Here I go - dive in to the cool, wet depths of passions and distraction.  Art and creation - all the exquisite ‘ah hahs’  propelling us forward as we carry on. The boulders that we choose to hold, firmly pressing up the walls that weigh against us .  All captivating my attention.  Like the mighty wave coming up from underneath, rising on each side to disguise the lonely path, to keep me on track and not wander into thoughts that cast a shadow over seeing.   Occasional hooks cast into my gills and the past loves to play fishing with baited looks and infatuation.  I-chatting visitation’s a strange recollection into the surging whims of nostalgia and late night cravings.

How do you define your happiness?

How do you define your idea of love?

How do you define the essence of what your soul desires?

Is it a thousand words?

Or one..  unspoken whisper..  of something..  for which..   there are no words?

Posted: March 30th, 2008 under NY Chronicles, my poetry.
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I am proud to announce my upcoming project..

Deborah Spake is directing the off broadway premiere of “The Baker’s Oven”,  a new play by Christopher Green-Goodwin, produced by Contact Theatre Co. on May 14-16, 2008 in The Amazing New Works Festival at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre at 303 W. 42nd St., at 8th Ave., NYC  

www.manhattanrep.com

www.contact-theatre.net (site under construction)

www.contacttheatrecompany.com (old site)

“The Baker’s Oven” is a set in the American south in the 1930s and explores themes of family, religion versus science, abuse and sexual identity.  It is intensely dark as it unearths the subtle complexity of human deceipt and human pain as everyone in it has a secret and no one is what they seem to be. “The Baker’s Oven” has a classic feel to it with a contemporary sensibility, something akin to “American Beauty”, “Death of A Salesman” and Tennesee Williams in the same room. It is set in the depression and though it explodes in violence, showing the monster ‘within’, as exemplified by the sinister Baker’s oven,  inside everyone is starving for love, connection and acceptance.  Christopher Green-Goodwin has written a masterpiece that enthralls, excites and disturbs the audience.

Posted: March 29th, 2008 under Announcement, Event, performance.
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Train-ing…  back to NY from Charlotte, N.C.
 
There’s a black Tom Waits talkin salvation to a man in a black leather cap. 
The handsome, young train conductor is making sign language to someone behind me
at the snack bar. His apple juice is swishing in the plastic quart jug.  He yawns and leans
on his hand, taking pause between working on parts of a cross word puzzle. 
Passing shrubs of brown, yellow, red and green - tall thin trees and the occasional home,
like islands in the wilderness.  My vision is quickly blurred by a fast freight train
rushing by the other direction. White blossoming trees draw my attention as do swampy
ponds and a house with tombstones in the backyard.  A town appears for a moment,
a graveyard, houses, and churches, laundry hung out to dry and a crowd of people
with a police car - lights flashing - something went awry, an event and the community
is witness on the scene.  Now the man in the black leather cap is croaking back in that
characteristic Tom Waits bellow. Voices spilling out over the music in my ears. 
Just ahead of Richmond, VA. train held before a bridge due to some burning trees beneath. 
The ‘all safe’ and we got on our way.
 
 
 
The Other End of the Spoon…,
My long day of auditions (for a show I’m directing), Ode To The Actors
 
It feels so free to be charging at the influx of the source, my creative sangria poured
and tasted to leave my tongue wanting of the glass. 
 A day of good, good, good and I’m good to be exchanging energies
with the most generous of souls that offer themselves as vessels for other’s lives
to transport and stories to be told through. 
How many ways strong can come, how many forms soft can take
and how finely tuned an instrument to play is that of human kind and human pain. 
There is a gift in  the act of giving.  There is a resonance in the room each person
adds their own tone.  What a spread of sounds we make as walls echo,
warp and shake.  Like a wave his feelings went through me and in the after shock
we both reverberated with an exhale and perplexity.  Has a demon entered the building? 
So immense this energy we compose, generate and transmit. 
The daggers are left here.  The rings and promises, the willing steps and hesitations. 
Voices sharp as knives to cut the space between us, pounding like the ocean fervor,
landing with animosity and resound to retract and rush in again.
Once more to the battlement of emotion. 
Once more to the trembling of triumphant exposure, stakes penetrating
and shattering the concrete box.  
This here the space we’ll soften and carve, net in hand to gather the shiny stones and shells,
feathers and leaves, pine cones and petals- all completely unique and lovely,
our excavators of existence and human connection - the sea of many actors in new york city.

Posted: March 26th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

March 11, 2008

Hello family & friends!

I hope you are all doing well, taking care of yourselves and each other and enjoying winter!

When last I wrote I was on the train to Rochester, N.Y.

I landed in the lovely, charming picturesque city of Rochester.  It was a snowy dreamland like one of those miniature winter scenes – but big!  Lots of character, big old houses perfectly spaced apart.  It reminded me of “It’s a Wonderful Life” – which apparently is a popular theme there as they have a yearly event inspired by the movie where folks dress up like some character or part of the movie.  This city is highly educated – dressed with universities, art, technology and culture, the home of the founder of Kodak.

I visited with a friend from old Peace Child days, someone I knew from conferences – who’s independent film short and trailer was premiering.  He was very nervous, but the premiere was well attended (300) and his production company got some media coverage as well as some interested investors in their proposed feature film (from the ‘trailer’ tease). 

I heard a wonderful singer, Laura Higgins, who has a myspace page, check her music out! And she’s a lovely person also.

My computer suffered an injury due to my instability and I paid a pretty price to get it rehabilitated, such is life!

I trained back to NY, worked on my screenplay more.

Then flew to Charlotte, North Carolina where I visited briefly with my aunts and a very resolute dog that goes by the name Bailey.  He’s not Irish.

My aunts took me around to see where my Dad and they were born, went to school, the movie theater my grandpa worked in, parks and key buildings in downtown Charlotte.  Charlotte is a charming city.  A big city surrounded by residential boroughs that come right up to the downtown. 

The occasional whistle of passing trains seep into my dreams,

The Mockingbird wakes me in the morning.

Cardinals, chickadees, crows and jays sing a lively set of tunes all through the day.

Bailey, the shaggy dog, dreams of his next opportunity to yelp like a seal and run to pretend to lose the ever important, key to his happy heart, bright yellow ball.

Bacon, again, oh my – I’m not in California.

Lima beans, grits, cornbread and meatloaf – mmm… Carolina.

Staying in these two houses, one built in the 50s and the other in the 20s, with photos from the turn of the century, an organ with candlestick holders that rotate, singing songs & playing them on my Grandmother’s piano, a manual coffee grinder on the wall, history and ancestors – generations and memories abound.

And the ever present mystery of a time before, before you were alive to peek into and wonder.

Posted: March 24th, 2008 under NY Chronicles.
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While I was down in the area of Charlotte, North Carolina I took two trips. 

The first was up to Roanoke, VA. for a week:

I headed up north into the mountains and as soon as I could see the valley below, the thankfully borrowed car ‘went south’.  Well, lost power as I sensed and responded with a gentle get to the right shoulder maneuver.   I sat for a moment reflecting on a conversation I’d had with my aunt - who was apparently concerned about her old car’s potential and we laughed as I boasted of my new AAA card, an insignificant conversation, until now, become relevant as if I’d said to the universe, “Okay, bring it on!”  The AAA lady inquired where I was and I was somewhere between Charlotte and Roanoke of which the exact location was indeterminate.  Oh, I could see that I was up above and there was a city down below, but which city had been passed last was not something I had noticed, eyes fixed on the open road,  and my head already arriving at the not yet reached destination.   I traced the letters of informative road signs not seen or read.  I searched my mind for some marker or landmark.  Anything.  Then SHE asked, “Do you see a mileage marker?”  I knew if I couldn’t it would mean getting out of the vehicle and onto a slim ’shoulder’ , at night,  to walk potentially almost a mile for that  would be ‘crumb on my path’, little insightful green and white beacon of ‘well there you are, dummy!’    How very unhelpful that Travel First Aid Kit seemed to snicker.  Then, behold, my eyes descended straight before me.  A cheerful green and white sign with the number “4″.  And with relief, the AAA lady said, “You’re 4 miles into Virginia”.  Well, “Halleluia!” I am.  Soon thereafter a tow truck took me to a nearby town, and we left my dutiful borrowed car to be examined the following day. I set up camp and lingered, at a nearby diner, for a meal on wax paper covering a black plastic tray and an eclectic mix at the salad bar of ambrosia, shrimp, fried foods, bean salads, jello and anything else you could think of that might combined to a frightening experience in the intestines.  I topped it off with chocolate cake-like stacked squares spliced with ice cream and luke warm fudge something-r-other, so as to complete my Showney’s  culinary experience as if the dessert might serve as proof that it had been proceeded by a meal!  I stayed at a hotel and with luck the borrowed car was up and running the next day to bring me to Roanoke, VA.  

There, in the charming town of Roanoke, born and bread was an old friend, in fact my ‘first love’ from adolescence - from my years traveling abroad to the Soviet Union.  We had not seen each other since some visits around the age of nineteen.

Roanoke has a church that sounds a series of songs, chiming at 5pm Saturday, filling the streets with its cheerful repertoire.  There are old brick buildings and this one modern, futuristic building springing up between them like a spaceship parallel parked and most likely its filled with art.    Above those there sits a large Elizabethan structure, and various bridges, for feet and wheels leading from downtown to the centers of technology and business. 

My friend, who here will go by the name of Floyd, lives just a mile from town in a large four-plex that stands proud with columns in the front and a grassy yard behind with two lovely gazebos.  In his fairly neat apartment resides a very large white cat with one shriveled ear and an expressive nub where a tail never was.  She discovers my red suitcase laid flat, usually unzipped with the top flap angled inward on itself, - to be her ideal comfort spot for the entire week that I was there.  (Luckily, I was not allergic.)  Floyd works like a dog at a popular restaurant in town, called Zack’s, at which he cooks and manages as he manages to hardly stop working as he earns a simple living and practically resides at his place of hard work..  As an excellent cook he kept my stomach in rapture and since he worked late, we talked late and I stumbled later and later into each day.  It was exhausting to reconnect with the past in the present.  I wish I could report that the love was rekindled, but time and life has taken us down different roads and at this crossroad, both were in plain sight.  I searched in his eyes and expressions for the boy of my youth, and aside from flickering glimpses, saw mostly an older, weathered and tired man - something of a shadow of his former self.  We enjoyed our exchange of intellect, humor, common interests, food, poetry and music.   I watched as the hopeful colors faded in his eyes, the clouds gathering at our feet and myself disappeared into the fog, with a heavy heart , to rejoin the solitary road in my sturdy borrowed car - my mind already arriving at the not yet reached destination, the city whence I came, Charlotte.

(The second trip I will save for the next chronicle… )

Posted: March 24th, 2008 under NY Chronicles.
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