Summertime and the Telling is Never Easy

By Gene Jeffers

Janis Joplin belts out "Summertime" in the folksy and intimate Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena, a funky little backroom venue that at first seems more suited to The Soggy Bottom Boys or perhaps a scene in the life of the itinerant Joad family than to a collection of normal-seeming people preparing to stand and bare deeply personal memories before an assembled group of total strangers and intimate friends.

The walls and the entire room are painted and decorated in a trompe-mind

Effort to situate our gathering crowd in some country-rich feed and grain warehouse where one can all but hear the echoes of bare feet stomping to fiddles from some long-ago summer hoe down. Each little square table has been autographed by past country music stars-to-be who have yodeled their way through the room and coffee cup rings that have settled with relative permanence on the lacquered surfaces. The only things missing are bits of straw to stick in our mouths and that hot, dusty aroma peculiar to farm buildings in the afternoon sun. It is, as it harkens back to an idealized and softly remembered time and place so not-Southern California, eventually understood as an entirely appropriate place to hear other's memories of past summers.

We have come, after all, to witness the Telling Tales Theatre "Summer Life Cycle" readings of highly personal writings generated during weekly meetings that challenged participant/writers to recapture events, people, crises, thoughts, joys and tragedies in their lives. Part of an on-going series of such workshops, today's presentation focuses on memories of and connections with summers past.

The lights dim, Janis fades away, the crowd hushes, and we begin.

"Daddy takes me beyond the edge," says Norma Fain Pratt, describing a long-ago summer when she learned to swim at age 2 and a half. "He holds me as Mommy paces back and forth [on the distant shore], and we glide effortlessly away."

And so we glide effortlessly away across a lake filled with summer memories. Dr. Pratt, who holds a Ph. D from UCLA in American Social and Cultural History, is the founder and leader of this band of brave adventurers so willing to share their most ordinary and yet personal reflections. Throughout the course of her workshops, which culminate in the on-stage reading of their creative nonfiction pieces, Pratt poses questions and provokes responses to help each participant/performer tease out meanings and significance that had lain dormant and untouched over the years.

Giving her personal stamp to every child's fantasies, KarenMarie Sullivan tells how her alter-ego," an Hawaiian princess, leader of a fierce band of warriors, before becoming a regular kid," emerged in full

flower as she visited an aunt's home during her sibling's delivery. "My mind was making pictures," she explains, providing to-the-point descriptions of the dying cigarette dangling from her auntie's opened mouth as the truth of her duality is revealed and she creates an entire persona and life filled with power and unseen dangers.

Camping adventures and a lesson on self-reliance strode in next vested in the persona of Jane Lemon, complete with backpack and bear whistle. She spun her tale of summer six miles up Pitkin Creek and being left behind by the bigger kids and cousins to find her own way home. Her mother had told her that if she ever became lost, she would always get home if she took the path that went downhill. Not always straight home, however, as we soon discovered on our vicarious journey down Lemon's memory trail.

Regal in a patterned dashiki and smart chapeau, Pearl Took swept us away to the early days of World War II, when she was an evacuee sent to the countryside to get away from German air raids in England. Despite the chaos and hurt that was filling her big world, she soon learned that apples came from trees and, wonder of wonders, there was "Something growing everywhere" for her memories.

Chaos is not confined to world events and can be intensely personal, as we heard from Denise Emanuel, who told of her struggles to understand her own self, and specifically of the enticing and exciting experiences of her "Bad Girl Summer. " Fourteen, for her, was a year of sneaking away from school, secretly drinking her parent's liquor, escaping from maximum security Catholic girl's school, a of conning parents, adults, other kids, and even, we suspect, herself. After all, she asked us plaintively, there's only so much you can do in a small town, isn't there?

What could or might lie beyond the small town was soon revealed, as Margot Gwin, dressed in memory-evoking tie-dye shirt and head band, told her tale of age fourteen adventures as she and a friend ran away to find

the world. Santa Fe Kid and she, on their way to school, decided to hitchhike to Santa Fe and places beyond. A kindly hippie and his girl friend obliged by giving them a ride as he endlessly popped pills and smoked dope. "My only memories of that drive," she recalls, almost too wistfully, are that the car was filled with smoke the entire way."

Eventually, the two landed at a commune, where our heroine soon realized she wasn't quite ready for free sex and some of the other concomitant realities of the lifestyle. Fortunately (or not) the police came and took them away, ending their summer flight to freedom. Having beenwashed, their commune clothes replaced with clean nylons, short skirts and neatly pressed white blouses, only then were they acceptable to be place in the Grant County Jail until her brother came to retrieve her.

Smoke-fogged memories of yesteryear were soon interrupted with a bang, as Brad Woods arrived in bicycle helmet, flashing red light, and a summer tale of bicycle commuting and fire crackers that quickly threatened to escalate uncomfortably beyond his own sense of justice. It would take an honest evaluation of his own youthful pranks to bring him to a place where he could humanize an erstwhile enemy and allow suburbia to return to normalcy and some semblance of tranquility.

Joane Copeland, replete with white feather boa and appearing every bit as exotic and eye-catching as the goddess Selena herself, took advantage of that quietude, and told of how, in summertime, the moon is a flirt, asking "What do you want casting a spell on all of us." If you let her, Copeland shares her secret that, "if you let her, the moon will be your portal to another world of dreams."

"I loved his childishness, that he liked to play, to tell stories," says Lemon in a return presentation, as she opened her most private heart and old of unrequited love, leaving us all to ask ourselves as she once did, "Wow, who is Ronnie Gibbons?" She will, Lemon says sadly, love Ronnie Gibbon forever, summer after summer, giving us all a bittersweet lesson that long term loving relationships sometimes miss by half and never have a chance to flower.

But love, we are to learn, is all about possibility, even when obstructed by our own efforts. Emanuel (Bad Girl Summer) returns to speak of a reunion between a woman and her child separated by adoption and about to meet again in a cold and empty hotel lobby. Presented from both perspectives as mother and now grown child approach the reunion, uncertain, unsure. Denise leaves us all that way, unsure, uncertain, as the curtain closes before the final results are in, leaving each of us to write our own possibility.

A gorgeous red silk Nehru jacket and carefully coifed golden hair give nary an initial clue to later descriptions of toilet facilities as Pat Twair weaves her tale of a summer spent on a Greek isle retrieving more ancient history. "Life hasn't changed much over 7,000 years," she comments dryly about the Neolithic finds, and notes the sad condition of the toilets. "The bathroom problem loomed enormously," she explained, describing the path to the facilities that led past a large sow with hateful pink eyes. The constantly overflowing pit and the irascible pig led to her own personal state of perpetual constipation, and a continual search for bushes and trees on the windswept, low growth island. The islanders gift of a beautiful woven cloth in tribute to her kindness to the local women still provides tangible strands that connect her to that timeless place.

Francis Della Volpe touched us all as he grappled emotionally with having to cut tenuous strands to a first and distant child. He fills the word "relinquishment" with his anguish and tells of moving on, of moving to California, where he suddenly found himself in the midst of the filming for The Wiz, complete with yellow brick linoleum road. "Time seems to dissolve serious delusions," he noted, such as being able to walk to the beach from Glendale, or that it never rains in Southern California. He closed with a quote from Antonio Machada, who wrote of honeybees busy deep in his heart, "Making sweet honey and white honey comb from all my past regrets."

Regrets and opportunities, secret treasures and hoarded passions, all had been revealed by the participant/performers and laid before an audience that had, by its very presence, become part of the program. Indeed, the final act of the play invited audience members to write and present such statements of their own lives, bridging that final gap between player and audience. "Mommy, I want to go back," Pratt had recalled in her opening piece, a frightened plea made while learning to swim. In leading her workshops, she has helped each of the participants to move forward by going back, back to places and times of significance that, in their sharing, offer meanings that transcend each individual's existence and offer opportunities to better understand what it truly means to be human.

If you would like more details or to participate in the next Telling Tales Workshop beginning on September 8, 2001, please contact Dr. Norma Fain Pratt at 626-797-4478 or email her at nfpratt@earthlink.net.