Showman/Shaman

Residential Yearly Meeting, DeSales University, Allentown, 7/26 – 7/29

Residential Yearly Meeting is a time for the Quakers in my Yearly Meeting to make some decisions and also to mingle, to socialize, and maybe – though we don’t do this well yet – to plan for the future. I’m running two workshops and doing and Actor’s Way reading here, as well as just being a part of it all. It’s my first time, and what with going solo with kids (Sooz is locked into her teaching gig at People’s Light), it got off to a rocky start today.

It’s 10:30 p.m. and I’m sitting in a little prison cell of a room in a dorm at DeSales college, where Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is holding this year’s gathering. We arrived this afternoon, and Ella and Griffen are finally asleep in a bunk-bed next to me. DeSales is a small Catholic college buried in the corn fields around Allentown. The priests plunked down East German inspired brick housing units and classroom buildings in the midst of swaths of lawn the size of soccer pitches. In the sweltering summer heat, getting from one building to another feels like an act of contrition – but maybe that’s the point. Do you think I have a little thing about Catholic colleges? It might be a the framed pictures of sour old Jesuits which greeted me and my harried children when we arrived. Or maybe it was trying to make the beds with sheets that a) didn’t fit and b) slid all over the rubber mattresses the inmates sleep on here during the year. Or maybe they’re just worried about Quaker bed-wetters. After hours of driving, Griffen whining and Ella clinging like a barnacle, I freaked out. What a weird place to have a Quaker gathering. But I guess the price is right.


7/28

What a motley bunch we Quakers are. Aging hippies with pot bellies and stringy grey hair which needs a good shearing. New-agey pseudo wiccans with pentacle necklaces and extremely comfortable shoes. American Gothic types from the rural mid-state counties of Pennsylvania - the men in collarless shirts, suspenders and Captain Ahab beards, the women plump beneath blousy home-made dresses. And a wide assortment of urban and suburban liberals like me: slightly goofy looking and decidedly unstylish. Then there are the kids: gorgeous creatures in thrift shop fashion, some pierced, some dreadlocked, some eccentric to make a point, most just . . . casual.

The girls are interesting. They seem to have resisted the body image indoctrination so many young women are fall prey to. Some of these Quaker girls are - how shall I put this - healthy. They are zaftig, with roundness and substance. So many young women I meet in acting classes seem to be trying to imitate what they see in Gap ads and on sitcoms, all hip bones and insecurity. These young women are abundant and confident, and I really liked them.

Out of all these Friends something similar flows, something not sensed with sight. If you are fortunate enough to be present for our ministry, you will be able to discern God’s little joke at our visual expense. The contrast between the richness of our ministry and our homeliness – or is it simple beauty? - is God’s way of saying: it’s not the wrapping that matters, but the gift inside. And the unity we experience, even in our difficulties, seems so improbable given our various and scattered appearances. Here too God is saying: look, I can bind you together in love, no matter the color, no matter the style, no matter the persuasion. For you do not bind yourselves, but it is I sweeping through you and holding you which makes you brethren.

7/29

I read from Actor’s Way today for Quakers gathered here at Residential Yearly Meeting (RYM). I had a half an hour, and so chose one letter of Alice’s to read. It begins on page 43 of the book, and in it she covers a bunch of topics that I thought would give the small group gathered in the make-shift Quaker library here a taste of what I’m up to in it. I stood behind a small podium and read. About a paragraph or two in, I realized that I had never read Alice aloud before. Soon, I was overcome with emotion. A small wave of warm release crested and I had to stop, as my voice rose higher and higher, trying to keep ahead of the wave. I felt embarrassed, and I couldn’t look at the Friends in front me, witnessing. I kept reading, and when I got to the part where Alice describes her love for her dead father, I lost it a second time. Again, I paused, then forged ahead. When Alice describes her experience in meeting of witnessing the bird of many colors inside her, the wave crested a third time. Finally, I got to the end of the letter. I stated my own astonishment at being so emotional, then entertained some questions. I sold a few books, signed them, and left to meet up with Sooz, who was to whisk Ella away to the Cape. Sooz’s Dad has taken yet another downward turn.

Sitting in my cell writing, I think I know what happened. I think it was the fact of my reading Alice here, in the midst of my spiritual community of Quakers, and that Alice is a Quaker, and that I am to, that led to the Spirit spilling out of me in this way. I recognized that Alice is a tribute to the Way I have chosen, the Way these cheerful, motley Friends have shown me by word and deed. And so I felt such a deep connection to my witnesses today (Art Larrabee’s mother was there, an Alice archetype if there ever was one), that I was overcome.

RYM has been an eye-opening experience for me. I have felt a sense of spiritual community new to me, that I have been hungry for, that I have only begun to taste at my Monthly Meeting. RYM has widened my faith to include so many others, and deepened it by placing me in the midst of a collective seeking of spirit unlike any I have ever felt. There was an amazing speech by my friend Tom Gates, which dealt in detail about one of my concerns – vocal ministry in worship. There were new friends made over many meals in the big sunny dining hall (I’ve warmed up to this place a bit, though the sheets still SUCK). There was extraordinary ministry during business sessions, and delicate examples of the ineffable event we call “Quaker process”. There were suddenly intimate encounters with Friends which felt like small blasts of Spirit.

And I have watched my kids enjoy being here too – Griffen especially – who has bonded with other Quaker kids in a way that has made him seem suddenly grown up to me. He’s actually fallen in love for the first time with a girl named Moxie (how could he not?). Her parents and Sooz and I were in a birthing class together before Griff and Moxie were born, and now her Mom Christie is something of a Big Deal in our Yearly Meeting. When he isn’t with her, Griffen constantly asks me if we can go find Moxie so he can “chase her around”. You go, boy. Last night he said that if he didn’t marry her, he’d marry his friend Emma. I said it’s always good to have a Plan B, something my friend Annie Lamott taught me.

The other Disney movie Ella is obsessed with – even more than Lion King – is Beauty and The Beast. This was not on my mind when I wrote the Spring integration, but the Spring integration was on mind the other day when I found myself alone with Ella for a few hours, and we played “Beauty and The Beast.”

I screwed up face and jutted my lower teeth out. I dropped my voice in to a raspy growl. I lumbered around like a giant ape, and all the while Ella played Belle. I tried to engineer the scenes so that, for some reason, Beast had to take a lot of naps. Ella liked this, because it allowed her to play out the “going to sleep” scenario with her on the powerful end, as the one putting some else to bed.

“Go to sleep now Beast. No crying.” she would tell me, before planting the world’s most tender little kiss on my lips. Within a minute she would wake me up. Some nap. I would pretend to cry.

“I’m hideous.”

“No, no Beast. You not hideous.” And she would kiss me some more. She pronounced “hideous” remarkably well for a three year old.

At least I’m not so hideous I can’t be on the radio. I had an interview about The Actor’s Way last Wednesday. It was for a local public radio show called “Radio Times”, which Susan and I listen to a lot. So when I showed up at the studio and was greeted by the host Marty Moss-Coane, I felt as though I was going to hang out with my cool aunt Marty in the radio station where she works and chat about some stuff we were both interested in.

I had spent the previous two weeks “rehearsing” this interview: playing out questions she might ask and answering them with glittering charm and intelligence, fielding awkward subjects (like alcoholism and tenure) with aplomb. But of course, Marty was way too sensitive to ask anything approaching an awkward question, and the questions she did ask were so germane to the book and my concerns, my effort was to pare down the 14 responses which lined up in front of me to the one or two which seemed most urgent. Marty asked questions about psychodrama and the wounded actor, about the criticism thread in the book and about what happens in acting classes. We got some call ins from all over. I left feeling kind of high from whole thing.

In the hallway afterwards, I had a comical talk with Marty’s producer, the red-haired Devora, about toilet training. It turns out she has kids about the age of mine, and had some good advice for Ella’s challenging relationship to her own poop.

“Have you tried just letting her sit in her shit for while?” she asked with charming bluntness. God I love strong women. I replied that Ella seemed to not mind that, or at least preferred it to sitting on the potty. “How about rewards?” she asked. “One piece of candy for just sitting, two for pee-pee, three for poop.”

Marty and Devora are a part of the community I serve. How I love my community.

The next day, The Crucible returned in the form of a horribly mishandled “evaluation” meeting at People’s Light. The issue at hand was my conduct in those difficult rehearsals of 2.2, in the jail, and my attachment to my initial vision of Hale the shattered man. Without getting into the whole thing, the meeting was based on second-hand information – essentially “he said, she said” stuff – and had the wounding quality of a reproach, although Abbey and Steve kept telling it wasn’t. I left feeling very hurt and confused, and resolved to go back to continue the conversation.

That night, Sooz left me and the ids to go to the Cape to be with her dad again. The end is near, I think, and death is like the haze of hot day in our lives, draping us in discomfort, blurring our vision slightly and making us want to just stay inside.

I took night off from child care top go see a festival of ten minute plays downtown, one of them by friend Michael and directed by my friend Joe, another featuring Jenny, one of our babysitters. It was a festival of the smaller companies in town, and it had the quality of a plate of hors d’oerves made by different kitchens. Some made you wanted another taste, others didn’t. One of my favorites was Heavy Metal Dance Fag, pt 2 – a riotous piece of physical theatre in which the title character did comical choreography to the likes of Guns ‘n Roses.

Then I went to a fundraiser for two local companies a The Khyber, a notorious local dive bar and music venue. There I got hang out with my “tribe”, seeing friends from the theater community who I had lost touch with, and just be a part of the merriment. To my shame, I smoked a few cigarettes that night, I strategy I frequently employ to make myself feel more “with it” when I go to bars, but, of course, don’t drink.

While there, I had my first fantasy-author moment. I was talking to a friend when a young girl, moving through the crowd at the bar, suddenly turned and stared at me.

“You’re Ben Lloyd aren’t you?” she asked. I said I was. “OhmiGod! You wrote The Actor’s Way! I’m only half way through and that book is changing my life!” I grabbed her hands and told her she had just made my whole night. She told me her name was Amanda, she was telling all her friends about the book and we talked about it for a while. You know that scene in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes to big? Yeah. That was me. Now I have to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to my head.

On the day of Sooz’s “day off”, Mom and I took the kids to see the Julie Taymore production of the musical The Lion King – a big Broadway tour in Philadelphia through September. We sat in the nose bleed seats in the Academy of Music, seats so high up in the air you can inspect the giant chandelier on it’s own level and experience vertigo if you lean forward too much. Still, we loved it, especially the actress playing the Baboon Rafiki, the choral dances and the African music. There was some astonishing mask work in it, and Taymore’s life-sized animal puppets are breath-taking. Griff kept turning to me and saying in a stage whisper, “This is awesome!” Ella sat on my lap a watched with great seriousness. She was, of course, used to the Disney DVD we play over and over at home, so she couldn’t quite reconcile what she was seeing a half a mile away down there on the stage with what she knew in her head. She got a bit restless in the second act, after getting jacked up on a box of Swedish Fish at intermission.

Truth be told, Mom and I both felt the second act doesn’t hold up well compared to the first. But three things are worth noting. I thought, do we come to the theatre to find what’s working in a play, or to note what isn’t? And as when I saw Spamalot, I found myself worrying about how these actors would react to The Actor’s Way if they ever chose to read it. The actor playing Poombah, the farting Warthog, was someone I acted with in Philly in 1995. I think he would have a dim view of my book. But I also noted that many in the cast thanked God in their bios. And thirdly, Sooz had charged Griff to look for God as he went about his day that day. “So Griff, “ I said at the end as the house lights rose, “do you see God anywhere?”

“Dad I don’t want to do that now!” he said sharply. And I hugged him.

The next day in meeting for worship, a woman rose and praised the great Mother, who dwells within and whose name has been forgotten. Time passed and then I felt as deep tremor inside me. I rose to speak.

I spoke about a letter an elder in my meeting had hand-delivered to my children at my home the past week:

Dear Griffen and Ella,

God speaks in the meeting. July the second, two thousand and six, God spoke in the soul of your father.

Benjamin Lloyd spoke those words to us and they lifted us out of our confusion and doubt.

Griffen heard them, Ella was not there.

Our hope is that he will write them in this letter, that someday you will know that what God spoke was truth.

It was a blessed experience.

Barbara, a thankful witness

What I spoke about then was the difference between knowing and believing. I said that knowing can be proved but believing doesn’t need to. Believing is for the believer, because he feels it makes him better. But last Sunday I spoke about how Griffen has always felt God to be a She. This was unprompted, and Sooz and I heard it first when the three of us were walking around a beautiful lake in New Hampshire. “Hey Griff, you see God anywhere?” I asked.

“Yep. There She is.” And he pointed to an old mossy stump.

In my ministry I described Griffen’s refusal to look for God at The Lion King, and my recognition that it takes effort, and that sometimes life is just to be enjoyed. But that as Quakers, we are called to seek God everyday, in everyone. And last Sunday I asked God for help, because I was struggling with my shadow, and I wanted to be a light, like God, because if you think about it, a light shining has no shadow.

Later that day, after a not-so-miserable meeting for business, Friend X and I helped each other with a small chore. Friend X has been at the nexus of my bad feelings about my meeting. But in this small act of collaboration, I felt a bridge begin to be built. She asked about Sooz’s Dad. We chatted.

Looking for God in everyone is hardest with those we are estranged from. But in those searches God’s miracles are most profound, and Her movement is smallest, so our attention must be sharpest. She will meet us half-way, and pull us over. But we must reach. We must reach.

My mother has been here for the last five days. It was great to have her here. I took her to her first rock concert, a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion tour which kicked off in Philly. I had initially bought the tickets for me and Sooz as a mother’s day gift, but a day after receiving them, Sooz gave them back to me, saying she really didn’t want to go. I was hurt but I got over it. I guess I forgot I was married to an agoraphobic recluse. Instead I gave her a day off, during which time she could do anything she wanted by herself. I timed that day to overlap with my Mom’s visit.

I was amazed to discover that it was my Mom’s first rock concert,. My Mom is a sixties “elder”, who was on the cutting edge of the avant gard dance scene from ’65 on. She looked at the CD case of So Far I gave to her. “I know these people played music when I was younger but I just don’t recognize the names of these songs” she said. Mom has “senior moments” like these, which are actually sixties blackouts. There are entire years in there Mom just doesn’t remember very much about. And she wasn’t dropping a lot of acid either. They just didn’t stick, I guess. Then I played some of the CD. “Oh yes . . . “ she said when Our House came on. Slowly, each song seemed to lift her up a bit straighter, until finally she was holding the CD case in her hand and squinting at it.

The ride to the concert was a traffic nightmare. I realized glumly that Sooz had made the right call. She would have been beside herself coming to this concert. Instead of feeling relieved that things were playing out the way they should, I wanted to run someone over. Mom sat next to me sensing my simmer and fished for things to say. We talked about a lot of things. But as is usual with her, I didn’t feel unburdened from talking to her. I just felt more and more irritated.

The day before the concert I had a session with Deb. During that session I uncovered my shadow for her. Like any good therapist she didn’t bat an eye. “What’s underneath?” she asked.

“Anger.” I replied.

“And what does that anger do for you, Ben?”

“It’s an engine” I said. “I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

“You’re a very powerful person” she said. “But I get the sense you keep so much of it in. It’s like you’re energy is this big, “ she held her arms wide, “but it can only come out an opening this big” and she made a small hole with her fingers. “I wonder what would happen if you just let it go.”

Give up and let it go. Give up and let your life flow, sings Francis Dunnery.

So in the car, in the hellish traffic, my Mom next to me behaving like a sweet Buddhist nun, my shadow was punishing me for telling on it as I had. Because my shadow dwells in a very private place, and it draws me to isolation. You’re only as sick as your secrets, as they say in the Rooms. But you learn who to share them with and who not to.

Finally we got to the lawn at the Tweeter Center. CSNY had started playing. They began with the new music, mostly from Neal Young’s latest album, a blistering attack on the Bush administration. As the night came on and the band played and they sang the songs I knew and loved, my shadow slipped away. Watching these guys in their sixties rocking out, getting us to sing along to lyrics like “Let’s impeach the President!”, sitting next to my sixty eight year old artist Mom, I wondered: where is the twentysomething Neal Young?

I fear our young people have lost the ability to revere their own big feelings. It takes big feelings to sing protest music. You set yourself up for a lot of ridicule (like the ridicule CSNY took at the hands of the idiot critic who reviewed the concert a couple of days later). It takes big feelings to work for social justice, to believe in a cause so much you’ll go door to door, or march on Washington, or write a song about it and then sing it in front of people. It takes big feelings to make it happen, as opposed to big ideas. Ideas can sit back and become passive. Feelings propel you to motion. The unity we seek is the detonation which occurs when ideas lead to big feelings and then the feelings spread. That’s called a movement. But in a culture in which big feelings are fundamentally unsafe, or are sources of embarrassment, movements are dead in the water.

Our youth are being trained to mock. So many young people prefer to sit in the back of the class and roll their eyes at someone else’s contribution. In our great virtual classroom, we are in danger of having everyone in the back of the class, and no one in the front raising their hands with something to say. Why would they, with such an enormous chorus of voices ready to shoot them down? Do you see, friends, how this plays into my concerns with criticism, which has become a forum for nasty sniping or pointless praise? How it is related to higher academia, in which ideas are favored and feelings are suspect? How it is connected to our political discourse, in which pundits and bloggers exist for no other reason than to find a way to bring someone else down? What brought down Howard Dean in 2004? I submit it was the reaction these media vultures had to his big feelings, which led to an unadorned howl on a cold night in Iowa, a great release of disappointment and cry to rally the troops. In years past, such a cry might have led the English at Agincourt, or rallied the striking miners in West Virginia, or sent students to seize a building. It might have been the stuff of legends. But today, soaked as we are in cynicism, it was a bulls-eye on his chest.

By the way, the song Let’s Impeach the President ends with the refrain “Thank God.”

My Mom was very taken with the whole thing, even though her trick knee began to ache and we left early to avoid the traffic on the way out. I think we were both a little high from the pot smoke swirling around us. “Actually, I think it was hash” said Mom, sounding like she might have been correcting me about a spice used in an old family recipe. We talked about teaching and feelings and protests on the way home. She was chirping. It was like she had just discovered this new thing, this rock and roll concert thing. The next day, she Googled CSNY and discovered a DVD documentary about them. Her interest was peaked. By the time we got to the video store though, she had forgotten the name of it. “It was a lyric from one of their songs . . . “ Uh-oh. The twentysometing behind the counter did a search for us which lasted a few minutes before I discovered he was looking for a documentary about Bing Crosby. “No, no. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young” I said. He made me spell it. He had never heard of them. We never found the documentary.

I need to record something that happened at the end of The Crucible. It was significant to me and it didn’t make it into this blog. During the talkbacks, a frequent question would be, “Why is the play named The Crucible?”

“Well,” I would reply, with great authority, “the word ‘crucible’ means a tipping point. Imagine a seesaw. The place where it balances is the crucible. So Miller is using the word to illustrate the way the choices in the play can go one way or the other.” Sounds good doesn’t it? The only problem is that it’s complete bullshit. I have no idea where I got this idea from. But I know I didn’t make it up. I had this distinct memory of someone telling me this. Recently, I heard a piece from the radio show This American Life about the dangers of a little bit of information. In the show, a person talks about writing for “Jackass Magazine” when they go on and on about something they know very little about. I was writing for Jackass Magazine, in front of my peers and thousands of young people, for about two months.

By the end of the run, some in the cast began gingerly approaching me. “Ben?” they would say, “I checked up on it and I can’t find that definition of the word ‘crucible’ anywhere.” My first reaction was bluster.

“Bosh! I’ll find it and bring it in for you.” Then I went looking. Imagine my distress.
So after the very last show, I gathered everyone together and made a comical and public apology for my mistake.

This was significant for two reasons. One was that no one ever told me I was mistaken. I think this had to do with the authority I generated when I spoke. This is a dangerous ability, the ability to sound authoritative even when one is full of it. I could raise some questions about politicians and academics, but I won’t. You get my drift. I was alarmed that I had fallen into this trap myself, and it was a useful warning.

The second reason it was significant was that I apologized for it. This is relatively new behavior for me. I hate admitting I’m wrong. I’d rather eat something disgusting, all the while proclaiming it’s tastiness, than admit someone’s assessment of it was better than mine. I am proud of that confession and apology. It is a sign of progress for me.