I have mentioned elsewhere on this illustrious blog of mine that for the past few years, on and off, I have been teaching about “cultural vocabulary” at a place called ABES in North East Calgary. (Please see Cultural Vocabulary at ABES and Work, Work, Work.)
On thing I believe it’s important for my students to know is who’s on our money, from the Loonie on up. I guess I might well ask at this point, to my Canadian readers, if you know, exactly, for all the times you’d handled, say, a ten dollar bill, whose picture appears on it.
I ask this because one day last week, I came upon a conversation between one of my students, a doctor from Pakistan, and a Canadian–born student from another of the programs. She was asking my student just what, exactly, we focus on in my class. (Another way saying, “What the hell do you do in there all day?”)
By way of example, he mentioned that he now knows who appears on our ten dollar bill. I asked her if she knew, to which she said she had no idea. The good doctor then informed her “It’s Sir John A. MacDonald.” To which she asked, “Who?” To which my student, who has been in Canada for all of six months, replied, “Our first Prime Minister, and The Father of Confederation.”
I guess we still must teach Canadian history in our schools. But I was really surprised, one might even say shocked and appalled, that a young, intelligent woman who received her education in Calgary wouldn’t know the answer to this.
While we might believe that all American students learn about George Washington (as we do in Canada as well), there are clearly gaps in the American system, as the following story illustrates.
A number of years ago, I found myself (not that I was lost, but you know what I mean) in New York City, specifically in Spanish Harlem. I was there with a program developed at Calgary’s Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts called the Playwrights’ Web. We had partnered (I hate using nouns as verbs, but sometimes it seems inevitable) a Calgary junior high school with one in Harlem, the idea being that we would learn about each others’ cultures through the vehicle of playwriting.
The class in Calgary had been quite into the spirit of the project, but when I walked into that classroom in Harlem, it almost seemed to be the first they had heard of it. One young, diminutive fellow in the class walked up to me, in the midst of utter pandemonium, stood there looking at me, arms akimbo (as we used to say) and said, “Yo! You’re the man! You’re the big tall white man! Do something! Teach us something!” And then he returned to his seat, getting high fives and low fives from his classmates as if he played for the Yankees and was returning to the dugout after hitting a home run.
I remember at that moment looking at the door thinking to myself, “New York City is just beyond that door. I could just leave. Why don’t I just leave?” It was very tempting.
As I stood there contemplating the closed door to the classroom, three girls in the front row who were all in their best attire, and unlike anyone else in the room actually seemed interested in the program, engaged me in conversation. One of them asked, “Do you all got your own money up there in Canada?”
I said yes, indeed we do. I happened to have a Canadian 20 in my wallet and so I fished it out and held it up for their consideration. At the moment I held it up, the whole room went quiet. No more pandemonium.
The young dude came back up the centre aisle looking at the bill with great confusion and suspicion. At length he asked,
“Whut da fuck’s that?”
“That’s a 20 dollar bill, I said.
“No it ain’t,” he said.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“Where da fuck’s that from?” he asked.
“Canada,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “Where da fuck is dat, anyway?”
“North,” I said, “North of the Bronx.”
“And it’s like its own country?” he asked.
“We like to think so,” I replied.
“And you all got your own money up dare?” he asked.
“Yes we do.”
He leaned in and looked more carefully and then asked, “Who’s the fuckin’ chick?”
“That’s the Queen of England,” I told him.
He worked that around in his brain for a moment before asking, “What da fuck’s she doing on your money?”
To which I said, “That’s a very good question.”
And after that little interchange, we managed to have a very good week together. I taught them a bit about the theatre, a bit about playwriting, a bit about Calgary, and a whole lot about the American Revolution, which oddly enough, they seemed to know very little about.
And so it begs the question, “Who’s on your money, and why are they there?”
Last night I saw John Cleese at the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary with my friend Zenon West. This was one stop on his Last Time To See Me Before I Die tour. For those interested in the phenomenon of Monty Python and really, the history of comedy in England from the 1960’s till now (which I am), this was a very entertaining and informative show. Mr. Cleese uses clips from the Monty Python TV series, as well as his films such as “A Fish Named Wanda” and the amazing Fawlty Towers to illustrate his points and to break up a very generous lecture of sorts – half lecture, half stand up comedy – which is always charming and informative.
The two hours go by so fast. It really is a brilliant evening. The audience is so appreciative to be in the presence of someone who has made us laugh for so many years. What a gift he has given us, the gift of laughter. I can think of none greater.
As I sat there, listening to one of my favourite people on the planet, I was taken back to an evening some forty years ago in my home town of Regina. It actually goes back maybe a year or so before then . . .
Some of you will have no frame of reference for this, but back in the 1970’s, not just in Regina but most anywhere, there were only a few channels on TV which were mostly black and white, and if you wanted to change the channel you had to physically do that on the set with a dial, there were no remote controls.
In Regina, there were two channels, CTV from Regina and CBC from Moose Jaw. (2 and 9, as I recall.) On Thursday nights at 9 on Channel 2 there was an hour long detective show on called Mannix, which I loved to watch. My friend Rick (aka Richard Campbell) told me about a new show that came on at 9:30 on Channel 9 called Monty Pythons Flying Circus which I wanted no part of.
On Friday mornings Rick would ask me if I’d watched Monty Python but I stood fast and remained true to Mannix. (Hey, if nothing else, I’m loyal.) Finally, one Thursday evening a little after 9, Rick walked over to my house and turned the channel on our old Zenith TV and made me watch Monty Python and from then till now I was hooked.
That summer, Rick and I learned that the Monty Python troupe was actually coming to the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts. We could hardly believe it. (No one came to Regina back then other than Valdy and Supertramp.) We were able to get front row tickets for the simple reason that not many people had heard of them by this time.
We were treated to an amazing show, all their TV sketches done live, and done word for word, as well. For a couple of aspiring theatre artists, this show must have had a more profound impact on us at the time than we could have known. I doubt that I’ve been more enthralled with a performance since.
After it was all over – after the flying edible missiles and dead parrots and cross-dressing lumberjacks and all the rest of it – Rick and I went back to stage door and waiting for them to come out. (The only time I’ve ever done such a thing.)
And then they came out. It would be hard to put into words the generosity they showed Rick and me that night. They not only signed our programs (which I have since lost, alas) but had Rick and me sign the various books and magazines they were reading, anything on hand really. As their cabs (and one limo) waiting to take them to their downtown hotel, they stood and engaged two young high school kids in conversation for what seemed like a good half hour. Amazing! It seemed so then and it seems so now, so many years later.
So, all that was going through my head last night as my friend Zenon and I watched Mr. Cleese’s very charming performance. After a well deserved standing ovation, it was over. Back in the day, back in Regina some 40 years ago, when the show was over they projected PISS OFF onto the curtains. The beauty of Monty Python was that we laughed at that. Of course we did. It’s funny.
No such thing last night, and when it was over, Zenon remarked that John Cleese genuinely seems to be a nice man, and I couldn’t agree more.
To end, here’s one we all know, that they did in Regina a million years ago and that Mr. Cleese shared with the audience last night.
Some of you may know that after defining myself artistically as a playwright for the last 20 years or so, for the last year I have been writing a novel. I have written over 20 plays in my lifetime, 18 of them have been produced at least once, some of them many times. The writing process by and large ends with the first performance, although we might sometimes go back and tinker with a few scenes here and there. This usually happens in the unlikely event that the play is being published.
And so I know my way around the process of writing a play, I think. This is not to say I know, absolutely, how to write a play, just that I understand the process of how one might go about doing it. The question I have been asked over the last few months is how I am finding the process of writing a novel, and how it differs from writing a play. So this post is an exploration of those questions.
One thing that both processes have in common for me is that I typically hand write a first draft, and then transcribe it into the computer which becomes in effect draft 2. The plays I have written have almost always been written in fountain pen on graph paper. I wrote the first draft of the novel in pencil on graph paper in three small notebooks. The novel in fact magically ends within a page of the end of the third notebook.
When one is writing a play, one of the most important things to monitor is the voice of the characters, making sure they are clear and distinct. My novel is written in the form of a daily journal and so the voice of my protagonist is of the utmost importance. It’s close to my own voice, but it’s not my voice, it’s his. So in a way, it has rather been like writing an extended monologue, and in this regard it wasn’t too much of a departure for me, if I thought of it that way.
This perhaps begs the question, could this novel then be adapted for the stage? The simple answer to that is yes, it might possibly work as a one-man show. Another question might then be, why didn’t I just write it as a one-man show? The simple answer is, I don’t know. The surprising thing about it is that if this were to happen, it wouldn’t interest me to do it myself. Again, I don’t really know why.
When I write a play, I am very tuned into the page and word counts at the bottom of the screen of any Word document. These counts tell you, roughly, how productive you’ve been on any given day. In a play, because of the nature of dialogue, it is possible to leap ahead in pages without drastically altering your word count; writing a few hundred words might swell the script by 5 pages, and you can feel that you have put in a pretty good day’s work in doing so. For some reason, I can remember that my play A Guide to Mourning is about 18,000 words long. It is, by today’s standards, a full length play, and so that has always been an unofficial benchmark for me.
Also, if the play is in two acts, you can reasonably tell by the word count if the two acts are of roughly the same length and therefore duration. This is important because you don’t want to end up with a first act that is 90 minutes long and second act that is only 15 minutes, say. You get the idea.
This is obviously not a concern in a novel. But what I have noticed is that while the words pile up, the pages numbers tick by very, very slowly. Like a glacier, receding. A few weeks ago, I seemed to get stuck on page 87, no matter how long I worked or how much I typed, I just seemed to be stuck there. (I noticed this because I don’t like the number 87, it being 13 less than 100. Another strange example of living with tridecaphobia!)
I have now typed just over 45,000 words, transcribing the written version of the novel from my journals into the computer. I am just starting the third and final volume. Some people ask why I don’t get someone to do this for me, but this is the most critical and creative part of the process. Hardly a sentence gets typed that isn’t changed, somehow. More often than not, the handwritten version is quite compressed and needs expansion, illumination. And of course at other times it just has to be thrown out. Sometimes, it actually has to be changed because I can’t read my own damned handwriting.
Overall, the main difference I suppose is the sheer volume of the novel. It really does take discipline and even courage to go on. You also have to manufacture your own enthusiasm for the project. Some days that can be difficult as you find yourself convinced that they guy who wrote the first draft is a babbling idiot. How James Joyce lasted 17 years in writing Finnegans Wake is beyond me. And he didn’t have Facebook to distract him!
Courage, discipline, optimism are what I need now. So far, so good. I am looking forward to sharing this tome with the world when the time comes. When it does come, I am looking at an innovative way of going about publishing it.
I have mentioned elsewhere on this illustrious blog of mine that for the past few years, on and off, I have been teaching about “cultural vocabulary” at a place called ABES in North East Calgary. (Please see Cultural Vocabulary at ABES and Work, Work, Work.)
eugene stickland 