The kids were kids. Now they’re grown.
Clinton was Prez; Sarah Palin unknown.

And here we are, about to delve
Into the year twenty twelve.

If a dozen years can go that quick
Maybe time and space are just a trick.

My mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, passed away at 2:30 am, just a few hours after this performance. I was with her. Squinting at my phone, I had just read Ed Norvell’s review of the play on the Salisbury Post website, and pecked out a short thank you note to Ed. Moments later, as I sat in the chair beside Mom’s bed, alone, I watched her breathing slow until she finally took her last breath.

We invent our contexts, and my context for this is that Mom — who was a great writer and my biggest fan and best teacher — was waiting for me to get a good review.

That next night, we added chairs, had a full house, and turned a few people away. Many of my dearest friends were there, supporting my play and consoling me. I dedicated the show to Mom. It was the best visitation a person could have.

Poochie is about a family dealing with Alzheimer’s Disease. This production ran in the black box theatre at The Looking Glass Artist Collective in Salisbury, NC, Oct. 19-22. Produced by Spoken Space Theatre.

Thanks to Jon Taylor for doing such a great  job of shooting this. Run time is 1hr, 23 minutes.

And thanks to Justin Dionne for bringing an insightful, energetic poignancy to his directing — and to his amazing cast and production team for this awesome, production.

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Cast
(in order of appearance)

RUTH — Lori Van Wallendael
EDNA — Sharon Doherty
JIM — Bob Paolino
LISA — Sara Coon
NATE — Chris Speer
VICK — Shawn Van Wallendael
NURSE — Preston Mitchell

Production Team
Director — Justin Dionne
Stage Manager — Lynn Harrell
Set Designer — Allen Jones
Lighting Designer — Adam York
Costume Designer — Shelly Porter Walker

written by Sam Post

Each afternoon, we let the chickens free range for about 90 minutes, before dark — and we keep Jackie inside.

So today, in order to clean and move the hen house, we created an experiment.

We braced ourselves for a possible dog-chicken attack, and let them be together.

The results are in and they are conclusive.

Not only should the farmer and the cowman be friends; so should the chickens and the doggie.

It was a great review, so the normal action to take, next, would have been to celebrate the good publicity by posting a link on Facebook.

But I never did share that link. Because of what was going on, it would have been most unseemly. I did peck out a quick thank you note on my phone to Ed Norvell. He had been kind enough to attend dress rehearsal the night before and then — a day later, with a last minute request and no warning — write the review.

Still wearing a suit from opening night, lying in the recliner, which I had pulled up next to my mother’s bed, I lay there, alone with her, watching her breathing get slower and slower until it stopped. It was 3am.

An hour or so later, Karen, from Hospice, told me that I had been given a gift. Such an understatement.

About 5am, I emailed something short to a few friends, and at 6am, one of them called me and asked about my mother and what she meant to me.

I said she had encouraged me, she had supported me, she had taught me, and she had inspired me. He suggested I take a minute before the show that night and share that with the audience — which I did.

I also added a little joke, saying that she was waiting on me to get a good review before she died. Whatever context we have for our lives is invented anyway — so I might as well make up something that empowers me.

Some of my dearest friends came to the show that night. The new play had opened, gotten a great review and great audience, my mother had passed away, I had worked very little and was totally broke, and I had not slept in two days.

And there they were. Great friends with smiles and hugs. And they watched my play.  It was the perfect visitation.

I never posted that review on Facebook, but something even better appeared there. Throughout that day and the next, my iPhone blinked and winked at me every few minutes as another friend posted a condolences on my wall.

Religions and cultures give us things to do at times like these. But no religion and no culture could possibly invent this. This was a completion filled with poignancy and love and luck and God and magic. Thank you.

Production shot from 'Poochie,' (Bob Paolino and Chris Speer -- from The Salisbury Post)

This new play has been different from any production of any play I’ve ever had.

I’ve had plays in other cities or states where I just showed up and saw the show. And I’ve had some around here where I basically watched the sausage being made.

But I’ve been busy. So I wrote it, gave it to the director, Justin Dionne, and basically left it at that.

I’ve had very little input. Even if I had had time for input, it wouldn’t have been a good idea. The direction and design is way beyond anything I had in mind for the little black box theatre on Lee St.

Because I didn’t really have time to go to rehearsal, I even gave Justin permission to change any lines he thought needed changing. A new play needs a little work, and I trusted him to do that.

It opens this Wednesday.

Saturday night, I went to rehearsal and saw the second act for the first time.  I was moved to tears — and I’m not exactly sure where the emotion came from.

Maybe it came from the profound gratitude I felt for these people applying such talent and hard work to the task of realizing something I wrote. Or maybe it was just the realization that I’m putting this material out there for others to see. Or maybe it was that I wrote about a piece of my life and saw it given back to me.

The play is about caring for a person with Alzheimer’s Disease, and although I intentionally did not make this autobiographical — I have had experience watching the progression of the disease — with my aunt, my grandmother, and now my mother.

What it is, I think, is that my own play brought back memories in the staging that I didn’t experience in the writing — if that makes any sense.

People may think or say I wrote a play about my mother. And there’s some truth to that. But I realize now it’s not about the mother who is now in the final stages of Alzheimer’s.  It’s about the mother who took care of my grandmother when she had Alzheimer’s. And it occurs to me now (and not before now) that the granddaughter is me.

So that’s my note on autobiography. It’s all so personal and subjective. I don’t  know how audiences will react but will find out soon enough. Wednesday night.

Whatever happens, I’m awfully proud — stunned, actually — by what these folks are doing.

‘Poochie,’ opens next week. Spoken Space Theatre. In the black box at Looking Glass Artist Collective.
405 N. Lee St., Salisbury, NC
Runs Wed. through Saturday, Oct. 19-22. Tickets $1o at the door.

Rabbi Israel Gerber passed away on Tuesday at the age of 92. Steve Jobs passed away on Wednesday at the age of 56.

Of course I did not know Steve Jobs.

And while I spent many, many hours with Rabbi Gerber, he sometimes couldn’t remember my name.

Both men caused a reaction. Jobs created “think different” as an message for his company and received the usual amount of criticism and scorn for it. Rabbi Gerber took a lot of heat also. He dared to fight city hall on many occasions on behalf of Jews in the New South — including the right to park on the street on High Holidays without getting a ticket, just as church goers were allowed to do on the same street — Providence Road — each Sunday morning.

In 1982, about a month after I started my career as a teacher, I bought an Apple II Plus computer. It had no shift key. No upper case lettering on the monitor.

At South Rowan High School, where I worked, there was only one other computer in the school, and that was in the computer programming class.

I started bringing my Apple II Plus to and from school with me each day. I taught remedial English, and the kids were fascinated. I had exactly one piece of software for that computer: Apple Writer, a word processor. And I had a little book on BASIC programming, so we could type a few lines and watch a word scroll down the screen really fast.

Word got out that I possessed this special, pioneer knowledge — the ability to flick the power switch on a computer — and I became part of the conversation to create technology facilitators in the school system and became a member of that original group.

When the Mac was introduced, I got one by winning a computer lesson plan writing contest.

I participated in many, many Apple vs. IBM battles, at the school and school system level. Apple prevailed, and for twenty four years, I taught kids to use whatever Steve Jobs invented.

I love Apple products and still am a complete idiot on a PC.

My mother also was one who liked to think different, and while all the other Jewish children were trained for their Bar Mitzvahs by Ben Shapiro, she had the idea that I be trained by a real rabbi. She took me to Charlotte each week for lessons with Rabbi Gerber. I think I was the only one from Salisbury who got this special attention. Most kids from Salisbury continued to work with Ben. My younger brother, who was also special enough to go to Charlotte, was assigned to Cantor Brown (the one who normally did Bar Mitzvah training there).

But for some reason I got Rabbi Gerber himself, and he wanted me to learn the torah portion so that I could read each line, from the torah, and translate it line by line — as he did himself.

The problem was, I never liked anybody telling me what to do, so I stubbornly resisted doing the work and learning the material.

One day, as I sat in the rabbi’s office and demonstrated my profound lack of facility with the torah portion, the rabbi became furious with me for not having made any progress since the week before.

“I couldn’t practice,” I said, “because I was in a tennis tournament.”

He suggested I stop the tennis for awhile, until I mastered the material.

It was summer, and I couldn’t do that — so I started to cry.

He also did not like my speech, so he wrote one for me that he wanted me to consider. I gave that the thumbs down.

Leaving the parking lot that day, my mother was furious with me for embarrassing her, and she gave me a lecture that was oft repeated and never forgotten. It had to do with the value of studying and what happens to people who don’t.

And then, while fussing at me, she had a wreck in the parking lot and totaled the family car.

A few years later, Alicia and I had a visit with Rabbi Gerber at his home. I asked him to marry us. He interviewed Alicia, asking her a series of questions (“If the Nazis took over The United States, would you go to the concentration camps with Sammy or let him go without you?”). Alicia, age 21, gave the wrong answer and Rabbi Gerber told me I was breaking my word that I had given at my Bar Mitzvah.

We found Rabbi Kaplan (also a free thinker), and he married us.

At the time, Alicia worked at my father’s store, and Rabbi Gerber dropped by and gave her books to read about converting to Judaism. She read the books but did not convert.

After he retired from Temple Beth El in Charlotte, Rabbi Gerber was a once-a-month rabbi in Salisbury for many years. He lost his job when a guy in the congregation broke his foot and complained that the rabbi never asked how he was feeling.

Steve Jobs and Rabbi Gerber — two men who profoundly impacted the course of my life by what they stood for.

St. Thomas Players is a small theatre troupe here in Salisbury. The MTA is the Metrolina Theatre Association, and it encompasses theatre from the entire Charlotte area and surrounding counties.

Nine nominations (including best director) is a lot — and quite an honor for Justin. I was excited and privileged for him to take on this project because I knew he had a real future as a director, and apparently that future is now. It’s a new play and a new theatre company. Justin is young, energetic, enthusiastic, and extremely talented. His day job is working as marketing director for Piedmont Players.

My vision was a bare stage with a couple of pieces of furniture. Lights up and lights down. I wasn’t sure if there was any humor in the play or not. Justin has “people” working on set design and lighting, and he does see humor.

Thanks to the incredible generosity of friends and family, the funding for Poochie is almost halfway there, with 11 days to go. Please share the link, if you’re so inclined…

the porch

Sitting here on my porch most of the day, working on my play, with the fan blowing my way.

The fan keeps it cool and keeps the mosquitoes away. Those little bugs are light; they can’t handle the wind.

What an awesome discovery. I’ve lived here in this house 26 years and have never worked out here before.

And, speaking of my play… there’s still a ways to go in funding the production. It’s an all or nothing game and it’s easy to play. Just visit http://tinyurl.com/poochieplay.

And it’s always a pleasure when somebody wants to use one of them in small space or classroom.

I get plenty of requests for scripts from overseas, sometimes for film projects.  What happens after they get the script is anybody’s guess.

The pleasure comes from the request itself, and that’s almost always the last I hear of it. Occasionally I get a thank-you email, sometimes with a photo.

But while there’s satisfaction, there’s also a certain emptiness that comes with the online giveaways to faraway places. I’ve had the urge to see my own work done and thereby grow as an artist from the experience. My first two plays, Coffee Therapy, and another that I don’t care to think about, much less name, were produced first as dinner theatre, here in my lifelong hometown of Salisbury, NC.  Both were done in the upstairs of a local restaurant. I’ve had lots of fun seeing my work produced in Charlotte, and even traveled to New York a couple of times.

But I’ve never had a play produced here, in my hometown, in a theatre. And we have a number of theatres spaces and companies here.

So I recently wrote a play, set a date for production, and put down a deposit at our new, cozy little theatre space downtown, a converted warehouse now known as  Looking Glass Artist Collective.

Since declaring this, things have started to happen.

We’ve had a few readings, with great feedback. And I’ve done a good bit of rewriting based on that feedback.

I started a theatre company, Spoken Space Theatre, and I plan to use this entity to give birth to more of my plays in the future.

Justin Dionne, an energetic, talented young director, has generously agreed to take on the project. He gave the script a careful reading, with more feedback, and suggested more rewrites.

Auditions are two weeks away, and I’m working on the script.

So this is exciting.

Producing my own play, here, offers the opportunity for me to see it, and work on it.

This has its disadvantages.  That is, if it sucks, I’ll be there — and that can be difficult.  And, if it’s great, I’ll be there — and that can be difficult.

And I’m responsible for paying for it.

The deposit for the theatre space was a chunk, and about as much as I can handle.  And I’m assuming we will sell tickets that will bring in some funds.

But there’s still a gap.

So I’m looking for a corporate sponsor or two to put in a thousnd dollars.

And I’m asking friends and family to chip in, via Kickstarter.com. It’s called groupfunding. That sounds better than “asking friends and family for money.”

There are rewards involved. Anybody who pledges $10 gets a ticket, which is the cost of a ticket. So while it is asking for money, it’s really no different that asking people to buy a ticket in advance.

Kickstarter makes it a game, such that the project gets funded when the goal is met, or not funded at all.

So there’s a bit of drama involved in paying for the drama.

So far, it’s been interesting.  Some of my oldest, dearest friends and family members have chipped in. Many of them live in other states and will not travel to see the show.

And I’m a third of the way there.

Drama.

The play is called Poochie, and it’s about a family dealing with Alzheimer’s Disease.  People who know me think I’ve written a play about my family and my mother.  I didn’t.  I’ve had some experience with this disease (mother and grandmother), but I want to honor them. So instead of writing about my own family, I made one up. Which is the way it should be.

So that’s that.

Want to be a producer? This is your chance. Go to Kickstarter.com.