Slim Volume

By Glenn Hopkins

“Glenn Hopkins is an American Original. Names like Johnny Appleseed, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, and Walt Whitman come to mind.”
---Backstage West

“A familiar figure on the Los Angeles theatre scene, Glenn Hopkins has written over twenty plays... melodramatic and hilarious, brash and sensitive, frustrating yet ultimately rewarding....Hopkins writes from the heart, exploring human verities as well as human foibles. His integrity and purpose shine through...”
---Drama-Logue

For the first time Playwright, Green Party activist, muck-raker, educator, Methodist and “Radical Faerie” Glenn Hopkins reveals the complexities of one who both needs much from, and offers much to society. Poems, research, articles, almost-poems, dreams, MRS. ROOSEVELT (a one-woman play), songs,, stories, politics, fervent prayer all come at the reader within the framework of a journal kept from Labor Day, 2004 to Easter Sunday, 2005.

Hopkins’ writing for the stage has been:

“outrageous...refreshing...intriguing...important...worthwhile.” ---The Daily Bruin

“infused with lyric imagery...billowing...lovely...fun...” ---The Hollywood Reporter

“gorged with ideas...admittedly wild...a literary volcano” ---Cleve Herman, KFWB

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 28, 2009
• ISBN: 9781469124087

Glenn Hopkins

“Glenn Hopkins is an American Original. Names like Johnny Appleseed, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, and Walt Whitman come to mind.” ---Backstage West “A familiar figure on the Los Angeles theatre scene, Glenn Hopkins has written over twenty plays... melodramatic and hilarious, brash and sensitive, frustrating yet ultimately rewarding....Hopkins writes from the heart, exploring human verities as well as human foibles. His integrity and purpose shine through...” ---Drama-Logue For the first time Playwright, Green Party activist, muck-raker, educator, Methodist and “Radical Faerie” Glenn Hopkins reveals the complexities of one who both needs much from, and offers much to society. Poems, research, articles, almost-poems, dreams, MRS. ROOSEVELT (a one-woman play), songs,, stories, politics, fervent prayer all come at the reader within the framework of a journal kept from Labor Day, 2004 to Easter Sunday, 2005. Hopkins’ writing for the stage has been: “outrageous...refreshing...intriguing...important...worthwhile.” ---The Daily Bruin “infused with lyric imagery...billowing...lovely...fun...” ---The Hollywood Reporter “gorged with ideas...admittedly wild...a literary volcano” ---Cleve Herman, KFWB

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Glenn Hopkins.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2008905124

ISBN:             Hardcover               978-1-4363-4871-3

                         Softcover                 978-1-4363-4870-6

                         eBook                       978-1-4691-2408-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 12/03/2018

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

September

Labor Day’s purple evening

Comedy

Strike the chord

One Web Becomes another

Selah!

Boy sneaks to school

The Proclamation on the wall in Venice

The Lady and the Tiger

The Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach

Far, far from any big city…

400 pages, plus Updike

Sahl, not Saul

The Beverly Wilshire

The monumentally small

Crickets

October

Goodnight, Mary

A seminal experience

Ohio atic and Playgroup

Washington, D.C.

Nailing Ray Bradbury

Under Arnold

Hallow Weenie

November

Bad election. Bad medicine

Harry and The Faeries

The Marriage Trap

What people will swallow

What would you have done?

Thanksgiving for Women

Mother, Sister, Friend and Wife

The Balkans

ESL Pedagogy and WHITE BREAD

Family Pictures

Allopathica

Kaiser

THE VALUE OF AN EPIDEMIC

… all in the same boat.

Prayer through The Revolutionary

December

The Children’s own tree

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Solstice Greeting

Neverland

A pitch for Meat

Tannenbaum ’04

Equinox Announcement: Where we’ll end

The Origin of Life: Rhythm

Angry Song

January

Family, Buck’s Rock, and the meadow

Ernst

Kuravunga Springs

Scene: young girl

Mrs. Roosevelt

Accordion Lesson

Pax Americana

February

Too much Three Stooges

Teenager tapped to grow up quick

White Bread rrrrrobery

The decline of Western Civilization in … Boat.

From the ground, up

Chinese New Year

The loss, the loss, the terrible loss

Birthday Boy

March

Petro-Sonic bombing and the Tsunami

Dismantling Douglas Memorial Methodist

King, take heart

My Hat story

Palm Sunday

Colony, Robin Hood and Brecht

Barbara makes it work

April

Wholly Weak

Rrrrobery Less and Less time

The Woodstuck Guild

Big Bear Lake

Holy Week

At Nappa Valley to 210 fairies

Easter Sunday

Gunsmoke Hearth

Simultaneous Organisms

Obituary Artifact

glenn.jpg

Glenn Hopkins as drawn by Lucy Nurkse

Woodstock Guild residency, 1998

Wilford Clyde Hopkins (1926-1984)

Known to most as Bill, to some as Slim

. . . but to a close-knit six of us as Dad.

front%20pic%20new1.jpg

Dad, you were so much better than I knew.

Please forgive me.

Slim Volume

©2017 Glenn Hopkins, Donatello Press, Ernest Harding,

Editor and Publisher, www.mootney.org

©2017 Xlibris, in cooperation with Donatello Press and

The Venice Mootney Co.

SLIM

VOLUME

SEPTEMBER

In the purple evening of Los Angeles Labor Day, 2004.

After a scorching week,

to cool this house bought with " . . . Frog" money,

I stand squirting the lawn,

I idly adjust the nozzle from single destructive ray

to a cone of finest mist

and back to the raindrop setting Dad preferred.

Half a century is erased.

I’m a fifteen-year-old bubba dying for armpit hair,

squirting the tiny lawn worn down by four brothers and one sister.

On such hot evenings then, in the D.C. suburbs,

cut off from the cool outside in the hot little living room

with my feet I pump the air into my 1874 parlor organ

and play it at every commercial.

They shout and shush me.

(It’s important to hear the commercials

not an old instrument that cost $50:

half from my savings;

half loaned by my father.)

Winston tastes good like a cig-cig-cigarette should. (3 1 3 1)

I have my own musical logo I play as we rejoin the show (5 5 3 1)

Comedy

I could also begin by telling you that tonight, on HBO, a black comedian asked his large audience, What do men want? It’s easy. Just lick our balls a little, make us a sandwich, and don’t talk so damn much. The mostly black crowd with their hard-won freedom to be loud, tough. opinionated and irreverent (or just the opposite if they feel like it) shouted and applauded. Some of the brothers stood up and rooted with a raised and circling clenched fist. (That circling closed fist is a gift to the culture from The Arsenio Hall Show. I once had an actress explaining her missed rehearsals for one of my 99-seat plays because she was working on that show. At that time I myself had never heard of the gentleman before. But now I say, Arsenio, where are you?)

I liked the quirky audaciousness of somebody talking about reducing a man’s needs to the bare minimum . . . in public. That’s just me. It’s very personal, very revealing. So it strikes me as audacious and funny. Look at Phyllis Diller, Roseanne Barr, and now Margaret Cho. The material of these comedians (Why are they all women? Must I say comediennes?) is kind of purposely gross. The first joke I heard Roseanne tell was: I quit smoking a couple weeks ago. I haven’t noticed any effect yet, but it does make it safer to drink out of the beer cans laying around the house. There’s a visceral shiver there once you realize that at one point she ostensibly tilted back a can and had a beer-soaked cigarette-butt come down into her mouth. On one level we’re all just kids laughing at poop.

Once he had abdicated from the throne of England The Duke of Windsor reported that he and his wife led a life that had two rules: never complain and never explain; complaining and explaining are tedious and without them the conversation rides very high and dry indeed. Without complaining or explaining things don’t get bogged down. What these rules don’t allow for, however, is heart space. Telling what’s in your heart is a kind of explaining and to the degree that there is pain, we might well complain a bit in the telling. The same balance is needed between story-telling as a kind of entertainment in which one is a dead-pan manipulator of the audience with set pieces fine-tuned and deliberate . . . My aunt Moanie, with her Don Rickles faces, and her moans and groans was a master of this, fascinating a whole room telling of a country cousin, near a parked motorcycle with a pet squirrel that purposely let a little line of hard little round turds. With moans and groans she let you know she was too prissy for her own story. Unh! Unh, Unh, UnH!

The opposite of a reheased story is what the faeries call heart space. Perhaps foolishly, I’m going to try to do both: the dryness of fact, plus something more juicy, and admitedly moany.

Where would my lick my balls-guy get a line like that if it weren’t personal and from a yearning heart? And why would guys stand up in cheering agreement if it hadn’t really struck a chord with them? See,

Strike the chord

Ring your bell

Be alive. Are you there?

I’m here.

Isn’t it about you and me?

I may be here in L.A. at 5:00 a.m. trying to keep warm . . .

You could be too. Welcome to my time machine.

It’s all about the spark, isn’t it?

We’re the slowest burn in the universe, aren’t we?

The burn watching itself burn . . . .

Our own metabolism;

Gaia metabolism: heating up and dying as we burn and radiate every damn thing in sight . . .

From the microscope they study now (Get inside. Take it apart)

To the telescope they studied back then (The twelve-year cycle of Chinese "animal

years" actually parallels the hugely influential orbit of mamoth planet Jupiter around

the sun and little us)

It’s about us. We’re it.

What’s more interesting than us? Machines? Games? Triumphs?

What we call our lives is just the slowest burn in the solar system . . .

watching itself burn.

You got something better? Machines? Games? Triumphs?

I don’t think so. All that male shit that avoids the soldier’s mother,

Avoids the kiss, avoids Walt Whitman

FUCK THAT. Oh you think they can take my nephew and make him a killing machine but I can’t scream fuck that?

Fuck that.

4082.png

Such language!

It’s called English.

And you see how I fall, hapless, inarticulate victim

of the violence/conformity complex . . .

using the f-word to attack, defend and repudiate.

Don’t we all agree that the word for intercourse should be the epitome of intimacy and love?

I timidly raise my hand to meekly protest Microsoft word,

which insisted that every time I went to a new line above,

there should be a capital letter,

which was not necessarily my poetic choice at all.

No doubt there is an override for this default.

And once all computer programs everywhere agree on what it is,

such as how the typewriter companies agreed on where to place the letters,

I would be willing to learn to override the default.

For the time being I just change each unwanted capital letter one by one.

This gives you a gauge of my basic Windows level.

In college I always wanted a typewriter that would remember text.

It is a marvel, after all.

This machine is way-better than the typewriters of my youth.

Oh, and I’d be remiss as poetry fades to prose if I didn’t say that I do not wish my wife would talk less. She and my eight-year-old daughter are like water to me. Their smiles, their patter, their physical presence keep me alive, keep me wondering. Their cheerfulness gives me vitamins and minerals. My wife, this one, not the one who dumped my ass twenty-seven years ago and counting but who’s counting? This one holds my soul in her talented concert pianist’s fingers.

Let me slip into something even more uncomfortable:

One Web Becomes Another.

For years people said, It was made for you;

And I resisted like a bear.

I began. We waited a decade for you;

And finally, boom, I was there.

There’s bound to be a clue to it,

When in fact it appeared I was dense.

But to me, it was counterintuitive.

Like the following, it made no sense:

First lesson; okay I’m getting it.

It’s not such a mystical art . . . .

Now to turn it off we’re setting it . . .

What??!! To quit, go to START???

Time out for sex, shower, church, omelet, beach.

Yeah, coochy-coo, cry for the cosmos, nurturance and sun, fun, freedom!

My poem frozen elsewhere. in inaccessible cyberspace,

Monday, I scribble this with a blunt pencil and a bonus, stolen 30 minutes:

The sex was gorgeous and the worship was too.

Damn. She reads that on the screen on Tuesday.

(We share him. It was her turn.)

I add the quotation marks on Wednesday.

Time and sloth and greed stab into this thing with a needle and sew into it

discordant threads. Plus, there are more offenses.

I lost more than I thought.

I sit here cutting and pasting my very life by Thursday.

He even came to church, he even made loving omelets

And blazing burn of sand and lovely boogey-boarded daughter . . .

(She and her Mom beach-it almost daily)

YOU can escape with Monday’s blunt, guiltless pencil:

Look at me . . . pathetic that at my age—

a moment of freedom then back into my cage.

I had it! I had it, my Sunday afternoon.

Now I’m back on the job and it’s way too soon.

And this meter takes over, though it’s not the original.

And it seems that my wings were only vestigial.

‘You’re a cooped chicken after all!.’ And you think it’s crummy.

But, doggerel-gone it all . . . You can’t take that Sunday from me.

4078.png

Gosh.

Dare I ask that you pass through The Filter of Poetry, rhyming poesy?

But I like the way the structure breaks down when my wife, er, I mean the wife in the poem peeks at the screen and the unknown, mysterious narrator gets busted.

4076.png

And I live in a house with five pianos, Selah!!!

My dreams are coming true.

(They’d better by this over-the-hump point in my own particular burn.)

Fortunately I’ve lit two other little bairn burns in my life. One is 32. One is 8.

Obviously I can’t stay away from the procreative fire. Dad: "Ain’t none of you done what I told you, ‘Keep it in your pants!’

Did my opening alienate women and others sensitive about testicles? As the Union Chapter Chair, I once presented a new principal with two heavy Chinese chiming balls meant to be handled as a kind of thoughtful yoga. When twirled they make a ringing sound. It was a faculty dinner at a Chinese Restaurant (see my February chapter). There was a poem I read about some of our past principals who were difficult and some kind of implication like don’t bust my balls. Whereupon the recipient principal, a tall unmarried woman constantly crowing about my wife’s beautiful skin became one of the most ball-busting principals we ever had. I should’ve learned, I hope, not to tip-off an adversary about one’s own vulnerability.

Gosh, I feel like I spend so much time tip-toeing around for . . . for whom? You don’t think anything’s more interesting than peep-hole do you? (Get it? That’s one of my pronunciation jokes: peephole = people.) Dad had a lot of those.

And yes, I’m steering this time-machine and yes as I enter this data we’re at September, 2004.

I could’ve begun here:

It was so early it was still dark. The young Korean boy carefully pulled the prepared bundle out from under some clothes. Being careful not to wake anyone the boy tiptoed to the window and tossed the bundle through to the ground outside. Just in time. From where they slept his father emerged: When they ask you a question, try to answer in Japanese. They like that.

Yes, Father.

"Try to get on the crew that has the strongest looking men. It will make your work easier.

Yes, Father.

There is nothing in the house to eat for breakfast. (Japan had controlled Korea about 30 years at this point, see period 1940.) So the boy bids his father farewell. But instead’ve going to wait with the other day laborers, Won-Young Chun angled back to his own house and picked up the package he’d thrown out the window. It was his school uniform. All this month he has secretly been going to school. His father would be angry. The family needs whatever money he can earn shoveling for the Japanese, or whoeverdddddddddddddddddddd Ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

4074.png

Gosh. What happened?

I fell back to sleep.

It’s six a.m. on Labor Day.

Given the fact that way-less than fifteen percent of American workers have the protection of a labor union these days . . .

it’s amazing they still let us have the first Monday in September off every year.

I don’t even hear traffic on the freeway half a block away.

(The Santa Monica, Interstate 10, five lanes east, five lanes west.)

I must be the only one on the block that’s up.right now. Look at me, talking about talk. You want the story, don’t you? OK. About my father-in-law:

What bothered Won Young is that he had to sneak to school, where the sixty students in his class stand up when the teacher enters the room, stand up when answering a question, stand up and scrub down the room and hall when teacher says tolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllssssssssssssssssssssssssss

It’s no good. It’s not that I’m not engaged by my Korean father-in-law’s story. It’s just that we all swam and swam in the Pacific Ocean yesterday and I need to go back to bed a few hours. It’s labor day, 2003.

4072.png

Ah. There. Great.

Nine-thirty and I’m still tired and stiff from being tossed around by the ocean on the proverbial last weekend of the summer. But I feel good: sanded by the sand, pinkened by the sun, shined by organic salt water. (We have lots of floating seaweed and dolphins further out.) Venice Beach, California.

Yesterday I caught a couple nice waves.

Me. A body-surfer.

The Proclamation on the door in Venice

I was living there, three blocks from the ocean (where in ’84 the neighborhood put up a huge geodome) at the tail-end of my first marriage without ever going into the water. Then one day shortly after my wife had grabbed my son and left, I got a hold of the truth serum developed by Sandos Laboratories in Switzerland for the CIA. I took some. As I felt it coming on I wrote in big blunt pencil on the white flat inside of my front door, I have lived here at the beach for two years with a wife and son; a reasonably good example of each. They left. I now love one woman and many men. That seems to satisfy both them and me. I shall now go swim in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

Too busy to stick a toe in the Ocean. No wonder Tillie left my ass.

I went down there, this would be 1977, stripped naked on the sand (remember the epoch and my dosed condition) and I plunged forward . . . shouting Two years! Two years! as the healing magic of the surf pounded and pulled me for the first time since I’d lived at Bohemia-central, Venice Beach.

Later in the 80’s at a section one blue lifeguard stand north known as screech beach my Japanese diamond grader boyfriend and I would join dozens of others out there. The style was to wear your swimming trunks around your neck as you stood or floated where the waves were breaking, hoping to be carried in on one. I used to marvel that I’d become a surfer. Me! If the wave grabs you to make you part of it, you can sense that it’ll be strong enough to sweep you to shore.

That Japanese boyfriend was in his late twenties. My Penelope’s son at that time called him that teen-ager. He always loved that fact and used to sign notes and letters teen-ager. I got a letter from him yesterday. My play Robin Hood, with narration by Quentin Crisp was written while he cooked and cleaned for us every weekend. Robin was dedicated to him and informed by our discovery of The Radical Faeries. (When he found that I was going to Penelope’s after he left on a Sunday night to drive back down to San Clemente . . . he began to jealouly block that by staying Sunday nights too, leaving at 4:00 am in order to get to work on time the next day and block my staying Sunday night with Penelope.

Having at that time Erio of Osaka as my own Little John, Penelope as Maid Marion, and the radical faerie gatherings as Sherwood Forest, in my version of Robin Hood, the famous guy in green proceeds with Maid Marion on one arm and Little John on the other. And Sherwood Forest is a haven for artists and craftsmen and odd-balls and faeries. It’s set in September, before the cold of winter, and was written at a high-water mark, before the onset of the winter known as AIDS. Of course taped narrator Quentin Crisp, who saw the rose through world-colored glasses, used to say, AIDS is a fad, by which is implied that VD in other forms, for example the pox in Shakespeare, and in some cases unclean in the Bible has existed a long time. And historically promiscuity plus VD in what we’re now allowed to call the gay community is responsible for the folk wisdom that shuns and proscribes gays as unclean and has instilled homophobia over the milenia. Germs are real.

And that bi Robin Hood has had four productions, including two evenings taped for radio on the grounds of The Washington Monument during the 1987 March for GLBT (gay, lesbian, bi, trans-sexual) rights. The interwoven narration and music cues won a Drama-Logue Award for sound-designer Leonora Schildkraut, the widow of Joseph Schildkraut who played the father in the original film version of The Diary of Ann Frank. I was told Mr. Schildkraut was campy and called Pepe.

Penelope, that one woman, I wrote about on my door stayed with me off and on for eighteen years. Remarried to others, we’re still friends. (Penelope is nine years my elder. My wife had been ten. Was