Monthly Archives: January 2018

My Brilliant Career in Film and TV

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My Brilliant Career: How I Found My Proper Place in Film and TV

I got bitten by the film bug when I lived in L.A.
and did some sort of movie work most every single day.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, I always had a class.
The U.C.L.A. campus is where they came to pass.
I studied film production and took screenwriting, too,
but my class in documentaries was where I scored a coup.
We made a documentary.  In fact, I helped with two,
but I knew by the end of them I hadn’t found my place.
I simply didn’t have the balls to run the movie race.

Then I studied acting at an actor’s studio.
I really did the best at this, but still, it was “no go.”
When it came to trying out for parts, I didn’t have the nerve.
Once again my movie plans took another swerve.
I worked as an apprentice at a Hollywood agency.
From all the other candidates, they selected me.
They had me reading novels and sitting in on sessions;
and this was more exciting than my former classroom lessons.
I met some famous actors and tried to be real cool,
and writing out readers reports was easier than school,
but still I knew that in my heart it just wasn’t for me.
After all this time, I didn’t know who I should be.

I’d been in California for three years by then;
and although I hadn’t found my place, still I had the yen.
But I’d run out of money. It was time to find employment
that would involve a paycheck and not just my enjoyment!
I’d heard of a position where I thought that I could cope
as publicity assistant for none other than Bob Hope!
So I wound up in production: typing, phoning, organizing.
The  people in my Rolodex were frankly quite surprising.
I set up radio interviews with the famous Bob.
To read the National Enquirer was required in this job!
I went to filmings of the shows, sent out his Christmas gifts,
ran back and forth to N.B.C. and soothed some office rifts.

But all-in-all though it was fun to be there on the fringe,
to be completely honest, I was not a vital hinge.
And so when I was married, we decided to move north.
I left my life in filmdom and boldly sallied forth,
moving up to Santa Cruz to live by doing art—
never really finishing what I had tried to start.
I had adventures plenty and saw much of the scene
and I enjoy remembering everywhere I’ve been;
but all-in-all, the truth is that there’s one place I’m most groovy.
When it comes to all the skills that go into a movie,
the only place that doesn’t make me sort of tense
Is center row and half way back, in the audience!

 

When I originally wrote this piece three years ago,  the prompt was: “The Show Must Go On–If you were involved in making a film, would you want to be the director, producer or lead actor?  You cannot be the writer,” but the prompt today that also fit it was simply the word  brilliant.

Auricomous Redux

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This is the photo I was looking for when I did an earlier response to the prompt.  I just found it so need to publish it.  Another gorgeous auricomous find:

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She was hanging out at a favorite restaurant that has an herb garden in back.  She is looking sort of grumpy, probably since they have adopted all 5 of her kittens out since I was last there.  Poor Mama.

https://bopaula.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/thursdays-special-pick-a-word-in-january-y3/

CYW: Robin’s Egg Blue

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Luckily, two friends have chosen to wear robin’s egg blue blouses recently.  The sculpture photo was taken in Puerto Vallarta. Not sure what created the ring effect, but I like it! Click on any photo to enlarge all.

For the Color Your World Challenge.

Hibiscus: Flower of the Day, Jan 8, 2018

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For Cee’s flower prompt.

The Willow Cutters

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The Willow Cutters.

They gather in circles as the day ends.
Men sit in one circle, closer to the lake.
Women, still standing, cluster laughing around a ribald tale.
They’ve been cutting old willow, then burning it for weeks to clear the mud flats.
Now new willow, red-veined with opalescent skin, springs up from the graves of the old.
The teeth of slender leaves cup up to catch the far-off whirr of rain bugs in the hills.
Every night louder, their repetitious whirr is as annoying
as the temperature, which  grows hotter every day.

The birds all seek their evening perches—
night heron on the fence post in the water,
blackbirds in orderly evening strings,
swallows in frenzied swooping snarls.
A young girl lies on her back in the short cool grass
that in the past few weeks has sprung from the cracked mud.
With her baby in arms, she rolls over to face the red sun and in her journey,
sees the ones from her pueblo who burn off last year’s growth.

Sees also the gringa who cuts the tender willow.
She is an interloper who watches birds, and as she watches,
is watched—the bright colors of her clothes drawing eyes.
She is the one for whom being a foreigner isn’t enough—
an ibis among herons, a cuckoo among blackbirds,
Now and then, all flock here.

As mother with child  stands to go,
the willow cutter, too, straightens her back
and trudges heavy, arms filled with willow,
toward her car far up the beach.
As  sun like a cauldron  steams into the hill,
horses stream smoothly back to claim their turf,
and the other willow cutters circle longer, telling stories, moving slow.
Children run races with the night as sure as new willows
grow stubbornly from the ground of parents
uprooted, but victorious.

 

 

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This is a poem written the year I moved to Lake Chapala, sixteen years ago.  Every day for two years, I walked on land that had formerly been lake. There were acres of willow that I later learned townspeople were hired to clear before Semana Santa, when hordes of tourists from Guadalajara always descended.  I was there to cut willow to make lamps. When the lake came up to its former banks a few years later, all of those willows, that grew back yearly, were destroyed.  Only their bones now stick up when the lake recedes a bit again every year.  They make perfect roosting places for birds. I rarely walk on the lakeside anymore. The lake has remained high enough so all of my former walking places are under water.  Instead, I stay home and write poems and post blogs. As usual, click on any photo to enlarge all.

White Bougainvillea: Flower of the Day, Jan 7, 2018

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White bougainvilleas are so rare that I had to stop to shoot this one. Click on photos to enlarge.

For Cee’s flower prompt.

Funneled

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Interloper

If you live long enough, what others consider history will become your life. Twelve years ago, I walked for hours every day on dry lake bottom, in places the lake a mile further out from its usual banks. Then, five years from its supposed extinction, the rains came. The floodgates of the dams upstream opened as well and the lake swelled to its former girth. My old walking trails through the cattails and the willows became suffused in a watery world. Tree tops became the perches for egrets scant inches above the waterline, and the lake became once more the private property of homes and landowners who fronted on the water.

But now, again, the water has retreated, and for the first time in eleven years, I am again walking on what was once lake bottom. I see for myself how this venerable lady who spreads  her skirts under the mountain known as Señor Garcia, has done so in a curtsy, before beating a hasty retreat. Freshwater shells pave the dry silt. Discarded soda bottles , moss-covered and corroded, lie in a pile as though emptied like catch from a fisherman’s net. Coots and grackles replace the white pelicans who have circled over in their last goodbye like other snowbirds heading north. Sandpipers whistle their reedy pipes, as if to rein in the small boy who runs with a rag of kite streaming out behind him, creating his own wind.

A man in red shorts wades out to a bright yellow boat, lugging a five gallon gas container. The kite pilot and his two brothers, as tattered as their kite, walk past, then circle as though I’m prey, to sit behind me on an archipelago of large stones that form a Stonehenge around the sheared-off skeletons of willows. I wrote about these willows in their prime— when the villagers had come to clear and burn them eleven years ago, not knowing they would not grow back. What had been foremost in their prayers for years would soon happen. The lake would rise again to her former banks. But now she once again beats a hasty retreat, leaving the stubs and skeletons of trees revealed again. It is a wasteland stripped of the life of water or of leaves.

“Rapido!” the boy in the green shirt demands of his brother. Their sister pulls the bones of the kite from their plastic shroud. Rags turn back to rags, their flight over. The brother in the black Wesley Snipes T Shirt winds the coil of string as though it is valuable and can’t be tangled or lost. The sun is half an hour from setting. “Be off the beach by nightfall,” a man had warned me as I set off for my walk. He was a gringo, and perhaps unwarrantedly cautious, yet still I am ready to start back. I remember the banks of blackbirds that used to settle in clouds in the reeds—acres and acres of cattails—enough to get seriously lost in. At sunset, the birds would lift in funnels by the thousands– a moving tornado of winged black that moved as one. But they are history, now.

“La Sangerona”—that bright yellow boat whose name translates as “the annoying one” does not disappoint. Despite her fresh infusion of fuel, she has to be pulled manually ashore. She is like a princess being towed up the Nile. She expends no energy to further her own movement. A red dog, wet sand to his high tide mark, settles politely in the sand beside me. Like iron filings drawn to their pole, the children gather closer. They pull at the rocks as though mining for worms— prod at the packed sand, casting eyes up, then away. Curious but silent.

Now, all run away. I am left with one grackle, three sandpipers and fourteen coots, drawn out by the waves and pushed back in, over and over in a lullaby. As I climb to the malecon, the sun dissolves into the mountains to the west. Shadows of palms are blown in a singular direction, all pointing north. Below them, the skirts of lesser trees, as low as bushes but lush in their fullness, toss with abandon, as though this lower wind does not know its own direction. I have a hunch, go closer and examine. I am rewarded. They are willows, swaying to obscure a fresh stand of cattails, once again beginning their long march of dominance.The water that was interloper is history. And I am part of it.

Dry lakebed. Once again revealed

Dry lakebed, once again revealed.

closeup of freshwater shellsFreshwater shells, revealed by the retreat of the lake.

Freshwater shells revealed by retreat of lake

new serpentine shoreline

A new serpentine shoreline.

bones of the old willows again revealed

bones of the old willows again revealedFresh catch!Fresh catch!

 

The kite flyer and  the recalcitrant “La Sangerona.”

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Palms point northwards in the sunset breeze.

The first surprise. New willows!

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A lake sunset

A lake sunset

 

This is an extensive rewrite of a poem posted years ago. The prompt today is funnel.

Happy Ending

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Andy and I outside our luxurious home formed of mud, manure and straw.  Dirt floors.  No running water. No bathroom. No electricity.

Mary has asked that I tell more of the story about the trial of the man who abducted me and the aftermath––especially  about Andu Alem and why I ended up not leaving Ethiopia after this horrid occurence.  I think the lady craves a happy ending, so here it is.  In the past segment, found HERE, I skipped over most of the information about the trial.  Here is more information as well as some of the aftermath, including Andy.  It starts the morning after I was accosted by two of Solomon Kidane’s friends who threatened my life and the life of my friends if I didn’t withdraw charges against him. The story continues:

The next day I went with my attorney and we started making the rounds of government offices and officials, eventually making it up to the equivalent of the national Attorney General. The way the Ethiopian justice system works is to hear an hour or two of testimony per week for each case it is adjudicating. This can lead to very long trials—sometimes a matter of years—and businessmen learn to devote one day a week to sitting in court to plead various issues before the court. After hearing my story, however, the Attorney General granted special dispensation for my testimony to be heard in one or two long sessions or for as long as it would take so I could then be free to leave the country. The fact that he had suspended this custom for me was remarkable, explained my attorney, in that it was without precendent. A court date was set for the following week.

The day of the trial, my lawyer and the embassy interpreter picked me up in a taxi and we rode to the courts building. They led me to the courtroom, where another case was being heard. Interestingly enough, it was the trial of a young Tegrian woman who had been among the hijackers who had hijacked the Air Ethiopian plane that I have mentioned formerly. Ironically enough, she was the cause of “Solomon Kidane” and the other security guards being on my plane and so was responsible for my kidnapping as well. It is a further irony that the hijacking had been done to call attention to the revolutionary cause that Solomon Kidane and his friends were also sympathetic to.

The first day of the trial, I sat in court watching several other cases being presented. I was curious about what was being said, but remained unenlightened for all of the testimony was, of course, in Amharic. When my case came up, they charged a young man sitting on the right hand side of the aisle with the crime. When they asked if his name was Solomon Kidane, he said no, presenting his identity papers. Clearly, his attorney said, they had arrested the wrong man. The judge told him to turn around and face me and asked me if this was the man who had abducted and molested me. I was confused. Solomon Kidane had had a full Afro, whereas this young man had closely cropped hair. Could they have substituted someone else in his place? What could have happened? He looked so different. How could I be sure that this was the man who assaulted me? Then I noticed the huge goose egg on his forehead in the exact same place where I had hit him over the head with the lamp. At the same time, I remembered him showing me various i.d.’s that he had used in his role as a secret security agent.

“I am sure he is the man,” I said to the three judges hearing my case, and went on to explain to them that Solomon Kidane was just one of his many identities.

For the next three hours, his lawyer did more to prove my moral turpitude than to defend his client. Was I a virgin, he asked? How many men had I slept with. Why was I crying when the airplane left Lalibela and who were the two men who had brought me to the plane? Had I slept with one of them? I answered truthfully that yes, I had. Had I slept with both of them? No, I had not. Why was I traveling alone he asked, and did I sleep with many men as I traveled. No, I did not. Had I not propositioned this man and asked to meet his family? When he came, had he presented me with a gift? Yes, I answered. In accepting this gift, was I not expressing an interest in this young man, and did I feel it was proper to accept a gift from a man who was a stranger. It was a cheap shamma that could be purchased in the marked for the equivalent of $3 American, I answered, and I felt it would be rude to refuse. In return, I had given him a hat I had bought that had cost much more. Was I aware that in Ethiopia an exchange of gifts like this could indicate an intention to wed, he asked? No, I answered. And was I aware that abduction of a bride was still a behavior often practiced there?
“And is saying you are going to kill your bride after raping her also an established tradition? “ I asked.

At the end of my three hours of testimony, in which his lawyer did everything to discredit me and to prove my moral unworthiness, Solomon Kidane was arrested and ordered to stand trial. The judges then released me from obligation to the court.

One very interesting twist to the story is that I was in sympathy with the E.L.F. cause and felt it justified, and so I never did reveal to police, my attorney, the embassy or the judges that these men were all E.L.F. members. If Solomon Kidane was to go to jail, I wanted it to be for his personal actions, not his political ones. I believe to this day that the men didn’t realize that I could understand their political ravings as they got drunker and by the time the night was over, they had given away a secret that I was wise not to reveal I understood.

The day after my court testimony finished, I was preparing to depart for Khartoum to join Deirdre when a letter was delivered to me via Poste Restante. It was from Andy, who stated that he had heard what “that man” had done to me. “He is just devil!” he stated in his usual colorful English, and he went on to say that sending me away was the biggest mistake of his life, and that I should come back to Lalibela to live with him until they were forced by the upcoming rainy season to journey out over the mountains via Land Rover to go back to Addis. “After that, we will travel to Kenya, and then we will marry,” he said.

Two days later, I was soaring low over a familiar grass landing field. Andy and Tessie met me with arms full of flowers. How did they know I was coming? I asked. It was Tessie who answered that they had met every plane since Andy had written the letter telling me to come back. When we went to the Seven Olives that night for a welcome back celebration, I noticed that the flower garden was completely shorn of flowers. “Every day, they granted us permission to cut flowers for your arrival,” admitted Andu Alem. “By the time you finally came, we had had cut every flower.” That night, lay singers in the Tej house once again sang the song of my coming back, and staying with Andy, and opening up “The Judy and Andy Souvenir Shop.” They had predicted it, they insisted. As it turns out, the ending to our story did not turn out as foretold, but in this way I nonetheless entered into the lore of this mountain village so far removed from civilization.

(Even though the name he used with me was fictional, I have changed the false name he used to “Solomon Kidane.” Ironic that I would change a real false name to a false false name, isn’t it?)

 

 

 

Shy Annes: Flower of the Day, Jan 6, 2018

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If I were to name these flowers, I’d name them Shy Annes.  In reality, they are thunbergias.  Sweet little ladies. (Enlarge by clicking on any photo.)

See Cee’s unusual flower photo Here.

Winsome and Then Some

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Most of you probably haven’t read the story of the beginning of my life in Ethiopia, but since my search for today’s prompt word presented it as one of the few posts prompted by the word “winsome,” and because I’ll be busy all day packing for the beach before my house sitters get here, I’m linking to it again today.  Here is the beginning.  If you’d like to read all of it, click on the link at the end:

Romance Underground

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I’ve given a few segments of the story of my time traveling and living in Ethiopia.  Some people have requested more of this story, so here is an expanded prose version of yesterday’s poem. The year is 1972.  This is long so you might want to read part of it and come back later.

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I was 24, just out of college, headed for whatever foreign country would hire me with no experience. The winner was Australia, and I headed out on my big life’s adventure. Setting out alone to somewhere where I knew no one, I was not scared. I was elated. I had no idea what people were like in this new environment. Perhaps they were more like me. I think I already knew that I was someone who enjoyed being the stranger. If I was the stranger, it meant all new territory for me. No one knew my family or anything about me. A youngest child, I could be judged for once completely on my own merits.

Australia was exciting, but after a year and a half of recruiting teachers from elsewhere, they decided they were overstocked and offered any of us willing to leave a payout equal to the amount of income taxes we’d been paid during the time we were in Australia. I cashed in and made $600! Wow! I thought this was enough to travel to London. My Australian roommate, Deirdre, decided to go with me. We planned to work enroute if we could and bought bus tickets from Sydney to Darwin and airline tickets from Darwin to Timor to Bali to Singapore to Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately, once we got to Timor, we discovered that the airline we’d booked our flights on all the way to Sri Lanka had gone bankrupt, so we were a bit stranded. We made our way by World War II Troop barge, which we “rented” from some Indonesian fishermen, then by foot through the jungles. This was the second biggest adventure story of my life and one told in an earlier posting, but that is not the story I am telling today. Suffice it to say that eventually, after about 4 months, we made it to Africa. (If you want to read the rest of this tale, go HERE.)

The prompt today was winsome.