Just Wrought

Day 2 / Reason 2 for Going Back to the Theatre: My Sister

Against all better judgement I have begun a 12-part blog series enumerating my reasons for going back to the theatre, specifically to see ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol on December 12. This is day two of my virtual half-advent calendar.

I have never really fully explained why I left the theatre back in 2013. My reasons were personal, even if my retirement was painfully public. Maybe I’ll get to sharing those reasons someday, but before I can do that, I should state for the record who is to blame for me becoming involved in the art form in the first place. That would by my sister, Margaret, or “Maggie” as those of us closest to her know her these days.

Maggie first fully electrified my theatrical imagination playing Puck in her junior high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was maybe six or seven, but I followed the Elizabethan text better than one might expect. Still, a lot of the language lofted over my head. Except when Maggie spoke, transformed as she was into a mischievous hobgoblin, seemingly in charge of all of the chaos reigning on the stage.

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

I already had it mostly memorized, because I had listened to her memorizing it in her room over the weeks before.

The following year, when my sister played Gollum in the school’s production of The Hobbit, the gas really hit the spark plug.

“Bless us and splesh us my precious. Gol-LUM!”

She would practice her lines over and over in her room with the door shut, but she was loud enough for me to hear everything in the room Eddie and I shared next door.

“What’s it got in its pockets, my precious? Gol-LUM!”

These eponymous punctuations "Gol-LUM!" burst forth from her as seemingly uncontrollable, autonomic eructations welling up from the pit of her gut. Or rather, Gollum’s gut, for she had, indeed, become the twisted little monster.

“We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!"

Looking back now, she was so unlike other girls her age, in the mid-70s: so obsessed with hair and fashion and looks. Oh, Maggie cared about those things too, obsessed about them at times, but she threw them all aside when she came to inhabit Gollum. Once him, she didn’t care one bit about looking feminine, even though the director had squeezed her blossoming body into a green and brown painted body suit. She gave herself over completely to the character. It was really, for me, the first time I had ever witnessed such a transformation.

Now you may say, wait a minute. She was doing theatre, pretending. This wasn’t real. But when your oldest sister by six years is becoming an avariciously murderous monster in the room next door to yours, it’s real all right.

Keep in mind this is decades before the magic of Peter Jackson’s digital capture of Andy Cirkus’ pliable, gamut-running, psychologically insightful portrayal in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It was even prior to the animated version of The Hobbit released in 1977. As far as I know my sister had never seen a performance of Gollum, and I’m not even sure she read the book. My sister had nothing from which to construct her portrayal but the text of the stage adaption and her own imagination. In other words, she did the quintessential actor’s job, and took fresh text (fresh to her anyways) and molded from it a character whom she then inhabited. Her portrayal of Gollum encapsulated everything about the theatrical process that would get and keep me stoked  for the next three decades. As an artist, my sister set me on fire. With Puck and Gollum she showed me how weirdness and audacity could be leveraged into a gift you could offer other people in performance.

The key to my origin story as a theatre artist—which I never put together consciously throughout all those decades of doing it, and only just fully realized writing this—is that I started acting, and then went on to playwriting, because of my sister Maggie. She touched the match to my fuse as an artist, and I’ve been burning ever since.

Every one of my siblings has some experience with the theatre, but I was the only one who went professional. I got my Actors' Equity card at the age of 19 playing Young Scrooge at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. I never used my union card again.

My Christmas present from Maggie that year was a beautiful, hardbound illustrated copy of A Christmas Carol. Here’s how she inscribed it.

1/11/88

Dear Paul,

I saw this book a week or so after we saw your show & I had to get it for you. I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart. Your show was an excellent adaptation of the story. After buying this book I started thinking about what it is that makes this story so special. What did I come up with? We can identify with Scrooge’s past, present and future “personas”, and we can relate to the loss of Christmas spirit that seems to occur as we get older. We become so caught up in the ways of the world, that we lose touch with the ways of the soul. I’d like to believe that in this story Dickens isn’t merely encouraging the celebration of Christmas, he’s demanding that we celebrate life. The ghosts are merely showing us how we have allowed the control of our lives to be taken out of our hands. To you, dear brother, I wis a full, rewarding, happy, sad, thoughtful, action-packed, glorious and challenging life. I hope that you will enjoy this book & celebrate Christmas every day of your life.

Lots of Love,

MCM [Margaret Cecilia Mullin]

 

There’s so much I could tell you about everything my sister has taught me over the years, but if I had to boil it all down to highlights it would be these:

• Life is long, but ultimately short.
• Be weird when you want.
• Be loud in your love.
• Celebrate light in the darkness.

Twelve Days of A CHRISTMAS CAROL

In twelve days, I will go to a theater to watch a play for the first time in eight years.

In twelve days, I will go to Northgate Station with my two teenage sons, my wife, and her mother. We will climb aboard the Link light rail and ride to downtown Seattle to see A Contemporary Theatre’s perennial holiday cash-cow stage adaptation of Charles Dicken’s classic novella, A Christmas Carol. If this were three years ago, and you knew anything about my history with the theatre as an artform, this news would be, at least to some degree, surprising, maybe even shocking. This is because eight years ago I made a big public stink about retiring from the artform for good.

So why am I going back now? Well, I have a hodgepodge of reasons, all sort of related, but they also stand on their own. So I thought I’d present them over the next twelve days, like a half advent calendar, leading up to the day we Mullins go to the show.

 

Dec. 1 / Reason 1  -  A Christmas Carol: The Book

I have always loved A Christmas Carol, going back to my first exposure to it, a radio play version put on by the various deejays, announcers, and on-air reporters  at WBAL in Baltimore, which was the city’s flagship adult contemporary radio station in the 70s. There’s nothing really like it one the air anymore, certainly not in Seattle. WBAL played a wide spectrum of pop music from the 40s forward to contemporary, but the station also ran news, sports, and hour-long interview programs featuring local figures: politicians, sure, but also local sports and entertainment luminaries. It played in the background at my house from the time my parents got up and had their first cup of coffee until they went to bed after their last cup of coffee. (I still don't understand how Mom and Dad could drink black coffee just before sleeping.)

I first read A Christmas Carol when I was maybe 12. It was a hard slog for me then, but I got through it, and enjoyed it, and it spooked me in all the right places. The novella is an astoundingly concise clockwork of a plot, moving the reader along relentlessly to its formalized conclusion. The language is rich: simultaneously lugubrious and cocksure.

Old Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Was there ever an opening argument of a case stated more plainly than that? But Dickens then goes on to expand and expound, like Bach working up a fugal theme:

Old Marley was dead as a door nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country’s done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Gah! I loved it as a kid, even barely understanding it as I did. And even back then I recognized how deeply and overtly political the story was.

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Can’t we just round up these people living in tents and RVs and put them somewhere we don’t have to look at them every day?

I don't think it's some warm and fuzzy "Spirt of Christmas" that keeps us coming back to this book. I think it's the author's very sharp and very necessary spirit of radical progressive humanism.

Dickens thought we could do better.

And we still need to.

My First-Ever Debut Novel is Available Now!

 

After five years, it's finally here!

My first ever novel, Seattle Trust.

Join the crowdfunding campaign to support its publishing and marketing!

Check out this crowdfunding kick off video:

 

Click here to reserve your personally signed advance copy now!

Leveraging Just Wrought’s Obscurity as a Feature, not a Bug

 

Okay. So yesterday’s experiment with blowing the dust off of Just Wrought’s mic went… well… not poorly—experiments can only be said to go poorly if they don’t yield data, and this one definitely did that. The data I took away from yesterday’s post “Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?” is that not many people are going to hit my blog for information about what I’m up to during the Covid – 19 Corona Virus Crisis. Blogs are so 12 years ago. I get it.

But now that I know Just Wrought is (for now) a place where only people who really care what I’m doing go, I can shift its use from one-way information flow, to a two-way back-and-forth. For instance, I’m about to make a move in the space of virtual performance, but before I do, I’d love to sort of test drive the text of the crowd funding release to work out all the kinks, and answer all the questions that might come up.

The Pitch:

Help me pay actors to record my short stories.

The Gist:

I retired from theatre, particularly play-writing, seven years ago to pursue other sorts of writing and story-telling. In that time I have written a wild, weird quasi-memoir called The Starting Gate (published in 2016), a novel (yet-to-be-published) inspired by my time working as the only male executive assistant in the senior executive suite of Washington Mutual Bank during the run up to the Great Recession, and countless essays, poems and short stories. I. And am sad to admit that I have given those short stories (if you’ll forgive the lame proto-pun) short shrift. That I,s, I do sometimes post them on line and I do read them at my monthly literary reading Loud Mouth Lit (which I founded 3 ½ years ago), but other than that limited exposure, they sit on a virtual shelf gathering virtual dust, perhaps never to be read again.

I’d like to change that by paying professional actors, first with my own money and then with yours, to record these stories and ultimately offer them back to the public as audio book quality recordings.

Here’s how I see it working.

I open an Indiegogo campaign, with a goal of raising $7,000 dollars. This is how I raised the money to publish my book The Starting Gate, so I can vouch for it as a tried and true method. The pitch will contain an explanation of my plan essentially paraphrasing what I’ve written above. I will set contribution levels as follows:

Story Patron

Give me $10 and I’ll give you a story, recorded by professional actor local to the Pacific Northwest.

Collection Patron

Give me $25 and I’ll give you all seven of the stories I hope to record with local professional actors.

Book Patron

Give me $50 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the paperback edition of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 15$ value.)

First Edition Patron

Give me $100 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the limited first edition hardback version of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 25$ value and there are only 20 of them left), PLUS I will record a sonnet of your choosing by William Shakespeare, written back during a similar epidemic which closed all of the theaters in England.

Casting Patron

Give me $500, and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but also I will give you the option of nominating a professional Pacific Northwest actor whom you wish to record one of my stories.

Commissioning Patron

Give me $1,000 and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but you also get to commission a brand new, original story from me based on beginning parameters that you help provide. And I’ll let you cast the actor, too, if you want.

 

For every $1,000 I raise, I will record a story, paying a local professional actor (whom I worked with back in my theatre daze) at least $500 to do so.

Why not the whole thousand? Well, there are several expenses associated with this endeavor in addition to the actor’s fee, such as:

• The director’s fee. (This would be for the services of the incomparable book artist, Lyssa Browne, and whose studio, Cedar House Audio, the stories will be recorded.)
• Post-production costs. These range from paying a sound designer to do the final mix, to any other costs associated with bringing you a professional audio book quality offering.
• Administrative costs. Indiegogo, just like every other crowdfunding platform, charges a fee for its services. In this case, it would be ~5%, which is ~$50 off the top of every $1,000 raised. Other hidden fees around distribution will also apply.
• Promotion costs. I would only be spending money to promote this if I had a little extra left over after everything else got paid.
• Paying forward. In the unlikely event that there is money leftover out of the $1,000 per story I’ve budgeted, l will plow the surplus forward into the next story. I honestly don’t anticipate this being a problem, but I am ready and eager to deal with it if it arises.

 

So that’s my initial sketch of my plan. What do you think? I welcome any and all of your feedback in the comments.

 

Also, what should I call this project?

Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?

 

It has certainly been a minute or two since I last posted here at my old blog Just Wrought. (Damn! Four years ago, Father’s Day!?) But I am considering blowing the dust off of it. (Metaphorically of course. I would never do anything as rash in this current crisis as literally blowing dust.)

I need a reliable platform from which to communicate, and, alas, very recently I have been hearing about problems with Face Book deleting posts for apparently no reason, and, let’s face it, all of the major social media platforms are utterly non-transparent and frankly a bit suspect when it comes to user data. When I post something here, I can see how many people have looked at it, and therefore have a much crisper insight into how well I am reaching people.

If you’re interested in my future offerings, some of which will be old-school style, essays, and some of which will be more like opportunities for actors, writers and other arts professionals to make a little extra spending money, then by all means, click “reload” a couple times on the ol’ browser, and heck, if you’re tempted, maybe even send a link of this post to a friend or two.

If I get enough hits here at Just Wrought, I’ll know I can use this as my primary form of communication on the internet. (Though of course, I will always post pointers to it on FB, Twitter, and Instagram.)

So if you’ve made it this far, and you like what you see, and you want to see more, say hello in the comments. And watch this space. I will have news on a special project I’m developing soon. Very soon.

Love,

Paul

Graveyards in Heaven

 

6/21/17

Last night I dreamed I was walking through the graveyards of heaven.

[I couldn't read the names on the stones.]

But I did rubbings all the same.

Crows are the dead, so much happier.

THE STARTING GATE for Father's Day

The idea came from my good friend and former theatre collaborator, John Langs, when I handed him his copy of the limited first edition hardcover version of The Starting Gate and he grinned and said, “Oh, man. I gotta get a copy of this for my dad!”

Lightbulb!

Of course this is a good book for Father’s Day. Not only is there a chapter (or two) that zeroes in on my relationship with my own step-father, but also the entire book is dedicated to my boyos, Declan and Keelan. In other words, this book was written as a father, in an attempt to capture moments in my life that my own sons might not otherwise be able to conceive of: simple things, like telephones being attached to walls, and having to go out and look for a job by walking up and down the boulevard and sticking your head in ever business you passed.

Here are a couple of the things I am doing to promote The Starting Gate as the perfect Father’s Day gift (though a good bottle of bourbon never hurt either):

• Bought a week’s sponsorship of The Seattle Review of Books. (This excellent new site founded by Martin McClellan and Paul Constant provides substantial, thoughtful reviews of books of all kinds, as well as blogging about the literary scene here in Seattle and beyond. It is a growing force for good in Seattle’s literary scene and wider world of arts.
  
• Slashed the cost of the Kindle version in half. It’s now $4.49 (that’ s 82% off the hardcover version!) Available here. 
  
• Released the paperback version. It’s available here: https://www.createspace.com/6282351
• Will give away free Audible downloads of the audio book to the first 10 people who message me. (So message me! Auctioning the limited first edition hardcover version of the book over at eBay. It’s currently bidding at $12, which is over 40% off the $25 cover price.

If you can think of another way I can make the book easier to get in time for Father’s day, please let me know!

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Moving THE STARTING GATE

Since the start of my Indie Go Go campaign to fund the publication of my book The Starting Gate, that site was the best, and really only, way to order the limited first edition hardcover version. As of midnight, that’s going away. So you have half a day left to go here to get it while the getting’s good. After that, the hardcover edition will be available for list price at Amazon here: http://amzn.com/0997074701

But Amazon is boring, and arguably somewhat evil. They certainly take the lion’s share of the sale price for themselves, so I am adding a fun way to get The Starting Gate for a deep discount, over at Ebay. Every week, starting now, I will be offering the book for auction starting at 40% off. At the end of the week one book will go to the highest bidder (or, you can always just pull the trigger at the list price of $24.95). Just go here:
http://ebay.to/1Ww08VT

Alternative versions, electronic and audiobook are available as always…

Electronic:

You can purchase the Kindle version by clicking here.

You can purchase the Nook or iPad version by clicking here.

Audio Book:

The audiobook version of The Starting Gate, narrated by yours truly, is available across a variety of different platforms, including Audible , Amazon, iTunes, Audiobooks.com, Hoopla, The Audiobook Store, Downpour, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble, Nook, and Playster.
 

 

How to get to THE STARTING GATE

 

If there’s one thing this retired playwright has learned about the independent publishing business, it’s that delays that would be impossible— unthinkable in the theatre—are par for the course. And so delivery of the hardcover version of my book, The Starting Gate, so beautifully designed by K. Brian Neel has been pushed back yet again, and may not happen until the very end of February, if then.

So here’s how you can, if you so choose, get to The Starting Gate NOW!

 

Electronic Versions:

You can purchase the Kindle version by clicking here.

You can purchase the Nook or iPad version by clicking here.

 

Audio Book:

The audiobook version of The Starting Gate, narrated by yours truly, is available across a variety of different platforms, including Audible , Amazon, iTunes, Audiobooks.com, Hoopla, The Audiobook Store, Downpour, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble, Nook, and Playster.

That said, if you are interested in listening to the book, but are new to audio books on-line, just message me and I'll offer some "off-line solutions."

 

Printed Versions:

Despite delays, the limited first edition hardcover is coming! I’ll be passing them out to people who have pre-ordered them at the IndieGoGo site at my book release party on March 14, at The St. Andrews Bar and Grill, starting at 7 pm. For more information on the party, go here.

The paperback version of the book will be available in the Summer of 2016.

 

About THE STARTING GATE:

The Starting Gate is a smooth cocktail consisting of thirteen interconnected chapters, tracking my life from my first job as a stock boy at a Maryland country bar (called the Starting Gate) where my boss once shot a man dead for trying to rob the local drug store, to my days as the only white kid on an all-black labor crew at the National Archives. You'll learn what it's like to spend days cleaning the high-rise glass windows of Manhattan and the rules you need to know to enjoy a cocktail with the greatest living bartender, Murray Stenson.

 

What some Amazing Authors are Saying about The Starting Gate:

"Do you want to know how to behave in a bar? Do you want to know how to live? Maybe they're not so different. Paul Mullin finds a real honor and wisdom in the messy practice of a life, and he makes me wish I too had learned how to work as a kid at a little country tavern in Maryland called the Starting Gate—even on Taco Night. How am I suddenly nostalgic for a life that wasn't even my own?"
– Tom Nissley, Jeopardy Champion and author of A Reader’s Book of Days

“Paul Mullin enters sacred territory in American Letters, the Temple of the Tavern wherein both grace and alcohol are dispensed. Like its successful predecessors, FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH, THE LIARS CLUB, and THE TENDER BAR. Mullin’s entertaining memoir is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, to explain the mystery of the now with a Drunkard’s Walk through his past of hard manual labor, art, and Zen Buddhism. It’s funny and moving, and Mullin’s chapter on how to properly appreciate a bar should be required reading for all those coming of age.”
– Robert Schenkkan, Tony Award-winning author of All the Way

"Playwright Paul Mullin deploys his gift for vivid storytelling in this lively memoir of work, play and apprentice barkeeping."
– Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

 

 

 

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