Gifts. . .

Three showings of Gifts in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Van Nuys, then back to Sebastopol for a very sweet performance.  It seems to deepen as we continue.

    As announced, we’re coming East to play at the Ko Festival of Performance July 25-August 2.  We have some inquiries for hosting Gifts en route and in the Northeast before and after.  If you’d like to consider hosting it, it’s free to hosts.  Email for details.  And we’re always open for showings in the Bay Area & North Bay.  Another show upcoming in Willits.

And if you’re in New England, our Ko presentations are on the KoFest website.

DamnedFool.com. . .

Twenty-two weeks into our weekly blog, my voice and Elizabeth’s and the Fool-mind we share in common.  Please visit and subscribe.

Lear progressing. . .

  King Lear is progressing.  Almost all the heads are cast and fifteen of the bodies built.  Now they’re all lined up in the shop to have their heads drilled for eyes.

     Still planning on a March ’15 opening.  Where?  It depends on securing grant support, which we won’t know till December.  Maybe an initial San Francisco run, or mayhap just a few people in our studio.  We’ll see.  In any case, it’ll be available for touring thereafter, whether to theatres or arts centers or just any strange individuals who’re willing to have King Lear in their living rooms.  It’s built to fit snugly in the back of our Prius.

A few months ago, we made the acquaintance of an extraordinary San Francisco photographer, Robert Fischer.  He came north and spent the afternoon photographing us and our puppets, with some extraordinary results.  One was recently featured in his solo exhibit in SF, and it has much in it that I’m hoping to capture in Lear.

So we just wanted to acknowledge his work and link interested folks to his website: www.robertfischerphoto.com.  Some very bizarre and very beautiful work.

And we should also introduce our long-time friend Arturo Castillo, who’s been doing some very fine work in photography, some to be seen on his website.  Arturo’s an actor, director, and also a co-author with us on a couple of filmscripts, but his recent photography — which we caught up with on our recent trip to L.A. — truly knocked our socks off.  Check out all this stuff.

Miscellany. . .

    The wedding was intensely memorable.  Our son Eli, his mate Meg, with a huge outdoor bash in Stern Grove, San Francisco.  Eli enlisted me as a kind of stage manager, though he’d arranged for the caterer, the wine, the cupcakes, the flowers, the chairs & tables, the silverware — when pretty off-beat people do something “conventional,” they really do it.  Steady work all afternoon, and then everybody started arriving.  Our daughter Johanna and her mate Francesco had come from Tuscany, where they live, and so the whole family was in the familiar pressure of pre-production.

The ceremony you can read about on our DamnedFool blog.  It was in Quaker style, presided over by a cartoonist-minister (it’s true), with long meditative silences — strange, I think, for people unused to silence but enormously moving.  Then afterward into the lodge for feasting, dancing, and thereafter striking the set: glasses, silver, tables, chairs right down to the bare four walls in time for the van to pick up the rental items.  A life in theatre suits one for abrupt contrasts.

And then, as Eli & Meg went to Big Sur, a week with Jo & Fra — his first time in the US.  Sonoma County is a good place to start.