4th of July
Watching the beautifully overcast sky and the trees bending to the breeze on this lazy weekend before the 4th of July, my mind drifts to another 4th, years ago, when I was still living in Texas but had travelled to Cripple Creek for a part of the summer.
At the time, Cripple Creek was a small, ex-mining town, catering to tourists who were interested in the Colorado Gold Rush. This was before they had brought back gambling and turned it into the boomtown that it is today. A friend of mine had a jazz band that had been hired to play at the Palace Hotel, a 19th Century structure with a lot of character and its own resident ghost. The owners of the hotel also owned a small rental house which they were letting the band stay in for the summer.
I arrived in the middle of the night one night and stayed for a few weeks. There were three rooms – a bedroom with a bed, where my friend and his wife slept; a bedroom with no furniture, where the rest of us slept on the floor in sleeping bags or blankets, and a living area with two couches, where the last two people awake each night would crash.
I spent the days exploring abandoned gold mines and ghost towns around Cripple Creek, then would come back to the hotel in the evening to listen to the jazz band. The other people in town who had been hired to work the tourist trade during the summer would also come listen to the band and hang out with us afterwards. It was a small, after-hour crowd of people who had chosen a gold mining town in Colorado for a summer job, over other options, such as a dude ranch in Montana, or an alligator farm in Florida.
As the 4th of July approached, we were told that we should drive up into the hills around town on the evening of the 4th to watch the fireworks. We loaded lawn chairs and ice coolers into our trunks and chose different overlooks around the city.
An old man in one of the passes opened the trunk of his car. He pulled out a pile of Roman candles and bottle rockets and began to fire them in the general direction of the town. When his trunk was empty, the show was over.
It didn’t last long, and was perhaps not quite what I was expecting. But somehow, Roman candles being shot off in the mountains beside an old gold mining town on a crisp, Colorado night made for a great 4th of July show.
New Year’s Morning
A leisurely New Year’s morning sipping coffee, reading, and watching the sun rise over the buildings across the way.
Suddenly I saw nine large geese strolling lordly down the sidewalk, like nine men of Boston, heads snootily high, chests puffed out, a comfortable, unhurried strut.
Intrigued, I walked out onto my deck. Thirty-three geese had gathered on the gentle slope that leads from my apartment to the road. Most were pecking the grass. Others walked down the sidewalk.
From time to time, as many as twelve of them wandered out into the street, stopping traffic. The cars honked at them. The geese honked back, just as angrily, and didn’t budge an inch. They didn’t fly, and they didn’t hurry in their steps. The cars would wait for an opening, then edge their way through gaps in the slowly strolling mob.
The geese were like a street gang. Confident in their numbers, they owned this piece of turf.
I watched entranced. Suddenly, at some silent call, the geese all stopped in place and stretched their necks to their full length. They turned their heads to face the same direction. Like everything else they had done, the movement was slow and deliberate, filled with a quiet dignity.
It was uncanny. Thirty-three unmoving sentries, stone still, facing some unseen point. Because I turned my head the same way and saw nothing that could have attracted their attention. No movement, nothing that could have emitted a sound beyond my range of hearing.
All at once, the geese spread their wings to full length and began to flap. It was the sound of a score of circus tents flapping in a hurricane. The geese rose. The noise was intoxicating, overpowering. I didn’t know the mere sound of wings against the wind could be so loud. It touched something primal in me and felt alien. A force entirely beyond my will or control. The geese began to honk, but not in unison. A cacophony of shouted orders, arguments, conversations.
They were still fighting for position in their formation as they disappeared over the buildings across the way.
My mind followed them in their flight for a while, then returned to my solid, land bound existence, unable to join them on their journey.
Bishop Castle — Another of the 7 Wonders of Colorado
It was almost dusk as I approached Bishop Castle. I had been exploring my new home state of Colorado and had just driven down from Evergreen, through Leadville, and now into the San Isabel Forest.
I wondered if I would know it when I saw it. They said it was a castle, built stone by stone, by one man, over a 43 year period — a unique individual named Jim Bishop.
Then I turned a corner and suddenly there it was, rising majestically to the sky like a dream from King Arthur.
I stood and looked up at the structure for a long moment. Then I entered the castle.
There are numerous stone stairways, both interior and exterior.
The second floor has enormous windows looking out over the San Isabel Forest.
Stained glass windows and skylights are supported by intricate wrought iron structures.
The Grand Arch is amazing, and it’s hard to fathom that this is the creation of one man.
You could spend all day just exploring the castle.
The exterior walkways are over 100 feet off the ground.
The views are spectacular, if somewhat frightening.
An amazing feat of imagination and design.
Someone pulled the rope in the bell tower. As the bell rang out through the evening air, I heard a cry of “Sanctuary!”
After climbing through the tower, looking out at the vistas that surrounded it, walking the grounds, reading the eccentric signs posted by the eccentric creator of Bishop Castle, I met Jim Bishop himself.
He was a crusty old character and was spreading cement with a trowel, laying in the final stones of a small retaining wall. His castle is a creation that never ends, and he works on it as the rest of us live and breathe.
He cleaned up his tools, and we spoke for a time. He was intelligent and highly focused. And very friendly to the vagabond author who had chosen to make Colorado his home.
The Paths Less Traveled
I’m sitting by the fireplace on this cold and snowy morning, reading “Little House on the Prairie.” But no, I’m mistaken—it’s not “Little House.” It’s a piece written by Katie Sanders, a dear friend of mine who is homesteading on the Colorado plains. She’s recounting her morning of warming her little home with heat from the wood burning stove. Of going out into the snow to check on her chickens, and breaking their icy water. Of looking for goats that have strayed, and watching horses that have escaped from a pasture to the north and are now galloping across her land.
There have always been those who have harkened back to a simpler way of living. I’m reminded of Thoreau and Walden Pond. Of Bronson Alcott and his different experiments in living, some of which were later recounted by his daughter, Louisa May. Even Plato bemoaned the over industrialization of his age—an age in which you could walk 20 paces in any direction and be lost in barren wilderness.
People used to live like Laura Ingalls. Then Thomas Edison was born. It has been said that modern technology is indistinguishable from magic. And it’s true, I’m a veritable wizard in my home. I control the weather with a thermostat. I choose the exact degree of temperature, and the roaring fire in my fireplace is merely decoration, to add a cozy ambience to my living area. The sun rises and falls at my whim with the flip of a switch. I press a button, and troupes of actors entertain me, or other wizards show me things that are happening in the rest of the world. And when I tire of this diversion, I press the button again, and they all disappear, leaving me once again to the coziness of my solitude. I open a book instead of a Kindle, and consider myself old-fashioned.
But as I sit here, wielding the powers bequeathed upon me by the Wizard of Menlo Park, I think of my friend Katie, and contemplate the paths less traveled.
Magic Town — One of the 7 Wonders of Colorado
In my early vagabonding around the state of Colorado, I travelled down to Old Colorado City just north of Colorado Springs to experience a place called Magic Town. I had just moved to the state, and was only beginning to explore the wonders and characters of my new home.
Magic Town was conceived in the mind and created by the hands of sculptor Michael Garman, one of the great characters of the Rockies. He spent his early years bumming around Mexico and South America, carving his figures and selling them door to door. Then he conceived the idea of creating an entire city to house his creations. First a bench, a curb, a hydrant; then a building, a street. Figure by figure, structure by structure, Magic Town was born.
As you step into a large, dark room you find yourself surrounded by an entire miniature city, circa 1930’s. The sounds of the city are all around you — voices, music — pool balls clicking in the billiard parlor, silverware clattering in the cafe. The effect is eerie.
You can look down the streets and alleys, peer through the windows …
Each figure is hand carved, and you can read their lives in their faces.
Each turn brings new wonders: pawn shops, hotels, a boxing gym …
The quiet bustle of a city at night …
After a while, you begin to feel that it’s real …
You can look into the windows and witness the lives of the people of Magic Town …
The loafers and bums … the wanderers and dreamers …
You can hear the echoes of the night through the empty alleyways …
As I approached the theater, I could dimly hear the dialogue and music of my all-time favorite movie, “Casablanca”. I bent down and looked through the doors. There was an entire little theater inside, complete with a 3″ by 2″ screen. And it was actually showing “Casablanca” — the entire movie. I stood and watched for a while. Just another bit of magic in Magic Town.
I met Michael Garman, the sculptor. An interesting character, crackling with the enthusiasm of life. He was happy to recount the adventures of his early years in Mexico and South America. “I was a drunk in those days,” he said. “Not an alcoholic. A drunk. There’s a difference.”
With a gleam in his eye, he tells of the day he first came up with the idea to add sounds to the city, enriching the effect. He recounts nights spent sleeping under a tarp in the rain beside his car on lonely South American dirt roads, of carving figures and selling them door to door to earn money for food. You realize that if he had the chance to do it all over again … he would.
It was dusk as I got into my car and headed for home, Magic Town behind me, the mountains of the Rockies to my left. I knew that I had discovered one of the true wonders and one of the true characters of Colorado.
A Christmas Memory
I’m sitting in my apartment with Christmas music playing softly in the background. The only illumination is the blue lights from the Christmas tree and the orange glow of the fireplace. I’m looking at the snow outside my windows and thinking of my first Christmas Eve in Colorado, seven years ago.
I had just moved here from Texas. It began to snow as I drove to my sister’s house in Elizabeth. The Christmas music on my radio took on a whole different feel as I passed the colorful light displays of people’s houses with their yards covered in snow and gentle white flakes falling all around.
I arrived at my sister’s house, and we all went to a beautiful candlelight service that the church was holding at a local Middle School. Afterward, we drove around and looked at Christmas lights in the snow, then returned to her house for some hot chocolate and Christmas carols.
After everyone went to bed, I decided to walk around in the snow. It was about 2 o’clock in the morning. It was a very silent night, and the wooded hills around my sister’s home were covered with a blanket of white.
I suddenly heard a commotion to my right. A deer jumped over the fence and stopped and looked at me. Then two more deer jumped the fence. Then a big, regal buck walked around the corner of the house. Suddenly, the head of a little baby deer popped up from behind the wood pile. Each one of them would watch me for a moment, then go about its business. The only sound in the night was the crunching of their hooves in the snow. Then one of them turned and cantered up the hill and disappeared into the woods. Two of the others followed, with the buck taking the rear.
I was alone with the baby. I shifted my position and accidentally kicked a tin plate my sister leaves out to feed her animals. The baby deer suddenly popped up and began to spring toward the woods in leaps that made his legs appear to be made of rubber. I had never seen a deer leap like that before. I now understood how legends of flying deer could seem real at Christmastime. In a few moments, I was alone in the silent snow beneath the stars. It was such a feeling of magic and wonder.
I hope everyone has a very special Christmas, surrounded by family and friends and all the love of the season. Stay warm and be blessed.
Halloween is rapidly approaching. Once again, I’ll be going as the Wizard of Oz …
I’ve been trying to think what kind of Halloween gift you might like from the Wizard.
I can give you a heart …
I can give you courage …
I can give you a diploma …
Or I can take you home.
Because it’s not exactly true that nobody gets to see the Wizard. 😉
“Once Upon a Midnight Dreary …”
When the weather chills and the leaves turn, my sister and I know that Halloween adventures lie just around the corner. For us, Halloween is not just a day, it’s a season. I always give her a unique Halloween gift. Sometimes it’s a macabre decoration or ghoulish ornament. But my favorite was the special gift I gave her when I first moved to Colorado seven years ago–at the stroke of midnight on Halloween night, I gave her a small, corked vial, filled with brick dust from the Lizzie Borden house.
Colorado has much to offer the Halloween aficionado. One year we hit the road for a Halloween tour of graveyards. We drove to Littleton to see the grave of Alfred Packer, the only man ever put on trial for cannibalism in the United States. We then headed up to Lafayette to visit the final (?) resting place of Todor Glava, the Lafayette Vampire. Yes, there’s a vampire buried in Colorado. A mysterious man with no friends or family, he arrived from Transylvania in the late 19th Century. It was said he never went out in the daytime; legend holds he was buried with a wooden stake through his heart.
Some of our adventures are literary. We went to the historic Byers Evans house for “An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe,” dramatic readings from the works of the morbid author. And one year we put on masks, climbed the fence of a secluded ranch house … but that story will have to wait; the statute-of-limitations has yet to run out.
Then there’s the annual stage production of “Night of the Living Dead” at the Bug Theater, a cool, bohemian theater in downtown Denver. Clever lines, clever staging. The most interesting stage effect: when someone leaves the house, you watch an old style, black and white movie of what they are doing outside. Then on the screen you watch them return to the house, and onstage they come walking through the door. Surreal.
One annual tradition we never miss is the Trick-or-Treat Street in Elizabeth, Colorado, where my sister owns her own gallery, selling her original artwork. The mainstreet area of Elizabeth is converted into a virtual Halloween town, with thousands of people of all ages in all manner of costumes, strolling up and down the street, in quest of candy and thrills. I always go as the Wizard of Oz—twice I’ve been asked for my autograph; one year I ran into Gandalf, who told me it’s always nice to meet a fellow wizard. A couple of times in the off-season, I’ve had people stop me on the street and say, “I know you–you’re the Wizard of Oz!”
And then there are my sister’s legendary Halloween parties, with great costumes, creepy foods–pudding graveyard’s, etc.– and fun games. (In my family, we don’t bob for apples, we eat donuts hanging from the ceiling.)
Halloween night itself, we stay up late watching horror movies—everything from the classic “Frankenstein/Wolfman” genre, to the old black and white sci-fi’s, to quirkier selections, like “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” and “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” as well as more modern classics, such as “Halloween.” We make fudge and popcorn, turn out the lights, and settle in for an evening of horror.
There’s a chill in the air tonight, the leaves are beginning to turn, and I have a roaring fire in my fireplace. I can feel the season of Halloween just around the corner.
The Heaven We Create
When I die, I want to go to Mark Twain’s library. Don’t give me golden paved streets and a city in the clouds. Let me rest among cushiony chairs, surrounded by hundreds of books in dark-wood, hand-carved shelves. Give me light from an arboretum and alcove windows, and an occasional chilly day, so I can build roaring fires in an ornately carved fireplace.
Mark Twain’s home rests in the lush woods of Hartford, Connecticut. In my tours around the country, I’ve seen some incredible mansions. I’ve been to the palatial homes of men like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison; I’ve experienced Hearst’s Castle–a complex of amazing buildings nestled in the mountains of California. But there is a beauty and a warmth to Twain’s home that is unmatched by any of the places I’ve seen in all of my travels.
Architecturally unique, this umber colored home, with its wrap around porch, octagonal balconies, walkway balconies, spires, and inlaid brick designs is an intellectual’s Disneyland–a thinking man’s castle. Among its design wonders is a fireplace with a hidden side-chimney, so that over the mantel he could have a large, plate glass window. Twain could sit there on snowy days and have the illusion that the beautiful white flakes were drifting down into the fireplace and melting in the fire.
The rooms are warm and inviting; they draw you in and make you feel at home and welcome. Filled with soft textures and stimulating angles, decorated with unique furniture and unusual paraphernalia large and small. Twain said his house had a soul, and a heart; and standing there in the living areas, the bedrooms, the dining room, the billiard room, I could well believe it.
As I drove away from Twain’s home on that beautiful Autumn day, I was headed up to Concord to visit Emerson’s grave and watch the sunset over Walden Pond. Slowly, quietly, I was learning a way to live. And it doesn’t require money so much as style; your own unique style, seeking out the things you find beautiful, surrounding yourself with the things you love, and listening to the things that resonate with your soul.
I’ll Take Manhattan
The envelope looked like so many others I had received. It had my name and address on the front, written in my own hand. It was folded into thirds, so that it would fit into another envelope. A rejection letter. I had once wallpapered my room with rejection letters, until the joke had stopped being funny.
The postmark was New York City. But I had identical envelopes with postmarks from cities all across the country. Including New York.
A friend of mine was visiting, and I had casually picked up the mail on our way out of the house. As he was about to get into his car, I tore the seal and began to read the letter.
I suddenly let out a whoop.
He stopped and turned around. “A production?” he said.
I slapped the letter against my palm, then held it up in the air.
“New York City!” I shouted.
The letter was from Scottie Davis, producer and owner of the New Ensemble Actors Theater of Manhattan. She had read my play “Asylum” and wanted to produce it at the Lincoln Square Theater in New York.
I vividly remembered the night I had finished writing “Asylum.” I had gone up in a high-rise building and looked out at the lights of the city and thought, “I’ve created something that didn’t exist before.” And that was enough. If the play was never produced, if I died or burned the script, it was enough that I had created it, and that it had existed.
And now I held in my hands a letter from a New York producer who wanted to mount the play in Manhattan. Scottie Davis is an amazing, feisty, brilliant African-American woman who had carved out her own unique niche in the New York theater scene. Always following her own taste, she was willing to throw the entire resources of her organization into a project she believed in. And she believed in this unknown author from halfway across the country. There were contracts, negotiations, discussions. We talked by phone and by mail. I came to love and admire this human firecracker long before we met. She worked out of several different Off-Broadway theaters in the Amsterdam area of upper New York City.
I still remember the day the first check arrived, an advance for $100. I went to the bank to cash it and told them I wanted a single $100 bill. For days, I carried that bill in my pocket, fondling it as I walked along. No matter what twists and turns life would bring, it would always remain a fact that I had broken a barrier that many writers never see—I had been paid for my writing.
The flight to Manhattan was a magic carpet ride. Having grown up in Denton, Texas, I can tell you without question that the distance from Denton to New York can’t be measured in miles.
The stewardess liked the outfit I was wearing and told me I looked sharp. She asked me why I was travelling to New York. I handed her one of my newly printed business cards, and told her I was flying up for the production of one of my plays. There are certain moments that money just can’t buy.
I met Scottie Davis for the first time in her basement office, connected to the Lincoln Square Studio Theater, an underground theater space where we were to have the rehearsals. She had beautiful ebony skin, and the long, lean features I associate with African royalty. She introduced me to Tim Taylor, the director, and the three of us discussed the play and the production. We then went to get something to eat before the actors would begin to arrive for that night’s rehearsal.
As the three of us walked the streets of Manhattan, I felt I was playing a scene in a movie. My producer and director and I were grabbing a bite to eat before heading back for the evening’s rehearsal of my New York premiere.
The coming weeks were one of the most amazing periods of my life. Scottie had arranged for me to be the guest on a late night/early morning New York radio talk show. We did a segment for cable TV about the creative process; Scottie, Tim Taylor, and I being interviewed on the set of “Asylum.” (For years afterward, friends in New York would tell me the segment was still playing on late-night cable TV.)
There was opening night; the laughs, gasps, and applause of the crowd. There was the morning I knew the review was coming out, and I bought a newspaper from a street vendor, and sat on the massive steps of the main New York post office, and read the headline: “ASYLUM: GRIPPING, WELL ACTED PSYCHODRAMA.”
And there was closing night, which drew the biggest crowd of the run. And something happened which I didn’t think ever happened in real life. As the crowd came to their feet, applauding, there were shouts of “Author! Author!”
Tim Taylor and I were at the back of the theater. At first, I honestly believed I was hearing wrong. Then Tim put his arm around my shoulder, and the two of us ran to the front of the theater. He gently pushed me out in front of the crowd, then made a broad gesture with both hands, presenting me to the audience. I took bows amid the applause.
There are certain pivotal moments in a man’s life. The day he takes his first step. His first kiss. The first time he falls in love.
And the day he opens a letter from Scottie Davis.
The Literary Lion's Roar 