gathering

Go see this

The Spitfire Grill at the Skylight Theatre in Milwaukee. It runs through June 15. This wonderful musical is a tale of triumph and trust and learning to see your surroundings and self in a new light. My partner, Becky Spice, is one of the performers. And what did the local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, think of the production? Check out the review here.  link Another of the performers in the production is Tony Clements, a good friend of Becky's and a Skylight veteran who now resides in New York. Tony, by the way, has a terrific blog you should check out here link

Dreams of a crown

So my partner, Becky, woke me up one morning recently to tell me about a dream she had. "you have to use this for story," she said. I agreed. The story is about a young girl from an unusual family competing in a kids beauty pageant, and it's told from her perspective. The entire story, actually, is just the girl's thoughts. The following is the first few paragraphs of the story.

Oh my god, he just said iPod! Everywhere they talked about prizes, it always said an mp3 player and I just figured that meant it wasn’t really an iPod, ‘cause if it was a real ipod they’d just, like come out and say iPod. But the announcer just said the winner will get a real iPod in addition to the clothes and the coupon to the salon and the scholarship for classes at the Piano House.

I won an mp3 before, in the Little Miss Oyster Festival pageant. I was so spazzed about it that I took it to school the very next day and Laurie Myer took one look at it and she was like, it’s not an iPod, it’s some cheap copy. I still use it, in my room, but I don’t take it to school anymore. It doesn’t even have video and the earphones don’t really fit inside my ears they way I think they’re supposed to fit. It hurts, but I wear them. 

But that’s just an uncomfortable sort of hurting, not really a bad pain. Right now I have a bow in my hair and it pulls my hair so tight that it hurts, but Gus says it’s so tight that it makes my face smile automatically. I guess he’s right but it’s so tight it also makes my eyes water. Maybe the judges will just think they’re more sparkly.

Which is odd cause I don’t cry that much. I can’t remember the last time I cried, I mean really cried. No, take that back, I guess I do, but that was serious and I had good reason then. I cried when I didn’t get the Tot Shot modeling job. The Tot Shot is a camera made for kids to use. It’s really easy and it comes in pink or dark gray and takes photos that are actually pretty blurry. I know that because at the photo shoot, they had one and the photographer or someone had this idea to take the photos of the models using an actual Tot Shot but when they looked at the photos on a computer, the really fast talking man had said they looked like shit - he used that word - and they decided not to use it. But the photos taken with the Tot Shot were put on a disc with all of the other photos of me they took that day and mailed to my dads.

fog

The following is writing I began as a writing exercise, attempting in words to match the mood and atmosphere of a piece of music by Brian Eno and Harold Budd called Stream with Bright Fish. I got very interested in this character and his plight. More is ahead for him, I think.

When the fog lifts
Malcolm McDowell Woods

Dusk. The day’s fog clings to the ground stubbornly. Sound, movement, color – all have surrendered to the suffocating gray. The slightest of waves wash weakly at the hard, frozen sands along the shore, then fall in slow retreat. The gulls - even the gulls, almost always rising and swooping on invisible currents and laughing like school girls at a dance - even the gulls are dead silent and unseen.

He has walked out on the breakwater, fifty yards, give or take a few. The city lurks somewhere behind him. Offices. Homes. Roads. A bustling hive split open and spilled across the hills which rise in fits and starts from the sea. All of it a mystery to him now. Always a mystery to him.

The water will be cold. It’s never really warm, but the sea in early April still remembers winter all too well. It will be cold and the salt will sting his eyes and the current will carry his body who knows where. Adrift in life; adrift in death.

He is blind to the irony in that.

Both of his arms are extended out from his body and with both hands he holds onto the railing - a smooth steel tube the color of the sky. Below the tube, spaced evenly between the tube and the ground, are three thin steel cables which run from post to post the length of the breakwater. He has been out here other times and has heard the wires resonate and sing in the sea breeze, a haunting hum he took to be the sound of drowned souls.

He’ll join the chorus. He’ll loosen his grip and lean into the sea and the water will accept his body and he will slide away into the fallen clouds and he will disappear.

Behind him, the hive buzzes. Queens are made. Deals are broken. Captains of industry parry and thrust. Children stumble awkwardly, gracefully, into adulthood. Cars race along mirrored streets. The low drone of life vibrates in every molecule.

If he were to strain, to turn and cock his head, he could hear it still – an urgent response to the low, slow moans of the sea’s lost souls.

But he doesn’t and that sound remains lost in the ochre murk behind him.

***

This was not a plan. The evening’s amble was without forethought. He had gone for a drive and then a walk, that was it. Dense fog this time of year often left him claustrophobic and he had simply left his apartment for air.

But it was not pure impulse either, that moved him now.

He looked out at the sea. The horizon was indistinct, an inscrutable demarcation between air and sea. Distances were unfathomable. He might be peering fifty feet out, or miles. It was all a darkening navy soup.

As a child, he had viewed fog with wonder and imagined that he might float up with the clouds when at last they rose. As he aged and learned more of the world, he still regarded fog with awe - how the clouds could appear so solid and impenetrable at a distance and so nebulous up close. The way of all matter, he came to learn. Solidity was an illusion, an act of faith.

The slightest of waves moved across the surface of the water and molecules of hydrogen and oxygen drifted skyward. Droplets of fine mist gathered on the surface of his clothes. Some of the molecules loosed from the water passed into him, mingling with the atoms which made up his skin and bones and blood; others drifted further from the surface of the water and passed through high flying gulls or the tight metallic skins of airliners soaring far overhead or the thin foil sheaths which wrapped satellites.

He licked his lips and tasted the ocean.

And then he was in it.

One moment he stood on the edge of the breakwater, the next, he was in the water. At least, it would have appeared that way to someone some distance away, watching from the shore, for example, if the fog would have lifted and afforded the view. But he himself was hard pressed to note the exact point at which he was in the ocean. The concentration of water molecules about him increased exponentially and those of air had suddenly diminished and the slight chill that had shaken him previously was now a convulsion careening through his body.