by Jennifer Bobiwash

As I continue on my journey to be a playwright, I try to surround myself with like minded people, so I can ask questions and pick their brains.  I started writing my first play by accident.  I was trying to work some stuff out and would write random thoughts, collecting stories, and poof a play.

Ok, not exactly poof, more like a volcano that has blown and the lava is slowly inching its way to the sea, and when it hits the salt water a cloud of volcanic yuck fills the airs with a sizzle.  That’s where I’m at.  Volcanic yuck.  My first play completed, workshopped and performed but no idea what to do next.  The sequel that I had started hangs over me like ashfall, with no end in sight.  I have been again collecting bits and pieces of writing as I try to figure out this next show.  Trying to write for a specific topic to be performed in a specific venue.  So many options for stories to be told, where do you start?

Sitting alone at my computer doing endless research, I am no further along, with the exception of a few dozen avenues to explore.  My goal is to find a writers group to just sit with and write.  I don’t have to share with anyone, I just need to feel the pressure of others actually writing and I think it would work.  When I do have the opportunity to sit with real writers, I feel like a fan girl gushing and asking non-stop questions.  Writing with other writers and then sharing is a an opportunity to understand the process of writing by their comments and how they ask questions.  They don’t offer up suggestions for your characters or “maybe you should change the location so then your protagonist escapes the bad guy, you can change this and you can change that”.  They tell you what they liked and what they didn’t understand and what they wanted to know more about and it makes you want work harder.

I can feel the tradewinds blowing and the ash lifting.  The only way to get past the yuck is to just keep writing.  Sit down, turn off your internet connection, so you won’t be able to do “research”.  Or better yet, go old school, grab your notebook and find a comfy, place to write, and just write.  Don’t worry if it’s good, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be.

keep writing!

by Diane Grant

I now know how difficult it is to send those rejection letters we all hate to receive.

Seven years ago, a small group of us started the Palisades Playwrights Festival at Theater Palisades, wanting to introduce new voices to a community theater that is still convinced that plays like Chapter Two, The Foreigner, and You Can’t Take It With You, are the only plays that people will come to see.

We have readings of new plays for three Tuesdays in April with a Q&A after and wine and refreshments before. We’ve found some really well written, entertaining – even crowd pleasing – new plays. They are well rehearsed and staged and the actors throw themselves into them. (A friend from ALAP came and although she didn’t say whether or not she liked the play, thought the acting was stupendous.) And even though we have yet to convince the powers that be to add any of these new plays to a season – we’ll keep trying – our audience for the readings has continued to grow and people come back every year.

We initially had submissions from only the Westside but alarmingly for such a small crew, our submissions have increased too, and this year we had seventy plays to read! We had to open up the process to more readers, and from October to February, we read, read, and read.

With only three slots, choosing the plays was very difficult.

Then came the writing of the rejection letters! It is so hard to reject good scripts and really awful having to turn friends down. Some people ask for notes and that’s OK. I’ll do that when I can think again. And some people don’t take it well at all! One playwright sent me a message that said, “Your financial institution has important information for you. Click here.” (Fortunately, he neglected to remove his photo from the side of the email.)

Surprisingly, we had far more submissions from men than women. We chose two plays by men this year, a romantic comedy about a novelist being dragged into the 21st century; a play set in 1947 about PTSD and the then new idea of putting small offenders into community service; followed by a dark hilarious comedy by a woman, Virginia Mekkelson, about how a surprise delivery of a crocodile solves a couple of problems with bad corporate bosses.

I hope that we have more plays from women next year and that lapfiers will make our work even harder next year and submit.

by Diane Grant

A while ago, Nancy Beverly, a fellow lafpier, sent me a link to a YouTube series called The Calamities of Jane, which is about a 50’ish actress who is still trying to make it in the biz. Nancy wrote a lot of the episodes on this show which stars Rebecca Klinger, who produced and plays the title role.

Each episode, and I’ve seen three so far, is sharp, honest, very funny and so painful.

And all released a flood of memories. I remembered the time I was auditioning for a commercial in which a woman who has won a big prize throws a bunch of cash in the air. I had made everyone laugh and I knew, just knew, that I’d booked it, when some demon inside me spoke up and said, “But wouldn’t they have given her a check?” End of story. There was a game show I thought I was sailing through until a guy came up to me and whispered, “Relax, sweetheart, and pull down your skirt.” Didn’t book that again. There was always something. I was too fat or too thin, too young or too old, or “too short for a two shot.” Strangely, whenever there was something I was absolutely right for, the daughter of my agent would get the part.

Then, my husband, a filmmaker, and I wrote screenplays together. And of course, pitched them. We pitched our little hearts out. And kept at it until we had holes (not diamonds) in the soles of our shoes. We worked for Amway distributors and phone rooms and wrote a charming little story that could have made the studios millions, called The Blini.

Like Jane, we always had car trouble and one day on our way to a studio, we heard a thump and a clunk and a rattle and a horn honking. A woman in the next lane yelled, “You’ve got a flat tire.” We kept on, flat tire or no. (We found out on another occasion, that the spare tire in the trunk is smaller than the other three and when you put it on the wheel and drive off, you feel like clowns in an impoverished circus troupe.)

We limped into the studio, and pitched our charming little story with great verve and sparkle and passion. The producer told our agent that she was “underwhelmed.”

We were sent out again and while waiting and waiting in the anteroom of yet another producer, told an assistant that we had to go soon to pick up our daughter from school. When the producer finally appeared, she said, “Make it quick. We don’t want your daughter to be abducted on the street corner.”

We were sent to another studio. We’d had to change the date and our agent assured us that that hadn’t been a good move. While we waited, sitting in two tiny chairs, in yet another anteroom, which was the size of one of those walk in closets you see on reality shows, the producer’s “girl” talked on the phone. “Well,” she shouted. “So what if he had a gun? What’s so wrong about that? What is your problem?”

Finally, we were waved into the producer’s enormous office, where he was watching the stock market figures moving across an electronic band at the base of his office walls. He might have said, “Go ahead,” but we weren’t sure because he was talking over his shoulder. However, we pitched our little hearts out and then he said, “I think I heard that pitch before and passed.”

We did have a little run of luck and after winning with a short film at Cannes wrote another charming little script, this time for a studio, a complete rewrite of one of their films. We called it Cannes Artists. I have to make this short because I might START SOBBING. It did make millions for the studio but not for us because the head of the studio who had employed us left and the project was passed on to a new writer who rewrote it and called his script Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Now, when I send out my plays and receive a rejection in two seconds flat or don’t hear back at all or get that “not for us at this time” email, I don’t blink. I pour myself a glass of chilled Pinot Grigio, turn on the TV, put up my feet, and watch Chopped.

The Calamities of Jane – www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIfiumV3S4s

By Analyn Revilla

What I have learned these past 4 months during my yoga teacher training is that yoga is not only about the poses (asana in Sanskit). Yoga is a practice, and like other practices every day is different. The regularity of the practice varies from person to person. What you put into the practice is what you’ll get out of the practice. I am almost near the finish line of this yoga teacher training journey. I wish I could honestly say it was a good journey in that I am coming though it with a happier perspective, but instead I am coming through with a broader perspective and disillusionment.

Los Angeles has grown to be a yoga mecca outside of India. If you google the studios that have proliferated in the Los Angeles area in the past recent years you might see a concentration of studios have budded and matured mostly in the west side. It has grown into a glamorous industry far away from the grass roots yoga images and institutions from where it was birthed. There’s aerial yoga, water yoga, pre-natal yoga, maybe one day yoga flavored ice cream. There’s even a social justice motivated yoga where I studied for my training.

My earliest practical experience of yoga was in a Bikram studio in Vancouver. I really liked it, and practiced yoga regularly there and also here in Los Angeles. Then my practice became dormant while I explored other parts of myself with acting, writing and music. All these other traditions take time so yoga fell off my radar. To revitalize my interest in it I chose to enroll for 200 hour teacher training for myself, without any immediate intention to teach yoga. In my enthusiastic haste to embark on this project the studio I chose to study was the one closest to where I lived in South Central Los Angeles. The cost was reasonable compared to other places offering 200 hour teacher training and the schedule was workable for me.

The course material is Yoga Alliance approved which is what most students would like to do as it gives their training credibility should they choose to audition and teach at a studio. The 13 weekends spent with my fellow classmates covered material from the basic asanas, yoga history, anatomy, ayuvedric nutrition and the different styles of yoga (kundalini, Iyengar, hatha, vinyasa, etc.) There was one module on social justice which was a very difficult class because of the discussions that came up. The primary divisor between the students was the topic of race. The subtlety of yoga is that people are drawn to it for a variety of reasons, but most of what I learned is that people were drawn to yoga for its healing aspects. A professional doctor or therapist may have prescribed to “try yoga” to alleviate an injury from an accident or to help someone manage stress and depression.

What can happen in a yoga class for those unsuspecting of its deep tension releasing asanas and “breathing into that space” is it can bring up emotions related to trauma that has been buried in the tissues of the body. This can happen with deep stretch poses that opens up the hip area. This is the part of our anatomy where we carry the most weight of our traumas related to family and our relationships with others. It is the area of the first or root chakra, and also the second chakra (our creativity). During the eleventh week of our class, the module social justice started with a brief apology from the instructor for not having more people of color teach other modules. The reason was yoga is a new practice that have mostly been learned and taught by white culture.

There’s already an inherent risk in raising a differentiating factor by using a person’s color. What surprised me most was yoga does not differentiate in any form – not color, not age, not body type, not socio-economic reasons, not religion. Certainly yoga is not always affordable and someone curious or really intent on practicing yoga in a shared environment would need to dig to find “free yoga” or “yoga by donation”. They do exist, and there are more and more of these places available. Some students began to rattle names of people of color who are qualified to teach yoga. Then the instructor further explained that the experts she brought in offered their teaching and time for free.

I asked people in the class to clarify what “people of color” meant to them. I have my idea of what it means to me, but I wanted people to express and hear for themselves what they were thinking and saying. The answer most commonly said was that “people of color” meant not-white. When I looked at the ratio of the people that answered vehemently on describing the expression, my observation was they were also the people in the class who seemed to live in their vocabulary of woundology. It is a word created by Carolyn Myss (a medical intuitive, author of “Anatomy of the Spirit” and “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can” http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/myss-heal.html).

“Woundology is the tendency to insistently hold on to old traumas. You define yourself by your hurts, not by your strengths, and there in those hurts you stay stuck forever.” – Source (Victor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy in Israel. He is the author of a book called “Man’s Search for Meaning”. He was a neurologist and psychiatrist and a holocaust survivor.)

Of the 14 students in the class there was only one non-person-of-color and I will call her Wendy. Wendy bravely spoke out on her views and feelings. I’ve observed her to be a sincere and loving person, and I knew where she was coming from when she said that she does not see people of color, because she sees people by their behavior. I get it when she said that. I am reminded of song by George Brassen called “Quand On Est Con”. The message of the song is when you’re a jerk you’re a jerk (When you were a zygote you were a jerk, and when you were a kid you were a jerk, and when you’re old, you’re still a jerk.) It’s funny and it’s not funny which makes it even funnier to me the way life is (and I’m probably the only one laughing.)

The responses towards Wendy included “well, if you don’t see people of color then you don’t really see me.” It went as far as the teacher admonishing to her that as white women it was their responsibility to teach others about this lack of awareness in society. I was taken aback by this landslide of peoples’ emotions and lack of discrimination between emotion and reason. What I saw was an alienation of someone who had been part of the group from the beginning that was coming to its end. The woman’s eyes welled with tears. I spoke up. I said “Wait. Whatever happened to personal choice? What about respecting peoples’ capacities? It’s my personal choice whether or not I turn on the TV. I don’t like it when people shove their beliefs and ideology down my throat. I came here to learn about yoga and not talk about politics.” Someone rebutted passionately with “Yoga is everything!” And that response made me see that there were many wounds in the midst of the students. I’m not immune to wounds. I’ve had snowballs thrown in my face as a dark skinned islander in the midst of a mostly white community in Northern Alberta. I’ve been beaten and called “chink” and “china man”. There are other wounds too, but I’m not going to bring them into a yoga teacher training environment. People came to this class for a different purpose.

I consulted privately with others in the class after that event. Some agreed that the topic should not have been brought up, especially to those unsuspecting. Racial discrimination issues in this city is not an easy topic and it should be facilitated with thought and finesse. One black student gently reproached me for standing up for a white woman. I thought hmm? I stood up for a human being – one of us who belongs in that class like anyone else. Wendy resolutely pressed on till the last class of the course. That class was spent at the beach. Near the end of the day as we packed our things I gladly ran to my motorcycle to put my things away and dress in my riding gear. As I walked back to the group for a group photo by the water’s edge I saw Wendy walking towards the parking lot. When I asked her what happened she tearfully said, “I’m so done with this class. I can’t even say anything without someone making a case of it.” She explained that she said she needed to get out of the sun soon, otherwise she would turn purple like an eggplant. One person in the class told her that it was a derogatory remark. I wasn’t there to hear this and watch whatever happened unfold, but the result it exactly the opposite of what yoga is supposed to mean – “Union”.

If you’ve tried yoga, a good teacher will begin the class by asking students of injuries or pain that need to be addressed, so that the teacher can offer a modification to a pose to make it gentler or simply to ask the student to refrain from doing a pose that could aggravate the injury. The point is to take care of oneself. So another characteristic I would add to yoga is self-reliance. We all have built in capacities for survival. Unfortunately, some of us may have been exposed to harmful environments that suppressed that natural instinct. I believe that yoga is a tool that can be used as a practice to learn self-reliance to give our mind, body and spirit the vitality to enjoy life. One of the virtues spoken in the bible of yoga “The Yoga Sutras” by Patanjali is ahimsa.

“Ahimsa is a multidimensional concept, inspired by the premise that all living beings have the spark of the divine spiritual energy; therefore, to hurt another being is to hurt oneself.” (source Wikepedia)

I am grateful for what I have learned in this journey to become a yoga teacher. Learning does have a price and over time I hope that everyone in my yoga teacher training class, will heal. The process will make us all better teachers. We can begin with practicing ahimsa.

Namaste.

by E.h. Bennett

I love words. I love reading words. Especially when they are able to capture a philosophy beyond pure emotion. I love to hear the pin drop.

But you wouldn’t think so by the number of words I write. My characters speak volumes, just not in quantity.

I’ve been so busy at work it’s been difficult to find to the time to write this post. It’s only 9 PM, and I should be sleeping. But here I am attempting to find the words to illustrate what my subconscious has been stewing over for the last couple of days.

Why don’t my characters speak more words?

Is it something I read from Beckett and/or Edward Albee. Could be. Dunno.

Or it it something personally damaging?

Does speaking aloud = ridicule?
Does daydreaming = a backhand?
Does having an opinion = punishment?
Does editorializing = retaliation?

Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. Events shape us. Or maybe it was simply the influence of Beckett and Albee. Could be. Dunno.

And ultimately, does it really matter?

Just keep on writing.

By Analyn Revilla

I can pick from so many things to write about and I want to see it all related and tied together like how Einstein tried to formulate the equation that represents the universe. He had this notion of a Unified Field of Theory – aka Theory of Everything (TOE).

A unified field theory would reconcile seemingly incompatible aspects of various field theories to create a single comprehensive set of equations. Such a theory could potentially unlock all the secrets of nature and make a myriad of wonders possible, including such benefits as time travel and an inexhaustible source of clean energy, among many others. According to Michio Katu, a theoretical physicist at City College, City University of New York, those in pursuit of a unified field theory seek “an equation an inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God.”

(Source: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/unified-field-theory-or-Theory-of-Everything-TOE)

As a writer I need to see the relationships of everything. To me, these relationships give meaning to existence.

I am proposing my Theory of Everything to be a cup.

I was inspired last year to write a poem about a cup. I never wrote the poem, but like one of those inspirations that is shelved and left alone to collect dust – it lingered and fell from out of the blue.

The expression arrived in the form of a sympathy card that I wrote to a friend for the loss of her mother last January. I couldn’t focus on my work until I had found the card, signed it and sent it. It’s funny how a deep inspiration just nags when it’s been put off for so long.

I walked to the coffee shop of an office building. This coffee shop is a gem. It is located at the back of the former Variety building on Wilshire (across from LACMA). What makes it a treasure for me is their espresso machine. There is not one coffee shop within a 10-15 minute walking distance of the office that serves the delights of an espresso machine. They also have a substantial collection of greeting cards and magazines. On days when I want to tune out for a little while I go to the coffee shop and just day dream over a latte with 3 espresso shots.

That day I went to find a sympathy card, but I could not find any. The next best choice was a decorative card without words. The most generic card I chose was a graphic design of 5 cups stacked on top of one another. Back in my office I stared at the blank space and thought of what I wanted to say. I remember writing something to the effect of “… her life was well lived. Her lips kissed pressed upon the rims of cups from which she drunk the rainbow of life’s experiences: beauty, joy, pain and suffering…” I imagined her mother drinking cups of coffee or tea in her different moods, whether alone or with company and in different places.

Think of the times you caressed the surface of your favorite cup as your thoughts drifted and the aroma of your coffee or herbal tea infused your sense of smell. That moment is imprinted in your heart. I know it, because I can remember that feeling, that moment when I inhaled then exhaled. That pause in your day was shared with the cup. That pause happens like the periods in our day when we take a break.

My mug at work has a deep brown stain along the waterline. It is brown from the tannins of the tea and oils from the coffee. I surprise myself at how I don’t bother to rub away the stain with some special cleaner or just elbow grease. Some people would probably shirk away from using my cup. Good. Stay away from it. It’s my cup and it’s my theory of everything.