Folding and Unfolding

Hello again. It’s been awhile. It seems a whole lifetime since last I wrote. One month ago, one of my dearest friends, Jeff Norton, was found murdered in his Florida home. I first met Jeff 33 years ago in Tampa, just after I graduated high school. He and Rosemary Orlando and a group of incredibly talented people had formed a theatre group called The Alice People, and for some crazy reason, they gave me a small role in The Comedy of Errors, directed by Arthur Lithgow, John’s father. Crazy, because I had no idea what I was doing, but they took me into their family and I felt loved and cared for. In those days, after the show, we’d all pile into someone’s car and head off on an adventure. Once we drove across the state to Sebastian Inlet and watched the Easter morning sunrise. Another time, we went to some little bar on the bay near Bradenton to see Bill Downe’s brother play music. We’d ingested some sort of mind-altering substance, and it kicked in just as we walked into the bar. I told Jeff I couldn't be inside, and so he accompanied me down to the beach. In the moonlight, I saw the sand breathing, and called Jeff over to share in the miracle. He saw it too, and as we inspected things, we saw small mountains of foam on the shore, and then hundreds upon hundreds of horseshoe crabs, piled atop one another, a full moon prehistoric mating spree. Not too long after that, Jeff, Richard Remington, Kenji Kenishi and I climbed to the top of Tampa’s Sulphur Springs water tower, a trip that took us into the dark middle of the tower’s shaft, where we scaled a rotting wooden ladder nailed onto the side with cement nails. We got to the top and flew a kite, and painted our names on tower walls. Fear was still a stranger then, the world a playground, and Jeff a guardian, a brother.

Years later, when I showed him the first play I wrote, Amy’s Pitiful Legs, Jeff read it and said, “Let’s do it!” I asked if he could play the accordion, and he said that he could damn well learn. When the play finished, Jeff, Marcy and I went to Costa Rica. We rented a beachside cabina on the southern Pacific coast, in a little town called Matapalo. Early one morning, Jeff woke us and said that we were going to put together the First Annual Matapalo International Art Festival. And for the next couple of weeks, we did just that. We involved the entire village, making banana leaf wings for the local kids, and percussion instruments out of dried beans and taped up soda cans. We covered ourselves in ashes, and played out a ritual stick fight, cartwheeling into the Pacific, then swimming down the beach and lighting a huge bonfire, burying ourselves, then “resurrecting.” For the rest of our stay in Matapalo, whenever we saw any of the local kids, they’d laugh and start doing cartwheels. Jeff was the most talented person I’ve ever known: a dancer, singer, actor, writer, painter, a man who could play any instrument he picked up, a dedicated teacher, expert stage combat master, and a friend to all. A few nights ago, I dreamed that I was in the woods with him and he was showing me an enormous tree house he’d built. It was made of scrap wood, all Seussical ramshackle angles. We climbed up inside of the thing, and he led me through tunneled hallways into a precarious room. “Go on in,” he said, and I told him that it looked like it might collapse. “It might,” he answered, and I looked back and saw that mischievous grin. “Hasn’t yet!” And then that barking laugh... This morning, I finally called Rosemary, and I told her that story. When I finished, there was a long pause on the other end. She then told me that a few days after Jeff was murdered, her daughter had a dream where she went deep into the woods, and Jeff was building something. When she asked what it was, Jeff answered, “A tree house.”

I’m going to Bali early Saturday morning. The same day of Jeff’s memorial in St. Petersburg, Florida. The ticket was bought last April through New York-based International Theatre and Literacy Project (ITLP), the same group I went to Tanzania with in the summer of 2007. The founder of ITLP, Marianna Houston, has invited me and my teaching partner from Tanzania, Jeanette Horn, to join her on this first Bali venture. I will fly two hours “across the ditch” (as they say in NZ) from Wellington to Sydney, change planes, then continue four and a half hours more to Denpasar. Bali is an animistic/Hindu island in the middle of Muslim Indonesia. According to my Lonely Planet guide, it is "like no other destination in the world.” I’ve been told that there is no word for “art” in Bali, that because their lives are so woven with ritual, offerings, ceremony, song and dance, the Balinese make no distinction between art and life. Marianna and Jeanette will meet me at the airport, and a car will take us up into the mountains to Ubud, where we will spend the evening and watch the Balam Dance concert. On Sunday, we will continue on to the small town of Bangli, where we will stay and teach an 8-day acting workshop to a group of 20 kids age 10-13, culminating with them performing a play they’ve created through the workshop for their school and village.

My research at U Vic progresses, my tutorials rewarding. The students are enthusiastic, and I am slowly making friends. A group of postgrad students who met at orientation have formed a Saturday Night Dinner group. There are about 10 of us, and last Sunday Rebecca and Jared, the only Kiwis among us, had the group over to their house for a really fine brunch. Some of Rebecca’s friends from the School of Architecture showed up, and we were a party of 12 people, representing 9 different countries. Friends help. I have never felt so isolated and alone as I did following the news of Jeff’s murder. Last week, I turned 50. And though my dissertation research is quite interesting, and Wellington on sunny days quite beautiful, it is loss and love that is shifting my view of life, of what is really important. I will take pictures, and write about Bali and post it all here when I return. The village where we’re staying has no electricity or running water. Our contact person there has said that at night, we will have candles. And stars. Life unfolds so gently, it sometimes takes your breath away.