Mitch Myers, Dan Rose, And The Call To Adventure

 Joseph Campbell, not my brother, but Professor Joseph Campbell, who taught literature at  Sarah Lawrence College in New York, studied epic poetry and compared its forms across cultures.  His experiences in World War II and his exposure to Carl Jung led him down a path that culminated with the creation of his theory about The Hero’s Journey or the MonoMyth.

In the Hero’s Journey, a character travels from a state of unenlightenment and naivety through trials and challenges and arrives at a point that not only transforms him but also has a transformative or explanative impact on the culture he came from.

The Hero’s Journey begins with hearing the call.  Menelaus calls Odysseus to fight the Trojans, Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring, and Obi-Wan tells Luke he must learn about the force.  My fifty-year journey has been about discovering where I came from and what made me–what familial, cultural, and accidental influences made me what I am.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a hero’s journey, but in my case, the forces that shaped me are the forces that shaped the country and, in particular, shaped Mississippi and Jackson.  The impact of these forces is what makes this a hero’s journey.  It’s not about what made me as much as it’s about what made us.

The call to action in this story came from my teachers when I was sixteen.  Before my encounter with them, I was satisfied only to learn the parts of the story that were unique to me and not look around the corners to see the whole image.  It was talking with these men that made me understand there was something fundamentally different about people in Mississippi who started school in nineteen sixty-nine, and talking with them made me want to understand it.  I heard the call.

Sometimes, you can hear a story many times and still only understand it once the right person tells it.  We know the universe through stories.  That’s what Campbell was getting at when he wrote A Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Stories are made of moments.  Moments are statements of being:  The bird is red;  The soup is cold;  The dog ran out. When you combine these moments, it makes a story.  “The red bird flew past our chair on Wednesday.”  Stories and emotions compose everything we know.  Everything else is just matter–the dust left after the universe made the stars.  

Turning 16 was not a good year for me.  My mother believed it best to try and treat my brother’s schizophrenia at home, which made being at home uncomfortable at best.  I found refuge in spending as much time as possible in weight-lifting gyms, primarily the downtown YMCA and Gordon Weir’s new Natalus-equipped gym. 

My school, a private Episcopalian school, was in quite a bit of trouble.  We had three headmasters in four years, and the new headmaster saw it as his mission to reshape the community and culture at my school completely.  That meant getting rid of several faculty members and quite a few students he saw as distractions and unleadable.  Feeling my community under attack, I felt honor-bound to do something about this, which seems ridiculous now since I was only sixteen and not a very good student.  The only thing I had going for me was that I was twice the size of my new headmaster.  He never missed an opportunity to point that out.  I’m pretty sure, in his heart, he believed he could take me and, later on that year, would put that theory to the test.  I also knew that my father’s name carried some weight, but I refused to bring that up as this was my fight, not his, and I wasn’t entirely sure he’d back up my argument.  

Part of reshaping St. Andrews meant that David Hicks, my new Headmaster had to replace the entire high school science department, having found issue with the existing one.  Two of his new hires became very important in my life and genuine beacons in my lonely existence.  They told me things and asked questions that made me hear the call to adventure.

The first was Mitch Myers.  Coach Myers was, at best, twenty-three years old.  From New York, his attempts to get into medical school weren’t going well, so he took a teaching job in exotic and remote Mississippi.  It’s not unusual for medical schools to turn down the application of young people in the sciences their first two or three times.  While Mitch was in Jackson, he applied to the University of Mississippi Medical Center.  His performance at St. Andrews impressed the parents at our school enough that they ram-rodded his application through UMMC.  Mitch got his MD in Jackson and stayed to practice medicine here for many years.

Mitch became very interested in physical culture in New York, particularly weight-lifting.  That became the common ground of our friendship.  Most of the weight-lifters I knew were tradespeople.  A surprising number were in law enforcement.  Mitch was one of the few serious weight-lifters I knew who were also educators and communicated at that level, even if he did have a strange accent.    

In 1979, sports drugs were just beginning to be an issue.  In Mississippi, there weren’t yet any laws against them.  A doctor in Jackson was even testing and prescribing anabolic steroids for the linemen at Ole Miss, a practice that would get the team suspended these days.  I was buying Dinabol from a gentleman who worked in law enforcement.  He was a bodybuilder, and I was a weightlifter.  He was a friend of Heavy Herb Anderson, if that helps you understand where this man fit into the world.  

Mitch Myers was also my football coach.  We discussed training techniques.  He liked trying crazy things like doing a thousand crunches in a day and suffering for a week.  His knowledge of chemistry and biology gave him a pretty informed opinion on steroids.  He was against the idea but didn’t tell me to stop.  He did make me promise to discuss it with my primary physician, which I did, and not to exceed the doses we discussed.  Steroids themselves aren’t addictive, but their results can be.  I wasn’t always very good about staying within the dosage guidelines Coach Myers and my doctor set for me.

During the year, Jackson Academy announced that they would add a high school the following year.  Since some students weren’t happy with David Hicks, there was talk among us of a group leaving St Andrews and going to JA.  One afternoon in the gym, Coach Myers asked me, “Those academies, they just for keeping the black kids out.  Right?”  

I didn’t know how to answer him.  I knew some academies were made for just that purpose, but by this time, most of them had gone out of business or were headed that way once it was declared unconstitutional for the state to pay parents an “educational grant” to send their kids to private school.  Where JA was concerned, I didn’t know the answer.  In the years hence, I learned that Jackson Academy was unrelated to the Citizens Council Academies.  JA was started when Jackson Public Schools switched from phonics to whole language and from old math to new math, and for some parents, this was inadequate.  There are people still who believe whole language and new math were communist-inspired.  

“I don’t know, coach,”  I said.  “They might be different, but I don’t know.  I’ll find out.”  I don’t know that I meant for that to be a promise, but it ended up being one.  “Finding out” why private schools started in Jackson, their difference and their effect on the larger public schools became a life-long journey.  One I’m still on.   I didn’t start the journey that day, but I heard the call.

Dr. Hicks hired a midwesterner to take over our biology classes.   Dan Rose was born in Illinois but traveled the world, including a stint teaching English in New Guinea.  Playgirl magazine named him one of America’s most eligible bachelors.  He died just as eligible as he was when they named him such.  

The biology classroom had a storage room, which Rose converted into a private office.  Unbeknownst to David Hicks, Dan Rose received guests in his “office” between classes, with the door closed, where he would tell you stories and share cigarettes and whiskey with you, if you had any, as long as you pet his dog.  That sounds like something I entirely made up, but more than a few can attest to its veracity.

Normally, when you’re sixteen, adults talk to you like you’re sixteen and tell you a lot of bullshit rather than the truth.  Dan Rose wasn’t like that.  Dan spoke to me about cigarettes, cigars, whisky, marijuana, and mushrooms.  He said to me about women.  Oh, he loved talking to me about women, and I needed to be talked to about women because I hadn’t a single clue what I was doing in that arena.

One day, Dan told me the story about Jesus and the pearl of great price and asked me if I understood what he was saying.  I took a sip and said I did.  He grasped me by the shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “I want you to forget every girl in this goddamn school and focus all your attention on Paige.”  

I told him I agreed, but so did nearly every boy I knew, and she had been complaining loudly about their lack of gentlemanly patience, so I resolved to (at least as far as she was concerned) be extra gentlemanly so that she would know I appreciated her in more ways than these other guys understood.  Even though it got me friend-zoned back to the cretaceous, I still think that was the right decision.  There were a number of shitty men in her life, but I wasn’t one of them.

One day, Dan Rose asked me, “What about Jackson Prep?”  

“It’s mostly a feeder school for Ole Miss,”  I said.  I still stand by that statement.

“I heard it was a bunch of pricks who wanted to keep the negros out.”  He said.

I’d never heard an adult lay it out so plainly before.  I’d rarely heard other kids lay it out so plainly.  Dan Rose put the meat on the table and the ball in my court.  I respected him so much and wanted to respond well, both truthfully and as frankly as he had been with me.

“I don’t know what the rules are there,”  I said.  “I know they don’t have any black students and never had any black students.  I met the headmaster but didn’t know him very well, and their coach tried a few times to get me to switch schools, even though he had gotten in a fight with my brother.”

I felt ashamed.  This was a very important issue, and I didn’t have the answer.  St. Andrews, I knew, had at least one black student in every grade, but I didn’t even know their policy about admitting students who weren’t white.  Now, I can look back and forgive myself for being just sixteen and not filling my head with these things, but that day, in Dan Rose’s stockroom office, I felt that I had let him down.  

“Let me ask around,”  I said.  “I feel like I should know this, but I don’t, but I think I know how to find out.”  That part was a lie.  I didn’t know how to find out.  I could have just gone to my dad and asked him to explain it, but that puts him in a spot both as a parent and in his job.  If I was going to find out which schools were about racism, and which schools were about something else, and what started it all, and where it all might lead, I’d have to do it on my own.  I heard the call to adventure.  I’ve been on this adventure for more than forty years, and I’m not done yet, but this is what started it all. 

The Way The Machune Works

A lot of the time, I'll start a writing project where I'll have the whole thing pretty clearly in my head, and I just have to go through the process of squeezing the tube until the words come out of my fingers.  I don't like to stop before I'm finished because once  I stop and do something else, it can take me weeks to return to the piece and finish it.  I have four really promising pieces in a folder now named "unfinished" that I hope to get to this week.

I'll never have enough confidence in what I'm doing that I can stop in the middle, go do something else for a few hours, and return to my keyboard and finish with the same energy I started.

This morning, about an hour before my alarm went off, an idea about a memory began poking needles in my brain.  When the alarm did go off, I thought I could get up and bathe, brush my teeth, shave my head, get dressed, and go downstairs to meet my ride that takes me to church, as I had planned...

Or I could write.

Children with communication problems can become very unsocial.  That was me.  If it's not dealt with, it can become something of a critical problem for the child, and they begin to lose what little vocabulary they gained; at the very worst, they can become functionally mute and anti-social.  That was not me.  I had three very vocal siblings, a very vocal grandmother and mother and nursemaid, and more than that, I had Martha Hammond's kitchen across our backyard, where I could sit and listen, and for whatever reason, there I could talk.  

I do enjoy socializing.  I enjoy church and Sunday school.  I was going to lunch at Hal & Mals and go see the last performance of Passage at Millsaps, but once I touched the keyboard, I saw the word count meter advance, but I wasn't getting closer to where I wanted to finish, so I typed and typed and typed and missed my leave-the-house time for Sunday School, then Church, then Lunch.  One-thirty came, and I could either leave for the play or stay and read over and edit my work.  I'm really bad for not doing that.  It's so anti-climactic and so unlike the passion of making the words new.

I suppose that makes me an unreliable friend.  I suppose it's always been so.  There will always be times when I have to be alone to work out the things in my head.  Sometimes I get them out and decide to show them to people, and sometimes I decide whatever it was I created, it wasn't worthy.  

I wouldn't wish the artist's mind on anyone.  It's not a stable or happy way to live, even though there are moments of ecstasy when what you create matches what you saw in your head before you began.  

The Agony and the Ecstasy is a movie about Michangelo made in the sixties.  It's also part of the deal for those who wish to create.  So are questions about "Who is that funny man in the dark with a pen and paper?  I never see him talk to anyone."   

It's not a matter of "this is what I choose."  It's a matter of "this is what I am."  and I've made peace with it.  If you ever expect to see me and don't, there's always a chance this is what happened.  It's not a bad thing.  It's just the way the machine works.  

A Letter To A Friend

 Dear Cinnamon, 

It’s been almost forty years.  Do you remember me?  I’m not quite sure why I remember you.  Sometimes, I wake up hours before my alarm goes off, and the past visits me like Christmas ghosts and bothers me until I write it all down.  

I can’t use your real name because there’s a chance people will know who you are, and that is not my purpose.  I just put cinnamon in my coffee, and when I knew you, your hair was the color of cinnamon.  Normally, I’m drawn to darker shades, but I punctuated that with some remarkable specimens of another hue, including you.

When we last met, I convinced myself that you were the worst thing that would ever happen to me and congratulated myself for getting past it.  I was so very wrong.  In the end, what happened between us wasn’t even in the top ten worst things that ever happened to me.  

I talked to your father.  He’s been dead for a while now.  He was angry with me because he was making a point and wanted you to raise the money yourself by working.  He could have done what I did to help you, but where’s the life lesson in that?  The life lesson, I suppose, was my own.  I never mentioned the fact that you wept uncontrollably, worried that he might find out what a mess you made of your finances–that the last thing you wanted was to disappoint him, which, I suppose, is what moved me to get involved in the first place.  

I had, I think, different ideas about the nature and the future of our relationship than you did.  There ought to be rules, or at least guidelines, in these matters.  There may have been a time when romantic or sexual encounters were a good measure of a woman’s feelings toward a man, but if there were, I never lived during them.  Some women will do more than you can imagine sexually and not care a bit about you; some are afraid even to kiss you but love you more than anyone.  That’s hardly a reliable measure.  I learned not to use it

In those days, my plan was always to assume that a girl had my best interests at heart, and in that way, if they see my heart heading in a way they’d rather it not, they’ll guide me back on a course they were more comfortable with.  For the most part, that worked.  I try only to become interested in women who are ladies, to begin with, and that helps, but there were times when that strategy failed miserably.  

My grandmother told me to avoid social entanglements with girls who weren’t properly introduced to me.  While that sounds like a rule from the 19th century, I followed it, and for the most part, it worked for me.  I can tell you what trusted person introduced me to every girl I ever kissed.  At least four were Inez, and one significant one was Maggie Nippes.  I suppose that makes it sound like I mostly meet women in bars.  Maybe that’s true.  

I met you, Cinnamon, at Millsaps.  You were one of the sorority girls I was sworn to protect.  Debbie Fisher introduced us at a swap when you pledged.  We never talked much after that.  There were an awful lot of other people taking up my attention and my time in those days.  A few months after you graduated, I saw you at Walmart with a big box of kitty litter.  “Let’s go out!” you said.  “I’d love to see you.” You said, and took the pen out of my pocket and wrote your phone number on the back of my hand.  

There were always pretty girls I overlooked because I focused on someone else.  I assumed that’s what happened here.  You seemed like fun, so I called, and we went out.  Then we went out again and again.  You wanted to move apartments, so I moved you.  There’s no sense in having a large, muscle-bound friend unless you’re going to have him move things.  

Like a kitten, you sat in my lap while we watched movies.  I was never very good at figuring out the exact point where someone becomes a “girlfriend,” but several days of the week, I kissed the same girl, and it was you, so forgive me if I was confused about where I stood with you.  

One night, eating upstairs at Scrooges, you didn’t seem yourself.  “It’s nothing.”  You said.  “I don’t want to talk about it.” You said.  Rather than hang out at the bar, we went to my apartment to “watch TV” and feed the fish.  My lionfish ate live minnows from the bait shop, and you liked to watch, so I saved it for you.

Lionfish look like a bass that became a drag queen.  They eat with lighting ferocity, though, and I suppose that’s why you enjoyed the show.  In a moment, all that’s left of the minnow is flecks of silver scales floating in the water.  As impressive as that show was, it didn’t change your mood.

In my lap, watching the television, you fought what you were feeling with determination.  When you began losing the fight, you turned your head and hid it from me.  When I smoothed your hair with my hand, you couldn’t hide it anymore and buried your face in my chest and wept.

The car that you drove to work, the car you were so proud of having, needed over two thousand dollars worth of repairs.  You had some of the money but not enough.  You’d gone to your father about it, and he helped lay out ways you could solve the problem, but you couldn’t make any of them work, and the thought of returning to him and admitting you failed is what brought on the tears.  More than anything, you wanted him to be proud of you, and having failed to get the money, you didn’t know how he would be.  

“Why not get a bank loan?” I asked.  You said you tried, but without credit, nobody was willing to loan you anywhere near the amount you needed, so I gave you the name of a loan manager I knew at Highland Village and said, “Call this guy.  I’ll vouch for you.”

The guy I sent you to passed you down to another loan officer under him.  You called at lunch to tell me that the lady at the bank asked if I would co-sign the note.  I had to think about that pretty clearly.  If you didn’t pay the note, then I would have to.  We’d been seeing each other a few times a week for a couple of months at this point, and we had a lot of friends in common.   I felt like I could trust you, and it was unlikely you’d stiff me on the loan, but, at the end of the day, if I gambled two thousand dollars on a girl and lost, I wouldn’t be bankrupt.  I wouldn’t be very happy, but I could afford to lose the money.  

When I got to the bank to put my name down as co-signer, I noticed that my name was listed first on the note.  I pointed that out, and the loan officer said it was the only way she could get the loan approved.  “So, basically, it’s my loan, and she’s co-signer,”  I said.  The loan officer assured me that was the case.  “Would paying the loan off build her credit?”  I asked.  She assured me that was so.  I made sure the bank understood that she’d be making the payments, and the loan officer said it didn’t really matter as long as the payments were made.

“Can I go outside for a minute?  I just want to check something.”  You and the loan officer excused me.  I leaned against my car and smoked.  This isn’t at all what I had in mind.  I thought pretty intently about how you might react if I pulled out now.  If this worked the way you wanted, you’d get your car fixed, and you’d be able to tell your daddy you solved your own problems like he wanted, and if you made the note payments on time, then both of us get a positive note on our credit history.  

I stamped out my cigarette and lit another one.  There was no commitment in our relationship.  We ate together.  We drank together.  Sometimes, we made out like rabid teenagers on the sofa together, but none of that really spelled commitment.  In the parlance of the day, we were basically just screwing around, another summer romance at a time of life when I had a different one almost every summer.  

There were the tears, though.  Deep, meaningful tears.  Helping you make your father believe in you would probably be the nicest thing I did all year.  “It’s only money,” I thought.  A girl’s heart is worth twenty times that.  I went back in and signed the note.

The first payment went by great.  You were happy, and we were happy together.  The time came for the second payment, and I got a call.  You’d been talking to your old boyfriend, you said.  He wanted to come back.  You wanted him to come back.  Would I please understand?

The first thing I felt was anger.  Tremendous anger.  I drove to your apartment with the idea that if I could talk to you, then I could change the outcome of this.  I knocked on the door, and when you answered it, the old but new boyfriend was beside you.  He was half my size.  I grabbed his shirt.  “I want two thousand dollars now, and you’ll never see me again,”  I said.  

“We had an agreement!” You shouted.

“That agreement didn’t include you dumping me before making the second payment,”  I growled.

“Look, we don’t have that kind of money.”  The boyfriend said.  I don’t think he ever fully understood how lucky he was that I keep pretty tight control over my temper.

“Call your father,” I said.  “Get him to write me a check!”  

And with that, you sank to your knees, weeping.  “Don’t call my father!”  You pleaded.  “Don’t.  Please don’t.”

The boyfriend wasn’t expecting that.  I wasn’t either.  The waves of anger tearing through me crashed on the unrelenting, impenetrable shores of a woman’s tears.  

I really wanted to hit something, but there was nothing I could hit that wouldn’t make things worse, so I paced back and forth under the porchlight.  

“If you ever miss a payment.  If you’re ever late, it’s gonna be bad.” I said.  

“I won’t.”  You said.  “I promise.”  

“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” The boyfriend said.

I gave myself one last chance to knock his head off but didn’t.  I slammed shut your door so hard that something fell off the wall inside.  I could hear you crying inside as I walked to my car.

I didn’t sleep.  As the sun began to rise, I wrote you a letter.  I explained that I was concerned that you used my obvious affection for you to secure this money you needed without ever having any real concern for my feelings in return.  We had a legal and honorable agreement about the money, though, and I would be willing to overlook any misgivings I had about what got me into that agreement as long as you held up your end of the bargain.  I was sorry for shouting, and I was sorry for slamming the door.  I felt like I entered our time together honestly with honorable intentions, but since I no longer believed you did the same, I didn’t think we should try to be friends in the future.  And I said goodbye.

The note was for two years and six months.  By the spring, you said you were moving to another state with the boyfriend and gave me the address where you would be.  You promised to continue making the payments, but one or two may be late while you set up in your new home and job.  

Everything happened as you said.  I didn’t hear any more about it for well more than a year.  With just a few months left in the term of the note, I got a call from the bank that you missed the last two payments.  I called the number you left me, and it was disconnected.  I called your father to see where you were, and that’s when he cussed me for getting involved in his plan to teach you a lesson.  When I persisted in asking for your new phone number, he told me to fuck off that it wasn’t his problem and hung up.

I called the bank to find out how much it would take to pay off the note.  A little less than five hundred dollars, they said.  Without any way to contact you, I calculated my losses and decided if I could get out of this and only lose less than five hundred dollars, I should be grateful, so I paid the note and went on with my life. 

There was a time when I thought what you did was about the worst thing a woman could ever do to me.  That was a miscalculation.  Ultimately, your plot to defraud me, if it was indeed a plot, was somewhere in the middle in terms of the wounds I’d take aboard, trying to be a lover.  

It’s been quite a long while now, and I have no idea where you are, so I suppose I’ll never know if you intended to mislead me so you could get the money or if it just worked out that way.  When I found out that you’d been talking to your new/old boyfriend the entire time you were talking to me about getting a loan to solve your financial predicament, it sure seemed like a plot, one that maybe he was in on.  I felt like he should have been the one to stick his neck out and get you the money, not me.  I still feel that way.  

There might be circumstances at the time that I didn’t see.  There might still be circumstances that I don’t see.  I’d hate to have believed you did something evil for almost forty years when really it was just a misunderstanding, or maybe there just wasn’t any understanding at all.  Maybe you’re just not the kind of girl who considers what a man thinks or feels because you don’t understand us and don’t feel obligated to learn.

It could have been much worse, so I’m grateful for that.  I hope you’ve had a good life.  I saw, a few years ago, that your father died.  I hope he was proud of you and satisfied with your life when he did.  If you had a child, if you had a son, I hope that gave you insight into what men are and what we’re about.  If not, there’s really very little I can do about it.  

I’ve never been in a position where I was willing to say with certainty what you did was wrong.  I’m not your judge.  What I can say is that you made me feel overlooked.  You had your problems, your new/old boyfriend who came up out of the blue had his problems, the loan officer had her problems, your father had his problems, and the guy fixing your car had his problems, too.  I did my best to satisfy everyone and make a happy ending, but nobody really was looking out for me.  The guy fixing your car got paid.  The bank got paid.  Your new/old boyfriend got his girl back.  You got your car back.  Your father got to see you solve your problems without him getting involved.  What did I get?  

Like I said, you were hardly the worst thing that ever happened to me, but do you ever think about it?  Do you ever think I deserved better?  Do you think I deserved worse?  Do you wish you’d found a way to solve your problems without getting me involved?  I don’t think I learned anything from this story.  People in trouble sometimes have flexible morals, and you believed you were in trouble, even if the worst of it was just the fear of disappointing your father.  

I thought then that life would balance out.  With you, I lost, but surely I’d win the next time.  That’s not what happened, though.  If you’re willing to take a beating for someone else’s benefit, then that’s what will always happen.  I never learned that lesson because the lesson I did learn was that if I didn’t take the beating intended for someone else, they would take it, and there would always be times when I wasn’t willing to do that.  

I hope you’re happy.  I hope you were always happy.  I hope you don’t remember me.  I hope that if you ever had a moment where you thought what you did was wrong, you forgot it long ago.

I thought I had forgotten about you long ago.  I guess I hadn’t.  I remain,

Faithfully yours,

Boyd

Chen's Passage At Millsaps

 The first play of Millsaps’ Player’s one-hundredth season, the second season with Sam Sparks as the professor of theater, and the second season after Millsaps brought Theater out of abeyance is Christopher Chen’s “Passage.”  Chen is a young (under 50) professor of Theater at the University of California at Berkley.  He lists his race as “East Asian,” which I normally wouldn’t mention, but Passage is a play about race, even though it never mentions race.  I’ll talk more about that later.

Passage is an interpretation of EM Forster’s 1924 novel, “A Passage To India.”  I originally read the novel Passage in the summer before I entered Millsaps College.  I read it because David Lean was producing a film version of the play, written in 1960, which I’ve never read.  I read the book because David Lean was not only one of the most remarkable English directors working, he was one of the most remarkable directors in the English language, having directed Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver Twist (‘48), and A Bridge Of The River Kwai.  The film was announced with Sir Alec Guinness in a major supporting role.  Guinness is a major part of nearly every one of Lean’s films, and, of course, he had also recently been Obi-Wan Kinobe.  

“A Passage To India” is often included in lists of fifty or one hundred of the “most important” books in the English language.  When I first read it, I was spending time socially with an older woman (25!) who had just begun teaching English in the Jackson Public Schools.  She described it as an English version of “To Kill A Mockingbird.”  Even though “Passage To India” was written some thirty years before Mockingbird, she was right in that it dealt with many of the same themes and developed them in similar ways.

The theme of both books is a divided society, where the division is tragically uneven.  In Passage, it’s between the English and the Indians.  In Mockingbird, it’s Whites and Blacks.  Historically, what happens when you have one of these divided societies is a sort of calm skin or detente forms over the daily injustices.  It happens because you can’t live in a constant state of revolution.  Look at what it was like trying to live in Mississippi in the sixties.  In our society, people sometimes ask, “Why didn’t you rise up and fight the oppression?” the answer is they did, but you can’t live in peace and have a revolution, and for many generations before the revolution, people chose to live in peace, even though it was an unjust peace before their revolution.  The same thing happened in India.  The novel is written about the period leading up to India’s struggle for independence.  

In a divided society, there develops an uneven, unjust detente and balance of cultural powers that leads to its own kind of struggles, and a lot of people have written about that.  When Eudora Welty writes about race, this is what she sees.  Forster and Harper Lee realize that to really expose this thing for what it is, there has to be an act that pierces the thin skin of civility that grows over a divided society.   They create in their stories an unjust, false accusation of a crime; in Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell accuses Tom Robinson, and in Passage to India, Adela Quested accuses Dr. Aziz Ahmed.

In both of these stories, it’s the trials where the author gets to investigate and develop the themes they’re interested in.  Sometimes modern critics make a point of the author’s own racism in that Forster’s character of an educated, young, white Englishwoman eventually comes to her senses and saves the day, whereas, in India, in the ‘20s, that most likely would not have been the case.  Likewise, Harper Lee is often criticized for setting up Atticus Finch as the great white savior so that her readers in white society can feel better about the situation they created in the first place.  Toward the end of her life, we learned that Lee originally had different ideas, but the god-like, near-perfect version of Finch was what her publisher preferred.  

In “Passage,” Christopher Chen chooses to take the words “English” and “Indian” out of the play’s vocabulary and replaces them with “Country X” and “Country Y.”  He does it to bring out some of the universal themes in the story, and it works, but if you’re familiar with India’s history at all, the Indianess of the story still comes through.  

The novel, the original play, and the movie all focus on the trial part of the story.  Even though there are scores of plays that are exciting courtroom dramas, Chen chooses to focus instead on the events and attitudes leading up to the trial and barely covers it at all.

Chen changes the script so that it focuses more on the Indian perspective than the English, sort of a reversal of what you see in the movie and the novel.  He’s written it so that many of the parts don’t specify race or gender.  He does that, I think, to illustrate how both race and gender are constructs we impose on ourselves.  Later critics of the film were uncomfortable with Alec Guinness playing a Hindu character.   In Chen’s script, he mentions Hindu and Muslim ideas but really leaves these religious differences behind so that you can focus more on human and character differences instead.

Settling into our new space, Sam and his team are learning more about what our new equipment can do.  The design of the play is dominated by the painted floor, which incorporates both Muslim and Hindu shapes.  Alumni Shawn Barrick graciously donated her time to apply the multiple layers in this presentation.  The rest of the set is simple shapes and movable set pieces that fill out the impressionistic style of the design.

Millsaps is in a fairly unique position in that it can produce plays no other organization in Jackson can.  Both Belhaven and Mississippi College are limited in the thematic elements they can present in plays, severely limiting the number of modern and contemporary plays they can produce.  New Stage and area little theaters all have to produce works that appeal to little theater and regional theater audiences.  Millsaps can, and is, produce works that are more intellectually challenging and deal with themes that some of the other educational theaters can’t touch.  

Anytime you deal with an undergraduate theater company, there are limits to what you can do with the age of your cast.  Everybody you can find is around twenty, which can be frustrating because many of the plays you want to do focus on characters who are around forty; Passage is one of those.  I think our cast handles that issue pretty well, though.  Most of our kids tend to be more mature and serious-minded than what you get at some other companies.  They clearly understood the material they were working with and represented their characters well, even if it’s really hard to portray gravitas when you’re twenty.  

Some of the speeches are long and complicated.  I was really impressed by our actors' ability to handle the line load, particularly Lizzie, who plays Aziz in this, although his name is never given.

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but there was a moment when one of the actors went up on their lines.  That’s an actor's nightmare.  It feels like you’re rocking along, doing your thing, and suddenly, the floor falls away, and you’re walking on a tightrope and really cannot remember what you’re supposed to say next.  She handled it like a champ, though, and in just a moment, she centered herself back into the beat of the scene and picked back up where she left off.  I was really proud of her.   

A couple of things are different that we’re trying this season.  One is that Shawn Barrick and her friend Fernanda Coppollaro  were offering complimentary wine, soft drinks, and coffee leading into the show.  Originally, we were going to do a cash bar, but it ended up being complicated with regards to getting a liquor license and insurance.  

You might also find it best to enter the campus by Webster Street (by the cemetery) rather than using Park Avenue, which goes behind the library.  Park Avenue is one of the city’s shortest streets and is in dire need of maintenance.  Webster Street, behind the dorms and the Christian Center, was resurfaced by the College just this Summer and is perfectly smooth.  It may be time to stop using Park Avenue to enter the school altogether.  The fewer entrances there are, the more our security team can monitor them, which increases the overall safety and security of the campus.  Changing the flow of traffic through campus has been changing every so often since I was a boy.  It’s just part of the deal.  

There are two more performances of Passages, tonight and Sunday Afternoon.  It’s with the trip to see what our cast can do with the material.  If you’ve seen the movie, it’s very different from that, but what Chen came up with is very interesting, and the way Sam and the Millsaps Players present it is a really thought-provoking hour and twenty minutes.  

John Kennedy Reads Dirty Books

Last night, I saw a video of Louisiana Senator Kennedy reading just the sexual bits from the book All Boys Aren't Blue in a Senate hearing on book banning in schools.  The way he read it really put me off my lunch.  I'm pretty sure that was his plan.  

On the Forbes YouTube channel, they have this listed as SHOCKING MOMENT: John Kennedy Reads Graphic Quotes From Childrens' (sic) Books At Senate Hearing.  All Boys Aren't Blue is listed as "Young Adult" reading level and is a collection of autobiographical essays from the author about his life when he was a teenager.  Saying the book is for children, I would say, is inaccurate.  Young Adult means young adult, i.e., teenagers.   It's a book about gay teenagers written by a man who was a gay teenager.

The witnesses in the hearing were teachers, librarians, parents, and students.  The issue was: How do Public School Libraries choose their books, and should parents have a hand in removing books they find objectionable.  This process is often called "Book Banning" or "Book Burning," although none of these groups have yet moved to try and make these books entirely unavailable, just entirely unavailable in schools.  

When I was younger, I heard Ray Bradbury speak on what motivated him to write Fahrenheit 451, and I had several opportunities to ask him questions.  This is the sort of thing that motivated him to write the book.  I don't know how far we have to go from Republican Parents making banned book lists to firemen burning books instead of putting out fires, but he felt, and I feel, that we're on the way.

When I was in High School, most of my free reading was science fiction, so I didn't really need that much help contextualizing what I was reading, but for the books I had assigned in class, Candide, The Red Badge of Courage, All's Quiet On The Western Front, Of Mice and Men, Dr. Zhivago, Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, did, at times, have passages, particularly violent or emotionally brutal passages, where I'm glad I had really good teachers to help me contextualize what I was reading.  

None of the books I read had much sexual context.  Candide had a lot of sexual subtext, but that's a different story.  I'll be honest with you, though: at sixteen and seventeen, I was having a great deal of sex, both with my steady girlfriend and a couple others along the way.  Besides that, my Biology Teacher, Dan Rose, taught the whole class pretty extensively about birth control and then went on a side venture to describe how people in New Guinea take care of feminine hygiene needs that left quite an impression.  I don't think I grew into a degenerate, and even if I had, I don't think you can blame Dan Rose or some freckle-faced girl.  

They say that teenagers are less sexualized now than they were when I was sixteen, and that may be true, but they also have the internet on their telephone, so I'm pretty sure they know a whole hell of a lot more about it than I did when I was sixteen.  Teenagers are making sexual decisions and learning much more about sex than we can ever control.  That's what people like Sen. Kennedy are afraid of, but I don't think that's what's going on here.  

I haven't read "All Boys Don't Wear Blue."  I probably won't unless this controversy gets much bigger.  I have read the reviews and the ratings on it, though, and this is clearly a major work, and it's won several awards.  For teenagers who are gay and black and looking for books that include people like themselves, this might be an important book for them.

I'm assuming that what Senator Kennedy read aloud was the most graphic passage in the entire book.  The part of this you don't see is all the staff members frantically reading books with a young adult rating for lascivious passages the Senator can berate his witnesses about.  

If that paragraph is the most troubling thing in the entire book, then I really don't think the Senator has much of a case.  If conservative parents consider their being able to control the school's library collection, I recommend private schools for them.  

A public school Librarian has an obligation to select books that speak to as many of the students as possible and not to obfuscate the perspective of any student because of their sexuality.  Honestly, if you can get a student to read the entire book just to get to that one-hundred-word passage, then I'd say that was a win. 

There are books written just to be pornographic, but there are also really significant books that include sexual issues to tell the whole story in the same way that other authors use violence or other extreme or private human events.  It takes a lot of work to become a librarian.  Their job is to figure out which books are just using sexual experiences to make money and which books use sexual experiences to say something important about the human condition.  I heard the testimony of the librarian in these hearings, and I have to say, I agree with her; despite Kennedy's every effort to discredit her and her position.

In her opening statement, Emily Knox, professor of information science (formerly known as library sciences), said, "When the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom released its data for book challenges in 2022, the headlines were glaring. “A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021.” Almost all of the books can be categorized as “diverse” or books by and about “LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities." 

What Knox, and the American Library Association are alleging (if not outright stating) is that this rapidly growing movement to limit access to books is based on bigotry.  If the numbers gathered by the American Library Association are correct, then their conclusion might also be correct.  I fear it is.  All of the passes Senator Kennedy read, with a face like he was walking through sewage, were from books about the experiences of gay men.

This entire movement to limit library books is the result of certain conservative forces spreading the idea that schools are unacceptably liberal and using their position as educators to indoctrinate your children.  It's openly a fear tactic.  I've known hundreds of professional educators, maybe even a thousand.  I was married to one, and I grew up supplying their material classroom needs.  From my experience and a lifetime of working with these people, I can say without hesitation that there is no organized effort to indoctrinate your children.  You are being told a lie to help gain your political obedience.  

Ray Bradbury said that Joseph McCarthy stoked the fires that led to his fears about books.  Hitler and Stalin too, but having this happen in America was particularly disturbing to him.  Bradbury wrote the novel in the basement of the UCLA Powell Library because, in the basement, they had typewriters that you could rent by inserting a dime into a slot every thirty minutes.  When he was trying to figure out what to write next, he would wander the aisles and let the books' physical presence infect and inspire him.  

Several years ago, I learned that electronic books were easier for me to read than physical books, I had a collection of books that had grown massive, and I didn't want to take them with me to my new home, so I gave most of my books to St. Andrews.  If your child at St. Andrews ever brings home a play or a book on film from the St. Andrews library, there's a chance it came from my collection.  Most of my reading I now do on my tablet or on my phone.  I take some comfort in knowing that nearly my entire library goes with me most of the day, nestled safely in my breast pocket in my cellphone.  Just knowing that books exist and I can access them means something.

Like nearly all of the social issues of the day, I believe that these things should be left up to the professionals, not some jaybird in Washington.  It's a lot of work to become a librarian, and there's fierce competition for good ones.  In 1987, when both Millsaps and The University of Mississippi applied for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the reason Millsaps won and Ole Miss didn't was because the review board thought we had the better library.  Libraries are important, even at the high school level.  Parents who are concerned about what their children might read should focus more on communicating their values to their children than trying to put limits on how librarians do their job.  

I'm starting to have trouble trusting some of the conservative elements in our country.  If their goal is to limit the amount of homosexuality or limit the visibility of homosexuals in our schools, then I wish they'd be upfront about it and not hide in an effort to control library books.  Let people decide the issue on its own face, without trying to accomplish your goals by fighting through other issues by proxy.  Librarians are not responsible for children becoming homosexual, and their providing books for students who are homosexual isn't part of some political agenda.  

Sensitive Artists

 People make much from this notion of artists being emotionally sensitive; even other artists make fun of it sometimes.  The phenomenon is genuine.  You can create art without emotion, but many question whether you should, and once an artist opens themselves up to the emotions related to what they’re trying to create, it can be difficult to shake them once the artist is no longer in the studio.

There’s a fairly famous story that came out of filming “Marathon Man” where the younger Dustin Hoffman kept himself awake for two and three days without sleep and lost a great deal of weight to create in himself the sort of emotions his character might feel for when filming began.  The story goes that during the setup for a particular shot, Hoffman complained about the preparations he went through (which he is somewhat famous for doing,) and his costar, Lawrence Olivier, said, “My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?”

I once wrote a paper for Brent Lefavor on the history of acting teachers.  I tried to find it before working on this, but I think I named it something funky and can’t find the file.  My point was that we discussed all the branches that grew off the seed Stanislavski planted but didn’t discuss much about what went on before that.

Before Stanislavski’s ideas about using memory and emotion in acting, most actors were trained in a type of pantomime where they used gestures to portray emotion, where holding your hands and feet in a certain position displayed this emotion, and changing how you hold your hands represents another emotion.  If you look at early silent films, this type of acting is pretty evident.  The Gish sisters were famous for using the same few gestures over and over again, but they were among the most famous actors of their time, so maybe they were on to something.

Olivier studied acting in London in the twenties.  He would have been the right age to study under Stanislavski but did not.  There may have been a language barrier.  Most of Olivier’s acting training came from working.  He does not use much of the pantomime method, even in his earliest films.  Olivier was one of a few actors who, early on, discovered on his own how to act for the camera.  He was a master of the medium shot and closeup,  which is very different from acting on the proscenium stage.  

Hoffman studied under Lee Strasberg.  Hoffman might be his most famous pupil.  Of all the “method acting” teachers, Strasberg might have been the most extreme.  If you look at who the Strasberg school produced, it’s easy to think maybe he was onto something.  Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Geraldine Page and Eli Wallach, and Elia Kazan were all students of Strasberg.  Even Marilyn Monroe took under Strasberg because she was tired of people saying she could only work as an actor because of her body.  You could see her work improving under Strasberg’s tutelage, but Hollywood, then and now, isn’t very interested in a Pinup girl once she hits her 30s.

My wife played piano.  She was also a devoted fan of other people who played the piano.  She set great store in the idea of pianists playing with emotion, as much of it as they could muster.  I always thought that was fascinating.  Of all musical instruments, the piano is possibly the most mathematical.  The pianist strikes a key that pushes a lever that makes a hammer strike a taught strong, and the vibrations of that string make a sound.  Then, the pianist strikes another key.  The pianist controls three things.  He controls the intensity he uses to strike the key, which translates to the intensity of the hammer hitting the string.  He controls the pedals, which change the duration of the string’s vibrations, and he controls the amount of time between notes, which is supposed to be consistent with what’s written on the page, so you’re talking about fractions of a second where he can portray anything like an emotion.  

All of that sounds very mechanical, and indeed, you can build a robot that plays any piece ever written for piano, but a robot playing will never really move you like the way a human pianist can.  It doesn’t look like there’s any room in the formula for playing piano for emotion, but there is. That propensity to express emotion by striking keys separates pianists from robots.  

Psychologically and biologically, we don’t really know where emotion comes from or how it fits in with evolutionary development.  It seems to come from the communication centers of the brain.  Some animals, like dogs, cats, and monkeys, clearly show that they also feel emotions.  Dogs and cats communicate a great deal.  When I would close the door so my cat Buddy wouldn’t come into the room with me, he would sing an opera with all the emotion of La Boheme until I opened the door for him.  While he might have used it to manipulate me, he clearly felt and expressed emotion.

Sometimes, who we communicate with changes how much we express and feel emotion.  When I was in college, one of my fraternity brothers died in an automobile accident.   The visitation and funeral at Wright and Ferguson downtown was packed with really very young people who, just a few days before, considered such an event impossible.  As an officer in my fraternity and the Chi Omega Owlman, I thought it my duty to be as much like a rock during this as I could.  Even though I’d known this boy since we were little, there would be a great deal of emotion and considerable fear that day, and everyone would be looking for signs of stability in a world that suddenly seemed very unstable.  I decided that should be me as much as possible.  

At least a thousand young people came through that day—most from Millsaps, but many from the other organizations he was involved in.  We had sort of a system set up where a KA officer stood at several points in the line to sort of greet people and basically do whatever had to be done.  My position was close to the door to greet people as they entered.  

This was very difficult for me.  There were an awful lot of young people that I cared a great deal about coming through who were very emotional and already crying.  Cotton handkerchiefs are pretty cheap, so I buy them by the box.  I kept about six in each coat pocket in case a lady needed one.  As the line wore through, I was running out of handkerchiefs, but I kept my resolve.  Even though I felt great emotion about what was happening that day, I kept it to myself as a matter of obligation.  That worked as scores of people I knew came by until…

Nearly everyone I expected at the funeral had come through, but then, through the window, I could see her get out of her car.  For people who went to Millsaps in the eighties, CS’s was part of the landscape, and at CS’s, there was a woman who not only cooked our food and served our bee, but she also took care of us and told us when we’d had enough, and sometimes when we were spending too much time with her and needed to go study.  Just seeing her made the emotions I successfully tamped down inside of me start to rumble.  

“Hey baby,” Inez said, reaching out her arm to hug my neck.  

My conscious mind still wanted to be in control, but my subconscious mind said, “She’s here now; you can let go.”  and I felt a great trembling, first in my fingertips, as this great wave of emotion worked its way through my body to my face, and I wept like a lost child.  

I regained my composure and finished the visitation and the funeral, and everyone moved on to the place of internment, where we stood in the sun while a family buried their son.  For some reason, everyone I knew had Ray-Ban sunglasses that year.  I wore mine and stood as straight as I could and stood between two of my Chi Omega girls, Maria and Mary Carol.  My goal was to be as strong as I could for them, but they were there for me.  Feeling another wave of emotion coming on, I clenched my fist as hard as I could to keep it out, and a tiny, french-manicured hand touched my arm. Water silently but freely flowed from my eyes while I fought back the shudder I felt in my legs.  My Celtic roots wanted to let out a piercing, deafening, keen of lament, but I kept it to myself.

Part of my technique in writing a memoir is opening myself up as much as possible to feel what I felt when whatever I’m writing about happened.  I did it just now, writing about the funeral.  In theory, this helps me choose words and choose formations of sentences that are more interesting to read.  I’m told it’s successful.  It’s interesting writing for this particular audience because there’s almost always someone reading who remembers the same events.

Most of the time, I’m very much in control of the process.  It can be really very cathartic, even exhilarating, as I’m convinced I’m actually feeling what Socrates and Plato meant when they talked about fear and pity and hopefully express that on paper, which is the whole point of the exercise.  It can have a very cleansing effect.  Most of the time, that’s what happens, but sometimes, things go off the rails.  

A few weeks ago, I was working on a piece (I still haven’t finished) that connects my conversations with Mitch Myers and Dan Rose with my Grandfather's conversations with Dr. Kirby Walker about how and why the schools in Jackson separated after Brown V Board of Education.  I should finish that this week if I get my head back in the game.  Working on that, I had a thought about a memory and decided to spend an hour or two writing about that as a procrastination from what I wanted to write about.  

I published that piece on the blog and had pretty good responses.  It was very emotional, and I felt like I could communicate what I wanted very well.  It was something of a pandora’s box, though, and opening it led to many other memories, and those memories knocked me off track for a couple of weeks, where I struggled to have any productivity at all other than to scribble about those memories.  I got stuck in a loop of fear and pity and regret that wrecked me for a while because it made me question what’s the use of really trying to create when that’s the result.  

I think a lot of writers go through this.  It probably explains why they drink so much.  Writing Naked Lunch, the friends of William S. Burroughs became very concerned about his well-being as the things he wrote about had a clear impact on the rest of his life, and he was becoming obsessed with his thoughts and feelings about the novel.  

When I talk to young people about acting or some other art, I tend to tell them that emotion is just another color you paint with, and on some levels, that’s true, but that’s really not a very complete description of what happens, and I probably should be more honest about it.  Art without emotion isn’t very filling.  That’s how I feel about most AI art, which is the thought that inspired me to write this entire piece.  

Art produced by artificial intelligence might be interesting, but so far, I haven’t seen any of it that was moving.   So far, I don’t think Michelangelo has anything to worry about.  Once we get to the point where computers feel emotion, we’ll have an awful lot more to worry about than just what AI does to the job market for artists, and without emotion, what they produce may still be art, but it’s art that’s missing the most important component.  

I spent this weekend working to get my head back in the game.  Trying to work as a serious artist can have pitfalls and tiger traps, and I fell into one.  I’m actually very pleased with the work I produced in that confused state, but I don’t think I can ever really show anybody.  I don’t mind opening my life up for people to read about, but I don’t feel right about opening somebody else’s life up for inspection.  That seems like a real violation of trust to me.  

What I’m trying to do isn’t always going to be easy or comfortable.  That’s ok, though.  I still feel like it’s worth it, and honestly, I’m pretty sure accounting and marketing have their ups and downs too.  

David Bowie was hired to write a song for the big-budget remake of Cat People, with really very little direction about what to write other than to write a hit, which he did.  While the name of the song is “Cat People,” the sentiment of the song is a repeated line where he says, “And I've been putting out fire with gasoline.”  Sometimes, to create anything, you have to turn up the heat as much as you can and work through the flames.  I’m not afraid of that, but I do need to get better at dealing with the aftermath.  

A Man Named Jed

Did I ever tell you the story of a man named Jed Clampett?  Jed was dirt poor, living in the hills of Arkansas.  He had no education and no job, but he had a little piece of swampy bottomland left to him by his father.  Jed always wanted to drain the swamp so he could farm his little piece of land, but he never had the wherewithal to do it.  

Sometimes, when what little money he had ran out, the only way for Jed to feed his family was by hunting.  Deer, squirrel, boar, it didn’t matter.  He’d kill it, and they’d eat for a few days before he had to hunt again.  

One day, Jed was hunting a boar when he noticed a big black spot bubbling up in the swamp water on his land.  Not recognizing this ooze, Jed collected a bit of it in a bottle and brought it to the county extension agent, Frank Kimball, to examine.  Kimball didn’t recognize it either, so he sent it off to the Arkansas State Geologist.  

A few days later, a man named Brewster came to see Jed.  Brewster worked for a large oil exploration company out of California, and he had great news.  What bubbled up from the swamp on Jed Clampett’s land was West Texas Crude, and if Jed allowed his geologist to run some tests, he’d like to buy that swamp land.  

Jed was against the idea, but his cousin, Pearl, encouraged it.  Pearl had been a widow for many years, and her opportunities were running low and this Mr. Brewster was single, so she talked Jed into letting him and his geologist friends have a look.  Within a few days, Brewster made Clampett an offer on the land.  He was willing to pay twenty-five million dollars in cash for a spot of land Jed and everybody in the county thought was worthless.  At first, Jed was dubious about the deal because he wasn’t entirely sure how much a million was, but Cousin Pearl again talked him into it.  

Suddenly richer than anyone ever imagined, Pearl convinced Jed that he should move away from their mountain holler.  He should go where rich folks go to expand the horizons for his twenty-one-year-old daughter and take Pearl’s twenty-year-old son with him.  Pearl’s son, Jethro, exceeded every possible educational opportunity in the entire county when he passed the sixth grade, and Pearl worried the holler couldn’t keep up with his vast potential at chiperhing and such.   

Brewster set Jed up with an account at the Beverly Hills Commerce Bank with Milburn Drysdale as his banker.  Drysdale found a house where their now largest depositor could live on the same street as his own house.  Jed, his daughter Ellie, Jethro, and Jed’s mother-in-law, Daisy, whom everyone called Granny, loaded up Jethro’s Oldsmobile Model 37 truck and drove from Arkansas to Beverly Hills.

That part of the story everybody knows.  These hillbillies trying to fit in Beverly Hills were the subject of constant gossip back in the early sixties.  Some of the neighbors hated them, but in some circles, they were celebrated for their unique views on life.  The world moved on, though, and Jed and his peculiar kin were soon forgotten.  I didn’t forget them, though.  Jed liked me, even though none of my business ideas ever panned out.  I was the one who brokered the deal for Jed to buy Mammoth Studios, which looked like a disaster at first, but eventually made a fair amount of money when we sold it to Universal so they could expand their theme park.

I think, at first, there was some thought that I’d be a suitor for Ellie May.  Don’t get me wrong, Ellie was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw.  Tall and strong, she was incredibly athletic.  Someone taught her how to play tennis once, and she spent the next twenty years beating all the men at the Beverly Hills Tennis Center.  One, she wore a silver lame dress to a studio function, and my friend Bolt Upright coined the phrase “Arkansas Titanium Torpedos” with reference to her bosom.  His real name was Barry Taylor, but nobody named Barry was going to make it as an actor in the sixties, so he changed it to Bolt.

Ellie was beautiful, and she had a heart of gold, especially when it came to animals.  After her father died, Ellie began opening animal shelters all over southern California, and she started a television campaign for people to spay and neuter their pets.  Ellie would have been the perfect woman, except for one thing.  Ellie was probably the dumbest person I ever met.  Her innocent, wide-eyed act wasn’t an act.  She lived with the mind of a twelve-year-old for the rest of her life.  

Her banker, Mr. Drysdale, had an assistant named Jane Hathaway, who was brilliant, financially and in every other way.  Although she was mostly a lesbian, Hathaway would sometimes drink herself into trying to seduce Jethro.  Hathaway took it as her life’s mission to take care of Ellie and Jethrow, advising them financially and helping them navigate the complexities of living in Southern California.  Ellie never married but spent the rest of her life living in the house her father bought when he moved to California, with Hathaway having her own suite of rooms.  

Jane Hathaway devoted her life to protecting Ellie from suitors with an eye on her father’s money.  She was successful too, but there are ways to rob a girl of her treasures without touching her bank account.  A young Freddie De Cordova, who went on to become the mastermind of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, had a contract to produce a picture starring a certain blue-eyed singer from Mississippi who was as famous for his hips as he was for his songs.  With filming set in Hollywood and New Orleans, De Cordova rented space at Clampett’s Mammoth studio to shoot the riverboat scenes in his picture, Frankie and Johnny.  

Visiting the set one day, everyone was only too happy to introduce Ellie to the movie’s young star, Elvis Presley.  The two Southerners stuck up a fast friendship and spent many hours talking in Presley’s trailer.  Ellie had never really been taken with a man before, but she swooned for Elvis.  For Presley, Ellie was just one of many, though, and soon the stars fell from her eyes.  Heartbroken, Ellie moved back to Arkansas by herself for almost a year before returning to California.

Ellie had little interest in the company of men after this.  She died childless but the loving benefactor of thousands of stray dogs and cats in California and Arkansas.  Her cousin Jethro would take many wives, but Ellie May decided she’d seen enough of menfolk.

Daisy, whom everybody called Granny, was in her seventies when she moved to California.  Of the entire family, Granny would be the least changed by the move.  In times of need, Granny knew how to distill liquor from corn and got quite good at it.  The family didn’t really understand the purpose of a swimming pool when they moved in.  Ellie kept trying to fish in it.  Eventually, she figured out it was for swimming only.  Granny took over the pool house, and that was where she kept her still.  Making your own whiskey was just as illegal in California as it was in Arkansas, but in California, Granny’s tonic developed quite a reputation for those wanting to try something a little different.  Granny became les causes célèbres, and everyone who wanted to test their limits loved her tonic.  Granny loved music and died on a trip to New York to see the musical Pippin with Ben Vareen.  She had a heart attack in the audience.  Out of her mountain clothes, everybody said she looked no older than sixty-five.  

The intellectual prowess that Jethro’s mother believed he had turned out to be fairly real.  Jethro was a brilliant businessperson.  Taken with the movies, Jethro became the executive producer for several successful films, including a romantic version of the popular song “Ode To Billy Joe,” which he shot in Mississippi.  Jethro loved Los Vegas.  With his allowance from Uncle Jed, Jethro bought an Alpha Romero and spent many afternoons driving out into the desert headed for Vegas.  

Jethro eventually got his hands on an interest in a smaller casino.  Noting how successful casino buffets were, Jethro had the idea of a buffet with a country theme that served grits and greens, chicken and dumplings, biscuits and gravy, and every other country delicacy he could think of, and he called it “Granny’s Kitchen.”  Granny’s Kitchen was so successful he began branching out and building restaurants all over the South East.  They were designed after Sam Drucker’s store back home and had cracker barrels and checkerboards to try and give suburbanites the feeling of living in the country.

Jethro’s mother, Pearl, borrowed a little money from Jed and bought the old Shady Rest Hotel back home.  An old boarding house next to a narrow gauge railroad, the hotel had seen better days.  Pearl died shortly after, but Jethro’s sister, Jethrine, had a head for business.  Jethrine had the idea she could sell weekends at an authentic country hotel, with home-cooked meals to people leading the accelerated lives of the sixties and seventies.   

Oliver and Lisa Douglass decided they were sick of living in Manhattan (or at least he was) and purchased a farm not far from the Shady Rest Hotel.  Douglass wasn’t much of a farmer, but he was a hell of a lawyer, and clients sought him out, even living in the country.  His wife Lisa maintained social ties in Manhattan, and her connections soon translated into guests for the Shady Rest as weekends in Hooterville became a popular vacation for the metropolitan set.

Jed Clampett had almost no business acumen.  Much to the chagrin of his banker, Milburn Drysdale, Clampett agreed to meet with anyone looking for investors.  Clampet invested his money based on how much he liked the people he was doing business with, not the prospects of their venture.  Normally, a man like this would soon be left without a penny, but the gods of finance smiled on Jed Clampet, and nearly everything he invested in paid off, even if it took a while.  By 1978, Jed’s original twenty-five million dollar fortune was worth nearly sixty.  

Around 1968, Jed’s young cousin Roy came to see him with an idea for Jed to invest in a television program.  Roy’s idea was a show similar to the Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In, but to replace the liberal politics with country music and replace the psychedelic design theme with a barnyard.   Jed didn’t know much about business or television, but he knew an awful lot about country music, so Roy’s idea fascinated him.  The show didn’t have a name yet, but most of their ideas about barn-this or country-that had all been used by radio programs.  When Jed saw design sketches for a cartoon mascot of a mule in a straw hat, he suggested they might name the show after the sound a mule makes.  Hee Haw ran for a record twenty-five seasons.  If Jed weren’t already a millionaire, he would be from this investment alone.   Before Hee Haw, Cousin Roy made a living playing “anything with strings,” including guitars, bass guitars, banjos, and fiddles. He could play classical as well as country, and for twenty-five years, Roy Clark was the host of Hee Haw, thanks to his cousin Jed.

The legend of the Hillbillies of Beverly Hills lived on well into the twenty-first century.  Jethro, Jethrine, and Ellie May all remained childless, so their vast fortunes were left to charities.  Animal shelters for Ellie May and scholarships for wayward girls trying to get into modeling schools for Jethro. Their palatial home, considered gaudy and ostentatious, even by Beverly Hills standards, remained on the market for many years and was eventually purchased by a family of Arabs who also found oil on land most considered worthless.

In the end, Jethro was all that was left.  Living in the penthouse apartment of his Los Vegas casino, you can still find him driving around the desert in an imported convertible, looking for pretty girls or a good meal.