John Lazarus

Category: Uncategorized

Categories
Uncategorized

OLD AGE IS NOT FOR SISSIES

“Old age is not for sissies.” — Anonymous, though attributed to Bette Davis, Malcolm Forbes and others.

Begun Saturday, November 16, 2024

Intro

This month I turn 77. Like other old people, I have begun to labour under the delusion that younger people might give a hoot about what I have to say about being old. So I’ll tell you. Also, like other old people, I ramble sometimes, so I’ll put these random observations in separate chapters. 

Chapter 1: On Falling Apart

(This chapter might be painful to people who already have dementia or terminal diseases, or for people close to them. I will understand if you don’t read on.) 

When I was young I read an essay by a journalist in his 90s. I wish I’d kept it. I remember three things from that essay. One was that he identified as a journalist, not a retired journalist. Another was his statement that he felt, not like an old man, but like a young man with a lot of stuff wrong with him. And the third was his admission that if the toothbrush was wet, it meant he had just brushed his teeth; if dry, he had not. The toothbrush thing took me by surprise. It was a shock to learn that the author of this wise, witty, beautifully-written essay couldn’t remember if he had just brushed his teeth or not. 

I have since learned that as our bodies begin to collapse around us, we maintain an illusion that their disintegration has nothing to do with Us. We cheerfully compare notes about hip replacements, bad knees and fading eyesight, as if we are sitting inside these crumbling bodies, inconvenienced by, but not actually part of, their decay – like the owners of so many rusting automobiles. 

So that essay now haunts me. I haven’t yet perceived my mind starting to deteriorate – which means either that it hasn’t or that it has. Either way, I now wonder whether experiencing your mind starting to collapse is like experiencing bad hips and fading eyesight. Does your essential self sit inside your brain, watching your synapses fall apart around you? If so, how long can you keep this up, before the part of your mind that you identify as You declines along with the grey matter around it? 

Chapter 2: Old Canadian Playwrights are New

I am part of a new phenomenon, almost unheard of before my generation: an elderly Canadian playwright. Playwriting in Canada got going on a large scale in the early 1970s, practised by a bunch of young hippies who are now the eminences grises of the art form. 

Of course the theatre scene has changed too. Our youth meant, almost automatically, that we were on the cutting edge and the avant-garde. Now, I’m yesterday’s man – and yesterday’s ethnicity and sexual orientation. Of course, there’s no point in complaining about this. We straight old white guys try to accept our fate like gentlemen. We had our turn – for centuries. It’s now time for the women, young people, queer people, and people of colour. 

But I do find it fascinating to read the bios of, and publicity about, younger theatre artists. Often they seem to boast of their ethnic origins and queer orientations, as we boasted of the few shows we’d done. At first I found this annoying. I wanted to read more about what they’d actually achieved! But then I realized that it’s a necessary part of their project, on top of the actual work: to educate the audience in the validity and respectability of art from unfamiliar sources – which, in fact, is exactly what my generation had to do while introducing the then-novel concept of Canadian playwrights. 

Chapter 3: Being True to my Blurred Vision

Another interesting irony: young artists are very rightly advised to be true to their vision, rather than practising their art with one eye on the box office. But the stereotype is that such uncompromising work is inevitably avant-garde, cutting-edge and ahead of its time. At first we may be overlooked or scorned for our weirdness; but if we remain true to ourselves, the world will come around and recognize our genius. 

Maybe I’m different. I wrote my most recent play for my own pleasure and amusement, to keep that part of my brain active. And if those stuffy old bourgeoisie didn’t like my bizarre, irrational, surrealistic, absurdist rantings, then the hell with them! The result was a pretty conventional drawing-room comedy about Oscar Wilde visiting Kingston, Ontario in 1882. 

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this. But I do love the play; so make of that what you will. Maybe I’ve come out of a rather large closet, full of artists ashamed of the secret that their radical personal vision is actually more Neil Simon than Sarah Kane. Or maybe I’m the only one. 

Chapter 4: Hippies No More

In the last season of the HBO series Six Feet Under (2001-2005), the teenage daughter of the family (Lauren Ambrose) attends a weekend party of elderly hippies, and watches in horrified amusement as these flabby oldsters smoke weed, drop psychedelics, dance naked around a bonfire to acid rock music, and have orgiastic sex in the grass. Those scenes reminded me of the image I had, in my 20s, of what life would be like in old age, for our generation. It isn’t.

As with most things, it’s a mixed bag. Weed is legal and psilocybin is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But there’s a new respectability to it all that seems to have taken the edge off. “Pot” was dangerous, exciting, and illegal. “Cannabis” is good for you – which, sorry to say, makes it a little less fun. 

And those orgies of nude geezers cavorting around the bonfire? Yeah, no. We sit around at dinner parties, just as fully clothed as our parents and grandparents were, though some of us have had a toke beforehand instead of a glass of wine – and we have the same conversations they did: cultural events, politics, prices, our medical conditions, and, weirdest of all from members of a generation that truly horrified our elders: complaints about Kids Today. 

Chapter 5: Did I Already Say This?

Besides this blog, I also write comments elsewhere, so I sometimes post the same stuff more than once. So there are lines in this month’s blog that I’ve also written elsewhere. Normally I would cut these lines. But I’ve decided to leave them here, as a way of saying, yeah, I repeat myself sometimes. I’m allowed. I’m an old man. 

Note: This may relate ironically to the theme of this month’s blog, but I’m going to be cutting back on these blogs in the New Year. They might no longer appear on a regular basis on the first day of every month, as they have in the past. – J.L. 

 

*****

 

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Trudeau the Drama Teacher, Trump the Ham

[Note, added just before this blog goes online: Things are changing fast these days. I finished this piece, and sent it to my estimable editor Claire Grady-Smith, shortly before the Republican Party rally in Madison Square Garden on October 27, which kicked the danger to American democracy up a notch with his and his supporters’ hateful, inflammatory, overtly racist, fascist-leaning remarks. Suddenly the concept of Trump as merely an amateur actor seems quaint, innocuous and sweetly old-fashioned. However, I’m going to let the piece go out as written – as a souvenir from that gentler, more innocent era of a week ago. For all I know, by the time you’re reading this, the Madison Square Garden rally may look like tea with Queen Camilla.]
 
 

Now that an election is approaching, we may be due for a revival of one of Pierre Poilievre’s favourite accusations against the current Prime Minister: the suggestion that Trudeau is somehow unqualified to be the nation’s leader on the grounds that he used to be – and this is, apparently, hilarious – a high-school drama teacher. 

This tactic began under Harper. During the 2015 election campaign, a Conservative attack ad attempted to portray Trudeau as a lightweight, offering as evidence the fact that he once taught theatre to teenage kids. The irony is built-in. The tone of amused condescension in the announcer’s voice over the fact that Trudeau was “a drama teacher!” is the kind of emotionally precise timbre achieved only by those who spent years learning their craft under the guidance of, well, drama teachers. 

For a while, Poilievre kept dragging that dreadful insult up again in Parliament: “No drama lesson will distract from the question that I asked…” “He’s trying to engage in a dramatic distraction…” “The high-school drama teacher over here…” It’s all clearly meant to imply that having done such work renders one unfit to hold high office. 

But the criteria for a good politician are similar to those for a good drama teacher. Both kinds of leader mould a disparate group of random people into a team eager to work toward a common goal, drawing on its members’ different talents. They encourage those suffering from nervousness and diffidence, and rein in those who are over-confident and hogging the spotlight. They encourage individual inventiveness and submit those inventive ideas to the will of the group; recognize talent in people in whom it may be hidden; maintain authority without being overbearing about it; and represent the team to the public in the best possible light – among other skills and abilities. 

So it’s not surprising that there’s a long list of professional theatre and film artists, liberal and conservative, who have gone on to careers in politics. Names include Shirley Temple Black, Sonny Bono, Clint Eastwood, Al Franken, Vaclav Havel, Glenda Jackson, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson, Jesse Ventura – and of course Vlodomyr Zelenskyy, whose extraordinary career took him from playing a non-politician who flukishly became President of Ukraine, to being a non-politician who flukishly became President of Ukraine, to being an authentic national hero.

But there’s another election approaching as well, rather near by, so let’s look at one of their candidates through an acting lens. Donald Trump has never been a real actor. (To be a real actor, you must be able to understand how other people feel.) However, he did his amateurish best to impersonate a successful businessman for 14 years on the NBC television series The Apprentice. I could not fathom the popularity that got him elected President, until I started watching clips of old Apprentice shows. It is edifying to watch those clips through the eyes of a drama teacher. 

They display an unskilled, untalented ham actor, ineptly portraying a powerful, savvy businessman. He struts and frets his hour, posturing like a plus-size department-store dummy and pontificating boastfully in that whiny, nasal voice with its tone of patient, put-upon fatigue. He seems to have collected a repertoire of facial expressions and gestures, by observing genuine successful businessmen and politicians. But he has probably never had a drama teacher explain to him that his job was not just to replicate the external appearances of real successes, but to inhabit their inner thoughts and feelings, drives and hopes and fears. Or maybe he has had such teachers, but he just can’t pull it off. 

Instead, The Apprentice gave him all the costuming, makeup, hair styling, lighting, settings, background music and worshipful fellow performers he needed, to help him look like the real deal. Fran Lebowitz has described Trump as “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” Others later added that he’s also a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, and a weak person’s idea of a strong person. The Apprentice taught poor, stupid, weak people that rich, smart, strong people like Trump spend their time riding around in stretch limousines, flying to mysterious locations in their private planes, and sitting enthroned in dramatically-lit board rooms where they pass judgment on us lesser mortals, based on arcane wisdom we could not possibly understand. The fact that this garbage was consumed by gullible Americans for 14 years may help to explain why enough of them bought into this plasticized version of the American dream to get Trump elected. 

Indeed, former NBC executive John Miller recently apologized for the program to the American public, in a U.S. News and World Report op-ed. “I helped create a monster… We created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty… Trump may have been the perfect person to be the boss of this show, because more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV and didn’t want to hire random game show winners onto their executive teams. Trump had no such concerns. He had plenty of time for filming, he loved the attention and it painted a positive picture of him that wasn’t true.” He added that even the famous board room was a set, because Trump’s real one was “too old and shabby for TV.” 

America narrowly avoided a disaster with Trump as President the first time, and as I write this, in October, it appears that they might avoid that disaster again: as I noted in an earlier blog, he is clearly too dimwitted, or too spoiled from earliest childhood, to understand that when you flout the rules, you’re supposed to at least try to cover up doing so. The real danger is that at some point in America’s future, somebody else will come along who shares Trump’s “values,” but who also has the brains to disguise their future schemes and past transgressions – and the acting talent to convince a larger public of their sincerity. 

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s a good thing Trump never had a drama teacher as good as Trudeau. 

 
 
Categories
Uncategorized

Mom Art

Selma Lazarus: Montreal Winter Scene, oil on panel, some time in the 1970s.
Selma Lazarus: Montreal Winter Scene, oil on panel, some time in the 1970s.

 

I’ve long held that the creative process is essentially the same, no matter what art form you’re working in. I think I learned this from my mother. Mom was an artist – a painter, printmaker, and quilter – and, without knowing it at the time, I learned a lot about my own favourite art form, playwriting, by watching her paint.

Mom enjoyed modest but reasonable success. She studied with Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer, and she exhibited her work every year in the Montreal Museum of Art Spring Show. One year she had a one-woman exhibition in L.A. On another occasion the Montreal Star ran an article about her, and my teacher, Mrs. Levitsky, put the clipping up on the blackboard, making Mom, briefly, a celebrity among my classmates. 

Her painting studio was in the basement of our house. She would work from found photographs or still lifes, or she’d photograph landscapes, take the photos home and create paintings based on them. I sometimes hung out in the basement while she worked, and she’d explain to me what she was doing. She never talked about emotional content, or what the paintings meant to her. She discussed technique. And years later, when I began to write plays, I found myself applying to them some principles she had taught me about painting. (Shameless plug: there’s more about this in my book, Two Ways About It, described elsewhere on this website.) 

She told me of other students who would be perfecting the leaves on the tree in a corner of the painting, without sketching in the rest of the landscape; later, the entire landscape would have to be revised, and all that detail work would be lost. Her solution was to make sure that all areas of the work were at roughly the same stage of development at a given time. I learned from that to “sketch in” my plot outlines and then go over them in increasing detail, before spending too much time on particular dialogue. I was also intrigued to see her occasionally pause in her work, turn the painting upside-down and look at it in the mirror. My playwright’s version of that has been to think of my plot in terms of what might happen if the characters make choices that are opposite to the ones I’ve chosen for them. 

And I learned from her – and, unintentionally, from my father – that sometimes even the people who love you the most don’t get what you’re doing. Dad was a shrewd and successful businessman, a kind and affectionate husband and father, and an excellent writer; but he did not understand my mother’s art, or art in general. He loved her, and if painting made her happy, then it was fine with him. But he was by his own description a proud philistine. He believed that Abstract Expressionism was a fraud and a hoax, perpetrated on a gullible public. So I grew up in the middle of a stimulating debate. 

Visits to art galleries with my parents could be an adventure. Dad was one of those guys who go around art galleries saying, “My nine-year-old son can paint better than this,” to which I would exclaim, “No I can’t!” – terrified that I might be called on to prove it. My mother would admire the paintings while my father grumbled about the price tags. Mom would say, “What are you kvetching about, you’re not paying for it,” and he would answer, “You’re damn right I’m not.” 

One year an American gallery revealed that a painting of theirs by a renowned Abstract Expressionist had been, unbeknownst to them, hanging upside-down for decades. My father argued that this proved that abstract painting was a load of crap. My mother said it proved only that good work is good work, whether right-side-up, upside-down or sideways. My father said, “And even better if it’s turned around facing the wall.” 

On one occasion, though, when he said, of a work by one of my mother’s favourite abstractionists, “I could paint better than that,” she said, “Prove it.” She gave him a brief lesson, stood him in front of a canvas, handed him her paints and brushes, and said, “Go ahead.”  

The result was one of the ugliest paintings I’ve ever seen in my life: a sort of muddy grey-brown swirl, utterly without charm or meaning. One of my father’s beefs with abstract art was their non-committal titles: “Composition 14,” that sort of thing. (He said it would help if the title at least gave you some hint of what the painting was “supposed to be.” My mother would say, “It’s supposed to be a painting!”) So in tribute to these unhelpful titles, my father proudly called his own masterpiece “Vortex Number One.” I said, “‘Number One’? Does that mean there’s gonna be more of these?” “Not with my brushes,” said Mom. 

This argument always took place in a spirit of good humour, but there may be a sad side to this story. My mother never tried abstraction. It wasn’t until after they’d both died that I realized that this might have been because the argument with my father was difficult enough when it was about other artists’ work: she didn’t want to bring it home and make it personal. 

But towards the end of her life, she took up quilting. She was a skillful seamstress, but quilting struck me as old-fashioned and a little foreign to our urban, Jewish, middle-class, 20th-century world. However, she loved it, and wished she had discovered this medium earlier. Again, it wasn’t until a few years ago that it occurred to me that this might have been her way of exploring abstraction without exacerbating the argument with my dad. An abstract painting was avant-garde and kooky, but an abstract quilt was just a traditional quilt. 

One more lesson was in the fact that we never know how our work will affect people, or what it will mean. Around 1974, I went to see a theatre piece, went backstage afterwards, met the one member of the company I didn’t already know – an actress named Lin Bennett – and came home with a copy of the show’s “poster”: actually a postcard, with a picture of the five cast members. 

Then my friend Anne Levitsky (mentioned above as my Grade Five teacher, and my friend to this day) visited our Vancouver home as part of a cross-country trip from Montreal, took some pictures of me and my daughter, and went home and showed her photographs to my parents. Later, during a phone call, my mother asked about the postcard, visible on the wall in one of the photos. I peeled it off the wall, put it in an envelope and mailed it to her, and she copied the image of those five actors as part of a print, which she called “The Old Bunch”. 

By the time that actress and I got married, some 28 years later, Mom had died, and she and Lin never met. But that print by my mother, featuring the image of my wife, hung proudly in our home for years, next to the original postcard, now in its own frame. 

****

Categories
Uncategorized

Welcome to Earth! Let’s Go See a Play!

In honour of the start of the new theatre season, let’s engage in a thought experiment. Let’s pretend you’re an intelligent, friendly extraterrestrial, visiting Earth from another planet, in order to study humans. 

We, your human hosts, are proud to introduce you to various human activities and accomplishments. You’ve found our math, sciences and engineering interesting and respectable, but it hasn’t knocked your 17 alien socks off: after all, you’ve already got to our planet while we’re still taking shots at our moon. You’re more curious about those human activities that are known as, well, the humanities: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, politics, law, history – and especially those peculiar pursuits called “art” and “culture.” You’ve sampled music, painting and sculpture; and now, we’re taking you to a building called a “theatre” to witness a human activity called a “play.” This will be your first introduction to human fiction. 

Wait, what? Why not start with written stories, novels, comics, movies, TV, streamed video? Because we want to hit you with the full magical weirdness of the most direct kind of fiction we have, unmediated by distracting technology. Just as this was the first form that fiction ever took among humans, let it be the first form you experience. We’ll go see something in IMAX and three-D next week. For now, welcome to the live theatre. 

You come with your hosts into a large room divided into two parts. The larger part contains numerous humans facing the smaller part, which is designed to replicate a human environment: perhaps the interior of a home, perhaps an outdoor Earth landscape. You and your hosts find your empty seats. Soon the lighting in the larger part of the room goes dark while that in the smaller part gets brighter, and then a few more humans come into this brightly-lit area, where they proceed to behave rather strangely, even for humans. 

They stand, sit, walk across the well-lit space, pick up and put down objects, and talk more loudly and clearly than humans normally talk, evidently to make sure we can all hear what they have to say. Some of them may not seem quite real. (“O, there be players that… have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well.” – Hamlet.) The larger group around you sits quietly, except for occasionally emitting that weird sound called laughter, and sometimes slapping their hands together to make a sustained percussive noise. 

After a while the humans in the brightly-lit area seem to become upset about their circumstances. Then they get more distressed, until everything either gets better or turns truly awful, perhaps involving violent death. Then they get up from the pools of fake blood they’ve been lying in, and take a bow. 

Partly thanks to your hosts’ prepping you beforehand, you do have some understanding of what’s going on. You know that the brightly-lit humans are pretending to be humans who they are not. The situation they’re talking about is not real. Nor is their apparent emotional distress, nor the deaths. 

I don’t know whether your species can lie. In the history of science fiction, there have been alien species depicted as incapable of lying, and alien species who are as good at it as we are, or better. But in any case, you have already learned that humans sometimes say things that aren’t true, to deceive other humans. However, here, in this strange space called a theatre, the large group in the dark know perfectly well that the small group are lying, and the small group are completely aware that they’re not fooling the large group. And yet the brightly-lit humans enjoy telling these lies – and the other humans, for some reason, enjoy watching them do it. In fact, they enjoy it so much that they pay human money, sometimes in significant amounts, for the privilege of witnessing these elaborate falsehoods. And this practice was invented independently by human societies all over the world. What strange creatures! 

Your hosts explain later that the point of all this is to let us exercise our emotions in a safe space, by showing us non-real humans going through non-real circumstances, and thus to purge us of bad feelings; and that we also get enjoyment out of watching the talent and skill of the artists who created and are performing this hoax. You admit to your hosts that it still seems surpassingly weird. Then they baffle you further by confessing that they think it’s kind of weird too. 

We humans are lucky that respected artists have blazed a trail for us that goes back thousands of years. If we lived in a world without theatre or fiction, and a group of us suddenly decided to make up a complicated two-hour-long fib about a bunch of nonexistent people, and to pretend to be those people, and to expect other people to pay money to watch us do this, we would likely be ignored, committed, or beaten up. 

So let’s be grateful to all the theatre workers who have gone before us, and given this peculiar human pastime an air of respectability, thanks to its long history, which goes all the way back to the era when – at the same time that your ancestors, dear alien, were already designing the systems that got you to our Earth – our ancestors were sitting around the fire, celebrating the hunting, killing, cooking and eating of a wild boar. At that moment, somebody said, “So we surrounded the boar, and – Hey, no, wait, Cyril, you put on the skin and stick the tusks in your mouth, and Phyllis, you be the dog, and Estelle and Gareth and I will be ourselves, and we’ll get up and show you how it happened!” – and theatre was born. 

And with that, I wish all my fellow humans, as well as any aliens who may be reading this, a great theatre season. 

*****

Categories
Uncategorized

Satch

Every year at this season I honour the birthday, on August 4, 1901, of a personal hero of mine. His origins were unpromising. He was born Black in a racist society, in an urban neighbourhood justifiably called the Battlefield, to a 16-year-old sex-trade worker and washerwoman, and a father who abandoned them after impregnating her with a second child. He left school in Grade Six, and at 11 was arrested for firing a gun with blanks on New Year’s Eve, and sentenced to the New Orleans Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, where he served two years.

From these humble beginnings rose a man whom the music critic Gary Giddens has seriously compared to Dante, Shakespeare and Bach; whom the great jazz and classical trumpet player Wynton Marsalis calls, uncategorically, “the greatest musician in the world”; and of whom the singer Tony Bennett said, “You judge a country by what it gives to the world. And what America gave to the world was Louis Armstrong.”

Armstrong revolutionized trumpet playing and jazz singing. He played so loud and high that other musicians would examine his trumpet for technological gimmicks. (There weren’t any. It was him.) The jazz solo, with each musician taking a turn playing a verse or chorus, is such a staple of the form that it seems to have been there from the beginning. It wasn’t. Armstrong invented it.

As a singer, he was famous for the gravelly quality of his voice (though there are some beautiful recordings, such as “West End Blues,” where he sings without it). Other jazz singers would catch cold deliberately, to sound like him. And experts say you can hear Armstrong’s influential phrasings in the singing of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, and dozens of others.

He was also the first to record scat singing, in which the singer improvises without lyrics: you can hear the moment when he did it, on the song “Heebie Jeebies.” While recording, Armstrong accidentally dropped the lyric sheet on the floor. If he reached down to get it, he would go out of microphone range. If he stopped, they’d have to start over, which was expensive. So he made up his own nonsense syllables (as they sometimes did in rehearsal), they put out the recording, and scat singing became famous.

He invented language. He originated the ‘50s slang terms “cats,” meaning men, and “chops,” meaning technical skill. And he was famous for his own nicknames for himself: “Satch,” “Satchmo,” “Dippermouth,” “Gates,” “Pops,” etc.

He was a funny, amiable, and hugely popular onstage presence. By the 1950s he was a living American icon and cultural ambassador. In 1964, his cover of “Hello, Dolly” went to Number 1 and stayed on the Hit Parade for 22 weeks. He was, at 62, the oldest person ever to have a Number 1 hit, and it knocked The Beatles off that position, which they had occupied for 14 consecutive weeks. (He said, “I like The Beatles. They got that beat!”) He won two Grammys and was posthumously inducted into the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame.

He had his personal flaws. He was a serial adulterer and womanizer: he married three times, and appears to have cheated on all three wives. (He once wrote an article for Ebony Magazine called “Why I Like Dark Women.”) He was obsessed with his bowels, and seemed not to understand that we don’t discuss such matters in polite society: he once handed out packets of his favourite laxative to highly-amused members of the British Royal Family, while Tony Bennett sat by, mortified. He was also addicted to marijuana, and got high almost every day of his adult life.

His record on racial politics is mixed. On the one hand, he cheerfully indulged in some appalling racial stereotypes. On the other, he displayed attitudes ahead of his time. His bass player, Arvell Shaw, said, “In those days, if one Black man called another man ‘Black,’ that was fightin’ words, you know. But Louis, he was the first man I heard say, ‘You Black. Be proud of it.’ […] He was saying that when it was so very unpopular, you know.”

During the desegregation of southern public schools in 1957, Armstrong wrote an open letter to President Eisenhower, inviting him to come to Little Rock and walk with him alongside the Black children who were daring to enter the school. The White House declined to respond, and such other celebrities as Sammy Davis, Jr. criticized him for rushing the process.

My favourite story involving Armstrong is about a white boy named Charlie Black, who grew up in Texas in the 1920s, believing that coloured people were all very well in their place, which was in service to white people. Then, in 1931, at age 16, Charlie attended a Friday night dance at Austin’s Hotel Driscoll, featuring a “Negro orchestra.” As Charlie and his buddies entered the ballroom, there were the musicians, and in front of them a young man playing the trumpet.

Black later recalled: “He played mostly with his eyes closed, letting flow from that inner space of music things that had never before existed. […] Steamwhistle power, lyric grace, alternated at will, even blended. He was the first genius I had ever seen. […] It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a Black person.” The trumpeter “opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ [But] what was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprang?”

In 1954, Charlie Black, by then Prof. Charles L. Black Jr., a distinguished teacher of constitutional law, volunteered for the team of lawyers, Black and white, who persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court that the racial segregation of schoolchildren was unconstitutional. And he always said he did it because, at 16, he heard Louis Armstrong play the trumpet.

Categories
Uncategorized

How to Save Our Theatres

In the June 8 Globe and Mail, there appeared an excellent wakeup call of an article by culture reporter Josh O’Kane, called “Squeezed Out: The State of the Canadian Arts.” The sub-heading read, “Costs are rising, audiences are hesitant and funding is shaky […] It’s a make-or-break year for the country’s cultural sector.” 

Sad but true – and the result of a perfect storm of causes, including the continuing psychological impact of the pandemic; competing technology that keeps people at home; and rising costs for everything, including evenings out. Live theatre is taking an especially big hit. O’Kane writes, “This past March, [the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres] published a startling number […] Theatre attendance was down 46 per cent from 2019 across the country.” 

Well, take heart, because I am now going to solve this. I’ve been compiling a list of the things wrong with theatre today, and how to fix them. Admittedly, these are small factors, but they may have some sort of cumulative effect. 

Let’s begin where the theatregoer often begins: at the websites. It’s astonishing how uninformative and un-navigable are many theatre websites, and not just because I’m old. Staffers construct them from inside the company, where everybody knows who’s who and what’s going on. They seem not to consider the average theatregoer who’s new to all this. 

So I suggest that every theatre pay an outsider, who has attended none of the meetings and knows nothing about the upcoming season, to visit the site and try to find out how to buy tickets to shows. Some companies might be surprised to learn how frustrating it is for mere civilians to find their way around. 

Next: this is elementary, but notably missing from both websites and programs is information about the show’s history and the artists, including what they’ve done before. My wife Lin Bennett, former actor, publicist and critic, wrote recently on Facebook: “If companies want to increase the chances of my attendance at a show (or spreading the word), then they can give me simple, readable, factual information in advance that helps me to know what’s genuinely special about the show: i.e., who is doing it? Who wrote it? And briefly, ‘Why choose this piece / Why now?’” 

Related to this: bring back paper programs. Some audience members seem happy with the QR codes on the posters in the lobby, but many of us miss those little sheafs of slick paper that we could sneak glances at, during the show, to see who that new actor is. I grant that it’s easy enough to download the program with the QR reader, and there are reasonable arguments for the QR programs: one is environmental, and another is the cost. Well, paper is recyclable. Print half, or fewer, of the programs you used to, and let the rest of them have their QR codes. 

Next: Please stop thanking audiences, in publicity and pre-show speeches, for “supporting” the theatre by attending. I don’t buy tickets to support your theatre. I support the theatre by contributing time or money, and voting for candidates who’ll fund the arts, but I buy tickets in the hopes of a good time. Calling our ticket purchases “support” reduces the theatre to a charity case. 

The last and largest of these issues relates back, again, to both the websites and the programs, chiefly the artists’ bios. I have mixed feelings about a current trend towards identity-politics-related publicity and bios. 

On the one hand, it seems a particular shame that audiences are dwindling just as Canadian playwriting is going through one of its most interesting phases, as we white folks are finally stepping aside, and playwrights of different ethnicities, queernesses and abilities are taking over our stages and telling their own, or their own people’s, stories, to exciting effect. And, refreshingly, the plays themselves are often set in a world in which it’s assumed, by both characters and audience, that we’ve moved past old bigotries. 

But on the other hand, when it comes to the publicity and programs, even this heartening development is occasionally contaminated with a tinge of self-righteousness, which seems to tout the plays as good for our moral development, or as compliments on how far we’ve come. 

Michael Paulson, in a piece recently published in the The New York Times, quotes an avid theatregoer as saying, “There’s so much going on with the ‘ought-to-see-this-because-you’re-going-to-be-taught-a-lesson’ stuff, and I’m OK with that, but part of me thinks we’re going a little overboard, and I need to have some fun.” (My thanks to website designer Claire Grady-Smith for this paragraph.)

In their bios especially, some well-meaning artists seem eager to promote themselves more by their ethnicities and orientations than by what work they’ve done, as if their identities prove their credibility. And it doesn’t help when their interests and areas of discipline are described in fashionable critical-theory jargon. 

Recently, a prominent playwrights’ organization invited its members to update their bios, and offered a new (and optional) set of categories: “demographic-like data,” including those ethnicities, genders, orientations and abilities. I do see that there’s a legitimate point to this. They make it clear that their purpose is to help users identify “playwrights whose social positioning serves as an inspiration to them, their community, and many more.” 

But it still seems a bit self-congratulatory, or flattering to the audience: almost like a present-day version of the old approach of presenting live theatre as an art form for superior people. This used to mean people with more money or “class.” I remember a long-ago ad in a theatre program which informed us that our presence at the theatre proved that we were of the exceptional taste required to appreciate their luxury automobiles. Nowadays it’s more about subtly flattering us that we are a cut above those racist, sexist homophobes out there watching vulgar movies.

(However, there may be a light at the end of this tunnel. These proud bios do reflect a real and heartening fact, which is that more and more theatre artists are not straight, white folks – and that, in response, there are also more non-straight and non-white fans in the house than there used to be.) 

In any case, there you have it: my strategies to save our theatres! Or if not, to at least make their death throes a little more entertaining for everybody.

*****

Categories
Uncategorized

Return to Vancouver, Part 2: Elysium, The Gilded Cage, The Belly of the Beast

(This is Part Two of my story of moving to Vancouver, from Kingston, for at least the next few months. For Part One, read previous blog.)

I’d foreseen having an emotional letdown on arrival, but not how devastating or long-lasting it would be. For the first couple of weeks I remained more or less depressed. A few days after my arrival, I performed a symbolic ritual that I’d looked forward to: I walked around Stanley Park, smoking a little cannabis, like in the old days. But I kept thinking, “Yeah, so this is the famous park, this is the famous weed, so what?” 

Back in Kingston, whenever I’d seen Vancouver on TV, I’d sighed a little. But now the actual Vancouver scenery looked like a TV screen in Kingston. On previous visits to Vancouver, I’d reminded myself that I was just as much here as I would be if I were living here. Now that I was living here, I felt just as much not here as if I were visiting. In Kingston I’d been in exile from Vancouver; suddenly I felt homesick for Kingston. I began wondering what’s wrong with me. Could I never be happy? 

At least visiting the family has worked as I’d hoped: it’s been a great pleasure to hang out with the kids, without needing to cram lots of information, conversation and feelings into a brief stay. There’s a nice everyday quality to these visits. And when I’ve gone into one of my emotional tailspins while hanging out with my daughters, they’ve been very patient and supportive. 

But I didn’t see my old friends very much at first. I felt uncharacteristically shy, withdrawn and socially anxious. That has improved. I’m having a weekly lunch with a group of longtime pals, and coffee and visits with others. And going to the theatre has also helped. Things picked up when I realized I just needed to get out more.

I also had work awaiting me here: adjudicating one high-school drama festival and teaching a playwriting workshop at another. At both festivals I ran into old friends, met some new friends, and sold some copies of my book. And the teenagers were terrific, and I felt grounded, useful and at home. 

The problem is this here newfangled city. Of course, what I really want to do is to go back to the Vancouver of 1972, and to be 24 again: the mustachioed hippie on this website’s “About” page. But I’m not going back there, and neither is Vancouver. PAL, where I’m living, is in a beautiful setting, but to get just about anywhere else in town, one must go through the downtown core. And in the downtown core I become an elderly, open-mouthed, small-town yokel. 

The downtown core is the belly of the corporate beast. It’s the gilded cage. It’s one of those futuristic sci-fi movies shot on location in present-day cities – like Elysium (2013), set in the 22nd century, when the wealthy live on a green, flowery, opulently designed space station which forms a ring around our planet, which is a dusty, muddy, overpopulated slum whose remaining resources the enslaved poor must gather and send up to Elysium. The scenes on the Earth’s grubby surface were shot in a Mexico City slum. The scenes on beautiful Elysium were shot in, yes, Vancouver. 

The downtown core (the real one, in 2024) is all glass, steel, plastic and electronics. We humans, moving in swarms through the environment, are extensions of the technology, components in the circuitry. The internet owns the businesses; the businesses own us; and, of course, everything’s insanely expensive. The buses are covered in photos of beautiful, smiling people selling real estate; the subway stations are full of ads for colleges that will make you rich. The models in advertising photos are multiracial, youthful, hip, and dressed and groomed with meticulous informality. They either laugh with excruciating joy, or don’t need even to smile to indicate that they’re still better off than you, baby. And whether they’re in convulsions of bliss or staring you down, the subtext is clear: you must become like them, and the only way to do that is by giving them your money. 

None of this – the expensiveness or the imagery – is news to Vancouverites, who seem to take it all for granted and accept it, resignedly, as the new normal. And it’s not like I haven’t seen this coming either: on our frequent previous visits, we’ve seen the changes happening. Nevertheless, to spend a month getting a really good look, especially after soft-sell, old-fashioned Kingston, is a true hit of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock.” 

And yet, there are still familiar buildings; some entire neighbourhoods, like dear old Commercial Drive, seem largely unchanged; and the parks, beaches and mountains endure. There are also new surprises, like the murals and outdoor sculptures, that feel right to me, although (or because?) so many of the sculptures seem like giant children’s toys. I especially like the droll creepiness of Yue Minjun’s statues at English Bay, of a dozen huge, identical men laughing hysterically. A signboard nearby reads, “the artist has given several hints that his own smiling face in these sculptures may not be what it seems… Is this laughter joyful or cynical?” That feels very Vancouver, somehow. 

So for the last week or so, I’ve been overcoming my fear that this has been a terrible, expensive mistake and I don’t know what I’m doing here. Expensive, yes, but it’s not a mistake: it’s a fascinating learning experience. And I do know what I’m doing here: whatever I happen to be doing, but it happens to be here. Lin and the dog will have joined me here by the time this blog goes online. And we’re going to stay a while and see how it goes. 

 

(P.S.: Since posting this month’s blog, I’ve worried that it may sound insufficiently appreciative of PAL, the Performing Arts Lodge. It’s a beautiful building, in a spectacular setting, based on a magnificent concept: providing affordable homes for people who have contributed to society through the arts. Our little apartment is listed as “near-market suite,” costing a little less than a regular apartment of this size in this neighbourhood. The rental revenue from these apartments helps subsidize other apartments for lower-income residents. I got on the elevator the other day, and another guy got on with me, we introduced ourselves, I asked him how he was doing, and he said, “So grateful to be here!” Nobody has asked me to add this paragraph.)

Categories
Uncategorized

Return to Vancouver, Part 1: What to Leave In, What to Leave Out

In March, after a dull day in Kingston, Lin said, “If PAL Vancouver calls tomorrow, tell them we’ll take it.” I laughed. We’d been on their waiting list for 14 years, and had never heard from them. The next day, PAL called: an apartment was available.

PAL is a Performing Arts Lodge: an apartment building with subsidized rents, mostly for older folks who’d wasted their lives in the arts and never made much money. Because we’d wasted half our lives in the arts and spent half making modest amounts as a publicist (Lin) and teacher (me), we qualified for a less subsidized but manageable rent – and in the most beautiful real estate in the world: at the entrance to Stanley Park.

But when PAL did call, the first thing we said was, “We’re not doing this, are we?” “Nope.” It was too much work, exchanging our big, four-bedroom Kingston house, crammed with decades’ worth of stuff, for a one-bedroom flat without enough space for the two of us.

But then we talked all afternoon about it. Were we being lazy? Cowardly? We’d both complained that our lives in retirement weren’t interesting enough. We’d contemplated different scenarios, including other PALs in Toronto and New Westminster. And we’d budgeted for a Vancouver vacation this year. So if we said no to this, we might forever regret chickening out.

Vancouver was where, for 30 years, I’d had the time of my life, working in theatre, TV, radio and film, and mostly hippie style: on my own terms and my own hours, self-employed, freelance and part-time. I got married twice, had a third relationship common-law, and raised two kids. Then, in 2000, Queen’s offered me a job and we moved to Kingston.

I loved the Queen’s job, and we’ve made some dear friends in Kingston, but our annual return visits to Vancouver were heartbreaking. This was our home! Ontario was exile! Over the years, that feeling subsided a little as the city grew bigger, glossier and more expensive, but it, and family and friends, continued to exert a pull.

So, the day PAL called, we finally changed our minds: we’d give it a try after all. Their rental agreement called for only 30 days’ notice to move out. So we could stay for at least several months. Lin started budgeting. I would go in April; she would join me in May. In our 70s, we were embarking on an unpredictable adventure.

Alas, we had no clue! We were so young and naïve, way back in March! The sudden stress was enormous. Each day, one or both of us would say, “Forget it, this isn’t worth it.” Even after we signed the rental agreement, we still considered kissing good-bye to a month’s rent, the plane fare, and what we were spending on furniture. Sometimes the challenges brought us together more, and we appreciated each other anew: after all, this was something we had to do together, or it wouldn’t happen. At other times, the project seriously threatened our relationship and our health.

There were the legalities and finances: renting out the house and arranging insurance, plane fares, furniture purchases, utilities and internet. We listed the house for rental on a website. We bought a new hot-water heater. We upgraded our insurance – a surprisingly huge hassle. Photographing our cleaned-up, freshly-staged rooms, and writing a listing describing the place in glowing terms, we wondered why we were leaving our beautiful home. We replaced our old nostalgia for Vancouver with a new nostalgia for Kingston.

There was the physical job: disposing of decades’ worth of stuff, storing our more precious belongings in the attic and basement, staging the house. Lin turned her home office into a bedroom, for the website photos. Against every instinct, I gave away large amounts of books. We put out extra garbage bags every week and frequented the recycling centre and Value Village.

And there was the dog. At 17, he seems too old and tired to subject to the ordeal of a plane flight and unfamiliar new surroundings, but not old and tired enough for euthanasia. We finally decided to leave him in Kingstown with our lovely dog-sitters, at least for now.

One task which stands out for me as a symbol is the Emptying of the Filing Cabinet. For years it collected material I didn’t want to deal with: bank statements, investment reports, insurance papers – stuff I would open and glance over cursorily and then file and forget, thinking that when I retired I would decide which of those papers to keep and which to toss.

That never happened. Suddenly we were throwing these important-looking documents from serious institutions, barely glanced at, into garbage bags, which I then took up to the recycling centre and dumped forever. All the paper I had carefully hoarded, to pass on to my more mature, more financially-responsible self, had instead come to this.

And there are the writings, dating from my childhood to today, which still sit in Kingston, waiting for me to decide whether to offer it to Queen’s archives or to leave it for my kids to sort through. And Lin has huge bins full of photos, negatives and contact sheets to deal with, courtesy of her deceased ex-husband, a professional photographer.

We realized we were summing up our lives to this point: taking stock of all we had done or left unfinished, and facing the big existential questions: what, after all, matters? What remains? Can we throw out those books I always thought I would read or re-read? What about my cringe-making teenage writings, or my 1980s critical reviews of plays nobody remembers any more? Will anybody ever read them? Will they affect how posterity thinks of me – if it does? Does anybody care? Do I care?

But then, rather suddenly – with the work unfinished and those questions unanswered, as yet and perhaps forever – I packed my bags, left Lin with her 100 pages of remaining to-do lists – and headed for the airport.

(To be continued next month, in “Return to Vancouver, Part 2: Elysium, the Gilded Cage, the Belly of the Beast.”)

Categories
Uncategorized

What Goes On in Those College Classrooms

“We all know what goes on in those college classrooms,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford once, on the basis of having attended college for two months. He was referring to the popular stereotype that our colleges are hotbeds of leftist professors surreptitiously indoctrinating innocent students with our ideology. Okay, look. I was a leftist college professor for 31 years. Here’s how this works.

First of all, it’s the world’s greatest job, and I’m not complaining, but nobody ever said it was not difficult and time-consuming. I earned my salary, spending thousands of hours on the job, inside and outside the classroom, teaching playwriting and related theatre topics. I can’t imagine taking on that whole other, unpaid job of brainwashing them with my leftist politics, on top of all the official, paid-for stuff. It would be a massive task to perform on a volunteer basis.

And the main reason it would be a massive task is because I have no idea how one might go about doing it. My students were not children. They were savvy, curious, skeptical young adults, with efficient built-in ideology detectors, which it was our job to help them refine further. I cannot fathom how I could possibly slip my socialistic agenda into their well-oiled brains without their being immediately aware of it.

But let’s say I did figure out some fiendish strategy. What would be the payoff? Let’s say that out of a couple of hundred students per three-month term, I managed to convert – well, 20 seems like wishful thinking. But if I turned 20 conservatives into leftists, then the Liberals, N.D.P. or Greens would benefit to the tune of 20 more votes in the next federal election. Again: an awful lot of work for precious little benefit.

So for this plan to have any appreciable effect, I couldn’t do it alone. I would have to work in concert with an extended secret network of leftist professors around the globe. And, in fact, that is the stereotype: all us professors working on this project in tandem, and in unanimous agreement about both goals and tactics. Yeah, right. Unanimous agreement. Gentle reader, have you ever attended a meeting of professors?

And finally, the stereotype of college professors being universally small-l liberal is, frankly, absurd – and even for us, a great many of the students are to the left of us to begin with.

There is another argument against the stereotype of the Propagandizing Progressive Profs, which makes me slightly uneasy. It has been popping up in the form of memes on social media lately. It is that, far from brainwashing our students, we give them the tools of critical thinking and objective analysis, with which the students independently conclude that it’s just plain better over here on the left.

Though I share that view, I find the argument suspiciously ideological in its assumption. However, it does seem persuasive, as leftists appear to be forever questioning and re-examining our own principles, while the right-wing crowd seems quite content to fall in line unquestioningly behind their leaders. Ironically, this may contribute to their strength: the right wing can form prompt phalanxes undistracted by doubts, while the left bickers and reevaluates and organizes circular firing squads. I’ve often been struck by the way Trump’s audiences cheer enthusiastically – or, of course, jeer us libtards – whenever he announces a blatant lie that would be instantly exposed if they would just take a second to fact-check him on their phones. But, of course, they don’t. So it’s hard not to infer that they’re perfectly happy to let him do all the thinking for them. No wonder he shouted, at a rally in Nevada in February, 2016, “I love the poorly educated!” (And, once again, they cheered.)

However, in fairness, let’s explore the opposite argument. (Notice what I just did there? Hey, I’m a professor.) I admit that I have encountered some profs who do assume that their students agree with their own politics: who make, for example, snarky jokes about those dumb rednecks, or dumb commies, and expect their students to laugh along. And many of the students do laugh – either because they sincerely share the prof’s politics and find the joke funny, or because they want to curry favour and get good grades – while others sit in silence, wondering if this is the right classroom for them. Though this hardly amounts to a massive program to indoctrinate the students, it’s definitely unprofessional behavior.

So I’ll tell you what I would do, when partisan politics found its way into our discussions of playwriting or theatre. Usually I would proclaim my political bias to the students. I would say that I am not one of those professors who expect their students to agree with their politics. And I would announce that conservative students were welcome in my classroom: that the course was not called (for example) Introduction to Playwriting for Leftists, but Introduction to Playwriting.

By now there would usually be a suspicious silence in the room, so I would then add, “I draw the line at fascism.” And that would usually get a relieved laugh. And, dear reader, if you think that my drawing the line at fascism constitutes stuffing the students’ heads with my socialistic beliefs, well, you go write your own blog, and maybe Doug Ford will give you a speechwriting job, because now you know what goes on in those college classrooms.

*****

P.S.: In February, I posted a blog, which you can find on this website, disputing the letters of protest that had contributed to the cancellation of productions of Christopher Morris’ play The Runner in Victoria and Vancouver. I noted that the letters ask us to imagine Canadian or South African plays depicting the experiences of indigenous people through the eyes of white settlers, and suggest that such a play would inevitably be racist. I wrote, “Some such plays do exist – Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose, an acclaimed Canadian play about a white nurse living among First Nations people, comes to mind” – and argued that in fact it’s an anti-racist play which, like The Runner, shows a white character getting a hard education in rethinking old assumptions. Well, whaddaya know: yet another play has been cancelled in Victoria because it commits the crime of “centring” characters who belong to the dominant culture – it’s called Sisters, and is about white nuns regretting their treatment of First Nations children in a residential school – and hey, it was written by Wendy Lill, the same playwright I cited in my blog! Of course I don’t for a moment believe that my mention of Heather Rose set the self-appointed watchdogs on the prowl for other suspicious material by the same writer; but it’s a disturbing coincidence, within what seems to be a disturbing, and continuing, trend.

Categories
Uncategorized

How I Stopped Struggling to Try to Learn to Draw

Page 5 from “Leon Plays a Grandpa,” an eight-page comic book copyright © 2023 John Lazarus

On my retirement from teaching at Queen’s, I decided to learn to draw. I had tried fitfully, a few times over the years, to master this craft, but had repeatedly given up. This time I decided to stick with it until I either became satisfied with my drawing, quit because it would never be any good, or died: whichever came first. I worked from two excellent, very different books – Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards and Making Comics by Lynda Barry – and from classes with some fine teachers at the Kingston Seniors’ Centre. And it all made me miserable.

In the long term, I had no style, context, or ideas about what to do with my drawings once I learned how to draw them. And in the short term, proportion and perspective in particular defeated me. My childishly distorted limbs and skewed horizons filled me with shame and anger. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do it right – or why it mattered so much. This began to take the shape of an existential crisis, exacerbated by the irony that I had just spent 31 years teaching playwriting students how to overcome exactly this kind of frustration: to stop worrying about quality, to ignore those demonic inner voices, to feel free to write badly. Now, looking at my deformed drawings, I thought about what Professor Lazarus would advise – to keep doing it badly until it got better – but I couldn’t follow my own advice.

Last fall, I was on the point of quitting forever, when I learned of a new course at the Kingston School of Art called (coincidentally like Lynda Barry’s book) “Making Comics.” I decided to give myself one last chance, and I registered. The instructor, a local cartoonist named Colton Fox, turned out to be 45 years younger than me – teaching for the first time in his life – and exactly what I needed.

For our first activity in our first class, he pointed out the pencil and sheet of paper in front of each of us, announced that we had 15 minutes in which to draw a six-panel cartoon about our day, held up a stopwatch, and said, “Go.” As my classmates, all Colton’s age or younger (including a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old), sketched happily, I stared numbly at the blank paper. He wasn’t going to teach us to draw. Maybe he assumed we could already draw. He was going to teach us to make comics. But here I was after two years of classes, still unable to draw so much as a simple cartoon of myself raking leaves. I weighed the humiliation of leaving (and sacrificing the tuition money and admitting that I was a coward) against the humiliation of drawing terribly. I reluctantly chose the latter humiliation. And, as I began drawing terribly, I had an insight.

I have long held that if two problems arise together, they are sometimes each other’s solutions in disguise. And here I had two problems. One: I couldn’t draw. Two: I didn’t have a style, and didn’t know how to develop one. But that evening, drawing my crappy stick figures, I realized that my lack of ability to draw was my style. Your ineptitude is your style. At that moment, after two years of struggling to try to grasp how to draw, I stopped struggling, trying and grasping, and started drawing. And Colton turned out to be encouraging about my sloppy drawings of myself, for, as it turned out, he did not assume that we could already draw; he just found the question irrelevant.

That same first evening, he gave us our course assignment: over the ensuing three months, each student was to write and draw an eight-page comic book (12 pages, including the two covers), under his guidance. The younger students were naturally influenced by X-Men, Avengers, anime and so on. This old guy over here chose the tradition of 1960s “underground comix”: Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, R. Crumb’s Mister Natural and Fritz the Cat, that sort of thing.

So my character is a guy from that world, now grown elderly: “Leon Schmacter, the Old Hippie Actor,” a Jewish-Canadian theatre and film performer barely scraping by in present-day Vancouver. The eight-pager, “Leon Plays a Grandpa,” was about his getting cast in a new play by progressive young liberals, only to be stereotyped as an intolerant old conservative – inspired by an anecdote I recounted in my January blog, “Old People Are So Bigoted.”

As I worked, I began to see some potential charm in the contrast between my slovenly drawing and the more experienced competence of my dialogue and plotting. It actually kind of works to have articulate social satire coming out of the mouths of these awkwardly scrawled sketches. I finished the eight-pager, gave some copies to friends, and have decided to continue working on these comics – because, most importantly, I’ve begun to enjoy the process. I’ve changed his name to Sherman Schmacter, which has more of an alliterative kick, and am busy with a 32-pager, for possible eventual publication.

It’s still a struggle. I still get discouraged. Every new drawing – of the interior of a bar, of some old people lying on Wreck Beach, of Sherman’s agent’s office – requires me to learn a new set of skills. I’ve become addicted to a huge archive on the Internet, “Drawing References,” from which I print other people’s sketches, which I then copy slavishly (and shamelessly). And, of course, I hope my cartooning will continue to improve with experience. But I’m also determined never to stop reframing my ineptitude as my style.

*****