Jesse Cole is a genius... or else a damn good dramaturg.
 
Either way, he took baseball—a traditional sport that has become notorious for dull action and interminable overtimes, rewrote the rules, and introduced the nation and the world to “Banana Ball.” This April, the Savannah Bananas sold out an 81,000-seat stadium in four hours. Tickets go by lottery now, because they are among the hardest tickets to get in all sports. 
 
This is going to be a blog about theatre, so bear with me. 
 
Cole started his meteoric career in the fall of 2015, when he moved to Savannah to become the general manager of a college summer team. Cole had the idea to make baseball fun and to bring back the fans... but neither of those things happened. By January 2016, just before their first game, the team’s bank account was overdrawn, and Jesse and Emily Cole had to sell their home to keep their dream afloat.  

But then, one month later, Cole announced the name of the team, and the rest is history. The Savannah Bananas have sold out every single game since their first season, playing in NFL and MLB stadiums across the country.
 
How did this happen? 
 
Like I said, natural genius or really excellent dramaturgy. (Dramaturgy is the theory and practice of dramatic composition.) It’s pretty simple, actually. Cole looked at what wasn’t working and then he looked at what would. 

What do the people want? They want to be entertained. They want to be surprised, delighted. They want to see something larger than life. Like a ballplayer on stilts. Like a backflip catch. They want suspense and momentum right up to the last second.

What don’t they want? To be bored or annoyed.  Like with a shut-out game, where everyone knows who is going to win before the game is half over. They don’t like "walking the ball,"  when the pitcher throws four balls and the batter is granted a leisurely, no-risk saunter to first base.  Oh, and bunting…  *yawn*  And,  then, of course, there is that time thing. In 1981, there was actually a professional baseball game that ran for 33-innings. Sprawling and crawling for more than eight hours, it lasted three days. Yeah, that happened. 

So, Banana Ball games have a two-hour time limit. No new innings allowed after 120 minutes. You can actually make plans for your life after the game.
 
How did Cole manage that? Well, games are won by points, instead of runs. The team that scores the most runs in an inning gets one point, except in the final inning when every run counts as one point.
 
Did you hear that?  In the final inning, every run counts as a point. That means that no matter how uneven the score, the losing team can always make a comeback in the last inning. Edge-of-your-seat stuff, built-in. Genius. Also a much-needed message for our time: It's never too late. 
 
No bunting allowed. And walking the ball has been replaced by the “ball-four sprints.”  What’s that, you ask? After ball four, the batter starts to run and they cannot be tagged out until all four infielders and all three outfielders have touched the ball. Instead of the leisurely stroll, it's super-fast action involving the entire team with even a possibility of a home run! Suspense and momentum! 

Cole has figured out that nothing energizes a crowd like breaking the fourth wall. Banana Ball allows for game-changing participation.  If a fan catches a foul ball, it’s an automatic out. And if the umpire makes an unpopular call? Well, the fans  have the opportunity, once a game, to challenge that call! Way more exciting than yelling “Throw the bum out!” Lived lessons in democracy. And fans love the “Golden Batter Rule.”  Once in every game, a team may send any hitter in the lineup to bat in any spot. So when the game is on the line, the fan favorite has a shot at saving the day. Super-hero stuff!
 
Food?  Unbelievably, the $20 ticket price includes all you can eat. With a pack of kids, it’s almost like getting in for free. Cole has done the math. There is that two-hour time limit, and what he might lose in individual sales, he more than makes up for with sell-out volumes. Families can budget both their time and their money in advance. And the free food makes for enhanced merch sales. Win-win. 
 
Everything in Banana Ball can be a game or a show.  For example... what if the the pitcher and batter play Rock-Paper-Scissors before each pitch? If the pitcher wins, the batter has to bat from the opposite side of home plate, but if the batter wins, the pitcher has to announce what kind of pitch he's going to throw. Genius.

The Savannah Banana walk-ups are legendary, often starting in the stands and involving lip-syncing and dance choreography.  The fans never know when the team is going to bust a move in the middle of the game.  And the home run celebrations are wild. 
 
But wait, wait… There’s more.  The cheerleaders! 

There are the "Savannah Banana Nanas," composed of women over sixty-five doing hip-hop dances, and the "Man-Nanas," aka “The Dad-Bod Squad,” who lead cheers with their beer bellies proudly on display. There is also a girls' junior dance team called "The Splitz."  They look like Taylor Swift fans. And the team mascot? A Banana named "Split."

Every game begins with the "Banana Baby ceremony," where a baby in a banana costume is lifted by a parent to the pitcher's mound while players and fans salute and "Circle of Life" plays. There is something for everybody in Banana Ball... except the creepers who would sexually objectify traditional cheerleaders. For the win, Cole! 

Obviously, rival Banana Ball teams are popping up all over the country, and this fall, the league formally inducted the "Indianapolis Clowns." The original Indianapolis Clowns were a popular team in the Negro Leagues, including such legends as Hank Aaron and Satchel Paige. This revival club wears a modernized form of the uniform jerseys of the old club. The revival of the Clowns name was done in partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and former Major League first baseman Ryan Howard is the “Prime Time manager” for the team. Respect.
 
Cole is obviously swinging for the fences when it comes to pleasing a crowd, but he’s not swinging wildly. At one point, he took to videotaping the crowds in order to study what was happening on the field when walkouts would occur. There’s a science as well as an art to Banana Ball.
 
And, yes, this blog is about theatre. Is anybody videotaping or polling our audiences to determine why they are walking out.... or whether they wanted to walk out but didn't?  Why is live theatre becoming something of a cultural oxbow lake, cut off from the currents of mainstream popular culture, stagnating into a bog of mediocrity?

How are producers adjusting to changes in audience tastes and time-money budgets?  Let's take a look:

The majority of new play competitions are now featuring nothing but ten-minute plays. Or, as we used to call them, "skits" and "sketches."  No time for subplots, character development, or anything else but maybe one plot twist and a laugh or two. But cheap. And if you don't like what you see, there'll be another one along in ten minutes.

And fifty minutes, which used to be the length of a one-act play, is now  defined in some venues as "full-length." Very few plays—usually the vintage ones—still have two intermissions.  Many plays don't have any intermissions at all. Casts are getting smaller and smaller,  and single sets are practically de rigueur for new plays.
 
But isn’t this what Jesse Cole did.. adjust to the times?  No! He understood that two hours was a good thing.  He didn't establish a 50-minute game. He didn't arrange for an exhibition of short, but disconnected 10-minute plays. And he didn't skimp on the drama. He amped the opportunities. He keeps his eye on the ball.

What live theater is doing is actually the opposite of Jesse Cole’s strategy. It is just naked cost-cutting.  It's lazy moves to lop off the most obvious, low-hanging fruit of production expenses.  It's actually cutting off the nose to spite the face.  These moves on the part of producers decrease and eliminate the spectacle, disincentivize audience investment, and minimize suspense and momentum. Plays are getting small in every way. Actors are at risk of losing range. Stakes are lowered. As the stories are stripped down, themes are increasingly trivial and only marginally relevant. The original definition of theatre as "an arena of significant events” is becoming sadly archaic. 
 
And the more live theatre loses audiences and hemorrhages red ink, the deeper the cuts. Think of the money that could be saved by not producing at all!

I understand that live theatre is not Banana Ball.  But there is much to be learned from Cole’s experiment.  I am remembering an apocryphal anecdote about Russian actor, director, and producer Konstantin Stanislavski. When asked if there was a difference between children’s theatre and theatre for adults, he responded, “Yes! Children’s theatre is harder!”
 
Why would he say that?  Because when a play fails to engage the attention of a child, that child will let us know it. They will wander into the aisle or onto the stage. They will turn around and begin a loud conversation with their neighbor, who is probably also bored. Children will make the dramaturgical failures of the play into a serious problem for the producers, actors, and playwright... which it should be.  Modern audiences are too polite, and producers oblige them by turning out the lights, so they can nap.  Wagner was the first to do that in 1876, at the premiere of his Ring Cycle in Bayreuth.  Perhaps that was the beginning of the end. Imagine the Banana fans sitting in isolating darkness, unable to share their experience with those 8100 other fans... 

What if the true immersive experience is one where the audience is thoroughly  immersed in the experience of being part of an audience, where they can register and reflect the bad calls by the playwright and actors, where they can catch the occasional foul ball and even change the trajectory of the game? 
 
What if we stopped the piecemeal removal of the vital organs of live theatre, and began to dramaturg a play as if it were a spectator sport? Because, swear to God,  that's what it is. 

Discovering the relationship between lesbian artists Berthe Wegmann and Jeanna Bauck has been a revelation, and it could not have come at a better time. 
 
Berthe and Jeanna were both European painters born in the 1840’s.  Although Berthe was a Dane and Jeanna a Swede, they managed to work together, study together, travel together, and—for long stretches of time—live together. They left a trove of letters, dating from the 1880’s to the 1920’s. But, more to the point, they left us their paintings of each other. And these are packed with codes of lesbian resistance.

As lesbian poet Audre Lorde writes, “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” If this is true, and I believe that it is, then what happens when we find ourselves confronted by lesbian art that resonates with these “unexpressed or unrecognized” feelings? I believe there is an unleashing of this power. The paintings of these women, like metaphysical defibrillators, sent a current of lesbian electricity through my system, resetting the joyous rhythm my Sapphic heart.
 
But before I talk about these paintings and what they mean to me, let’s set the stage.  This was the first generation of European women artists who had a real shot at becoming professional painters, because, prior to the mid-19th century, women had been denied access to all the traditional pipelines for advancement in the arts. There were, of course, the lucky few whose fathers were professional artists open-minded or financially strapped enough to train and apprentice their daughters. Grateful as we are to the Rosa Bonheurs and the Artemisia Gentileschis who won the parentage lottery, this does not mitigate the cultural loss from generations of unrealized female genius.

But the world was changing. The art schools were beginning to offer instruction to women, and recognized male artists were taking on women as students. Both Bertha and Jeanna had begun their training with private lessons—Berthe in Copenhagen and Jeanna in Munich. Then, in 1867, when she was twenty-one, Bertha moved to Munich, a German city with good exhibition opportunities and low living expenses.  Four years later, she met Jeanna, who was already living there. Berthe was twenty-four and Jeanna was thirty-one. In short order, Bertha moved in and the women cohabited in Munich for nearly a decade.
 
Berthe and Jeanna, like many artists in Europe, were restless…  There was this exhilarating movement coming out of France called “Impressionism.”  The Impressionists were going outside and painting “en plein air.” Instead of cursing the fickleness of the elements, they actually celebrated the transitory effects of sunlight in their art through the rapid use of “broken” brush strokes, sometimes with unmixed pigments, making no attempt to blend. The immediacy of their startlingly vibrant paintings marked a radical departure from tradition.  

There was also an interesting group of artists in Italy, the “Macchiaioli” painters. Influenced by the Impressionists, they were focused on the play of light and shadow, considering this contrast to be the major component of a painting.
 
Jeanna and Berthe began working en plein air and traveling to Italy for painting trips. In fact, Jeanna would come to be known for her landscapes.

Then, in 1880, the Académie Julian in Paris did the unthinkable: They threw open their doors to women… and Jeanna and Berthe grabbed their palettes and brushes and headed to France. They rented rooms in a guesthouse on Rue des Bruxelles, in the 9th arondissement, and they also shared a studio. Women artists from all over Europe were coming to study at the Académie Julian, forming a dynamic, international, all-women community of students.
 
But before we consider those Paris years… who were Berthe and Jeanna, really?
 
Helen Thorell, a fellow painter who lived in the same guesthouse, wrote this about meeting Jeanna:
 
"Jeanna Bauck is one of the most adorable people I have met in my life. The first impression, i.e. her appearance is not appealing—she looks like a student with her short hair, but that similarity disappears as soon as you talk to her. She seems exceptionally mild, bright, modest and always with bon courage. She is 39 years old, which I almost could not believe, but she told me today. She is awaiting an intimate friend and moreover a prominent painter from Munich, Miss Wegmann, Danish, who will also be living here… I almost dare to say that Jeanna and I have already become good friends."

A decade later, the artist Pauline Becker, who was one of Jeanna's students, would write: "Jeanna Bauck […] is extremely practical. Everything she says, in
fact, is practical and at the same time wonderfully subtle. She is very modern, which means, in the good sense of the word, nothing more than youthful effervescence. She is in remarkable condition for someone fifty years old. I love her very much. Speaking with her gives me a feeling of great comfort. She is so
charming and innocent, has that kind of innocence that simply disarms you."

Helen Thorell found it more difficult to befriend Berthe: “Bertha is a fragile nature, […] and it would not happen, even just for an hour that Jeanna would separate from her.” This dependence and introversion are a theme throughout Berthe’s life. Berthe wrote this about living apart from Jeanna, “…as long as she is not there, too, I feel drawn back and forth and have nowhere to gain a foothold.” In 1889, during a lengthy stay with Jeanna, Jeanna wrote this to a mutual friend: “Now in Munich she has become really unsociable, cannot stand talking to anyone, locks herself up in the studio, and doesn’t want to do anything but quietly sit and paint with me, read and keep silent! I am the only lucky one who is allowed to be around.”
 
But for now, they are together, and Paris was the place for early career painters. Achieving recognition for one’s work in Paris carried significant weight in cities outside of France, and Jeanna and Berthe were keen to make their mark. The biggest flex was having a painting accepted into the annual Salon, the official, two-hundred-year-old exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The Académie itself was closed to women, but anyone could submit their work to the judges.

Jeanna had one of her plein air landscapes, Summer Evening, accepted into the 1880 Salon. The next year, she made it into the Salon again, but this time as the subject of a painting by her lover Berthe.

But before I talk about that miracle of a portrait, I want to set the scene:
 
Here are these are two brilliantly gifted painters in the early years of their career. The portrait is set in their studio... that most precious, rare, coveted, sacred, and sanctified “room of one’s own.” The artist Marie Bashkirtseff, a contemporary, had this to say about studios:
 
"In the studio, everything disappears, you don’t have a name, no family; you are no longer the daughter of your mother, you are yourself, you are an individual and you have art in front of you and nothing else. You are so happy, so free, so proud."
 
And this is a studio in Paris. And, most exciting of all, Jeanna and Berthe are middle-class women on the adventure of a lifetime, living "comme les garçons." That’s a French expression that has become an English idiom, meaning “as the boys do.” Berthe and Jeanna are living without chaperones or family, renting rooms in an arts district. They are taking their painting seriously—professionally… comme les garçons. They walk the streets alone or with other young women, they go out at night, they do as they please… comme les garçons.

No doubt, they are reading the just-published book Studying Art Abroad And How To Do It Cheaply, which offered this advice to female art students: “It only needs, however, the co-operation of a sufficient number of earnest female students to form a club, hire a studio, choose a critic, and engage models, to secure the same advantages now enjoyed only by men, at the same exceedingly low rates.” Comme les garçons. Jeanna and Berthe are doing what they love, and doing it all day long and often far into the night. They are living the dream. And painting it.
 
And their Paris studio is the setting of the painting titled The Artist Jeanna Bauck.
 
To me, it’s obviously some kind of sacred grove or temple. There is a massive vine across the top of the canvas, creating a bower effect. There has been no attempt to tame this plant, and it appears to be taking over the space. The leaves are not arranged for effect; they follow their own inclination, crowding toward the light from the window. The overarching presence of this vine suggests that the outdoors is either moving indoors, or perhaps the indoors is in the process of returning to nature.

“Under her own vine,” as the Hebrew scriptures would say, Jeanna sits enthroned not on a chair, but on a table, her table… which Bertha has painted at a giddy tilt, with a counter-tilting palette suspended on the wall above one of Jeanna’s landscapes. Jeanna, she-of-the-feral-arts, perches on her table surrounded by the tools of her craft and the wildness of nature. Her hair is cut short, comme les garçons, and in its feathery, blonde anarchy, it catches and reflects the light like a halo.
 
And what is our goddess doing amid all these tilting planes, underneath the undomesticated vine and that radiant nimbus of unruly hair?  Well, clearly, she has been interrupted. We know this, because she has just closed her book, keeping a finger in it to mark the page.   
 
Now, look… I am a lesbian who owes her life to books. Helen Keller put it perfectly: “Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends.” And because I am a lesbian who loves books, I notice art that combines women and books. Don’t judge. And yes, apparently it is “a thing.” There is the 1903 marble monument to the Empress Elisabeth “Sisi” of Austria in Merano, Italy.

And here's a collage from across the centuries...

There is also the delightful 1972 series, “Books and Fingers,” by Jen Mazza, of which this is just a sampling...

Back to The Artist Jeanna Bauck... So the subject has been interrupted, but she is not disturbed. In fact, she is leaning forward eagerly, toward the source of the interruption, who must be Bertha herself. Jeanna is smiling, her lips parted. Her expression is one of ease and delight: “What is it, liebchen?”
 
And she does something else that is very comme les garçons: She crosses her legs. In 1881, ladies only crossed their ankles. Leg-crossing was the exclusive purview of males, at least in portraiture. But here’s the thing: Jeanna isn’t posing. That’s the point. Like the vine leaves over her head, Jeanna arranges herself as suits her nature. Just as they grow toward the window light, so she leans forward toward the light of her love.  And in return, the painter is capturing an image of her lover being herself, because... what could be more beautiful?

Jeanna wears a smock. It’s a nice one, but it’s a working-woman’s garment. It has a job to do: keep the pigment off the dress underneath. Also… no corset, which explains her ability to hold that leaning-over pose. And how does she accessorize? Practically. She wears a watch.
 
She does have something on a gold chain hanging from her neck, but on closer inspection, one can see that it’s a “notebook necklace.” These were very small notebooks with gold or silver covers, usually with a writing implement fastened to one of the sides. Without pockets or cellphones, a notebook necklace was handy for keeping track of appointments, addresses, and errand lists. It signifies, again, a working woman. So… a watch and a notebook… but what about jewelry?

Well… Yes. Jeanna’s jewelry in this portrait is no afterthought. It’s actually the secondary focal point of the painting, her face being primary. In fact, unlike her casual posture and demeanor, her hands appear to be deliberately posed, specifically to foreground her jewelry. The positioning of the wrists appears stiff and uncomfortable. She is having to support the hand holding the book.
 
Jeanna is, in fact, wearing a wedding ring and an engagement ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, a signifier of marital status since Roman times. She is showing us that she is a married… married, but yet not a wife--comme les garçons.
 
Berthe and Jeanna have married each other in secret and now they are telling the world without telling the world.

The Artist Jeanna Bauck is a painting bursting with lesbian joy, pride, love of self, love of studio, love of independence, love of the painter who is painting her, love of life, of spring, of art, of the world. I look at this painting, I look at the eyes of Jeanna, and I say, “Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes… Oh, yes!”

And the Salon judges accepted it in 1881, because there was no way to say no. The painting was much noted at the exhibit and very well-received, even if some assumed, because of the extraordinary intimacy, that it must have been a self-portrait!

Back in Bertha’s hometown, however, the reception was decidedly different. In 1881, she wrote this in a letter to a fellow artist back in Paris: “My studies, and Jeanna’s portrait simply have no luck here, they look at them dumbfounded, and there is no one that comprehends one whit of my painting.” A year later, she wrote, “I despise the Danes with their philistinism, which pervades all their manners and tastes. Would you believe they found Jeanna’s portrait to be “flighty and wild”, this means to say as much as in Swedish “rusket” [unruly] and for the sole reason that she is not sitting neatly combed in a chair with her hands tidily in her lap, as in all their other portraits.”

I’m not sure that Bertha’s assessment of these Danish critiques is accurate. I remember when I was first coming out, I had a crush on a lesbian actor who identified as butch. Intrigued, I asked her, “What is ‘butch’?” She answered me with immense sadness: “Nobody can tell you, but everybody knows it when they see it.” I have never forgotten that, and I believe that the good people of Copenhagen, standing in front of The Artist Jeanna Bauck, knew exactly what they were seeing. And, unfortunately, their judgement fell more heavily on Jeanna than on the woman who painted her. The portrait was controversial enough outside of Paris to raise questions about Jeanna’s professionalism.

And so it was, four years later, Berthe would set out to make a second portrait of her beloved—one that would silence the critics. By then, the women had left their student days behind. Jeanna was back in Munich, opening a school for women artists and supporting her mother and sister. Berthe had returned to Copenhagen. In 1885, seeking medical treatment for rheumatism and anemia, Berthe was temporarily in Dresden, and Jeanna came to take care of her. It was during this time that Berthe painted the Portrait of Jeanna Bauck.

In the first portrait, Berthe had painted Jeanna as an artist. This time she would paint her as a lady. Veil, check. Gloves, check. Absence of all color, check. Conspicuous consumption, check-check-check-check. Bourgeois to the hilt and “come il faut,” which is another French expression that has become an English idiom. It means “as it should be.”

Art historian Frances Borzello talks about how the female artist has traditionally had to use self-portraiture to reconcile “the conflict between what society expected of women and what it expected of artists.” ("Comme il faut" versus "comme les garçons?") According to Borzello:

“The problem for women – and the challenge – was that these two sets of expectations were diametrically opposed. The answer was a creative defensiveness. It is only through understanding the women’s desire to out-maneuver the critics by anticipating their responses that one can begin to make sense of why their self-portraits look as they do.”

So here sits Jeanna, upright and in a chair. If her legs are crossed, we can’t tell. She’s not going to show us her wedding rings, either. They’re under a glove. The hair has been captured by the netting of the veil and lies squashed under it.

Now, there is one small signifier: the pince-nez glasses. In 1885 ladies preferred the lorgnette, a pair of glasses with a long handle that could be held in front of one’s eyes. The lorgnette was impractical for reading anything more taxing than the hallmark on the bottom of a china cup. That Jeanna has pince-nez indicates that she does close work (writing, reading, or painting) for extended periods of time. It’s a mark of professionalism, and, of course, comme les garçons.

It is difficult to believe that there have only been four years between the Paris studio portrait and this one.

This is the mature look of a woman who has had to make and to accept painful concessions in her art and in her life. In fact, this entire portrait represents a concession. Jeanna is struggling financially, while Berthe’s career in Copenhagen is so successful, she is turning down portrait commissions almost every week. Berthe is painting this portrait in hopes of advancing her partner's career.  If accepted, it will hang in the Paris Salon, as a testimony to Jeanna’s middle-class respectability.

But there is something else. Jeanna is sitting for this portrait, because Berthe has been sick, too sick to work, and this is a project that has revived her interest in painting. And so, Jeanna is wearing tight, expensive, and uncomfortable clothing, as a concession to her long-distance lover who believes that a bourgeois portrait is all it will take to bring acceptance and recognition to an obvious lesbian. Jeanna’s face, full of tenderness, fatigue, and resignation, says it all.  She is indulging her lover.

This portrait fills me with something more profound than joy. It fills me with poignant, beautiful, and powerful  lesbian truths about loving women in a patriarchal world.

And there is one more thing in this painting that I want to talk about. The chair. It is the ugliest chair I’ve ever seen, and I have seen and owned my share. It’s a chair that Goodwill might turn down.  The color is ghastly, and the leather or the cloth is so shabby that the wooden struts of the chair back are beginning to wear through. The twisted braid has some kind of frayed, metallic thread that highlights the shabbiness.

Why would an artist choose, or allow,  such an unattractive prop? Her subject is certainly dressed to impress. Why this monstrosity?

I have to conclude the chair is intentional. As intentional as the display of the wedding rings in the earlier portrait. The chair happened to be at hand, that’s all. It was there, so they used it. And that’s the point. The most elegant chair in the world or the most dilapidated... the difference is insignificant in the presence of Jeanna’s luminous spirit. And here is Audre Lorde again… “It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.”

Jeanna needs no high-status chair to prop up her character.  In fact, Berthe painted her in her artist’s temple in the 1880 portrait, but the public could not see it and would not understand it. So, now, what they get is the chair. The ugly one from someone else’s room, an example of Borzello’s “creative defensiveness.”

The painting was accepted into the 1885 Salon.

Four years later Jeanna returned the favor, painting Berthe in “The Danish Artist Bertha Wegmann Painting a Portrait.”
 
Now, in my humble opinion, this is the quintessential butch self-portrait. Bear with me.  Jeanna is painting her lover painting a man. She is standing behind Berthe, where she can see the subject and also the painting.  The subject is a renowned Danish physician and psychiatrist. It’s quite a feather in Berthe’s cap to be commissioned by him, and Jeanna is going to paint the occasion as a giant letter-of-recommendation for all of Paris to see. 
 
But back to the butch self-portrait.  Jeanna quite literally has Berthe’s back. Berthe’s back is turned to us and her head blocks our view of the canvas. In essence, Jeanna has made the painting into a portrait of the back of Berthe’s head. Now, what do we know? We know that Berthe is reclusive. She doesn’t like being around people. She doesn't like being looked at. She wants Jeanna by her side all the time. We also know that, for career reasons, she has moved back to Copenhagen.  And yet, this painting was made in Jeanna’s Munich studio. Is it possible that she has arranged an extended visit in order to execute this portrait? That Mr. Dethlefsen has had to travel to Munich for the sittings? And that the whole point is to have Jeanna in the studio for every one of his sittings? 

Jeanna is standing outside of the frame, but offering critical support to her lover, holding the space and creating safety that allows Berthe to focus on her work without distraction. She is also creating a record of Berthe’s professionalism. Viewing this portrait through the lens of lesbian culture, Jeanna may not be visible, but her loving presence informs and animates every aspect of the picture.

And, yes, the painting was hung in the 1889 Salon

And there is one more portrait that has come down to us. In 1905, Berthe painted  the “Portrait of the Swedish Painter Jeanna Bauck.” Jeanna is sixty-five.

This time the chair is draped with some kind of expensive fabric. The style is more impressionistic, less focused on details.  Jeanna has moved the rings to her right hand, possibly in acknowledgement that Berthe has been living with another woman for nearly a decade, a woman seventeen years younger than Berthe.

In 1893, at the age of forty-seven, Berthe met Toni Müller, who was thirty-one.  In a letter to their mutual friend Helen Thorell, she wrote: "I have got a new friend who is living with me now, but Jeanna allows it, because it is a sweet quite young girl, actually a true child, I met her in the summer on Rügen, and she became so fond of me that she asked if she could come along with me. I like her a lot and her company is a great joy and comfort to me. Jeanna knows how much her company means to me and she is happy that I am not so alone anymore."

Jeanna was more ambivalent than Berthe’s letter would imply. Jeanna described her as “beautiful, energetic, domineering, but everything around her has a tendency towards the abnormal – otherwise endlessly good-hearted.” She also, occasionally, referred to her as “Berthe’s foster child.” But, as Berthe noted, Jeanna had allowed it.

Why? Because she lived in Munich and Berthe was in Copenhagen. Berthe, in her extreme isolation, needed a companion, a protector... and, as she aged, a caregiver. One more concession.

But something else had happened during the period between the portraits: World War I.  Jeanna had remained in Munich, where the hardships of the Allied blockade were severe. During the war years, both food and fuel were in short supply. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians died from starvation and malnutrition, and another hundred thousand died of the Spanish flu in 1918. The borders were, of course, closed and the women could not visit each other. The war was followed by a revolution in the streets of Munich, and the economic chaos from reparations and hyperinflation.

It’s probable that Berthe sent money and packages of food to Jeanna. As Jeanna would later write, "I barely got through it alive."

Jeanna is not looking at Berthe in this portrait. She appears to be lost in her own thoughts. The book in her hands is now closed—finished, no longer half-read. Although the war has been over for seven years, it has taken a terrible toll. She has survived years of indescribable trauma. But the character, the inner resolve of Jeanna is still evident in the painting. This is the same inner resolve that took her to Paris in pursuit of her bliss. It’s the same inner resolve that manifest itself as tenderness in the 1885 portrait. It’s the inner resolve that had her lover’s back in 1889.

Interested in reading more about Bauck and Wegmann? Check out  Becoming Artists: Self-Portraits, Friendship Images and Studio Scenes by Nordic Women Painters in the 1880s by Carina Rech.

Well, this got my attention:
 
“In 1665, actors put on the first play in colonial America and were immediately arrested for public wickedness.” 
 
If we are seeking relevant antecedents for modern times, we turn to this era at our peril. It was the era of, well, colonization.  Colonization, enslavement, and genocide.
 
Still, I was intrigued.  Was this because theatre was prohibited?  In the Massachusetts colonies, we know that theatre, dancing, cockfighting, boxing, and other entertainments were banned as “forms of levity and mirth [that lead] easily to sin.”  But this incident occurred in Pungoteague, Virginia—in a tavern, no less. Unlike Massachusetts, which was colonized by Pilgrims and Puritans, the Virginia colony had been established by a joint-stock company chartered by King James I. Whether or not capitalist imperialism constitutes a form of cult is the subject for another blog, but, in any event, Pungoteague was not Puritan.
 
Yes, theatres across the Pond had been officially closed and mostly silent during two civil wars and the period of rule by Oliver Cromwell, but, by 1660, the Restoration was on and English theatres were opening up again. In fact, they were an integral part of the process of re-establishing the hereditary monarchy.

Well, then, was it an issue of petty grievances?  Were the actors locked up at the behest of a powerful neighbor who had some kind of beef with them—a boundary dispute or a wandering spouse? Certainly, up north, the courts were not above arresting local scapegoats—mostly female—accusing them of witchcraft, and then hanging them.
 
But here’s the thing…  The itinerant judge for Accomack County requested a re-enactment of the play at the hearing, which—there being no official courthouse yet—was held at Fowkes Tavern, conveniently the site of the alleged crime.  The judge, obviously a connoisseur, even specified that the defendants were to show up in “those habilments that they then acted in.”  This would indicate that the actual content of the play was at issue. In other words, the trial was to determine whether or not the performance contained material that constituted “public wickedness.”
 
Well, did it?

The records of the case are scanty, but we do know the title of the work: Ye Beare and Ye Cubb, aka The Bear and the Cub. Remember this is during the colonial era, about a century before the Revolution. What came to be known as the British Commonwealth, upon which “the sun never sets,” was just getting started. “Mother England” had colonies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, the Carolinas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and—the original one—Virginia. 
 
Scholars have speculated that this bear-and-cub thing was a metaphor for the Virginia colony’s relationship to England. One such scholar, Joel Eis, relates the play to the tensions between an upper class still loyal to England and a rising middle-class of merchants who were angry about restrictions that the king had placed on international tobacco trade—tobacco being Virginia’s cash crop.  Further, Eis has located a number of pamphlets and speeches from the 1660’s that employ similar “parent-progeny” analogies to criticize England’s patronizing relationship to its colonies.
 
The specific charge “public wickedness” adds credence to this theory. What exactly is “public wickedness?”  Apparently, it was a colorful term for blasphemy, which, according to my dictionary app, is “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things.”  And there is rub:  Sacred things.  Like Mother England…? Like King Charles II…? 

Public wickedness is a concept that is very much still with us today. It has undergone a number of permutations across the centuries. By 1735, for example, it had become “seditious libel.”  Under English law, it was a criminal offense to publish or otherwise make statements intended to criticize or provoke dissatisfaction with the government. Ironically, truth was not a defense and, in fact, made the offense worse. English libel law spelled it out: “The greater the truth, the greater the libel.” Who knew?
 
This law was tested in the colonies in the 1735 trial of a printer named John Peter Zenger. He put out a weekly journal that routinely roasted the governor of New York… and, remember, in the colonial era, this governor would have been appointed, not elected. Not surprisingly, the governor hand-picked the two judges to evaluate the allegedly libelous material, and, also not surprisingly, they found in his favor. The jury, however, was of a different mind. At the urging of none other than Alexander Hamilton, they defied the judges and acquitted Zenger.
 
Then there were two brief decades following the Revolution when the young United States apparently let public wickedness run rampant, but by 1798, Congress passed four laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government or its officials.
 
It was, needless to say, not a popular law, and it expired when John Adams left office in 1801. After this, public wickedness had an astounding century-plus-long run before another sedition law was instituted. This happened in 1918, to amend an espionage act that was passed the previous year.

These laws were responses to concerns raised by the Great War. The Sedition Act came hard for public wickedness, imposing “a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both” on anyone who dared “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” It was repealed three years later, but not before legendary trade-union activist Eugene Debs had been sentenced to ten years in prison.
 
The Sedition Act of 1918 was repealed in 1920, although many parts of the original Espionage Act still remain in force. In fact, the charge leveled against controversial whistleblower Edward Snowden was a violation of two counts of the 1917 Espionage Act.
 
Anyway…  there was another world war and another sedition law. This one was called the Smith Act, and it was passed in 1940, making it a criminal offense to advocate the violent overthrow of the government or to organize or be a member of any group or society devoted to such advocacy. 

During the notorious witch-hunts of the 1950’s, the Smith Act was applied broadly to members of the Communist Party, to labor union activists, and folks rumored to be gay or lesbian. In 1957, we the people said, "Enough is enough," and the act was amended to limit its application. Now, under the Smith Act, the prosecutor bears a considerably greater burden of proof, because they must prove “beyond reasonable doubt” active participation in or verbal encouragement of specific insurrectionary acts.  In other words, no more prosecutions based on sexual orientation, membership in trade unions or civil rights organizations, and so on.

The Smith Act, even in its worst iteration, did establish an important precedent. Because it was federal law, it has been used to nullify various sedition acts passed by individual states. Some of these have been profoundly arbitrary, vague, and even draconian. Good riddance.
 
Well, we have certainly wandered far afield of Fowke’s Tavern and Pungoteague…
 
The playwrights and actors had their day on December 18, 1665. The judges failed to see the public wickedness alleged by the plaintiff, and, in fact, the plaintiff didn’t even bother to show up.  All charges were dismissed and the plaintiff was ordered to pay everyone’s court costs. And thus ends the historic record of the first English-language play performed on these shores.

But I worry about public wickedness. I do. I’m a playwright--an American playwright--and my cultural lineage absolutely traces back to Ye Beare and Ye Cubb.
 
I am not afraid of violating the Smith Act. I am afraid of violating something far hazier, far more pervasive, more pernicious, and, ironically, something that appears increasingly to be itself approaching violation of the Smith Act. 
 
I am talking about the stream of executive orders of the current regime. I’m talking about executive orders that:

No, none of these tell me what I can and can’t write. But they certainly tell me what I can expect if I promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. I can expect to be banned from production contracts, from performing, from teaching, from lecturing, and from a very broad range of funding sources.
 
So, what exactly constitutes “promoting DEI?” Writing a play that features a disabled character? A character of color? That centers women’s rights, or lack thereof?  At what point does race-specific casting fall under promoting inclusion? Or, open-casting, for that matter? I tend to write about historical themes. What if history itself promotes DEI—and what history doesn’t?  
 
I have to second-guess what this means, or else go with “better-safe-than-sorry” themes, which, by process of elimination, appear to be narratives focused solely on white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class, male heroes and their struggles.

Well... I do have another choice. I can opt for public wickedness. My heritage. My birthright. And when I ask myself what "public wickedness" means in today’s theatre, I hear the admonition of longtime civil rights activist and Georgia Representative John R. Lewis:
 
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
 
Public wickedness is good trouble, necessary trouble. And it’s also something else. It’s a duty.
 
Not to put too fine a point on it… Here are the  words of Dr. Toni Morrison, and, make no mistake, she is talking about healing:

“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”

Amen.

Deb Randall has just published two books: a collection of monologues by women playwrights she has produced, Frozen Women, Flowing Thoughts, and a memoir, Venus. Venus Theatre has produced more than 70 plays by women since 2000, a phenomenal track record. She has produced  readings or full productions of a dozen of my plays, and her journey has been an inspiration to me.

CG: The issue of space is interesting to me. I feel it’s the tail that wags the dog. Reading your memoir, I was struck by your struggles and the adaptations you made in finding and creating venues in DC and then in Laurel (outside Baltimore.) Your thoughts on this… and the future of little theatres in light of the insane inflation of rental costs…? 

DR: Fortunately for me, the theatre space afforded me as a High School student was state of the art. I believe it was sponsored by DuPont. So, access to proscenium spaces when I was a teenager was constant even going into Community College. So much so, that I found it boring. It was when I decided to revive the experimental theatre program with my professor that my imagination took off in terms of alternate spaces to produce theatre. I found this style much more engaging. Since my time there in the 80’s, our whole culture has left the age of analog and moved entirely into the digital age. This only affirmed my distaste for the proscenium style of theatre. Why pretend actors are inside of a picture frame when you can go to the cinema and watch realistic stories with unending production value?

My advice is that your only limit is your imagination. I was once advised by a panel of female directors during a symposium at the “National Museum for Women In the Arts” that “Theatre is not made of bricks and mortar. Theatre is made of people.”
 
Theatre sits at the center of the humanities. As long as there is humanity there will be theatre. Maybe not in huge structures developers build to fill their wallets. I don’t think it works well there anyway. Might as well go to the mall and window shop. 
 
I think the rough state of our world is a result of bad theatre right now. Like most dictators ours are all failed artists. Bad actors (in every sense), terrible theatrons. Just look at [Steve] Bannon’s rap opera of Coriolanus. 
 
Powerful theatre is always a result of powerful connections. I have a feeling we’re making our way back to those connections now out of sheer necessity and I’m excited about that.

CG: I appreciated how your memoir blended what was happening in your personal life with what was happening in your professional life. I sometimes think that theatre self-selects those of us who are not finding a place for ourselves and our dreams in the so-called real world—either because of trauma and/or marginalized identity issues. In my experience, this was exhilarating and visionary, but at the same time, it made for a lot of “explosions in the laboratory.” Any thoughts on this?
 
DR: The thing about “explosions in the laboratory” is they feel absolutely devastating when they happen and yet, they are the most informative and impactive truth-telling events an artist can experience. When I think of the moments I really got something wrong, I remember how inept I felt. How it made me want to shrivel up and quit. Then came the next breath though. I knew in that next breath that somehow I was still standing.
 
Every crash is really an opportunity to grow.  I think the patriarchal way of thinking is linear. Beginning, middle, end. It’s dull. It’s not my experience. There’s no greater beginning than the last terrible ending.
 

CG: You produced several of your own shows… for me, most notably the play about the rape and murder of your best friend. How was it different, doing your own work?

DR: I’ve been writing monologues and poetry forever. Way before I was cast in anything. I still write a monologue a day in my studio. Staging my own work is something that began when I was a kid with carport shows for my Grandmother. In my immediate circle, I have people who really love my writing. I couldn’t find the characters I was looking for inside of the canon so one of my mentors used to say, “If it doesn’t exist, create it.” And that’s been a mantra for me.
 
Finding the female playwright, outside of myself, made me feel less alone. That’s the big grift isn’t it? “You’re all alone in this.”  The more I produced women the more I realized how much bullshit that was. Working with women in so many social movements taught me a lot. Heather Booth, one of the founders of the Jane Movement, said “it’s always the same”. She went on to explain that whenever women gathered, and they could be seated on the floor of her carpeted living room while she fed her son sitting in a high chair, it was always the same. Each woman would arrive thinking she was alone and isolated in her experience. And as soon as one woman began to talk the rest would join in and this solidarity would arise around the survivorship of women.
 
There have been many times I’ve circled back to doing my own work. I think it’s kind of like calibrating my compass to true north. As much as I love producing other work, it’s equally important that I stay in touch with my own voice. It’s also exciting to see the growth that comes from collaborating.

Tricia loved my solo shows. She sat in the front row. She brought people with her to the backs of bars where I performed. I distinctly remember her instructing them to “spread out!”.  I developed some of my work in her living space. My set was a barstool and a small ladder. She loved giving me feedback. She would tell me I had to cut a character and I would go and write more of that character to show her how it worked. It was a big part of our relationship.

So, when I developed that solo piece I was in dialogue with her in my own soul. I would rehearse myself for the walls in the space and remember each audience seat she’d occupied. The trauma of her rape and murder was so overwhelming I’m still recovering. But, for some reason, I could still hear her laughing, can still hear.  And, it became essential that I embrace that energy. I was playing for her laughter knowing I’d never hear it again. But, still needing to play for it. That’s the best way I can describe it. I miss her. I miss our relationship. It was unique in the way we laughed our asses off at the world. And, I’m still searching for that laughter, reaching through the veil for it.
 
Afterwards, people would just nod with their faces covered in tears. One thanked me for putting words to the unspeakable. Theatre is all about connection and she was our center and we were all shattered. So that piece was a way to collectively experience her again. It was important. It was life changing for me. I’m so glad I had the skill set to do it.

CG: Poet Adrienne Rich said, “The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.” That resonated with my experience with my theatre company. It was, for me, the best of times and the worst of times. My theatre was riddled with issues of unaddressed trauma, mental illness, and addiction, as well as wildly unrealistic expectations of sisterhood. This is kind of like the earlier question about why certain people are drawn to work in theatre. Any comments?
 
DR: This is almost an insider conversation between you and me, I feel. We’ve talked about this privately so much.
 
One thing I learned in my PTSD recovery over the loss of Tricia was that I had to get mad. It’s a human emotion and suppressing it is harmful.  This terrified me because I’d been terrorized as a child by a rageful mother. So, for me, “getting mad” was the thing to avoid. Learning to get angry has been a challenge for me and I think it’s an overall issue for women. The societal expectations that we are to make everything better and also, accept blame for anything anyone else is not ready to face is so toxic.

Unaddressed trauma is a big deal. Having been out of our space for three years now, I’m able to begin to look back. I see that creating a safe space for women often meant putting myself in unsafe positions. And, that’s not good. I wouldn’t do it again.

We must be able to speak frankly to one another. And this hostage-taking situation of feeling like if you say the wrong word or think the wrong thought you might be responsible for someone's deep unhappiness, or worse their mortal demise is all too much. There’s no way to create in that environment. That’s a therapeutic environment, not an artistic one. Not to say that art cannot be therapeutic. But, to specifically point out that you need a clean channel to create. If you haven’t dealt with your issues by way of being aware you have them and cultivating a tool kit of responsibility to address them, you do not belong on anyone’s professional stage. The show needs to be about the play, not the trauma of the players. Once this is made clear and collective decision to move forward arises, it’s absolutely phenomenal.

CG: Best memory of a production?

DR:  Best? Hard to say. I think the night lightning struck and took out all of the power after our instrument check was profound for me. I was doing, “Living and Dying with Tricia McCauley” and we lost electricity just as the audience was arriving. Amy and I put our heads together. We’d produced for so long that there was no way we’d ever turn away one audience member. So, those who could not come back on a different night stayed. They mostly sat in the front row on the red couch. This was significant because it was a symbol of Tricia’s couch in her living room where she would sit and watch and give me feedback. And a mutual friend brought a painting he’d given her to give to me. That was over the couch. So, we told the audience to use their phones and we cued them into video and sound spots.  They lit me with their flashlights. I experienced that show in a completely different way. It was terrifying. It was really dark and I had to move where the audience guided me with their lights, and they were with me. I mean really WITH me.  I couldn’t leave the stage after curtain because I couldn’t see anything so for some reason I just sat down. And everyone was piled onto that red couch. We talked and talked for longer than the run of the show. There was something profound and deeply truthful about the experience. I felt held. I felt understood. I felt that we can always create no matter what.
 

CG: If you were to mentor a young producer today, what would be the thing or things you would most want her to know?
 
DR: I think my mentor is a collage of many people doing many powerful and unlikely things. That, sprinkled with people who simply bring light. I hold onto to those memories and experiences and let them shape me. And, I keep searching for the people moving forward.
 
As a mentor I would advise to stay true to your mission. Don’t confuse concessions with collaborations. I promise you there are other creatives out there who will lock into what you are seeing. There really can’t be enough women's theatre produced. I’d say lose all desperation and dive into that thing that tickles your soul and create it. Easier said than done, I know. But, it’s really a matter of discernment. Even if you are in an unpleasant set up you can learn from that and use it to shape what you are building as you move forward. The world needs diverse, unique, specific voices all rising up together. So, if one thing isn’t a match that’s okay. Let it go and move on to what pulls you and trust that impulse. “Impulse is golden”.

When the audience laughs at something on stage that is supposed to be serious, you really—as a playwright—have no choice but to roll with it or else revise the scene. You can rail all you want about their failure to embrace a lofty concept in the direction. You can accuse them of being shallow or juvenile. You can talk about the few bad apples. But long, long after all memory of the production has faded, the echo of that inappropriate laughter will continue to haunt and reverberate.

The first time I experienced this was at a community theatre production of the musical Camelot. Lancelot is a new arrival at King Arthur’s court, applying to become one of the knights of the celebrated Round Table. His reputation for purity and piety has preceded him. In a jousting tournament at the end of the first act, he defeats his three challengers, and accidentally kills the last one, Sir Lionel. In fact, if the chorus is to be believed, Lancelot has completely run him through with a spear.

 Distraught and humbled, he kneels in prayer over the body, taking the dead man’s hand in his. The crowd stands silent and motionless. It’s a long, long moment for musical theatre, and then Sir Lionel gasps and sits up… It's a miracle!  The entire court kneels in awe, and Queen Guinevere herself takes a knee, signalling her surrender to an adulterous love. It’s the high point of the act and a major turning point in the musical.

In the version I saw, the entire audience broke out in uproarious laughter when Sir Lionel sat up. They could not be brought round even by Guinevere. They laughed straight through the to end of the scene, ruining the act.

The second time was at a production of the opera Manon Lescaut. This is a story about a student who runs off with a young woman  who is on her way to join a convent. Eventually the young woman is deported along with a group of other young women who are mostly prostitutes. Her student lover manages to get hired as one of the crew and the two sail off to the New World where the young woman will die of dehydration wandering the deserts of Louisiana.

In this production, the music swells as the lovers are about to board the vessel that will carry them off to their doom.  Suddenly the sails unfurl, revealing a death ship constructed of skulls and bones. The ship was so over-the-top, the audience burst into laughter that was followed up by a chorus of booing... apparently signalling displeasure at  the effort to update a classic.

And the third time was just last night, when I streamed the National Theatre Live production of Anthony and Cleopatra, featuring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okoneda.  In Act IV, Scene 14, Anthony is told (falsely, as it happens) that Cleopatra is dead. His response to the news is to command  his manservant to kill him, but instead, the loyal servant kills himself.  Anthony then takes his knife and attempts to stab himself.  It is a clumsy attempt, and we know this, because he immediately says:

“How, not dead?/ Not dead?”

[The live audience found this hilarious, as did I. It was like, “Oh, shit, I can't even do this right!”]
 
In the next scene, he is brought, dying, to Cleopatra. She is hiding out in some kind of monument which is going to requiring the hauling up of Anthony’s body.  And she says:
 
"But come, come, Antony.--
Help me, my women!—We must draw thee up.--
Assist, good friends."
 
At which point the good friends begin lifting him. And then Anthony says:

“O, quick, or I am gone.”

[At this point, you could feel what was coming.]

And then she says:

“Here’s sport indeed. How heavy weighs my lord!”
 
And audience breaks out laughing. And, in truth, the Queen of the Nile didst inflect too much. Now I’m sure Shakespeare intended to use the mechanics of the scene to inspire a disquisition on the ponderous nature of death, on the burden upon losing a great love, and on the crushing agony of defeat in warfare… But instead this Cleopatra appears to be working off the mirth of the audience, as she proceeds:

"Our strength is all gone into heaviness;
That makes the weight. Had I great Juno’s power,
The strong-winged Mercury should fetch thee up
And set thee by Jove’s side. Yet come a little.
Wishers were ever fools. O, come, come, come!"
 
All this played like the cast of Friends frantically attempting to navigate a large sofa up the hairpin turns of their apartment building’s staircase:  “Pivot! Pivot!”  If Shakespeare failed to see the comedic potential of his own staging, Sophie Okoneda certainly did not.

These are all fond memories for me. Is there any kernal of dramaturgical wisdom to be gleaned from these failures of gravitas?  “Shit happens,” maybe? Or perhaps, “Never take yourself too seriously.” More to the point, “The closer a scene approaches the zenith of angst and pathos, the more it teeters on the brink of absurdity.” An audience who is not engrossed by the action on the stage, becomes a passive aggressive entity—and rightfully so. 

If they can laugh at you, they will. You have been warned.

So I have lots of opinions, and especially opinions about celebrities, because I consume popular media.
 
Given this proclivity to be opinionated along with the media’s proclivity to manipulate, I usually keep these opinions to myself. But every now and then I experience a 180-degree reversal of my opinion (see my blog on the Amber Heard/ Johnny Depp trial), and, when that happens, I feel it might be of some use to share about it.
 
So… here goes:

This is going to be a blog about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and the now-infamous “plane episode” that Jolie claims to have been the reason why she ended the relationship.
 
To recap their relationship: “Pitt and Jolie announced their engagement in April 2012 after seven years together. They were legally married on August 14, 2014. On September 19, 2016, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt, citing irreconcilable differences. On April 12, 2019, the divorce became legal.” [Wikipedia]
 
But the wrangling has continued.  The two are embroiled in a complex civil case that involves a jointly-owned chateau/vineyard in France they purchased jointly in 2008.  Apparently, they had a verbal agreement that neither would sell their portion of the property without permission from the other.

Well… In 2022, Jolie sold her share to a Russian businessman without Brad’s permission, and he filed a 67-million-dollar lawsuit against her. Jolie claims that she did try to sell to Brad a year earlier, but that he backed out of the agreement.

I know… *yawn*…
 
But listen up:  She claims that he backed out because his offer to buy required that she sign a non-disclosure agreement that, according to Jolie, would keep her quiet about alleged incidents of abuse by Pitt, toward her and their children. She said this abuse had gone on for years, and that it came to a head in an incident in 2016 on a private plane.
 
Now, at the time, I remember that Jolie reported the incident to the police when the plane landed, and the story in the press was something about Pitt "putting hands on" their oldest son Maddox. Both the FBI and the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services investigated and cleared Pitt of all charges.

Yes, I had an opinion. Pitt just didn’t give off domestic abuser vibes to me. Stoner, yes. Violent abuser, no. Yes, of course, that’s an incredibly stupid opinion for anyone, especially a woman, to have. But I had it. 

I also had an opinion about Jolie based on previous untruths she had told the media. I thought it was not unthinkable she, in a spirit of retaliation, might make exaggerated claims. (Pitt had been accused of a recent infidelity on a film set.) Anyway, after this, Pitt went into recovery and was very public about his history of drinking and smoking pot.
 
Speaking to the New York Times in 2019, Pitt shared, “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges.” He attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a year and a half following his split from Jolie. In fact, he was so forthcoming about his struggles with substance abuse disorders, that he caught flack for breaking his own anonymity.

Okay. Good for him. But back to my 180-degree-turn. So Pitt is suing his ex for all kinds of damages, including punitive, for selling the vineyard without his permission. Jolie claims that she was willing, but Brad tacked on the non-disclosure agreement, and now in order to defend herself to the court, she is needing to request an enormous trove of Pitt’s communications, including personal emails, messages, etc.,  dating from the time of the plane incident. The court has agreed with her request, and I’m guessing we’re going to see a settlement.
 
But in her counter-complaint, Jolie shared details about that plane incident that are far more detailed than her previous public disclosures about it.
 
And here are some excerpts:

The narrative makes no mention of anyone else being in the cabin, except the members of the family. That was likely a rarity in a family with a ton of security personnel and household staff.  And it was a long, long flight… from Nice, France to Los Angeles.

This narrative rings true to me, and if it is true, it must have been terrifying. I had never considered how trapped and isolated Jolie and the children were. And, obviously, my opinion of the incident has undergone a sea-change.  I respect that Jolie has refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement, especially when the stakes for refusing were so high. I respect that Jolie, for eight years, kept private these details, probably to protect the children. At this point, however, they are eight years older, all of them are estranged from Pitt, and one has even legally dropped his last name.

What’s my point? I believe Jolie. My earlier opinions did not take into account how frequently abusers mask their behavior until their victims are trapped and cut off from the outside world. I also didn’t take into account how frequently abusers take advantage of a partner’s efforts to protect the children from the media, nor how vulnerable Jolie may have been to  charges of “parental alienation” while custody hearings were pending.

Mea culpa.

Lying has been on my mind this summer. There is a presidential candidate whose brand is, literally, lying. The Washington Post fact-checked the number of lies he told during the years when he was in office:  30,573 lies. And yet, he is the candidate for a major political party. Apparently, people prefer being told what they want to hear, even when it isn’t true.
 
Then, a few weeks ago, I heard a news story on the radio. It stated that the average person tells fourteen lies a day. This surprised me. I have whole days where I don’t even make fourteen statements. An internet search turned up more realistic statistics. One study said people lie twice a day. Another asserted this: “The average person lies four times, totaling 1,460 lies each year. While men lie about six times a day, women lie three times a day, on average.”

And then…. I had a troubling  conversation with a young friend, a recent graduate of an elite college. We were talking about lying, and when I expressed my shock about the fourteen lies, she told me that she had no difficulty believing that at all, and that she probably lied that frequently… and maybe more. 

I was gob-smacked. She saw no problem and was actually proud of her facility in misrepresenting truth. She explained that people like to be told what they want to hear. In other words, it’s not her fault. It’s other people who have incentivized her to lie. And that led me to consider our respective situations. I am comfortably retired. She is just starting her career in a world that is many times more competitive than the one I faced at her age. Is honesty a privilege? A class issue?  Are my survival needs at risk when I tell the truth? Are hers? And does that require a tabling of judgement?

But here’s the thing: Once a person has been caught telling a lie, it’s rational to consider that anything else they say may also be a lie. Not a judgement, just a logical corollary. Also, in order to be accountable to ourselves and to others, we need to be working with our best understanding of the facts when we make our choices. Liars restrict our options in order to keep their own open.
 
But do we operate rationally? Thinking of this current presidential candidate, I would say that apparently half of the country does not. But maybe that’s too black-and-white. Maybe logic is subject to Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. That’s a theory of motivation which states that five categories of human needs dictate an individual's behavior. These are: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. Maybe we need to hear what what we want to hear. 

A dependent child, for instance, needs to know that their primary caregivers are reliable; otherwise they can become overwhelmed with anxiety and even terror. They need to protect themselves from knowing that their parents lie to them. I know myself, from growing up with folks in active addiction, that I learned to “fix” all the lies:  “I must have heard them wrong. It’s somehow my fault. They didn’t mean what they said.”  It was a survival strategy. In my early years in recovery, it would take me months before I realized that someone was lying to me. Now, with thirty-plus years in Alanon, I can allow myself to recognize a lie within a day, or even an hour.  I still have difficulty identifying the lie in the moment.

But my young friend’s pride in her lying really bothered me. She wasn’t talking about lying when survival needs were on the line. She was talking about across-the-board lying any time that she perceived the truth as being anything less than what the other person wanted to hear. I really struggled with what I wanted to say to her, and as I did that, I realized that the basis of my struggle lay in a lack of words to describe my experience of working a recovery program to be honest. It was beyond “Thou shalt not tell a lie,” and, for lack of words, that was how I was sounding… preachy, judgmental, holier than thou.
 
And then I remembered something that author and activist Sonia Johnson said: “The means are the ends. HOW we do something is WHAT we get.”

Yes. That’s the thing. And suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to say to my young friend. And I knew the analogy I would use. It was mountain climbing. Both of us are avid hikers, and my friend will often choose the most challenging route up the mountain. Some of the mountains that we climb have roads to the summit. We could actually drive to the top, but we don’t. That’s not the point. The point is getting there by hiking.
 
For me, lying is like driving to the summit. If standing at the top is the goal, it makes sense to drive. It’s easier. I don’t get tired. And I get there a whole lot faster.
 
How can my friend and I explain why we choose to hike? What are the words? Joy, pride in achievement, exhilaration in pushing limits?  Are there words to describe the experience of being in nature, moving in nature without mechanical aids, being in communion with ourselves among other forms of life?

There are a ton of words for the shortcuts. A ton of words for why they make sense.  But I really struggle to explain why I prefer to walk uphill for hours, sometimes at great risk. It’s one of those “if you know, you know" things.  And, as Sonia says, the means are the end.
 
So what I would say to my young friend is this: Lying is the shortcut to the summit. Her definition of ‘getting there’ is cheating her out of an incredible journey and an incalculable richness of experience. When she hikes to the top, that’s what she gets: the hike to the top. She gets the satisfaction of her effort, and so much more. She also gets a community of like-minded hikers.

When someone works to tell the truth all the time, it’s a steep climb and sometimes a rugged one. Sometimes they don’t get where they wanted to go. Sometimes they have to recalibrate the route. But they build spiritual muscle. I can promise that. They build faith in themselves. They also hone their technique. I’m talking about communication technique. I suppose there is some skill required in telling people what they want to hear, but it’s nothing like the skill set you have to build when you are habitually learning to tell an unpopular or inconvenient truth. When someone gets to the goal without lying, they earn and they own the summit experience in a way that can’t really be described. You just have to live it.

Lying as a way of life reduces the infinitude of life to a singular-dimension, board game of getting what you want. I can’t put it more plainly than this: You lose. You lose even when you win. You may not notice or even miss the people whose trust you have forfeited. You may be progressively extinguishing your capacity for joy in exchange for the cheap thrill of empty goals. You are definitely devaluing truth and authenticity every day.  And, by the way, you’ll need to make a lot of money, because lying cuts you off from the rhythms and flows of reality, which teem with serendipity, synergy and karma. You’ll be needing to pave your own road wherever you go.

The means are the ends. If you get where you’re going by lying, what you will get is a lie. And you better take a picture when you get there; because it's quite possible no one's going to believe you.

“Bernice Reagon is a living treasure in an institution used to dealing with static treasures. When you meet her, you know there’s something there – a vision, a focus, a drive, an intensity – and that’s never changed.”—Ralph Rinzler, Smithsonian Asst Secretary for Public Service

“For more than a half-century Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice; singing, teaching—speaking out against reacism and organized inequities of all kinds. A child of Southwest Georgia, an African American woman’s voice, born in the struggle against racism in America during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Reagon’s life and work supports the concept of community based culture with an enlarged capacity for mutual respect: for self, for those who move among us who seem to be different than us, respect and care for our home, the environment—including the planet that sustains life as we know it.”—from www.bernicejohnsonreagon.com

Dr. Bernice Johnson was a musician, producer, scholar, activist, composer, commentator… and an invaluable role model.
 
I know her work through reading histories of the Civil Rights Movement, through seeing her perform at a number of Sweet Honey in the Rock concerts, and through her writings. Her example, her art, and her counsel about struggle have given me strength, courage, and clarity. It’s the clarity I want to talk about in this blog. I’m going to focus on three memes that are on my screensaver. These are quotations by Dr. Johnson. Here’s the first:

I am lost a lot. I’m autistic, an incest survivor, a woman living with hidden disability, and a lesbian feminist in a neurodivergent, misogynist, heterosexist, ableist, rape culture. I am frequently overwhelmed, scapegoated, confused, and frustrated. Frequently. This advice by Dr. Johnson reminds me that this is to be expected. No shame. Pick yourself up and go back. And for me, that going-back means going back to my first encounter with Second Wave women’s writing, my first encounters with the writing from the women from the Civil Rights movement… Fanny Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara,  Dr. Johnson.

These words helped me understand that I was not crazy, and that I was not alone. They helped me understand the significance of “context,” and that without my own context I would understand myself the way the enemy wanted me to understand myself. Creating my own context, I could see my enemy exactly for who he is. This meme reminds me it’s not enough to go back to a memory. I need to start "doing" again. I need to start doing whatever I was doing when I was not lost. And for me, that is generating work that makes myself visible to myself, that gives voice to the women like me whose voices have been stolen or silenced. This meme reminds me of a piece of recovery wisdom: You can start over at any time.

This is the next meme that continues to alter the course of my life. We humans are social creatures and when we are uncomfortable in social settings, that can mean that we need to adjust our behaviors or attitudes… or that we may be somewhere we do not belong. That discomfort can be interpreted as a warning sign of danger.

Remembering this bit of wisdom from Dr. Johnson enables me to do a self-intervention. I can recalibrate: “I’m in coalition and I’m insanely uncomfortable; therefore I must be nailing it.” I don’t change my position. I don’t apologize. I don’t get up and leave. I stay, I fight, I work. I’m in the right place and doing the right things. The discomfort is normal. It’s healthy. It’s productive. This IS the work. How you do something is what you get. This is bigger than myself and bigger than my ego. As an autistic person, I can have difficulty interpreting my own discomfort as well as the discomfort of other people. Dr. Johnson reminds me that their discomfort can also be healthy and productive. Allow others the lessons of their own struggles.

My final screensaver is not a meme. It was a posting on Toshi Reagon’s Facebook page. It’s the story of a conversation between her and her mother, and it made a deep impression on me. I am frequently up in arms over some fresh outrage… politically, culturally, socially.  I am often calling for my sword and my best horse. Today I grab onto these words by the “Queen Mother”  instead:   “You will not kill people today. They are already dead. Let us move forward.” 
 
I work with “they are already dead.” What did she mean when she said that? Clearly they are not! Look how angry I am!  But I defer to the Queen Mother who has fought way more battles and way more successfully than I could ever imagine. So what does this mean?  I think it means that they have already left the field… or, rather, the field has left them. The field that I am fighting on is somewhere else, something else. The fact that their values are so utterly foreign to mine should make them dead to me in terms of the teeming array of brilliant beings that inform my world… real and imaginary. Which leads right into the next question:

“Have I done my work?”  Isn't this my work... the constant charging out the door? Dr. Johnson reminds me that it probably is not. It’s one more way the patriarchy and rape culture absorb my energies and eat my spirit. Fighting them or subordinating myself to them, they still win: I am not able to pursue my own vision.
 
Yeah, vision. Dr. Johnson again: “Had my anger wiped away or cleared my vision?” Nearly always wiped it away or distorted it.

And here is a sentence that lights up the night sky: “She reminded me not to hover over dead places I had no intention of reviving.”  Okay, truth here:  99% of the time when I am riding out to do battle, I could care less about reviving the institution or the individual with whom I intend to engage. I am fighting to win, to defeat, to overcome, to wipe out an enemy. I am fighting to make it absolutely clear that me, and my views, and my values shall prevail and dominate. I could care less about the spiritual life of the entities opposing me. Isn't that the model for warriors?  No. Not when I remember that Dr. Johnson is one of the greatest warriors who lived in my time. This is the model:  “She reminded me not to hover over dead places I had no intention of reviving.”
 
Again, the word "dead." Already dead. Done. Move on.

And then she ends with this “She told me my only failure in life would be if I could not access my heart to create.” And if I have been struggling with her words prior to this, reluctant to give up my oh-so-righteous fight, this sentence wipes the board clean in one sweep, and I surrender. This is so completely correct. I’ve lived it. I’ve proved it. I know failure and I know success, and she  is absolutely right.
 
My disability includes extreme fatigue, and I suspect the incessant, autistic drive for confronting injustice is a big piece of this. I thought I was being intrepid, noble, self-sacrificing, and sometimes even awesome in these confrontations. That they had disabled me and in all likelihood would end by killing me just seemed like some kind of inescapable collateral damage. This little anecdote as recounted by Dr. Johnson’s daughter has turned my approach to life on its head when nothing else could. Not even death.
 
I’m not someone who gets physical tattoos, but I do collect psychic ones, and the words of Dr. Johnson are tattooed on my soul.  They are the metaphysical letterhead  for my agendas.  Cultural commentator David Brooks writes about "deterioration of motive," which occurs when fear and a sense of threat enter the chat. This is the point when engagement becomes nonproductive and destructive. Dr. Johnson's advice provides me with a standard against which I can check my intentions and I am so grateful to her.

And one final meme...  It's been a privilege to live on the planet at the same time as Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon.

So “winter burn” is a plant situation that I just found out about last week. My question is this: Is this analogous to a human situation involving those of us who have survived harsh environments?  Does plant nature have something to teach us about ourselves?
 
But first… What is winter burn?

Yesterday I posted a photo of one of my rhododendrons on social media, asking if anyone could tell me what was wrong with it. Half of the topmost leaves were turning brown on the ends.  Up close, the brown party actually looked like shoe leather.

I live in Maine, and this change occurred in early March, when the temperature was mostly below freezing. It didn’t seem to be a time of year when fungus or parasites would be a thing.
 
But… the miracle of social media! A friend of mine, whose son is a professional gardener, explained to me that what I was seeing was the result of winter burn.
 
She explained that winter burn was a condition that develops in winter (duh), and it happens when there has been an unseasonably warm spell… maybe just a day or two. In the fall, this warm spell would delay the onset of plant dormancy, but in the case of my rhodies, it did the opposite. The warm spell was in early spring, and what it did was bring the top leaves out of dormancy.
 
Because the warm spell was so brief (just a day or two), it was not enough to warm up the roots and bring them out of dormancy. The rhodie roots were pretty clear that early March in Maine was no time to wake up. But, unfortunately, the leaves fell for it. They did wake up and were all ready for action. They started opening for business and waiting for the roots to send up some water… but the roots were unable to deliver. As a result, the leaves underwent a sudden and severe drought condition, causing the outer edges of the top leaves to turn brown and curl up. 

The good news is that it’s not systemic. It’s not something that’s going to spread, take over the whole plant, and kill it. The bad news is that I will lose the affected leaves, and the plant may look a little scraggly for a while. Also good news… I can prevent future incidents of winter burn by constructing a burlap teepee over the rhodie in the fall. (I always thought those were just to keep off the snow!)
 
But… what’s the human analogy—the lesson to be drawn, if you will?
 
Frozen roots and thawing leaves. Do humans experience a kind of “winter burn” for opening ourselves up to the warmth of human interactions before our roots have had time to thaw? I think we do.
 
I experienced a traumatic childhood, and it took me decades to understand and heal from the effects of it. Clinically, I had complex post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It’s a syndrome, not a disorder, because it’s actually a natural and functional response to chronic adverse conditions, especially in childhood. Something like plant dormancy to ride out a frozen winter.

As a young woman, I began to live in more nurturing environments, and I attempted to open myself to these warming experiences… but my roots were not ready yet. I had a long way before I could really accept that the winter was over.  In human terms, I had a long way before I was ready to trust again. And, yes, I believe I experienced a kind of “winter burn,” my outer self reaching for life while my roots were still shut down. I had searing emotional encounters on my way to recovery. And it wasn’t pretty. But you know what? It wasn’t fatal either.
 
What I needed was that little teepee of shelter, in a recovery program or with a therapist. I needed help moderating my core trauma response and my outer eagerness to live in the world as a person who had never experienced that winter of the spirit. I needed the support of folks who understood the process of gradual opening to new life. I needed help understanding that a disappointed expectation is not a permanent blight, but a reminder to recalibrate, to understand that deep healing takes time. A day or two of sunshine doth not a spring thaw make. And a warm human interaction does not necessarily signal readiness for full engagement.
 
Be kind, dear ones. Seasons change, and our psyches have wisdom beyond what we know.

In her concluding remarks in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe took up the question regarding abolition that was on so many white people’s lips, “What can I do?” This is what she wrote:
 
“But what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do—they can see to it that they feel right.” [her emphasis]
 
I find myself thinking about this challenge, and her emphasis, during the bombing and invasion of Gaza. What does it mean for me to see to it that I “feel right” about what’s going on? And what qualifies as “feeling right?” Who can be the judge of what “right” means?

When I consider this directive to “see to it” that I feel right, the first thing that comes to me is to search out a wide range of perspectives on the situation. For me, that means to read the Arab world press and the Israeli press, and to read these publications across the right wing, moderate, and liberal spectrum. It means to seek out the opinions of the political leaders in my own country who have earned my respect for decades—and, sadly, they are a precious few.
 
It also means listening to my friends who are often expressing themselves with unfiltered rage, grief, and alarm and from every conceivable point of view. It means listening to friends who are triggered, who are in post-traumatic states. It means listening to friends who are absorbing and responding to horrific propaganda. It means listening to dissociation, demonization, dehumanization, projection, denial, and selective amnesia. It means maintaining compassion in the face of verbal abuse.  It means being wildly misunderstood and developing the algorithms for determining where, when, and how it might be productive to attempt to make myself understood.

It means watching my own process closely, scanning for signs of my own compassion fatigue, frustration, temptation to embrace a simplistic narrative, or  temptation to succumb to the apathy of overwhelm.
 
It means distrusting what I hear and still listening. It means maintaining integrity and emotional sobriety when I become the target of outrage by people who are traumatized. It means responding to, but not reacting to baiting and catcalls. It means holding a number of contradictory emotions and scenarios simultaneously.
 
It means understanding that “feeling right” is an elusive and subjective state, an ever-receding horizon, and that the striving towards it is the closest I can ever come to achieving it.

This “see to it” business is very hard work, and I’m not good at it. I don’t enjoy it. I realize that I enjoy being righteous far more than I do this striving to feel right. But the longer I pursue this injunction of Harriet’s, the more clearly I see that it’s absolutely necessary. It is the price of wholeness.
 
And of course, in terms of action to take, she has been clear: “Of that every individual can judge.”