Spending Father's Day Casting Nasturtiums On His Good Name

I can’t resist re-posting this. Today would have been my father’s 84th birthday. I’m spending the day writing, Dad, and tonight we’ll drink a glass of red wine in your honour.

My father loved words, sounds, and language. I guess I’ll always feel that he played a role in setting me on my voice training path.

I remember back when I was working as a text coach for a production of ‘Medea’ at UBC, I’d discuss Greek pronunciations with him - did he think ‘Glauce’ should be pronounced ‘Glau - say’ or ‘Glau - kay’’, and so on. Dad was emphatic about the muscular sounds of the Greek language, insisting that “the vowels are long, the consonants are hard! It’s always ‘KUH, not ‘SUH’!” I’m not sure he was right about that, but it wasn’t about scholarly precision. He loved the vigour and vitality of those sounds. 

He felt the connection between characters and their utterances.  He once gleefully told me about a woman waiting in the line at the bank who, needing to sign a paper, had turned to him and asked, “can I borrow your paaaaaan?” From this articulation, Dad created an entire character.

He kept note of what he called “howlers” – warped expressions and malapropisms - whenever he heard them. Like the sailor “changing his tact”, or someone “casting nasturtiums on his good name”. Or typos - he took the time to clip an article out of the newspaper and mail it to me just so I could see that the headline read, “Detainee Welcomes a Pubic Inquiry”. Scrawled on the side of the paper was Dad’s voice: “Look at his big smile! And the wife’s expression!”

 At a launch party for ‘Piccolo Mondo’ he said, “Writing began for me in Grade Eleven…It continued at UBC where I sat in the basement of the student newspaper office every Thursday slowly clicking my loves and hates into a Remington typewriter and onto a column of arts criticism…What I loved most dearly, though, was reading poems to audiences, showing off...I’ve always loved having an audience. Lend me your ears.”

What I remember about him, and what guides me, is the way he spanned a continuum of physical, vocal, verbal, and written expression. He embodied words - reaching across, darting through, dancing along breath, muscle, sound, typeset, and ink. For him, sounds, speech, words and text merged in a way that is rare – a way that I will likely spend my whole life trying to understand.

To me, his sound and fury signified everything. 

All The Virtual World's A Stage

Last week I played my first Virtual Reality game. It’s called The Tempest, have you tried it?

There’s this old woman, Prospera, who lives on an island and wants revenge, it seems. I was the only player on that day, so I started as myself, then became Miranda…then I think I was the bad guy at one point, and then I was back to Miranda.

The whole Virtual Reality experience left my state altered for about 18 hours after the event. And not in the same way I used to be altered by live theatre experiences back in the old days. It was overwhelming at first - I was definitely overstimulated. But it soon faded to just an occasional flash through my brain of a spinning and swirling triangular cartoon character.

Now it’s hard to remember that it even happened at all. I mean, I know that it did. I have a sense of myself standing in my living room, looking like Princess Leia in that bounty hunter get-up that time she rescued Han Solo from Jabba The Hut, and, I gather, waving my arms around and shuffling my feet *cue hysterical laughter from those watching me*.

But the memory is housed in a different part of me, because my body-brain can’t recall much of it. I have no physical reference point of walking into a theatre and sitting in my seat. My heart did not beat in tempo with fellow audience members. My breath did not sync with the players on the stage.

Back at the start of 2020 I wrote about working and learning remotely, and the past six months has taught me a little more about that. And I have a lot to say - I am a talker, after all, and when I learn a little, I talk a lot. But in that respect, I’m thinking about the benefits of online learning, and I’ll try to articulate more about that later. Tomorrow. Because today I’m thinking about what happens when mind and body are separated. What happens when the head brain is receiving all the information and stimuli? The body brain is relegated to responding to, and adapting to, the unusual weight of machinery and electricity putting pressure on the cranium. Huh. What heavy issues must be virtually grappled with up there…

I’ve just now realized that in the Tempest game, I saw no Caliban. Where was that character? Was it too hard to integrate the data for a figure who embodies connection to the land? Too hard to find a digital role for a physical sense of place?

No wonder those VR figures have large heads covered by powerful, magical masks. Heads which lead the movements, and drive the figures endlessly forward, onward, through virtual space, as their light bodies float behind.

Spending Father's Day Casting Nasturtiums On His Good Name

My father loved words, sounds, and language. I guess I’ll always feel that he played a role in setting me on my voice training path.

I remember back when I was working as a text coach for a production of ‘Medea’ at UBC, I’d discuss Greek pronunciations with him - did he think ‘Glauce’ should be pronounced ‘Glau - say’ or ‘Glau - kay’’, and so on. Dad was emphatic about the muscular sounds of the Greek language, insisting that “the vowels are long, the consonants are hard! It’s always ‘KUH, not ‘SUH’!” I’m not sure he was right about that, but it wasn’t about scholarly precision. He loved the vigour and vitality of those sounds. 

He felt the connection between characters and their utterances.  He once gleefully told me about a woman waiting in the line at the bank who, needing to sign a paper, had turned to him and asked, “can I borrow your paaaaaan?” From this articulation, Dad created an entire character.

He kept note of what he called “howlers” – warped expressions and malapropisms - whenever he heard them. Like the sailor “changing his tact”, or someone “casting nasturtiums on his good name”. Or typos - he took the time to clip an article out of the newspaper and mail it to me just so I could see that the headline read, “Detainee Welcomes a Pubic Inquiry”. Scrawled on the side of the paper was Dad’s voice: “Look at his big smile! And the wife’s expression!”

 At a launch party for ‘Piccolo Mondo’ he said, “Writing began for me in Grade Eleven…It continued at UBC where I sat in the basement of the student newspaper office every Thursday slowly clicking my loves and hates into a Remington typewriter and onto a column of arts criticism…What I loved most dearly, though, was reading poems to audiences, showing off...I’ve always loved having an audience. Lend me your ears.”

What I remember about him, and what guides me, is the way he spanned a continuum of physical, vocal, verbal, and written expression. He embodied words - reaching across, darting through, dancing along breath, muscle, sound, typeset, and ink. For him, sounds, speech, words and text merged in a way that is rare – a way that I will likely spend my whole life trying to understand.

To me, his sound and fury signified everything. 

That Was Then, This Is Now

Here's a photo I found in a old file folder, taken when I was coaching ‘Romeo & Juliet’ at the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival in 2007.

...and here's another one, taken recently by the genius Mark Halliday, during rehearsals at Bard on the Beach again this summer.

These pictures track a decade of my coaching life.  I'm now bespectacled, goofier, and apparently still unable to speak without the hand.