A Not So Boring Life

LOVELACE MARIONETTE THEATRE I have been fortunate.   In the mid-seventies, I moved to Pittsburgh, PA.   There, I did a variety of things:   working as a carpenter´s helper; repairing toilets and operating a telephone switchboard in a roadside hotel; studying early childhood education at a Penn State branch campus; working as a direct care worker in a center for Severely and Profoundly Retarded Adults who had spent their lives warehoused in large state-run facilities; studying Sociology and Political Science at a Community College; being a VISTA volunteer promoting an Adult Literacy Program; catering rock concerts at the Pittsburgh Civic Center; growing and marketing bean sprouts out of an abandoned brewery; working as a volunteer on the “Mill Hunk Herald” – a grassroots worker writer magazine.   And I met Margot Lovelace.   Margot was an icon of the Pittsburgh art and theatre scene, founder of the first professional puppet theatre in the Un...

The best time is early morning, when they are still bringing out yesterday’s donations from the back.   “By the pound” stores are the most fun, - as well as the most dangerous - as the lady next to you slides under your arm and agressively hip bumps you out of the way to snatch a likely looking gem.   Being tall and long armed is an advantage, as you can reach over the heads of shorter rummagers to the middle of the box.   Getting in next to the person who is obviously specializing in stuffed animals is a good tactic, as he/she will take care of the heavier work of flipping things over in their search for the unstained and only lightly battered Care Bear or Pokémon figure. Having a good eye is all important: if you can spot the item that is made of fine wood, that is obviously old or that has some distinctive aspect before anyone else, you can grab it, throw it in your cart and later review it with greater care. Try to stay ahead of the “professionals” – those thrift ...

RUMINATIONS ON MASCULINITY AND A LONG-AGO TIME AND GALAXY It may sound a bit strange now, and most probably open to a few jokes, but in the late 1970s I became involved with the National Movement of Changing Men , or as we simply called it in Pittsburgh – Changing Men .  The movement was begun by pro-feminist males who were engaged with feminist women and interested in supporting feminist ideas. One of the tenets of the movement was to recognize the dominance of male power and privilege and through a critical lens begin to challenge the notion of “traditional masculinity” and the dominant model of manhood by working with one another.  An interesting element of the movement is that it later began to branch off in other directions and themes, with some groups of men proclaiming that they were the oppressed ones in society and at a disadvantage in things like divorce and child custody. I became involved with the feminist side of the movement through my acquaintance with Bob, ...

BE PREPARED! Different from many boys of my generation, I didn’t have much of a scouting experience.  I think my parents must of made me join one cub scout troupe when I was pretty young, because I have this memory of having to march down the main street of Danville during a Halloween parade, dressed along with the rest of my troupe in handmade skunk costumes, carrying signs that said “I’m a Little Stinker,”  I often think that was NOT what the Brits had in mind when they founded the Boy Scouts in 1908. There was also that time when I got to go along on a Scout camping trip at a nearby lake. We pitched a long rectangular canvas tent and after a day of activities that I don´t remember at the moment (other than the fact that someone laced the toilet paper in a camp outhouse with itching powder), had a dinner of campfire roasted hot dogs.  There might have been some beans in there somewhere, but who can remember that long ago? After dinner we sliced some gig...

Another entry from the letters written from Nicaragua in 1984: In the mornings, the sun rises to the day’s activities that began in the fading darkness of the early dawn.  The night’s chill is burned off quickly in a rising cloud of haze.  The noise, so very much a part of life here in Nicaragua, remains constant through the morning:  cows lowing, dogs barking, children shouting, chickens clucking and pigs squealing – not necessarily in that order or volume. I am now at the rural farming cooperative “La Quinta”, officially with the name of “German Pomares Ordoñez” – the name of a Sandinista commander who died fighting against the Somoza dictatorship.  The cooperative is located about a half hour truck ride from the city of Estelí, travelling more or less east along a winding mountain road.  I began living and working at the cooperative around August 5 th , after a short and complicated trip to the Costa Rica border in order to renew my visa for another ...

The following is the first of a series of "to the world" letters written while on a prolonged experience in Nicaragua in 1984, done as part of an independent university internship.  I would click these letter out on a battered portable manual typewriter and send them up to my sister Rose in the U.S., who would copy and send them out to a network of friends, students and professors.  Put into context, they represent an intense and important part of both my life and the history of Nicaragua during that time. I’m sitting in the living room of my house at about six-thirty in the evening on Sunday the 29 th of April, 1984.  I started to sit down about two hours ago to type this letter, but alas, the gringo’s typewriter is a very popular item in this house. I’m living now in an Esteli neighborhood called “Jose Santos Zelaya”.  The neighborhood is named after a famous Nicaraguan leader which, coincidentally, is also the name of the son of my Nicaraguan host “mot...

Six Degrees of Separation I was reminded of this theory of interconnectedness today.  First put forward by a Hungarian author in 1929, it postulates that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world.   Many of you probably know it through that Will Smith movie. In the late seventies, I met Larry Evans, a laid-off steelworker, self-taught writer and all-around rabble rouser who had moved to Pittsburgh PA from his birthplace of Baltimore, MD after a stint as a VISTA volunteer in a Florida migrant camp.  When we met, I was a VISTA volunteer working with laid-off steelworkers in Pittsburgh through an Adult Literacy program, while also studying at a local community college. Larry was the founder and guiding light of an innovative worker-writer magazine called the Mill Hunk Herald .   Surviving on goodwill, youthful energy, sporadic donations and hard-fought subscriptions, the quarterly mag...