cleveland Public Theatre in 2011, performed a single evening with I Hate This (a play without the baby).

Pairing the two shows together only pointed up the flaws in this newer piece. Though they share themes and feature a similar character (me) IHT is straightforward and weighty while ATYD flails all over the place, trying to decide what it wants to be. Or so it seems to me.

It was Chennelle’s suggestion that, having proposed a revision, I may want to hear the script read out loud first, and by someone else. We asked James Rankin to read the script, he has already performed in several plays I have written, including Double Heart, both of my Agatha Christie adaptations, and The Great Globe Itself.

The crowd was intimate, by design, as I limited the gathering to folks who were unfamiliar with the play, mainly folks I had only met in the past eight or nine years.

It was refreshing to listen to the play, to experience it in real-time like an audience member. The structure takes the audience all over the place, from the past to the “present,” from formative moments to the job of training for a marathon itself.

The middle section is powerful with poetic imagery, and it made members of this audience wonder why it took so long to get to that point. Of course, the early scenes give the middle scenes their strength, building the story and the character so it/he can take flight.

I also made a running list of all of the Cleveland references, and how many were helpful and which were not. It’s definitely a play which takes place in Cleveland, and nowhere else. But it does get bogged down in minutiae of interest only to a local. That’s fun and all, but takes up valuable verbal real estate.

Not an illustrator. Actually a runner.

Finally, it is a period piece, the story of a Gen X father preparing for a marathon in 2006. References to the now disgraced Lance Armstrong and now ubiquitous Alexander Hamilton ring differently than they did even eight years ago.

My audience was asked to reflect back to me what they felt the play is about, what message it attempts to convey, and some of the answers surprised me.

The effects of long-distance running on the human body, the functions of the body, its capacity and fragility.

I have created an alternate professional life for the main character, that of a visual artist and illustrator. How relevant this is was the subject of some conversation, and also how more clearly to draw these aspirations to the personal and athletic goals, errors, and achievements.

One of the New York reviews from years ago remarked on how characters arrive, never to be heard from again, which is a thing that happens during a person’s life. But the place of “father” in all of this, the original inspiration for becoming a runner was an important question for me, and I received some valuable feedback on that.

My goal is to rewrite the play entirely, leaving most of the skeleton intact and changing all the words. My writing has evolved in the last ten years, or I like to think it has, and this is a story I want to return to, to get right. Listening to it read has only strengthened that commitment, the fact that I am training for the 2019 Chicago Marathon will provide a lot of time to ruminate on the revision.

I'm taking the TEAM CHALLENGE for the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation,to raise $2,000 and run the 2019 Chicago Marathon! Will you kick in something today? Visit my TEAM CHALLENGE page and learn more about my reasons for supporting this cause. Many thanks!

A walk with Julie

One Monday afternoon in early October I received a text from my friend Julie, to whom I was once a terrible boyfriend, which read, “Hey David! I’m in Cleveland with my mom today and tomorrow. Can you get together tomorrow evening?”

How often do old girlfriends reach out for an evening of booze and reminiscence? Not often enough, to be sure. Especially when those who do happen to live in Anchorage. My response was a subtle, “Whoa! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

They were staying at the Drury Hotel, which is a recent venture, carved out of the former Board of Education building on East 6th Street. Twenty-five years ago we saw candidates Bill Clinton and Al Gore speak before a tremendous crowd from a platform in front of that building.

Julie suggested we have a drink in the lobby, but she hadn’t really been to Cleveland since the early 1990s. I thought we might do a little better.

I met her in the lobby, which features these two amazing, restored murals from 1931. Her mother was staying in for the evening, and she had already tied one on so I knew we were in for a good night. Instead of heading out through the main entrance, I noticed that the rear of the lobby opens onto Veterans’ Memorial Plaza. Had she ever seen the Fountain of Eternal Life? Indeed, she hadn’t. She was impressed, and so was I. I always am.

It was just after dusk, and the weather was just perfect jacket weather. The streets were alive with people, neither team was playing that night, and it was a Tuesday, but many were out enjoying the weather.

We ambled through Public Square. I felt wistful, we all, my family, my co-workers, we spent a lot of time visiting and hanging out there the summer before. Good Lord, the convention and all the rest. The kids running through the fountain. But it was like we’d never even been there this summer. We just hadn’t.

Lek

I was surprised and delighted to see the large, metal “free speech” art installations by Lek (Olalekan Jeyifous) and we made our through the square heading for our ultimate destination, which was East 4th Street.

I didn’t really know which bar we would choose, I just wanted to impress her by showing off the street. The Greenhouse Tavern (which is my favorite restaurant, anyway) had a board out touting it’s rooftop bar, and that was enough for Julie. Up we went.

We sat at the bar and we talked. We talked for a long time. We talked through one old fashioned, and then two, at an open air bar, the screen showing some basketball game (not the Cavs) with a narrow view of the slice of the roof across the promenade, the Terminal Tower, the colorful, hanging light bulbs of East 4th Street.

We remembered old friends, and boyfriends and girlfriends (yes, even one another) and what it is like to raise teenagers, in Cleveland, in Alaska, in Trump’s America.

Social media has afforded us all the opportunity to make contact with, and even continue and grow, relationships with people who in an earlier time we may never have seen or communicated with again, from childhood, high school, college. But what is the nature of that communicate, and what does it mean? That we’re still cool with each other? We mostly agree on things? We make each other smile?

Taking, grabbing the opportunity to sit and talk, for hours, with someone with whom you have a shared history. That’s what we’re missing when we think we’re staying in touch through Facebook and the like. Julie and I barely scratched the surface, but I learned things that were new to me, events I hadn’t heard about or worse, entirely misunderstood.

"The Branches of Education" by Cora Holden (1931)
Do you see Shakespeare?

I have spent a great deal of my forties digging deep and regretting certain decisions I made a very long time ago, but she made me remember why I had made those decisions and some of them actually made sense. It was a great relief.

The bartender gave us a last call, which made me believe it was very late, so instead of having one last at the Greenhouse we hit the street because I had to show her where I work. We walked to Playhouse Square, where nothing was really going on on this Tuesday night, they were in tech for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hanna Theatre, but we took a peeked through the windows, and took our chandelier selfie.

Parnell’s was still open so I checked the time and realized it was only just past nine, which was only how late the patio at the Greenhouse was staying open on a Tuesday night, silly me. Well, I had to show her my favorite bar so we went there for another and more reminiscence, sitting out on the sidewalk which is the best place to be.

Some time after ten, the server asked if we wanted another round and Julie said I have to drive eventually and should probably have a glass of water, but that she’d have another, which was perfect. And so it went.

She suggested getting a car to take her back to the Drury but I insisted on walking. How many more night’s like this would there be this season? Just when we reached 6th street it began to lightly rain and we said our goodbyes at the door. I had almost reached the sidewalk when I heard her calling for me. I ran up to the portico, out of the rain, a bit apprehensive as to why she would call me back.

It was the music system. They were playing Tom’s Diner.

“It’s always nice to see you.”

@InTheCLE

Spending the week as the voice of @InTheCLE which is “a citizen voice social media channel that lets Clevelanders share and promote their love for Cleveland via Twitter.” Basically, they pass off the handle to a different person every week, whose responsibility is to tweet early and often about what’s happening in the city.

From March 6 - 12, 2017 that’s me, they even swap your face in and so when I go back through the timeline I am surprised to see my face attached to things I did not actually tweet. Other InTheCLE contributors have a greater interest in sports or civic engagement, mine has a lot to do with promoting area theater.

This is not the first time I have done this, I was on InTheCLE last January, too. It was quite an education in Twitter, which I rarely used. I didn’t know the difference between a "Reply" and a "Quote Retweet" and why you would rather use one than the other. I was also obsessed with creating my own original content, and was unaware you could get away with retweeting interesting local news without having to comment upon it.

Because I have been taking this seriously (a little too seriously) I have been on Twitter A LOT this week and it’s a little disorienting. It’s funny, people will ask InTheCLE for a recommendation for something - say, a good vegan restaurant - and I feel it is my job to find out a million suggestions right away. I even use Facebook to poll my friends there, who are all too happy to offer their opinions, and then report back. Before I know it, I’ve lost a half-hour.

In the late 1990s, someone did an experiment where they holed up in a hotel room for a week or a month or something, and their only communication with the outside world was the internet. No TV, no phone, just the “world wide web.” If this person couldn’t pay for it with a credit card and have it delivered via internet, they couldn’t eat it. Video streaming was nascent - no DSL, so no movies. Watched a lot of porn, apparently.

Okay, so I’m not in that situation. I move freely through the world, but in the interest of providing original CLE-based content (once an hour is a goal) I have spent a lot of time scouring for interesting things to report, even if they don’t necessarily interest me. And, because the point is promote the city, my commentary should be positive, supportive. It’s a challenge.

Some people think the Browns management have made some very good decisions today. Others do not. I avoid politics. I try very hard to avoid politics. Twitter is a political sewer.

But it has also been invigorating, catching all the responses to Mayor Jackson's State of the City address today, if not the address itself. Yesterday, it was all about discovering, acknowledging and promoting woman-owned businesses for International Women's Day. I have also tagged several professional theater productions.

Anyway, the weekend is coming up. If you know of any interesting activities or special events in the Cleveland area coming up, please let me know. Just tag @InTheCLE!

Apply today to be considered as an @InTheCLE Tweeter of the Week.

Little Nemo In Cleveland

Just prior to switching from the New York Herald to Hearst's New York American newspaper, in 1911 Winsor McCay sent Little Nemo, Flip and Imp on an airship tour of the United States, stopping in all the major American cities. Guess where they landed in March? Cleveland!

NEMO: We ought to have a good time here next week! Cleveland is a great city!

In the panel above, we see a photo-realistic image of the Public Square (pre-Terminal Tower) facing east. See the Soldier and Sailors Monument, Superior and Euclid Avenues stretching out to the horizon. If it were not for those three significant landmarks, the place would be unrecognizeable, none of these building still exist and so many were yet to be built. Even the May Co. building would not be constructed for another three years.

NEMO: Cleveland is a beautiful city!

A young volunteer leads Nemo around and shares a raft of statistics. For example:

"Cleveland has three thousand streets; over 300 miles of sewers, an' 200 miles of paved streets. We have sixty thousand dwellings, 18 big hotels, 3000 factories employing sixty-five thousand people! There are seventy-five public schools, 5 high schools, one thousand and five hundred teachers and 60,000 pupils!"

:::Sigh:::

The American Chicle Co. You're welcome.

The one-hour stage adaptation "Adventures In Slumberland" by David Hansen is available for reading at New Play Exchange.

This post has been updated.