For Darin Price

Darin at center. I'm at bottom, second from left. Fall 1992.

The world lost a good one this week: Darin Price, who managed and pitched for the Dukes' softball team in Sunnyvale, California. I played shortstop for them in the nineties, and had some wonderful times.

So wonderful, in fact, that I wrote an autobiographical novel, The Legendary Barons, which is available for free download the next five days on Amazon.

The book is largely about Darin, who I dubbed Tommy Folgett (I went by Honus, my Dukes nickname). This brief excerpt speaks to the ways that teammates become friends, and also to Darin's very deep soul.

White Plaid

The only one of my teammates to display actual artistic talent was my tough-guy manager, Tommy Folgett.  When I mentioned I was putting together a small literary journal, Tommy surprised me by offering to do an illustration. 

I used to joke that divorce was the number-one cause of bad poetry in America.  Tommy was ripe for some of his own artistic therapy.  Having survived a long bout with alcoholism, he had been ready for a nice easy cruise, but then his wife Sarnah threw up a brick wall.  At the dreaded quarter-century mark (land-mine for young wives everywhere), she started taking night classes and discovered a latent passion for math.  She set her sights on a doctorate, and decided there was only one obstacle - the husband had to go.

Tommy was shell-shocked, clutching for straws, and one of them was my journal.  I agreed to his offer with some trepidation, then found to my great delight that he was quite talented.  Some of his drawings were too slick and cautious for my needs, but others carried an appealing dark edge.  He was working as a designer at a sign shop, so apparently his artistic leanings were not going entirely untapped.  I asked if he would illustrate a poem of mine, and promised to bring a copy to the next game.

I was working as a publicist at an arts center, and had befriended Sandra, a composer of wild, assonant works for exotic groupings of instruments.  Her latest was a piece for violin, saxophone, timbales and congas, which she pounded out on her piano one afternoon as I listened, completely entranced.  She was having trouble coming up with a title, and asked for my help, asking only that it have some connection to the idea of apocalypse.

We were eating a smoked-salmon pizza in Palo Alto the next day when I jumped off the hood of the car and said, “White Plaid! Get it?  If you look at it, it’s just white, but because it’s plaid there’s all these hidden stripes and checks.” 

She loved it. The piece debuted a year later – Sandra sent me a program – but meanwhile, I was left with a title that demanded a poem.  The first part focused on the burst of light from a nuclear explosion, but the final stanza took an unexpected turn.

The bride wore white plaid stealing stripes and checks down the aisle

The groom’s eyes were blue and saw only future

After the next game, Tommy followed me to my car so I could give him a copy.  As he read it, his face took on an expression of increasing fascination. “Honus,” he said. “This poem is about me.” 

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Your eyes aren’t…”

Blame it on male obliviousness, but until Tommy looked up from that poem I had never noticed that he had blue eyes.

Two weeks later, he handed me a pen-and-ink drawing, a breathtaking vision of grace and empathy.  A young bride kneels at the foot of a painted pony.  She is weeping, having missed her first ride on the carousel.

(RIP my friend. You're home.)

Assassins? Now?

 

Sondheim’s Assassins

July 19, 2024

3Below Theater, San Jose

It’s pretty wild that 3Below scheduled this show for a July 13 opening night. They canceled that performance (understandably), but the Attempt on Trump has certainly added an extra layer to the show’s meanings. At a time when the right wants to whitewash anything unseemly about our country’s past, it’s refreshing to hash out some of our ugliest moments in such a bold manner. Consider this one required viewing.

Jon Gourdine and Scott Guggenheim’s set presents the assassination parade as half-carnival, half-horserace. Each criminal is given a chair and a chute under a Vegas-style sign reading TAKE YOUR SHOT. Out comes The Proprietor, a character reminiscent of the Emcee from Cabaret. Kristi Garcia makes the most of it, deploying an impressive array of sly expressions and dazzling red hat and tails to play the role of temptress. The festive opening number says it all: “Everybody’s Got the Right.” (To kill the President.)

Arriving next is The Balladeer, which Jeremy Kreamer performs in an amiable Guthrie/Seeger fashion. His likeability presents a bit of a gut-punch later in the show, when he transforms into Lee Harvey Oswald.

The dubious roll call kicks off with John Wilkes Booth, who seems downright noble compared to the rest of the crazies. Stephen Guggenheim is a perfect match for this role, possessing the needed flash and intelligence for Booth, whose success as an actor meant that he didn’t need the fame sought by so many of the others. The highlight is a monologue in which Booth references the funeral lament of the widow Loman in Death of a Salesman - “Attention must be paid!” - to describe the quiet desperation of his successors.

Meanwhile, a great portion of the show’s appeal comes from recounting the assassins most people don’t know about, including:

Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley, citing the hardships of American laborers. Omar Alejandro plays the part with particular intensity, both of person and (baritone) voice.

Charles Guiteau, a spirited con man who shot James Garfield (the greatest President who never had a chance to govern) because he didn’t grant him an ambassadorship to France. Dario Johnson did a fine job of projecting both Guiteau’s showy positivity and utter lack of substance, especially in his gospel-tinged farewell, “The Ballad of Guiteau.”

Samuel Byck, who dressed like Santa Claus and recorded messages to celebrities (including Sondheim cohort Leonard Bernstein), while working up the nerve to fly his private plane into Richard Nixon’s White House. Rick Haffner is excellent and funny, painting Byck as a sort of left-leaning Archie Bunker.

Fortunately, Sondheim and book writer John Weidman didn’t stop there. They had great fun spinning fanciful combinations. Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley (Alexandra Shephard and Ryan Sammonds) perform a beautiful love song, “Unworthy of Your Love,” to their dreamboats, Charles Manson and Jodie Foster. The show’s climactic scene has Booth pleading with Oswald to take his notorious shots - and thereby restore the reputations of their infamous little club.

The show accidentally solves a great problem of Sondheim, which is his tendency to overuse his favorite musical devices. With Assassins, he draws on numerous historical sources, including folk, jazz, gospel and minstrelsy, which broadens his palette.

The performance I attended suffered some technical glitches, including the rebooting of a monitor during the show. Even this, however, provided some accidental meanings. The poor tech was stuck on a menu guide that kept returning to an ad for Dateline. Perhaps our assassination attempts are now merely another form of entertainment, as witnessed by the fashionable wearing of ear bandages.

Through August 4 at 3Below, 288 S. Second Street, San Jose. 408/404-7711, 3belowtheaters.com. $25-$65.

Michael J. Vaughn is a forty-year opera and theater critic, and the author of 29 novels, including Mermaids’ Tears and Punks for the Opera, available at Amazon.

Monarchs

I come to a sign that says Monarch Boardwalk. I picture butterflies on rollercoasters, butterflies on Ferris wheels, mama monarchs pushing green, black and white caterpillars in strollers.

And I see Dad in cargo shorts, a golf shirt and a U.S. Navy ballcap. He stops at the sign and reads it out loud.

“Well, let’s see… ‘The orange and black monarch butterfly, known scientifically as Danaus plexippus, migrates every year to Monarch Grove, a preserve at Natural Bridges State Beach.’”

I stand next to him, waiting patiently as he finishes the paragraph. I’m certain the child version of me was much less understanding - a ten-year-old needs only so much prologue to the Grand Canyon or Old Faithful - but this is different. My dad has always enjoyed these performances, but even more now that he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This is a way to demonstrate that he’s still in the early stages, that he can still give a decent reading of a park sign - even the Latin words.

This little program was dreamed up by my big sister, who thought my stepmom could use a little time off from Dad, who was getting cantankerous and slovenly. We’re calling it Dates with Dad, and taking turns dreaming up entertaining afternoons. As a huge fan of Dad’s home county, I suspected that he had never been to see the monarchs, and I was right.

Problem was, there were none. We stood on the viewing deck, slowly rotating, like a couple of well-behaved drunks, and could not locate a single speck of orange. We had come too late; the monarchs had headed north.

Still, it was a nice stroll. We stopped at a spot next to a lagoon to watch a snowy egret prowling the lily pads. My dad sighed and said, “You know, I thought I could at least make it to ninety.”

But it was not the Alzheimer’s that got him. A long-ago case of scarlet fever had damaged his heart. Now it was leaking, and he was too old and fragile for surgery. My family said that at least he didn’t have to go through the ravages of Alzheimer’s. I’m a little grateful that he didn’t have to go through the pandemic and my nephew’s suicide.

Today is different. It’s an artfully sunny oceanside afternoon, with just enough wispy clouds to frame the blue. Halfway down the boardwalk, an elderly couple sits on a bench next to a sign reading Please be quiet - monarchs at play.

At the end of the long descent, a group of eco-tourists gathers in a library excitement, conferring with a woman in park service clothing. At first I assume she’s playing bouncer, limiting the number of patrons who can board the main deck. In fact, she’s got a telephoto camera trained on a high cluster of monarchs, and her visitors are gathered at the screen. I walk past them to the viewing deck.

In the sunlight, the leaves of a small tree are popping bright green as monarchs fit from twig to twig, gathering nectar. Above them, in a large eucalyptus with its familar blue-gray leaves, hundreds of butterflies huddle on the Chosen Branch, looking like thickly set orange and black leaves in a constant flutter.

After peering at this marvel for a few minutes, I lower my gaze to let my neck rest. I leave the viewing deck in search of better angles, and just then I hear an excited chattering. I look up to see that dozens of monarchs have taken flight, scribbling the blue gaps like motorized confetti.

And I think, Yes, that’s how it feels. If succession holds, each of us will experience orphanhood. But it doesn’t have to be dismal. One is no longer beholden to the unique supervisory power of parents. It’s as if the universe is whispering in one’s ear: It’s all up to you now, buddyboy.

My eyes have taken in all the butterflies they can hold, so I take my leave. I am met by a long line of second-graders, barely able to contain their need to shout or squeal. I am grateful to have avoided this imminent melee, but I do feel like handing them little track-and-field batons. Here, it’s your turn now.

A couple of things. These eucalyptus trees that monarchs so love are not native to California. They were shipped in from Australia to be used as windbreaks. Two: it takes three to four generations of monarchs to complete the northward migration from these wintering grounds to the Pacific Northwest. And yet, the great-great grandchildren of these very butterflies will return precisely to this little grove in Santa Cruz. This blows my mind.

Michael J. Vaughn is the author of Punks for the Opera, Mermaids’ Tears and 27 other novels, available at Amazon.com. The image is from B. Smith’s 1970 painting, formerly owned by LCDR Harold J. Vaughn.

A Note on Woke

If being "woke" is just too dreadfully arduous a task for you, then, at the very least, if you have any desire to understand why you are so fortunate to be an American, I ask you to undertake a mental exercise with me.

First, transport yourself out of this artificial, skin-based identity of "white" and imagine yourself to be simply a Human Being-American.

Now, place yourself in the body of an indigenous American, wracked with disease brought on by the recent arrival of Europeans, your entire village dying around you. This, even more than the constant Indian wars, is what "opened up" the continent for European settlement.

Your next role is that of a Black American, ripped from your African culture, forced to contribute hard labor to build the foundation of an historically great economy, momentarily freed, but  immediately subjected to another century and a half of soul-breaking oppression.

You don't have to take on the responsibility for all of this. Guilt is much less important than the acknowledgement of truth. If you can at least go this far in understanding the involuntary sacrifices made on behalf of your country, then perhaps you can call yourself an American.