I miss our stage mates…

If you are what you eat, then I hope playing a giant chicken pointing out the tragic consequences of your choice for lunch, provides a unique experience for the audience.

I believe the fool travels the crossroads between tragedy and comedy.

Being a chicken is a hell of a gig.

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StarTribune photo:

A week ago today the great artist Tony Caponi died. I had the opportunity to meet Tony for the first time when I was the opening act of the 2015 Season at the Caponi Art Park’s Summer Performance Series.

After a 40-year career of teaching art Tony spent the next 30-years of his life sculpting a 60-acre masterpiece. Every stone in his park was laid with his own hands. I performed in what he called his, Theater in the Woods. It is a circular stage at the bottom of a natural amphitheater large enough to fit a thousand, but intimate enough for a few hundred-audience members to enjoy an evening of performance art under a canopy of trees.

Even though my time with him was brief, his impact on me was tremendous. I felt like I was somehow participating in his larger artistic vision, when he witnessed me performing in his magical 60-acre work of art.

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Photo by Marc Norberg:

Pictured here is the full cast of THE VAUDEVILLIAN. I wrote the play in collaboration with Kevin Kling for the 100^th Anniversary of The Southern Theater. The vision was to recreate the first vaudeville show that played the Southern Theater in 1910. When I read the grand opening playbill there was a tap dancer with a band, I immediately thought of Scott Crosby and The Medicine Show. Next on the bill was a two-person juggling team with a WC Fields’ style trick pool table. Arsene Dupin is the only performer I know who can match WC Field’s attitude on stage, plus we had already worked up a juggling act together, so the choice was hauntingly obvious. Finally, the spookiest discovery was that the only woman on the bill was an eccentric musician named Rose.  Who do you suppose could play that role?

Standing here on stage are well over one hundred years of show business experience. I remember being backstage before each show.  Arsene would be busy preparing all the magic apparatus, while Rosie sat with Scott and the band telling jokes. Rosie has always been able to hold her own in our male dominated business.  As I watched her, I imagined the ghosts of the original cast circling around Rosie telling her jokes, and laughing.

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Photo by Marc Norberg:

This is another photo from THE VAUDEVILLIAN. I’m trying here to juggle a bucket in the pattern as Arsene throws everything within his reach at me.

I loved performing this routine.

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Photo by Marc Norberg:

This is the opening of Arsene and my act together. We first put together a two person-juggling show after Rosie and my daughter Liza was born.  I had a blast performing with him around town while Rosie was a new mother.

In 2010 I invited Arsene to perform in The Vaudevillian for the Southern Theater’s 100-year anniversary, after I discovered that on the 1910 grand opening bill was a two-person juggling team that hauntingly reminded me of our old act.

It was a delight to perform with Arsene again.

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Photo by Marc Norberg:

This is a scene from The Vaudevillian at the Southern Theater here in Minneapolis. I wrote the play in collaboration of Kevin Kling back in 2010 to celebrate the Southern’s 100-year anniversary.

The show was based on the original vaudeville show that played the night that the Southern Theater opened its doors in 1910. When I looked at the original line-up the only woman on the bill was named Rose. The play was about the spirits of these original cast members returning to the stage 100-years later.

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Photo by Layne Kennedy

Photo by Lloyd Brant:

I went to see the movie, He Named Me Malala, with my Mother today. I thought the Lutheran Mother Theresa should see a story about Pakistan’s Mother Theresa. She watched the movie smiling ear-to-ear. She was riveted by Malala’s story of surviving an attack by the Taliban after speaking out for a girl’s right to an education, Her mission of worldwide education really resonates with my Mom.

I told her, “Now that Malala is born the next generation is in good hands, so you’re off the hook from being the one to save the world through education. My Mother was a pioneer in education. She started her career in 1966 as a foot soldier LBJ’s battle for a Great Society by helping high school dropouts get their GED. Then when refugees started to flood into Minnesota at the end of the Vietnam War my Mother helped the U of M write the curriculum for Minnesota’s new English as a Second Language Program.  After nearly thirty years she retired from teaching, and began a second career as an Adlerian psychologist.

The reason my Mother has the “street cred” to be called a Lutheran Mother Theresa is besides being five feet tall and hunchbacked, she spent a year in India traveling from city to city teaching western style counseling. She then went to Africa to found a school for western counseling at Iringa University in Tanzania.

Her secret has always been to work one-on-one with her students; whether it was a single mother struggling to get her GED diploma; an immigrant from a war zone learning English; or a native African navigating the 21^st century global world.  My Mom has spent her live helping change the world one person at a time.

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