War Horse Blues

WAR HORSE is heading towards its first change of personnel next week as some of our cast leave and others come to join us. So I thought it might be a good time to release a little video postcard from our time on the road.
We have a few very talented musicians in our midst, and they've put together a little ditty. So I collected images and video from everyone and edited it together. I hope you enjoy!

"War Horse Blues" by The Dirty English from The Woods on Vimeo.

A Story for the Season

At this time for celebrating new beginnings, of travelers taken in and souls being saved, I wanted to share my thanks & congratulations to some very special individuals who - six years ago - made sure that there was room in the inn for a very lucky little fellow..

While I was on tour with TWELVE ANGRY MEN, the show was engaged at Houston's Hobby Center in March of 2007. Although I'm not always so good about exercising on the road, I was running daily - I'd usually take the same route, and every day I'd jog past the same parking lot.  And every day, the same stray dog was there: skin & bones, mangy and dusty, but always very sweet, if understandably skittish.  I'd stop and say hello.  He'd look nervously at me, and then he'd back off & over to the other side of the lot.  And he was there, no matter what time of day I passed by.  Morning, mid-day, or late at night.

After the third day of passing him, I couldn't take it - I got a company car, bought two Subway sandwiches, lured him in, and I took him to the local shelter.  He was a pit mix, pretty mangy, probably suffering from mites or worms or who knew what and dreadfully malnourished.  As I signed the forms and handed off the rope which I had fashioned into a leash, I asked if I could be notified of his progress and eventual adoption.  "Oh, he won't be adopted out. Even if he wasn't sick, we don't adopt out pit bulls.  He'll be held here for a week and, if he isn't picked up, he'll be put down."

I was the owner of a pit bull mix back home, whom I was missing terribly from all my travels.  I know how great these dogs can be, and I know what aggressive behavior looks like - behavior which this dog wasn't displaying in the least.  And he didn't look like the kind of dog someone had recently lost and for whom they would be desperately seeking.  "Alright, give him back," I said.  I'd keep looking.

I spent the day driving around, trying to find for a no-kill shelter.  Eventually I found the number for Dana Blankenship at Scouts Honor.  Their ranks were pretty full just then, having recently rescued several dogs from a raid, but when I explained the situation he told me to let him make a few phone calls and he'd get back to me.  He was obviously trying to do what he could - he didn't know me from Adam, and he'd never met this dog, so the fact that he did any hunting around at all was very kind.  And more help than I was getting from any other shelter to which I went.

Meanwhile, I took the dog (which I'd nicknamed "Cheech") to Heights Veterinary Clinic for a basic workup.  The veterinarian and his staff were incredibly kind and patient with me, and when he explained everything that was wrong with him - fleas, mites, malnourishment, probably heartworm - he gave me a compassionate look and said, "So...how far are we going to with this?"  I asked him to give him a flea dip, take basic recovery measures and - here was the kicker - would he be able to hold him overnight until I could 1) go to my performance that evening and 2) coordinate with Scouts Honor?  It wasn't the usual protocol, he admitted, but he took pity on me and the dog, and he agreed.

Scouts Honor did find a foster home for him, and after spending a night at Heights Vet Clinic, the dog was transferred to the care of Scouts Honor, where he began making slow progress in recovering.  The generosity of spirit from both Scouts Honor & the Heights Vet Clinic was remarkable.  It was touch & go there for awhile.  He was heartworm positive.  He was severely dehydrated and riddled with parasites.  But due to the care and concern of everyone involved, he made slow progress.

Eventually, a woman named Brooke came into his life.  She found his face on Petfinder.com and was decided: he would be hers.  She went to pick him up soon after, without so much as a dog bowl or bag of food.  But on the way home she stocked up all all the necessities, as well as plenty of healthcare instructions.  She persevered through illness, a long recovery, bias against his breed, and the resurrection of a mischievous spirit.  Eventually "Chuck" (as he's now mercifully been renamed) got rid of the heartworms and put on weight - and most importantly, regained his smile and impish behavior.  Chuck found his home.  And Brooke found her dog.  There's no better ending than that.

A month ago, while on tour with WAR HORSE in Philadelphia, I was able to visit Chuck and Brooke (who had since moved), to thank Brooke and to see what had become of Chuck.  And I brought along my camera this time.  It was a little hard to get my photos in focus, at times, because I was wiping tears away.  But it was an incredible reunion.  (He's barely recognizable as the same dog, so complete has been his recovery...)

One wonders if, at some point, Chuck might have remembered me from some distant part of his memory of a dark point in his life.  I kinda doubt it - I don't know that their memories work that way.  But for what it's worth, my smell, my voice, my demeanor - Chuck seemed to like them, a lot.  He hung close, and he looked me in the eye quite a lot.

There are always times when it seems like too much of a burden, to help out, to step in, to take action.  And of course there are always very legitimate reasons, very good reasons not to get involved.  But there are times when we must - when we're moved, or when we're urged, or when we're just plain tired of saying "no".  It's such times, when we do break the rules, when we do make the exception, that we are most anxious that our actions may be in vain.  And it's so gratifying when we get to enjoy an outcome like this.

Angie and I recently made our annual Christmas charity donation - this year, it went to Stray From The Heart, the organization who rescued Butley.  Butley's foster dad responded by telling us how pitiful he seemed in the shelter, how unresponsive he was, and how he almost decided to foster another dog instead.  But there was something about him that caught his eye.  And how lucky we all are for that.

Kindness saves us - it allows us to infuse our lives with vulnerability and to acknowledge our own frailty, and to entertain the possibility of hope.  But it isn't always the option we choose to take, either because our lives are speeding along, our resources are limited, our perspective is narrow.  Without judgement, I readily accept that there are times you have to move on, and there are times you have to stop and take action.  Most of us all have done both.  This is one of those times that I chose the latter, and I am incredibly lucky to have had such a small investment pay off in such huge dividends.

To all who stepped in, who stepped up, who took a chance and decided to make just one difference - just one - I want to say thank you.  Thank you for helping me be part of such an endeavor, thank you for believing that there was hope and reason in the effort, and - on behalf of Chuck, most especially - thank you for saving a life.

WAR HORSE 2012 Holiday Video

Ho-Ho-Ho...

Vacansopapurosophobia

It was only relatively recently that I learned that people actually do read this blog.  My sluggish entries and literary infidelities with other blogs left some readers with the sense that I had abandoned them.  I'd have thought that the combination of media fatigue from our modern era and one man's hubris that his life might worth more than a five phrase bio would result in my nattering away into a digital black hole.  Kindly, I have been given to discover this is not the case.  I have been scolded for not writing more.  My writing has received comments from engaged readers.  And I have been invited to guest journal on another blog.  Granted I was writing more about my dog than myself, but the writing is still all mine.  (Butley's sentence structure is abysmal.)


So the first order of business, from me the writer to you the reader is simply to say "thank you."  Your encouragement means a great deal, and I do look forward to hearing how my little missives might strike this readership.  Some of you have yet more kindly shared my writing with your online community, and not even for general public mockery but actual literary enthusiasm.  High praise indeed.  So thank you, thank you, thank you.

I once had a director who argued - somewhat cheekily but not entirely without conviction - that an artist's first creation is when, as a wee baby, he or she messes their diaper.  The infant bears down and out pops a work that required both effort and ingenuity and the creation of which has resulted in relief and invigoration.  Also, it is the artist's first rave review, because the child's mother, admittedly not the most discerning audience, looks down at the filled diaper and coos in motherly tones, "Oh, what a good baby!  You made a poopee!  What a good baby!"  And the mother inspects the work, and comments to other adult members of the the household that the child has produced said work.  Then she bathes the child, and powders the child, and praises the child on and on.  "You made a poopee!  You feel much better now, I bet, yes?"

Now, I could make a clever quip here.  "And that child's name was Andrew Lloyd Webber!" or "And that mother now works for People Magazine!"  But I've just spent two paragraphs thanking my reading audience for attending to and complimenting me on my poopee, so it would seem a bit disingenuous, no?  Ungrateful?  Or at the very least, tempting fate?  After all, mewling and bawling my way through my own creative endeavors, I am all too aware of the great effort - and more to the point - the great vulnerability that any artist undertakes in the production of something new.  It is an act of immodesty that rivals a political campaign.  But the truth is we need artists & art and, like sausage, their making is often best kept behind closed doors.               




But recently, I was entrusted with a work from a complete and total stranger.  Someone took the time to put thought and care into words meant to entertain.  To ennoble.  To enlighten.  Someone stopped what they were doing, in the middle of the day (or night), to answer the siren song of Calliope, the muse of epic poets.  And like Athena who sprung full-grown and fully armed from the mind of Zeus, their screed landed (a few weeks ago) upon the windshield of my car, parked in Jamaica Plain, Boston.  (We had parked it there, naturally, because parking in downtown Boston is verrrry expensive, and our friend lives right around the corner.  And as we were in Boston for two weeks, it sat there for nearly that long.)

The missive began with a kind entreaty:

Now, if someone has actually taken the time to not only leave me a note but address it, fold it, leave instructions for it, and tuck it beneath my wiper, then I ask you: How can I not open this work with anything but the most eager of eyes, the most open of hearts?  They even begin with "Please."  Plaintive. Yearning.  A delicate call that trusts its contents wholly and without reservation to the proper ministrations of its recipient.

And before I share it with you, I'd like to suggest that this be a lesson for all of us, sitting in the audience, standing in the gallery, holding a book, or even passing by a busker.  Just as we have been told, never to judge a book by its cover, so must we not judge any work of art by the medium or context in which it is delivered.  I enter, as Exhibit A in this argument's defense, the following work:

Now, a callous attack full of vicious epithets?  A harsh critique of parking etiquette?  A grammatical embarrassment?  I prefer to think of it as a first effort.  What valiance and forthright sense of mission!  A nascent Hemingway?  A burgeoning Huey Long?  Who knows?

In my defense, I had parked in such a way as to make room for the garbage can which - at the time - was blocking my parking right up to the corner, and the space behind me could only possibly have held a Harley Davidson or a Smart Car.  But the rightness or wrongness of my decision pales in comparison with the nigh Shakespearean linguistic innovation.

Observant sense of detail: "To the Fuckface from New York."
New words:  "Douchenozzle."  "Ass hat."
Innovative grammatical disregard: "Learn to NOT be a douchenozzle." (split infinitive)
Playful irony: "Sincerely, Pissed off Masshole"

...And, I might add, EXCELLENT spelling.

No, I wasn't in the least offended by this communiqué.  Because je suis un artiste.  I understand the volatile fragility of the artistic temperament.  And I not only applaud this person's effort to free from the bonds of creative stagnancy, I am honored to have been the single, entrusted audience member of his or her newest creation.

Vacansopapurosophobia:  Fear of the blank page

Chalk another one up for humanity's rise above the animals, my friends.  

Sound & Fury Signifying...?

So, there was a hurricane last night.  Floods overtook much of downtown New York.  Trees fell and transformers blew.  A crane fell, a boat came ashore, a building lost its facade.  There were rivers running down main traffic arteries.  And what with all the artificial lighting in The City That Never Sleeps, day - once night - became night again.  Concrete canyons housed hundred of thousands of human prairie dogs, all tucked in as best they could manage.

However we were quite safe and comfortable in our little Arlington home, and we followed along on our iPads and iPhones and cable television and laptops, reading status updates on Facebook, loading photos from Gawker, tracking the storm via Weather Center or CNN or the NY Times, updating our reports of sustained and gusting windspeeds or watching well-groomed broadcasters walk through digital renderings of city blocks with CGI directional arrows revealing airflow and structural weaknesses.  Even the poor suckers standing waist deep in flood waters had preternaturally clear and unmolested sound - apparently modern audio has bested Category 1 hurricane winds.

Like so many natural events, wars included, of the past twenty years - Sandy was packaged and delivered to us through a thousand different filters.  And I am not here to cry harm or foul; it's an antique critique, that our life is over mediated.  It would also be painfully ironic: you're reading a blog post written on a keyboard in Arlington, VA, about events in New York City, that has been stored on a server somewhere probably in California, and then likely beamed to your internet connection from a satellite in space.

No, what I mean to point out is something I remember from a quotation by Jorge Luis Borges.  He said that every time you remember a memory, you actually only remember the last retelling of that memory, not the experience itself.  This is an operative point in the use of journaling to handle emotionally charged events: rather than actually reliving the event, you re-write it (potentially).  You add perspective, context, retrospect, commentary.  You remake the event with all the tools at your disposal.  In your recollection of a traumatic event, the moment where the end result becomes inevitable - the point at which you began to nod off at the wheel, the point where you angrily decided to smash a glass into the wall, the moment when you picked up the phone to receive horribly disturbing news - becomes significant, whereas before it was merely an event like any other.  At moments like this, you are a time traveller - you change time, or at least your recollection of it.  You change your own history.  You change the past.

(Even God doesn't work that way.  He changes the future, maybe; but I don't recall any bible stories in which God says, "Oh, that thing you remember?  It didn't actually happen that way."  Maybe I'm wrong.  Lazarus' death got re-written, "No he's just sleeping!"  I'm open to other corrections.  But I think the Big Guy's main focus is on changing the future.  If you do this, or don't do that - then this other thing will - or won't - happen.)

Admittedly, I'm playing word games here.  Of course you're not really changing the past.  But you are changing your understanding of the past, and by so doing so you're changing yourself - which is the only thing that remains.  The past is gone.  Our only remnant of it is the world we have before us.  And if we embrace it as a new thing, does it actually become a new thing?  Or is it more accurate to say that the thing itself is the same, but we've created a new relationship to the thing?  And in the end, which really matters more?

Why am I babbling about this?  Because as I sit in the dining room of the home we have rented here in Arlington, Virginia, surveying the (thankfully only) modest disarray outside - the leaves, the downed branches, the overturned lawn chairs, the spilled & spewing garbage bins - I'm also listening to birds muttering to themselves, I'm hearing cars sssshhhiissssing by on the wet streets, presumably carrying people to work, I'm texting with our temporary landlords about when they can have a heating repairman come to look at the furnace without disturbing our morning.  I'm hearing daily life resume.  And I think to myself that we don't actually know ourselves but only the story of ourselves.  We tell the story to ourselves or to someone else.  And if, as I say, the telling of a thing changes that thing itself, or our understanding of that thing, then is it true that the only way we can truly know ourselves is to enact that telling that over and over and over again?  Can it be that self-knowledge is not a static kind of knowledge but a kind of ongoing investigation, a never-ending story, a verb instead of a noun?

This is all sounding a bit late-night-collegiate, I'm afraid - my apologies.  I generally try to wean myself from the first person plural or a preponderance of -isms and -tions.  It starts sounding like what it is - some kid who read a lot of Dostoevsky and thought that, because he understood about 25% of it, he could be the next great social commentator himself.

But maybe I'll leave you with these provocative questions - and know that today, sitting in a heat-challenged dining room in Arlington, Virginia, I am asking them also of myself:

What parts of your own story have you changed?  

And what parts of your story have changed you?


(the Philosopher Dog Inquires...)