I Remember Radio

If you’ve been coming to Open Notes, you’ve heard me read from, “I Remember Radio,” a compilation of light, humorous pieces. But my other work starting with the novel Peace Now! ranges from the very serious to the completely ridiculous. What I’ll read tonight veers into the bizarre, but is still comical. I’ve written since college, and I go where my imagination takes me. I am a prose artist; Yet, one of my major influences is the work of the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. Thomas wrote poetry, short stories, and radio plays for the BBC. He had hoped to create a new literary genre inspired by his efforts there. The result is the play for voices, Under Milkwood. It is a radio play without actors or sound effects. It has only readers, like you and I. Under Milkwood gave Thomas lasting fame, but sadly, it came only after his death.

I began to read Thomas my junior year. First, I read his poem about the death of his father. You may know lines from it.

“Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage rage against the dying of the light.”

Then I bought a collection of his poetry and discovered his magnificent “Poem in October.”  Which begins:

“It was my thirtieth year to heavenWoke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron priested shore The morning beckonWith water praying and call of seagull and rookAnd the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wallMyself to set foot that secondIn the still sleeping town and set forth.”

 I went from it to “Under Milkwood, an homage to the tiny Welsh village where he was born.  

“To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters’ and rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

Thus armed I decided to write a play for voices. If he could, I surely could. My effort, entitled “The Mayor of Angel Swamps,” impressed me so much, I persuaded other artsy students to help me present it at the Student Center. We drew a full house who cheered the performance, the readers, and best of all, the playwright. Then, in the wrong headedness of youth, I packed the manuscript and a recording of a rehearsal into a box, and I left them there for decades. Who can say why?

I left them in that box, forgotten, until one night at the Root Studio an aspiring producer pitched his ten-minute play festival to the room. I thought, hmm, I could write one of those. Which I did, and then submitted. He promptly sent it back with a note. “It’s too weird.” I thought, man, you ain’t seen nothing yet. I dug “The Mayor of Angel Swamps” out of the box I’ve drug around since college. I read it beginning to end, remembering the cheering crowd that foot of snow Thursday night. The kick off to my certain fame and fortune.

“The Mayor of Angel Swamps” had one performance, exactly one. Thank God! It may be the worst thing I have ever written. I laughed at myself for days. But then I thought, yeah, it’s awful, but there’s something there. The something there is “The Mayor of Cannibal Flats,” a chapbook of two plays meant to be read aloud at Halloween parties, and a spoken word piece, “Why Radio?” The great thing about being a creative person, whatever your passion, is simple. Nothing you do, no matter how bad, is ever lost. Though forgotten, it remains at the farthest reaches of your imagination. Where it waits for you to come back to it.  

Tonight, I will “The Mayor at the Tarpits,” one of three pieces to rise from the wreckage of “The Mayor of Angel Swamps.” It is set at the La Brea Tarpits Park in Los Angeles. Only a few blocks from the building where I worked early in my career. I walked there for lunch often. One day sitting on a bench near a pool, with my hopes, dreams, and homemade sack lunch, I wondered: What I would do if one of the animals buried in the tar came up through the oily water. This is what.

"Dur and the Howlers". The libretto I have written for a new rock musical. If you are an agent, director, or producer who wishes to see the libretto, please contact me. dirhdirhowls@gmail.com