Actor's Way

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.