OFFICE HOURS Sometimes on days when I am not teaching it feels seductively like I have a day off. I can enjoy the drive down Washington Boulevard without having to rush, I go down side streets and take pictures of neighborhoods, find new shortcuts and buy something from a street vendor (don’t judge) but still I have to remember – I am on my way to work. Yesterday I had one of those full days - office hours, committee service, lecturing in a friend’s class, ending with watching my students in one of their productions on campus. It quickly became a sixteen-hour day. I remember leaving the house at seven in the morning and then arriving home at eleven-thirty at night. It can suck you up so fast. I only teach on Tuesday and Thursday, and yet, I will have been at school all five days this week. I love office hours. Students come in wrestling with something larger than what can be dealt with in class and you get to meet face to face with young artists in their struggle and vulnerability. It’s really such a privilege even when it’s exhausting. To bridge a way of thinking that leads to enlightenment, reminds me of all the mentors I have had in my life. I can still remember meeting Paula Vogel at a café in Los Feliz and having her model her passion for me in ways that made me want to work with more dedication. Maria Irene Fornes standing across from me doing yoga and asking me questions about my play. Scott Kelman practicing deliberation with me, in the act of doing nothing you are always doing something so we would do nothing, and sure enough, I started to relax and let the thing that needed to come to me arrive. Sitting with Mac Wellman in a bar on Beverly and having him slide me a list on a napkin of the required reading in my life, high up on the list I see the Bible, the Koran, Connie Congdon, Len Jenkin and Ionesco. Thank goodness I am drunk. Reading a scene to Morgan Jenness and thinking you are going to get notes and instead having her school you on what your work means in the world. I remember being seventeen and walking with C. Bernard Jackson of the Inner City Cultural Center down Pico and he turns to me and says, “Can you imagine a world where there is no dominant culture? I can.” I leave him somewhere past Vermont, but before Hoover, and my mind is racing… It’s so ancient isn’t it? This idea of passing on what you know to the next generation and hoping they will succeed more than you ever did, move the field forward, advance the scholarship, and yet so damn hard. Argh, where’s John Houseman when you need him? My office is the most boring office ever. I took everything off the wall last semester and put it in boxes. It’s just an empty space (Peter Brook would be proud). I claimed it was because they started the tear down on the building next door. We are not lying to ourselves, it’s clear we are next. You can tell when you read the donor announcement bulletins. Very soon, a thirty-two million dollar gift will make a brand new microbiology-building stand in the same spot from where I write to you now. But the truth is, the tenure announcement is mere months away and I watched the sweet guy before me not get it and have to leave in record time. So I am being practical and realistic. If there is one thing we artists know is that change is the one constant in our lives. We move from play to play, sometimes painfully pulling away from collaborators that become family, and yet in order to do the work, you have to move on to the next play, the next experience. Like everything in my life, I don’t assume I have it until I have it. Leave gracefully and prepared or if you get it, enjoy putting everything back up. Poor Patti Smith poster keeps looking up at me from my box. I was there during the Taper massacre, it wasn’t the artists that were the most painful, but the longtime employees of thirty plus years or so, without warning, called up and asked to turn in their badges and keys and escorted out by the guard, carrying their boxes like refugees at a border. I get it. I understand the liability and security concerns. I was one of the lucky few given weeks to clear out. I am not sure you can marry anything anymore, especially institutions, ironically even the ones that are in the business of truth telling, which is something I have been wrestling with this week. There is a put upon cruelty involved in producing theatre these days, investment bullying, the protocol of bad behavior and the endorsement of mediocrity along with the lack of leadership has been weighing on me heavily. Enough said. We must be brave artists if the field itself seems mired in fear of its own future or trapped in the La Brea tar pit of the present. I walked across campus to VKC, I have no idea what that stands for, a big block of a building in the tradition of old state courthouses. It’s been ages since I have come to this part of campus, walking from Vermont to the Figueroa side. It’s so green over here! Which leads me to conclude that I am stuck on the south-side cement-only section of campus, across from the Taco Bell, but so far away from the Starbucks and Peet’s Coffeehouses. Clearly, I am in the ghetto section of school. There is a lush openness over here that I definitely don’t get in my congested corner of campus buildings and parking lots. As I was walking along the newly redesigned esplanade (bummer they landscaped the track & field for privacy and now you can’t see the hot high jumpers and sprinters doing their thing anymore, which is probably why the plants are so high, to combat the voyeurs like me!) two students were in front of me for a bit and I overheard just a snippet of their conversation. “HER: What are you doing for the holidays? HIM: Working on my abs. HER: I wish I had your discipline.” I love VKC! I teach in PED, the P.E. building built in 1930. VKC is definitely more modern a 70’s hipster vibe with the welcoming international flags that circle the structure. They have these amazing chairs on wheels that recline slightly and have an adjustable side arm that slides over and becomes a desk table. I am in love! I taught next to this building my very first semester of school seven years ago, when I replaced someone on sabbatical and had three amazing graduate students, all fully produced and exciting playwrights now, in a three hour class in which we drank wine, ate Thai food and wrote, read and talked art, art, art. You can’t do that anymore, the booze I mean, but I wonder if Gabe Rivas Gomez, with the great taste in wine and graphic novels, and Janine Salinas Schoenberg with the Bay Area attitude and meta-theatricality, and Boni Alvarez with the flair and poise of his penmanship remember the joy and intensity of those meetings? They taught me how to teach, that group. I don’t know what happened at VKC. I have a three hour or so lecture (with slides) that I can tailor to 45 minutes or more depending on the situation. I ended up doing the whole three-hour content but in an hour and a half. I was blazing through it and I could see the faces of the students wide-eyed and attentive. Were they struggling to keep up or did they think I was riding some cocaine-induced wave? I don’t know how I got it all in. I could feel myself talking fast and salivating, but that’s about it. Afterward, I started to walk back to my ‘hood part of campus with my friend, Meiling Cheng, the professor of the class and head of Critical Studies. Meiling is quite the beyond of the beyond in our school, a scholar of such dimension and one of the real risk takers in bringing something the students just don’t get - an appreciation of everything outside the norm. I met her a million years ago when she wrote “In Other Los Angeles” including me in her writings about performance art in L.A. She was a Yale graduate then by way of Taiwan. Most recently, she has worked with the celebrated political artist, Ai Weiwei on “Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Chinese Time-Based Art”. In short, she is the fresh breath in a department. I’ve been feeling a bit of academic loneliness lately. One of the side effects of this tenure process is that you hear everything that is bad and wrong about you, but little about what’s good about you. Your colleagues are not really there to support you in this period, but rather to evaluate you. And it’s confidential, so you know they are going to vote and talk and ponder the why of you. It’s not a time of affirmation, per se, they are there after all to create a case for your employment. I had a dear colleague pull out of this process mid way through, maybe it was too much, too hard to hear, but for me, even at the risk of having to leave, I think it’s important to elevate, to put yourself in a position where you can do more fearlessly. Before I could say anything, we were walking across the Tommy Trojan statue, which is under wraps and being guarded twenty-four hours by fraternity guards in fear of a rival prank, a UCLA bear hangs from the rafters. I look across and see one of my mentors and, frankly, idols, Claire Peeps, head of the Durfee Foundation and one of the essential voices of Los Angeles. We hug and I introduce these remarkable friends to each other. We decide to take selfies, each from our own phones, all at the same time, a terrible idea that results in each of us looking in three different directions! I even pull out my extending photo camera stick that my family gave me for my birthday (why am I carrying it in my backpack? Don’t ask) and we take a timed picture looking up at the camera. It’s ridiculous, it’s fun and suddenly this campus feels small and friendly and full of the joy of teaching. We say our goodbyes to Claire and as we walk down the long esplanade, Meiling points out my lecture style today. In her wonderful Chinese accent with its wickedly built-in sense of humor and observation, she says, “You started and for the next hour and a half I couldn’t tell if you took a breath or not. It was a great performance, but I found it interesting because part of your lecture was about artists needing to meditate, slow down, conceptualize, breath, but you took no breath of your own…” Ouch. She said it with all the warmth and generosity of the dearest friend, and yet I know I was having a mentorship moment. They come when you least expect them but most need them, dont they? We stopped in the middle of the walk, in front of the shrubbery blocking the track and field and I unloaded, some information, but mostly feelings. I don’t ever do this. I find that I spend a good deal of my life taking care of others, my students, my colleagues, my plays, my family, my writing, but these conversations I generally have in the quiet of night alone in bed with my Imelda Marcos stuffed doll (don’t ask) and I work these things out on my own. But it was good to work them out with a friend. Did we really stand there for nearly an hour? What a great friend. I hope one day I will be able to stand and listen to her speak her heart and tell me whatever she wants. Maybe because of our conversation, I went to the play with a much more open heart and less critical eye. I promised myself I wouldn’t love this group of MFA actors in their second year. They actually kind of annoyed me in the beginning, but now… Dammit, I love them, all fourteen of them, even the still annoying ones. I swore to myself there would be no room for them, but that’s the thing about teaching and that organ we call a heart, it expands in volumes. Your head fills up with information, your body gets into the ritual of teaching, but your heart, it expands with so much love at the possibility of the next generation and before you know it, you are in love. And now, in honor of my friend Meiling - an evening of meditation, and taking a breath…
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 07:47:49 +0000
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