Sandy's Staging Preferences

Sandy seemed to really love the more traditional comedia dell arte and I think that's where her heart was.  She loved staging plays in front of houses and buildings that provided the scenic backdrop.  She would scour the neighborhoods wherever she was to find a perfect tudor looking house and so on to be used as a living stage set to help set the atmosphere of the historic work being presented.  Just as it was done in the old traditional days of comedia dell arte. She also insisted on costuming being as authentic as possible for the play being presented and had a friend who did her costume sewing.

Censorship

Another of the early Mime Troupe puppet skits had to do with censorship.  A little puppet came out holding a script .... soon the other puppet arrived with a little wooden vaudeville cane to pull the little puppet offstage ... this was carefully crafted so the cane never touched the puppet's neck (NO!  That's wrong!  That might hurt the gentle little puppet) and the puppet would protect his neck with the papers he had rolled into a tube.  Then ... more dialogue which I forget .... the ATTACK!  The Censor puppet grew more alarmed and rose up as if shrieking and shivered as he did in absolute outrage and disgust, and the other little puppet would collapse over the edge of the stage in laughter .... (ha! ha! you're ridiculous, Censor Puppet! Everybody's laughing at YOU now!)

Then ... the near punch and judy duel in the sun ....

The little puppets parried and thrust, vaudeville cane against rolled script, but they'd never hit each other (NO!  That's wrong!  That might hurt the gentle little puppet) but as this was the CENSOR puppet being attacked, he was brushed on the head with the script (to whistle and boing and gong sounds from backstage people) and was almost knocked unconscious by it, and then was struck by surprise he couldn't win this round of the censorship war against the little Actor puppet.  And I think at one point the Actor puppet had little boxing gloves put on his hands so he could continue this battle.  (Little bells like fight bells would sound to bring them back into the ring.)  And he would SWING and the Censor puppet would block his swing with his cane a la Toshiro Mifune and LAUGH an evil little Censor puppet laugh.  And as I recall, as the show evolved the little Censor puppet even for the first time (like Beanie, like when they showed Beanie's legs) HAD A LEG (whoever heard of a hand puppet with a LEG? This was a THEATRICAL BREAKTHROUGH) with a soft little shoe on the foot and kicked like Bruce Lee not just hit but tried to KICK the little Actor puppet below the belt ...  who defended himself with the script because it was WRONG! for even little puppets to do such things that might hurt another little puppet.  But still .... the little Actor puppet had the wind knocked out of him and seemed to be going down for the count (and the audience said OOH!) But it ended up the little Actor puppet won the fight against the Censor.  And at the end, the puppets came out for an encore from behind the little curtains and held hands like stage people do and then thrust their little arms in the air together held high (and they were still a little feisty towards each other, but they eventually worked that out before they disappeared behind the curtain). 

Great show!!

Tear Gas, Pink Slips, and FEAR!

And after I got up from the curb, after being fired onstage mid-performance by Ronnie, I continued on down the stairs, and through the crowd..  I staggered in a zig-zag out into the busy street traffic and threw myself at a bus .... I wasn't really trying to do myself in, but, you know theatrical types and street work, and I collapsed at the tail end of the bus (my best prat fall ever!) as the smoggy exhaust fogged out over the street ... and my friend Heidi came to retrieve me, and I rolled over on my back and said, "I can't seem to do anything right today."

We used to do real guerilla comedy pieces in the middle of demonstrations when the tear gas was flying and the cops were rushing us ... which worked ok, or so it seemed, until the day the clown got a little scared and ran off down an alley to evade the charging pigs.  I'd seen the look of "FEAR!" in Darryls' eyes, that day, too! 

The varieties in performance sometimes caused disturbances in us all.  And sometimes that was the result of an actor's reaction when facing the audience and picking someone to play to, and the audience interaction could be bothersome.  Sandy always looked skyward to the heavens when she moved and danced, and would sometimes bow low and reach out to the audience that way, and lovingly play into a person's eyes.

Oh, I should point out here, we weren't hippies .... we were longhairs.   The hairstyle was kind of the same, but .... you know ..... the hippies came later.  And it seemed like "hippies" was a made-up work coming from Bill Balance radio in Los Angeles all those years ago, when he said at a show's close, "all right, my little hippies" and anyway by now it didn't really matter if it did, everyone with long hair was a hippy, though sometimes I got hung up trying to remember the exact dirty phrase Bill Balance had used in a late-night live on the air announcement that had him kicked off the air, and I just couldn't remember it ... but it was naughty!  And I wanted to work it into a skit somewhere, somehow ... to see if censorship had changed a bit.

Members of what had become the Mime Troupe would visit me sometimes at that cottage in Richmond in 1967 and again (c. 1968), and casually talk or mention "Dr John" (meaning Dr. John W. Hopkins) (That abbadodo song "Nighttripper" was on KSAN then in 1968, with discussions about the place having been mentioned in a book, which is what Dr Schoenfeld had unearthed somehow) and in 1966, 1967 and 1968, I would travel by motorcycle to Williams College and visit them in their cottages.  The grounds looked familiar to me, and I had a sense of "déjà vu", but I really didn't remember I had been there before right then, not until a bit later did I recall the other motorcycle ride up into the hills in 1964, the one that first carried me to Williams College.  Eeerie!

déjà vu, jamais vu

And why I prefered (and still do) thinking about art and music and such, is because when I really get deep into thinking about Devil's Island (because I'd read the first English translation in 1969 or was it 1970), even my typewriter begins to stutter and doubletalk in fear and anger, I end up sounding like Professor Erwin Corey walking among the ghosts ... ('pa-pa-pa-pa-papillion! papa-ooh-mau-mau sheebadahobbadasheebadahobbadasheebadahobbada")

He finally returned to France, visiting Paris in conjunction with the publication of his memoir Papillon (1969). The book sold over 1.5 million copies in France,[3] prompting a French minister to attribute "the moral decline of France" to miniskirts and Papillon.[4]


(She said "en France c'est un sujet tabou!")

(And my mind plays tricks on me, because I vividly recall reading that book in Richmond in 1969, but I didn't live in Richmond in 1969, so maybe it was just a magazine article in 1967 in some journal translated into English, a excerpted chapter, a preview of the book and other coming attractions).   

And that french prisoner's denim shirt I used to wear for quite a long while .... I'd bought that at an army navy store, there were tons of them on the rack where I was, at least 50 of them.  Those shirts were likely for people imprisoned by the french navy as the shirt had a french navy swabbie cut but without the little cloth rain shield, that's how they sewed them up, as some industrialist in France probably had got a contract for new prison wear, just to give civilian prisoners an even harder time than French naval prisoners while they stood in the rain, and the remainders were shipped off to Devil's Island, and now they'd closed those out because they were closing down the prison facility.    It all comes together sometimes in a really weird line.