Smaller world

"I've been a huge Chicago Public Radio junkie lately. They're playing a lot of radio plays and new music shows. Today I woke up for my ritualistic noon dose of This American Life. Afterwards, they played a radio play called "I Hate This (a play without the baby)," a one-man show by David Hansen which chronicles his and his wife's experience of having a stillborn child ... "(more)

"Just another victim ..."

Shame on me. Thoughtless. I try not to post without editing but that was dumb. Obviously it has been sticking with me for months.

We're all victims of something, and I guess it's what you do with your personal hell that defines you. For some actions are very personal, they work on the family-level, the spiritual level. I have a tendency to broadcast and I can't help that. I have been doing it since before I could remember, since I could type or learned to use the cassette recorder.

I recently re-read I, Trissyby Norma Fox Mazer (a startling, eye-opening book from my fifth grade year, just behind Bridge to Terabithiawhich it seems Disney is geared to entirely f*ck up) which exposed me not only to the horrors of divorce, about which I was ignorant. Of course, my two best friends' parents had split a few years earlier, but it took a book to know what they were going through.

It also had the effect of making me feel I had the right to type anything I felt like, any way I felt like, the right to say whatever I felt about anyone, even people I care about. I should have used Harriet the Spyas my bible, I may have learned a tip or two about discretion.

All these books are about intelligent, independent girls. Hmn.

Lately I have fallen in to a sizeable malaise. Blame the weather, everyone's health (but mine) the fact that I am "between projects," what have you. It has gotten me running again, at any rate. Rehearsals for THE TEMPEST begin on Tuesday, we'll see where that takes me.

A great deal of effluvia has been seeping through my brain over actions of the past seven years. A seven-year stink? How odd. But seriously, a rush of images and songs have been coming at me from Year 2000 to the present. And part of that (though not all) tie in to the boy, and where his existence has taken me, has taken us.

I could not sit still and just feel these things, I had to write about them, and having written about them, I had to share them, and having shared them, I needed to broadcast them as far as possible. This used to mean the ends of the living room. Now they go a bit farther.

I have three gigs coming up in the next few months. This spring will take us to a performance here in town, and a week or so later we should be traveling to Louisville, KY. And then ten days in Britain - the schuled is embryonic, but this time in June I may be performing I HATE THIS in London, Cornwall, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Never been to most of those places.

But again, this reflection on the past seven years. It all made me sad. Made me feel old. I have always said I enjoy perfomring this play because it keeps me close to Calvin.

I am beginning to worry that it is keeping me trapped in 2001.

As the present conflicts so harshly with that past, I have begun to rethink the show, and whether or not I should continue presenting it. The mission is still important, and so, frankly, is the money. But I've never really thought of what it has done to me, and whether or not I need to take a break, and permanently.

I had thought all of these things through last week, when I got this email:

Hello David,
(Our mutual friend) mentioned your play to me in our playwrights' group and I listened to the (radio) version. I think it would be great for med students at Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx University or the general support group. I am in the Dept of Bioethics and Humanities at XXU. What would it take to bring you here?
Xxxx Xxxxxx MD

And so I told him what it would take. Because I can't let go.

"The I Hate This Show"

So for a few months now Dave at WCPN and I have been going back and forth about having I HATE THIS (the radio drama, of course) aired on WBEZ In Chicago, home to such noteworthy NPR programs like This American Life and Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me ... WCPN had submitted it to the Third Coast International Audio Festival at WBEZ, for which it did not win, but it attracted the attention of the folks at Re: sound a program which, if I am to understand it correctly, rebroadcasts programs from other NPR stations.

We were negotiating the fine points of the contract, and looking forward to finding out the broadcast date - which I was going to post here and send via email to my friends in Chicago so they could hear it.

It aired last Saturday. So, as Dave put it, oops.

You can listen to the online version of the Re: sound broadcast here.

I wonder if Ira despised it.

Applause, applause.

Recorded my interview with Dee Perry for WVIZ's arts and entertainment program Applause this afternoon.

I have been making appearances on WCPN's Around Noon since 1998. Radio was already something I'd gotten very comfortable with, I fiddled with it in college, Guerrilla Theater Co. did a radio show on WRUW ten years ago. I used to get nervous coming in for an interview with Dee but with practice, my familiarity with her, it's just no freaky thing now.

But TV is just weird. I gave myself a tension headache earlier today just thinking about it. Frtunately, so much of producing television is this tedious standing around and waiting, any potential nerves just evaporated.

It helps when the situation is new to everyone around you, too. Both WVIZ and WCPN have only just recently moved into the Idea Center on Euclid Avenue. I believe they have taped some segments for Applause in the new studio - which is located right on Euclid, you can see the studio from the street - but the part of the show where I perform scenes from I Hate This was the first time they tried to shoot something using the window as a backdrop.

They were messing with filters, which glare screen to use ... I didn't get to see the final take, but apparently everyone was pleased with it.

Usually I do a scene with Lydia in it if I need to pick something out of context. But they aren't very active scenes, and this is television, so I did the Nurse Angel scene, where I get to run all over the bed. We did a few takes, I managed to fark up a word or two in each take, but I think they got something good. I hope so.

The interview was unnerving as well. I knew I'd have to be concise, that it would be a shorter interview than I was used to. I mentioned how the mission of the show was to get people to open up, and to discuss this dark part of life. I think I said there were more people who'd experienced neonatal death than you might think.

After the taping, the producer and one other member of the production team came up to share their stories with me. One was a survivor of another kind, a cancer survivor, but also told me how their mother had lost a girl, and she wasn't allowed to see her. The other was the parent to a boy he lost nineteen years ago.

And you know, sometimes I get stuck as to exactly what to say. "Nineteen ... wow," was probably how I started. But we kept talking for some time.

Of course, when I was asked about the sgnificance of March 20th as the broadcast date (they knew - it was a set-up) I am not sure what I said, but I might as well have said, "Five. Wow." That would have been enough.

Applause broadcast dates: Thu. March 16 @ 7:30p, Sat. March 18 @ 6:30p & Sun. Mar. 19 @ 1:00p