Doing Justice

Working for so long on my film about the Square it has been frustrating to have nothing yet to show for all of that effort. I started it back in the fall of 07 thinking I could get it out by the Bicentennial in 2008... then it was set back on the shelf to accommodate the Underground Railroad film for October 2008, the Library Centennial film for December 2008, then into limbo for Historical Society stuff, Arcadia deadlines, and more and more.

Realizing that it could pend forever if I didn't extricate myself from all the distractions, I quit the Carousel Board, the Historical Society Board, the Cosby Center Board and went back to my real job.

The film is in 4 parts and I have addressed each separately to get a rough working draft going. Finally last month, as I was photoshopping my way through part 4 and the end of pre-preparation actually loomed into sight, I understood suddenly that I have a serious need to see some results that are not in the box of gettingready. I was assembling images of the Lady Justice sequence for the Courthouse segment and could see that within the framework of Part 4 I could never do justice to her story... so in a thrilling moment of clarity I pulled all of her material out of the film to do a short just about her. And set aside Thanksgiving vacation for completion.

I set myself to tell the story of Lady Justice on the top of the Richland County Courthouse, and use her tale to address a topic that resonates to my soul: the cut-through of the Square.

What a blast. That's what I love to do: have the subject, a theme, the materials, the vast possibilities, the time and a deadline.

Here's the best part of this story: the day after I committed myself to this work all full of en-theo-siasm, I ran into a guy who told me that he had just come from the inaugural meeting of a committee who is working to restore the Square to its former whole. And I had already begun their first piece of propaganda.

Mansfield Muse

It is not commonly known that the inspiration for many of the great paintings of the world actually originated in Mansfield, Ohio. As you can clearly see from this vintage postcard, Edward Hopper, riding a late train from Chicago to New York that laid over in Mansfield for an hour, took a stroll down Main Street before rushing to his easel with a great idea.



Jackson Pollock, as well, drew his inspiration from the sidewalks of our town when he woke up one afternoon in 1947 in the Leland Hotel with a terrific hangover and stumbled down to the Square for coffee where the famous Mansfield crows had just the night before hosted a mass roosting in the trees overhead. As his eyes gradually focused on the pavement under his feet his heart leaped and his destiny incarnated.

Astrology Wars

I got on Rob Brezsny's website to see if I could find that book of his that I read in 1983, and was embarrassed to discover that it actually wasn't him at all.

What I had completely forgotten in the intervening 25 years was the battle of astrologers going on in Santa Cruz at the time... one of them (I think it was Rob B) had his column in the weekly Good Times paper, and the other, whose name was ROBERT COLE, had his column in the Santa Cruz Daily Sentinel. The town was divided pretty evenly in their allegiance to one or the other of them, much as the world is split between Coke and Pepsi, though, unlike the soda partisans, the astrology factions were dogmatic snobs and witheringly critical of one another, not unlike Republicans and Democrats today.

The only thing I could remember this morning was Cole so I googled Santa Cruz/ astrology/ cole and discovered that he died in 1992 of AIDS. So I guess that whatever clarification we can get from him about his theories will have to be by seance.

There was a restaurant in SC that was open only for breakfast called Zachary's where everyone in town met on Sunday mornings, so that the wait outside was up to 2 1/2 hours. We used to sign in and then walk down to the Boardwalk and by the time we got back we were seated. Anyway it was the place to go if you wanted to catch sight of either of the astrology czars. We wanted to sponsor a Wizard's Duel down on the Seacliff Beach because it was a very dramatic setting with overarching cliffs for the audience. The beach was to be empty except for Rob and Robert doing, oh you know, transits in the sand with wild conjunctions and perilous trines, until some juncture in the action when suddenly everyone would storm down out of the poppies like a flood and enjoy a bloody melee. TBM

The Amphitheater

This summer I was at Kenyon for the afternoon reading on the quad, and strolled down to see the Bolton Theater. I once performed on that stage and as I entered from the lobby expected to whisk back to Shakespeare. My experience, however, was not that of the past at all... but of the latent and enthusiastically potent possible future.

When I was in Santa Cruz I used to ride my bike north of town along the coast to a secluded beach tucked into the cliffs along the Pacific, and wandering north from the most public part there was a hidden and very private enclosure that was just stone and sand and sea. It always seemed to me a perfect stage, the proscenium at water's edge. I guess it is actually backward because the rising walls that would be audience seating was at my back. It was the roaring approval of the waves in front of me.

Shizuo was practicing his ancient Japanese dance about Urashima-Taro, and I thought the perfect place to film the story would be on this beach.



Anyway as I stepped onto the Kenyon stage and looked up into the seats it was silent. No echo of the past. Only unlimited joy of what can be. When I was an actor I had not enough experience of life to have anything really of significance to say. I think young actors only have sex appeal. They draw from the audience a libido and, only by chance of a fortunate playwright, any sort of authentic inspiration.

I have a life to drawn on. I have unlimited creativity. What I can do today is so much more than I ever had to offer when I was on that stage.

When I was memorizing Ballad of the Good Cowboy 12 years ago I felt that I was not old enough to play the role because, no matter how excellent my acting might be, I would be a young man impersonating men of greater years. And that is always false. In this play of many characters it is easier for an older man to adopt the life of a younger man for those scenes.

Today I could do it. Today I can do it.

The Ghost of Park Place

When I got a job at Park Place in the 90s doing the front desk on graveyard shift I didn't realize that I would be joining an exclusive club of Downtowner Front Desk alumni whose members occupied my position up to 30 years before I did. Periodically someone would saunter up to the desk with a knowing look and casually let it drop that they, too, did desk clerk duty some number of years ago. They were usually on their way to the bar in the back and not infrequently already not needing to visit another bar. The conversation was polite and pending until sooner or later they came to the real point of the encounter: they asked me if I had seen the ghost.

When the place was built in the early 60s it was called the Downtown Motor Lodge, but we all called it the Blue Dolphin because of the sign out front, and even from the first day there was a ghost who dropped into the Main Lobby around 2 AM. She was said to have been from prior ages when the corner lot site on Park Avenue West was occupied by the home of the Weaver family.

No one knows exactly which Weaver or why but she is always dressed in the voluminous garments reminiscent of 19th Century ladies apparel, and was most often seen in the part of the Hotel that would have been the front porch of the Weaver Residence back in her time.

If it is Helen Weaver, then her disorientation is not difficult to imagine because the world outside of the confines of her time and place is so drastically different now. In the 1880s she was responsible for starting the Public Library and other community institutions that brought refinement, beauty and dignity to this town. How bewildered she must have felt when the Blue Dolphin supplanted the integrity of her realm.

When you take a look at the charming tree-lined hometown appeal of Park Avenue a hundred years ago it is clear that what we see there today is the merest ghost of the personality that is the heritage of our town, and that the real ghost in this scenario is not Mrs. Weaver, but Mansfield itself: lost with no direction, no grounding, no sense of self situated in a dynamic moment of time and place.

Visitors who came to Mansfield between 1890 and 1950 left words behind on post cards and travel reports that still glow today in their appreciation for the loveliness of the streets and neighborhoods. They made picture postcards for people to send home - that people wanted to send home - showing simple views of residential blocks so enchanting that it would be a dream to live there.

So how did we get from that world to this one? Surely that's what Mrs Weaver is wondering too.

I put the question to an old man back in the 70s who had lived through the entire metamorphosis. It was his opinion that the young men who went off to WWII came back from the war with a self-consciousness so poisoned by the horrors they had witnessed that their sense of community was deformed...they were consumed with a desire to get what they could get and obliterate the past. Those young men of the 1950s were in positions of decision by the 1970s when the great demolition was at its height. Facing the economic realignment that our town was struggling through, their vision of what it would take to remain viable in 20th Century American society did not include any consideration of the heart-warming hometown charm that they had grown up with. Old fashioned meant outdated. Historic meant old fashioned.

* * *

I didn't get a good look at her -- it was just a glimpse from the very periphery of vision as I was sitting on a lobby couch watching the television screen -- but I read in an instant by her body language, facial expression and a certain hesitancy and bewilderment that she was lost. I assumed it most likely that she was a hotel guest looking for the ice machine or searching the wrong wing of the building for her room.

Then the phone rang and, stepping behind the desk, I anticipated her coming through the lobby door to ask directions. It was only when the phone distraction passed and she failed to come into the lobby that I engaged my space/time brain to realize that it was a Sunday night of a holiday weekend and there actually were no guests in the hotel.

* * *


So where does she go now? She is displaced once again. And where does Mansfield go now in its search for a sense of identity.