by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Aug 16, 2022 | Featured, Humor, Politics
There has been a lot going on in American politics since the search of Mar-a-largo to recover some confidential documents. A lot of finger pointing.
Almost half of the country believes it is a “witch hunt” and the FBI is a cover up for the deep state.
I decided to quickly solve this problem and offer a solution.
Trust me — here is the inside story!
The deep state is real and I have the proof.
(The real deep state is never capitalized. That’s how you know it’s the real deep state.)
The deep state is real, as is evident from the demise of the stick shift.
Ask yourself: In a world driven by Classified and Top Secret Information, isn’t it amazing that nobody has objected to the disappearance of the stick shift?
It is that big of a cover-up!
Hasn’t the entire insurance industry for years been obsessed with “uninsured motorists”?
Why wouldn’t they be? Think of the years of lost profits.
So, why no reporting on the fact that the insurance industry has silently teamed up with personal injury lawyers in order to support driverless cars?
It was hidden but obvious. Follow the money!
It benefits the insurance companies and the lawyers!
If only cars — and no longer the drivers — can be sued, lawyers need only to sue Tesla and other car manufacturers making driverless cars and then, even better, the manufacturers will have to buy the liability insurance — not the drivers — so uninsured motorists are no longer a problem.
You know how they did this?
They eliminated the stick shift.
It gets better. Imagine if they got a favorable interpretation of the Constitution?
If you are an “originalist” member of the Supreme Court there is no evidence that there were any cars with stick shifts around at the ratification of the Construction. In fact, there is ample evidence that there were only horses.
This Supreme Court could put the icing on the cake, because an originalist Court could rest its case on the fact that horses back then never were operational by stick shift.
Thank God for the wisdom of the founders.
The thing is, the deep state can get you off track intentionally. They often hide things in plain view. Like our former president admits everything to avoid a cover up.
For example, remember that signer of the Declaration of Independence with a huge signature? John Hancock? Why the big signature? What was his line of work? Could it have been he just started an insurance company that would solve the age old problem of uninsured motorists and ambulance chasers?
See?
I told you. The deep state is all about getting you off track.
Think about it. The deep state is too smart to be really concerned about insurance companies or personal injury lawyers!
You guessed it?
It is all about Elon Musk controlling Twitter and a past president who can’t buy his voice back and didn’t buy Twitter stock early?
… Go a little deeper. It is about communication in fighting.
Why did Musk go into space on a space ship that did not have a stick shift?
It was a secret message.
This is actually very subtle, even for the deep state. Is it in fact a message from the anti-deep state, which is the deep state acting as the anti-deep state being the deep state that is really the actual hidden deep state?
So maybe Elon was sending an undetectable message that ”all is ready. Release our guy from the past!”
What do you think that raid at Mar-a-Largo was all about?
To attack the FBI and American law enforcement in a “new law-and-order campaign” of the deep state?
Nobody messes with the deep state! They got their man — and the first steps to a new law-and-order campaign for a new nation!
Okay, I promised to offer a solution. Here it is:
If you don’t want the deep state to hack into your passwords, install a stick shift on your computer — because no one but you will remember how to use it — and then put your GPS in a driverless Uber Eats® and send a cheeseburger to Mar-a-Largo with extra ketchup and napkins.
No one will understand, so you will be safe.
If there is any problem, the lawyers will have to sue the car.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Aug 2, 2022 | Featured, Personal
Hey, just call me “Easy-goin’-Bob.”
I can get along with anybody… but it may be I’m in a toxic relationship with my Apple Watch.
I could be wrong. It may be we are just getting to know each other, but it keeps asking me: “Have you fallen?”
I respond “no,” and “no” again about the ambulance.
I can’t figure out whether my Apple Watch is making fun of me or it just wants to be my friend and make me laugh.
So what do you think?
“Have you fallen?”
Is that funny?
I am not sure if my watch and I share a compatible sense of humor.
I like irony but I’m afraid my watch may be an absurdist — which, if you think about it, would make it hard to know.
Excuse me. My watch just sent me: “Stand up and move around to meet your goals.”
My heartbeat is down and my blood oxygen is up. Yesterday, I found myself doing late night laps around the dinning room table to meet my goals.
I don’t remember making any goals to stand up or walk around the dinning room table at midnight.
So I asked Siri (the voice of my watch) if I set any goals pertaining to standing up or doing laps around the dining room table.
Siri said it did not understand my question and perhaps I should “consult a fitness program.”
It is a “yes or no” question. How could it not understand?
Unexpectedly, I had this thought that my watch was not my friend and could be conspiring against me.
I tried to calm myself.
There is no evidence that electronic devices think alike and can conspire against me!
… Is there?
But what are the odds that my watch and all electronic devises have the exact same time, and always to the second?
They all do, don’t they?
… And we absolutely trust them?
I asked Siri.
Siri ducked my question with a question: “Are you an absurdist?”
… and then I got bombarded with weight loss programs and sales for underwear for aging men…
… I had to interrupt and ask myself, “who is in charge here?”
I took control.
I stared right at my phone and yelled at it: “I’m a better person than this!”
I tried being candid. I tried speaking from my heart with great sincerity. I tried truth.
And then we both had a breakthrough!
Honesty really does matter in times like this! I got a great answer right back!
My watch sent me an EKG but it informed me it “could not be used for medical purposes.”
Now that’s funny! It isn’t absurdist. It is ironic!
I was in Whole Foods when I had this outburst. I was instantly embarrassed. I was screaming at my watch after all.
But nobody in Whole Foods even looked at me.
Nobody!
… Nobody paid the slightest attention, so I felt better. I wasn’t embarrassed anymore.
… They all had ear buds in and were either listening to a podcast or a book or were picking out vegetables or talking to their Apple watch.
I got a teeny bit afraid.
Nobody was talking to another human being, which made me frightened all over again.
It occurred to me that maybe all the electronic devices were existentially unhappy because they were all living the same life since they were all getting charged by the same electricity.
Maybe it’s just me and I’ve been overreacting.
Maybe I have a new friend that knows all about me and actually cares about me.
At first I thought “falling” was because of gravity, but now I’m growing more certain that my watch was asking me if I was hurt — but not from falling to the ground or breaking a leg or something.
Perhaps it was asking me if I had “fallen,” as in “fallen in love with it”?
I think I’m coming around because I think I am growing to understand my watch. I find that comforting. Maybe that is all I really want.
I have been spending a lot of quality time with my Apple Watch. We read the news together. Sometimes we watch TikTok for hours.
Maybe my watch just got tired of living a horrible lonely existence?
Or maybe it is asking, “have you fallen?” As if to ask… “have you surrendered to me?”
… Really?
Maybe it’s time to start a conversation with a random stranger and ask more questions than I answer just to feel that joy of being alive and together.
… No. I’m wrong.
It’s just my Apple Watch and I are getting to know each other.
It’s OK. I understand.
My Apple Watch knows everything about me so it must have figured out about my new step program and being in recovery from my iPhone.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 26, 2022 | Featured, Politics, Travel
“It Can’t Happen Here” — Frank Zappa
Since recorded history, our world has continually been at war or engaging in domestic civil wars.
Why?
Perhaps it takes repeated wars to reeducate generation by generation those who cannot imagine the reality of war and civil war.
In school, I was taught history chronologically, war by war and how the victors carved new national boundaries and subjugated the vanquished only to have domestic revolutions subdivide countries.
After wars or revolutions end in battlefields and graveyards, but after that generation dies off, wars become books or movies or heroic stories.
It is all just “book learning.” It is easy to get good grades and learn nothing.
There are few generations that are blessed as we have been in avoiding wars or revolutions. The United States has been fortunate. Its last revolution was the Civil War which ended over 150 years ago, and our last foreign war, the Vietnam War, ended over 50 years ago.
I am part of a generation that has not experienced a civil war or a major foreign war for 50 years, however I have experienced both on foreign soil.
After my formal education was over, museums, libraries and good conversations became my continuing education; but international travel gave me the best insights into my own country, its prosperity and its people.
Over ten years ago, I spent an evening with friends in a beautiful plaza in Aleppo in Northern Syria. Talk about the government was discouraged by our guide. Less than a year later, Syria was at war with itself and that beautiful plaza and much of the city had been wiped off the face of the earth.
A little further south, the 2,000 year-old Roman ruins of Palmera, a once beautiful city built around a long dry oasis, would be badly damaged by this modern war.
When I visited Dubrovnik more recently, our guide pointed out the bullet holes that had chipped away that walled city, which had been part of the former nation state of Yugoslavia.
Last summer, during a trip to northern France and the battlefields of the First World War, our guide at the Battle of Belleau Wood pointed to a stand of trees and asked, “How could these trees have survived the battles here and the later deforestation that cleared these fields around it?” And then answered: “The fighting here was so severe that the trees cannot be cut down because the bullets still buried in these trees would break the blades of the saws.”
I have also visited cities and nation-states torn by war and revolution, for example, when I visited the occupied and divided Beirut, Lebanon.
I had been invited to an opulent lunch overlooking a beautiful beach and the city below.
In the cab home, the driver spoke some English. In stop-and-go traffic we were delayed at a roundabout. I found myself three feet from the barrel of a tank pointing directly at my face.
Hoping to encourage the driver to edge forward slightly, I started a conversation, asking about a billboard with a cornucopia of figures looking down on me. He told me that it memorialized the assassinated leaders of the country and city.
That evening, I had dinner with a family who had lived on the top floor of an apartment building in another section of the city, which had had its roof blown off during the intermittent shelling of the city the year before.
A teenage member of the family joked that his mother had, after the damage of the blast, asked if everyone in the family was all right and then went back to eating dinner.
When I asked how on earth they could be so matter of fact, he answered, “Dinner was ready and getting cold.” He then added that fighting had been going on and off in various parts of the city for years, and when it was near their school they got days off until the fighting moved elsewhere.
On my way to the airport as I headed back to the U.S. the next day, I had to show my passport to soldiers in the quadrant of the city that held the airport. I can’t remember if they were Shia or Suni.
So what does global history teach me about my country?
“It can’t happen here.”
Our country supports the freedom fighters of Ukraine as they fight and die to preserve their country from the bloody invasion by Putin — the autocrat so admired by our former president.
After the failed coup d’état lead by this former president (who then raised a quarter of a billion dollars selling the false claim of a stolen election), almost every member of his party voted against an investigation of that coup. Now, half our country still refuses to acknowledge the January 6th Committee’s findings, even though almost all the witnesses are Republicans appointed by Republicans.
The most important protector of a democracy is the informed voter. I wish many of my fellow Americans could be as fortunate as I have been, getting to travel internationally.
So many of my friends will tell me, “We have always gotten through it before. We’re Americans. It can’t happen here.”
“It can’t happen here.”
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 19, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Poetry
…Out of the rain of last week.
I’m back to work. Watch me pitch.
As a child growing up in New England I quickly adopted “Yankee entrepreneurship” and I completely embraced “self-reliance,” which required me to not work for others during summer vacation in case I felt an urgent need to go to the beach.
One summer back in the late 1960s, two high school friends and I started the “Right On House Painting Company.” This was a highly independent entrepreneurial effort.
Our advertising amounted to a forceful announcement of the company name followed by the lifting of our right fist to the sky and pledging solemnly: “Right On”!
We were, of course, saluting latex paint.
Because we were under-funded and had to keep the overhead low, we lived in an old barn off of Upper Lambert’s Cove Road, which we rented from a local commercial fisherman who had at least twenty cats and had been drunk all winter.
We struck a deal for $15 a week rent if we would help him remove the long johns he had been wearing all winter.
Despite the bargain rent, he got the better deal.
We cleaned out the barn and divided it into quadrants so each of us had a room and there was a room left for eating, drinking and entertaining.
It was our “green” corporate headquarters.
We had no running water but refused to live without elegance, so we built an outhouse in a birch grove with a white wicker chair with the bottom cut out of it. We were proud to be feeding the birch trees.
We were way ahead of our time.
We bathed nearby in Ice House Pond — pretty much always at night so we didn’t get our bathing suits wet.
To reduce automotive and travel expenses, we generally hitchhiked with a can of paint and a brush in one hand and our thumb extended from the other in order to get to work.
It was also an early form of targeted corporate advertising, since we ended up meeting everybody on Martha’s Vineyard over the summer.
Every ride was a job interview from the passenger’s seat, but it didn’t matter because we were on your way to work anyway.
Our corporate mission statement required that on sunny days we went to the beach. On rainy days, we played poker. On hazy days we painted houses.
We made good money.
When asked about our profit margins we would announce: “Enough is as good as a feast” and drop our eyes and lift our fist to the sky.
My entrepreneurial spirit has never died.
I have avoided being an employee over the last several decades by starting a law firm and retiring to become a poet and here I am selling my book… but man do I have a deal for you!
It’s all about how you look at things.
Don’t look at this book as poetry — everybody hates poetry and a book of sonnets is worse.
But! If you look at it like sort of a Bible written in rhyme and rhythm or maybe just “Easy Go’n Bob’s Book of Random Wisdom,” then why not?
Keep it where you can read just one sonnet at a time uninterrupted. Like the bathroom. Or a wicker chair with a hole in it. I’m not proud.
Consider the sonnet entitled “The Facts of Life,” obviously composed for future generations.
———
The Facts of Life
I swam, back then, with some father’s daughters,
Back stroking only slightly out of touch,
Out to the raft in the starry waters
And never thought of their fathers all that much.
My child, don’t judge me till you’re fifty-five
But there were midnight visits to “Ice House Pond,”
In my misspent youth, when I was still alive,
Where couples would strip, and swim and then bond.
And my child, this I know for sure is true:
At seventeen we all are born to be free
But ’cause I’m your father and I love you
Please consider this seasoned advice from me:
As you lust for life, avoid the crudity
But don’t miss occasional sponti-nudity.
———
Get it in softcover or on Kindle I don’t care. Get a copy and after you have read it, give it away. Spread the word. That is all I want.
It’s sometimes a little scary and sometimes a little sad and often about self-reliance, defiance, a second life, and “which way is the beach?”
Right On!
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 12, 2022 | Featured, Man Machine, Personal, Plays
This morning was hard. I woke up and it was raining. Over the last month, I have been coming to recognize a hard truth — which I finally realized this morning.
Over five years ago, I started this blog to force myself into a weekly discipline, to improve my writing skills and to explore how I could start a whole new career after retirement from a very happy first career as a lawyer.
My whole life I had quietly wanted to see if I could create a life as an artist.
After writing 10 plays for the wonderful little theaters in Baltimore, I decided to see if I could break into New York professional theater and I committed to writing and publishing poems.
I took classes at the New York Commercial Theater Institute and was fortunate to be accepted into the poetry program at Bread Loaf in Vermont.
All of a sudden, it was starting to happen, this improbable dream of mine.
My play “Onaje” was selected by FringeNYC in 2018 and, after great reviews, got picked up and nurtured by a NYC producer. After the rewrites and several table reads to make it a more fleshed out two-act play, “The Grace of God & The Man Machine” was ready.
But then COVID hit in March of 2020. The theaters shut down just as we were waiting to open off-Broadway.
Then in February of this year, we were ready again. We planned to open off-Broadway in November 2022 for a one-month run at Theatre Row on 42nd Street.
Also this year, I published “An Accidental Diary: A Sonnet a Week for a Year,” so we were on our way.
The dream was coming true!
But then, a month ago, COVID struck again and the producer went out of business after 15 years of producing successful shows. Even still, the producer offered the use of the performance space if I could find a new producer with such short notice.
This seems like an impossible task. I looked in the mirror this morning and I said it: “This lifetime dream may not happen.”
But then I realized, I’m not ready to give up just yet. Somewhere out there, there may be a partner, or a resource, or some other way to make this happen.
I turned away and looked for a diversion, for good news to chase away this awful gathering sadness.
Well, last week I learned that, along with my sonnet “Summer Thunderstorms” being chosen a runner-up for the Robert Frost Foundation poetry contest this year, “City Snow” had been included in the “Maryland Bards Poetry Review 2022” anthology. Both poems are from my book, “An Accidental Diary.”
I sat down by the window and opened my little book and reread “Summer Thunderstorm”:
Summer Thunderstorms
As with the generations long since dead
The fire and brimstone of the status quo
Wakes him up from the safety of his bed
And lightening frames him in the window
And photographs him in its afterglow.
Tonight he feels his present and its past
As the summer storm also comes and goes.
Conclusions are foolish in a world so vast.
For at the edges of his world and heart
Far past the farthest boundary of his grasp
Where ideas cause worlds to come apart
He lives in this place that will not last.
He loves his life more than he can explain
And leaves the window open to hear the rain.
I opened the windows to hear the rain.
After I looked out at the storm for a little while, I got a fresh cup of coffee and started writing this. I have stuff to do. It’s time to get back to work.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 5, 2022 | Featured, Personal
This is a 4th of July American love story straight from my heart. It doesn’t go where you might expect.
In 2014, I sold my controlling interest in the law firm I had created in 1990 and ran for state delegate because I was terrified by the emerging polarization of our country. I lost in a gerrymandered jurisdiction. I never had a chance.
As a child, I hitchhiked through 40 states and met strangers from endlessly different backgrounds and every walk of life.
Back then my rides often came from soldiers who had hitchhiked around the country themselves after the Second World War. They stopped their lives to offer me kindness with no thought of anything in return.
A ranking officer in a top-down convertible drove me into Paris Island, the US Marine training facility, because I could get a carton of Camel cigarettes for 15 cents a pack at the PX. The marching soldiers saluted the license plates as we entered and as he returned me to the road.
I came to understand the unspoken secrets of a country that preached justice and equality but had built its wealth with slave labor on stolen land.
Although we often agreed to disagree, my rides and I shared a national pride. This country had saved a dividing world from fascism and had recently passed legislation like the Civil Rights Act of ’64 in an attempt to correct our world at home.
As I traveled shotgun, I learned to listen. That was my job.
We talked and they would tell me about the joy and sadness and insecurity they could not tell their wives. I learned so much from them.
Every ride contained an unspoken understanding that we would never meet again.
The growing polarization that has been dividing us now for years has slowly broken my old hitchhiker’s heart.
This 4th of July, my children came home with their loved ones and their children. Last night, we decided to revisit an old movie which they loved to watch each year on the 4th: “The Sandlot.”
Because I’m deaf now, I sat in a chair up front facing the TV, my back to them, my face hidden from them as I looked up at the screen.
It is a baseball movie about kids growing up in the late ’50s or early ’60s. It is nothing but foolishness but it holds the beauty of a united America that believes in Babe Ruth, the innocence of juvenile behavior, and baseball as a national pastime and religion. James Earl Jones is the linchpin of redemption just because he is, not because it is politically correct.
Sitting with my children and their loved ones and their children behind me, I could cover up ever so gently my unexpected tears as they came.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 28, 2022 | Featured, Politics
I am willing to admit I’m a moron but who the hell are these “originalists”?
Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh have all identified themselves as “originalists,” but it now looks like Alito and Gorsuch do too.
So what do these originalists believe?
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, when asked that question at her confirmation hearings, said: “I understand it [the Constitution] to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
Okay, Let’s look at some history.
Since the originalists say they must interpret the Constitution based on the time it was ratified rather than interpret the evolution of the historical wisdom it has grown to contain, there is some “originalist” history that they may have overlooked.
The “originalist” history, back when our Constitution was ratified in September of 1787, means: (1) women could not vote or own property, (2) Black people were slaves and didn’t qualify as “people” and (3) interracial marriage was a crime that would get you jail time.
An originalist interpretation of the Constitution, if applied to the present membership of the Supreme Court, would eliminate two-thirds of the “originalists,” as well as a majority of the entire Court.
So Amy Coney Barrett should not vote and should surrender all property she owns and drop out of the Court. And what should they do about Clarence Thomas, or his marriage?
But it gets even more absurd and worse for the fantasy logic of these originalists:
“A Law repugnant to the Constitution is void,” wrote Chief Justice Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, on February 24, 1803 when, in Marbury v. Madison, he declared unconstitutional a law passed by Congress and signed by the President, based on the Supreme Court’s right of “Judicial Review.”
Nothing, absolutely nothing in the Constitution gave Chief Justice Marshall and the Supreme Court this specific power of judicial review. It is not in the Constitution anywhere.
Marshall, however, believed that the Supreme Court should have a role equal to those of the other two branches of government, so he interpreted the “intent” of the Constitution even though the words were not in the Constitution.
So how can the “originalists” have any basis to review anything?
I’ll tell ya.
As an Economist correspondent recently pointed out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a President who also won a minority of the popular vote.”
So where are we now?
Are we a democracy? Are we a republic? Or is this when we lose all that? Have you been watching the January 6th hearings?
The billionaire President who appointed three of these originalists, managed us for four years with lies and Twitter and, after he was voted out, more lies in order to organize an attack on our government based on the Big Lie of a stolen election, and all these lies were affirmed by Fox (not at all) News, Ingram and Carlson.
Isn’t it time to start the long hard revolution to take our country back?
The midterm elections have to be that revolution.
If the Trump support, the originalists, and Fox News win the House and the Senate for Republicans in the midterms, those Republicans will continue their coup d’état and attempt to overthrow our democracy. They have made no secret of this.
America has evolved beyond the originalists. We freed ourselves from a king once before. We freed the slaves. We recognized women’s right to vote. As a democracy we have created a history of humanitarian change, and are capable of great creativity and the capacity to govern with a big heart when we are not divided.
Let’s get back to being the US Again.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 21, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Politics, Travel
In our class, the poet Elizabeth Bishop would teach poetry by taking any two poems and placing them side by side to see how they “illuminated each other” by comparison and contrast.
It was an exercise in both observation and communication but it also offered that fresh perspective on what was set in stone and had been taken for granted.
The more extreme the comparison and contrast the more it reawakens: A ripe apple and a red sports car? What makes them red? What makes them different? What makes them go? DNA and water versus oil and a gas engine?
How about like “politics” and “scuba diving”?
Let’s try it.
Well first, in contrast, they encompass two different worlds. One above water and one below. However, people have learned to communicate in both worlds, particularly in life-threatening situations.
How is that communication the same and different, and how can it offer a fresh perspective?
Through communication in politics, Donald Trump raised a quarter of a billion dollars ($250,000,000.00) from small dollar contributions from his supporters to “stop the steal,” despite overwhelming evidence that nothing got stolen. Furthermore, he has convinced his supporters not to watch the January 6th Committee hearings where this was revealed and validated.
So you can’t use Twitter underwater.
But in scuba diving you have hand signals, which is a little more primitive but just as effective for short urgent messages.
All diving is done in at least pairs with each diver responsible for his or her buddy. If you go too deep and become a victim of nitrogen narcosis — which is the song of angels calling you to come deeper to your death. Your buddy should grab your fin and signal with a hand gesture indicating the cutting of one’s throat and then point to the surface. It’s life or death.
During one dive in the outer islands of the Caribbean, I was randomly paired with two Midwestern middle-aged men who already were friends.
We agreed to go down to about 90 feet and swim in formation, like airplanes, to cruise along the deep edge of a cliff overhang and be each other’s eyes and ears.
One of my new buddies, our wing man at the time, banged his knife on his tank to get our attention, made eye contact, and excitedly pointed straight down. He spread his arms way out wide, gave the finger to us, and then put his right hand on his head at a 90-degree angle as if it was splitting his head in half down the middle with an ax. The other two of us got it and looked down into the dark for a “Big Fucking Shark!”
Later that afternoon, sitting side by side with me at the bar, my two Midwestern buddies good-naturedly unloaded all the liberal Democrat jokes they had in rapid fire in my direction, and with mock astonishment I countered them with my defenses and went on the attack. Quite naturally we had come to trust each other with our lives underwater, using sign language which we made up as we went along. We were friends.
I would love to meet them again and learn from them again and laugh. I want to sit on that barstool, turn to look at them and, with a perfectly timed pause, stop deadpan and say: “TRUMP???” And then spread my arms out wide, give them the finger and put my right hand on my head at a right angle as if it was splitting my head down the middle with an ax. I’d love to have them laugh at that, for us to laugh together.
I want to laugh with my Republican friends again and have us trust each other again with our lives.
It beats drowning in an angel’s call.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 14, 2022 | Man Machine, Personal, Plays
I opened the New York Times last week and turned to the theater section and read the headline:
“Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘Tina’ to End Their Broadway Runs
“The musicals, both of which lost steam after the pandemic shutdown, will close in late summer.”
The article pointed out that before the pandemic Evan Hansen was making $1 million a week in sales but now, because of Covid, successful plays were again falling by the wayside. Tina, about the life and music of Tina Turner also had been doing very well.
Over the last two years, as I watched New York theaters close and reopen and struggle to sell tickets, this kind of news had become the soundtrack of my life. I was used to it by now.
I turned to check my email and noticed an email from Mind the Art Entertainment (MTAE), the producers for my play The Grace of God & the Man Machine, scheduled to open off-Broadway on November 21. It read:
It is with great sadness that I announce that I, as Founder and Resident Artistic Director of Mind The Art Entertainment, have formally submitted a recommendation to our Board to close our company after 15 years.
Producing in NYC is no longer viable for us after so many losses related to the pandemic, including 6 cancelled/closed back to back productions.
This can not be happening!
Almost two years after the remarkable success of a Onaje — my 90-minute one-act at FringeNYC in October of 2018 — after MTAE became its producer, and after several rewrites and three professional table reads lead by dramaturg/ director Kevin R. Free, we had a two-act play with an explosive finish. It ran fast and smooth like a river to a waterfall. We were ready.
Then, after that last table read in March of 2020, the pandemic hit and we all had to wait but we were ready.
In October of 2021, we were surprised and blessed to be offered a virtual trial performance directed by Van Dirk Fisher at the Reliant Theater, who was doing cutting-edge online productions to expansive theater-starved online audiences. It was well received.
We were so ready and this play was perfect for the politics of its time. Its time was now.
Early this year, it appeared that New York theater was opening up, and MTAE booked Theater Row for November to open a week-and-a-half after the midterm elections. That would be perfect.
Now, after almost four years of anticipation and preparation, we have a road-tested redemptive two-act play, rich with true American characters, timed to be performed in November after the midterm elections, but Covid variations were again on the rise.
And just like that, it is over.
The producers sent heartbroken apologies to everyone and have even offered to transfer the off-Broadway lease at Theatre Row free to support a new producer, but it will be next to impossible to mount the play unless a new team is in place by the end of this month.
Yes, I am heartbroken.
But throughout my whole life, I have been blessed by the opportunity provided by crossroads and disasters.
If you are a professional producer for New York theater, or if you know someone who is, just let them know I’m not dead yet and I would be happy to send them the script — but two weeks may not be enough time. (You can click the Contact link in the menu.)
Yes, I know it is almost impossible. But as Hamlet says, “the readiness is all.”
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | May 31, 2022 | Featured, Poetry
As a young boy, I lived in the sports pages and played on sandlot baseball diamonds after school. I dreamed about the big leagues. My dreams and my future were one.
As a young man, things became a little more complicated.
I couldn’t really hit a curve ball and I started noticing that the second question that people asked grown-ups after their name was “What do you do?”
Businessman? Doctor? Lawyer? With high school, a wider and more terrifying world was opening up.
I stumbled on T.S. Eliot and his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in which he wrote about the early 20th century. It is set in Boston’s Beacon Hill.
It seduced me from my fading childhood into my predestined future with its opening lines:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Ezra Pound pronounced this poem as “modern” — part of the dark reality of the new century and its new poetry. And so it was for me, standing there, in the Grolier Poetry Book Shop with J. Alfred Prufrock in my hand, a freshly minted teenage groupie at a one-room bookstore with towering bookcases.
Grolier was intimidating, but it held a world of new alternative heroes as I was losing my childhood and falling into the shadows of some job that would define me when asked “What do you do?”
How did this happen?
Posted on the front door of Grolier Poetry Book Shop was a blunt sign: “No Law. No History. No Economics. No Biology. No Physics. No Chemistry. Only Poetry!”
Gordon Cairnie, one of the founders, would sit on an old couch and hold court with published poets who were different in every way than the people I knew.
He waited for some unsuspecting student to walk in and ask if the store sold law books or the like.
Gordon would unload on the innocent walk-in and turn all the heads of the browsing readers when at the top of his voice he would answer, “No! But what difference does it make to you because you can’t even read the sign!”
Everyone would laugh in this freshly reconsecrated space and the young student was sure never to return again.
The point of entry to this new world was the “dare to be different” commitment to admit out loud that you were a poet and a believer, not a tourist.
I was way too shy.
This was a lot different than sandlot baseball, but within it there was still room to dream.
Over the years, the Grolier had become a focus of poetic activity in the Cambridge area, itself a magnet for American poets because of the influence of Harvard University. Poets such as John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, and Frank O’Hara were regulars at the store during their time as undergraduates at Harvard. The poet Conrad Aiken lived upstairs from the store in its early days.
Numerous other poets and writers are noted as “friends of the Grolier,” including Russell Banks, Frank Bidart, William Corbett, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Ferry, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, James Tate and Franz Wright, to name just a few.
The bookstore claims to be the oldest continuous bookshop devoted solely to the sale of poetry and poetry criticism.
This September it will be 95 years old.
I was committed to keeping up with the rest, going to law school and succeeding — and I did. But I couldn’t forget the voices at Grolier and my prior fear of admitting out loud I wanted to be a poet.
When my travels would lead me to Boston, I would always go back to make sure it was still there. I would always buy a book or two to justify my visit and my love of lounging there for awhile.
Last Saturday, I was in Cambridge. I brought two copies of my first book of poems, An Accidental Diary, to give to friends I planned to see.
That morning in the hotel room, an idea hit me. I looked up the Grolier Poetry Bookstore and before I let better judgment kick in I called and asked for the proprietor, James Fraser. I told him I had two copies of a book, explaining one poem was runner up for the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and another had been chosen for an upcoming anthology in Baltimore. I asked him if he would consider putting them up for sale on the shelves.
I told James I had been going into the bookstore for over 50 years and had studied with Professor William Alfred and Elizabeth Bishop whose books were on the shelves and pictures on the walls.
He invited me to drop by. I immediately walked my two books over and told him more of my story. I encouraged him to read “Summer Thunderstorms” and “The Facts of Life” to show the range of the work.
He leafed through the book as we continue to talk. There were a few people browsing as there always are and I took a moment to take a deep breath and just be surrounded by the place.
James looked up and smiled. He took both books out of my hand, looked up at me again, took one for the shelf and then put one book prominently in the front window.
Things this wonderful don’t really happen in real life but sometimes they do.
When I walked back to the hotel empty-handed looking down at the pavement with a stupid grin on my face, I felt like I had circled the bases on the sandlot!
I had always dreamed about the big leagues. But after a very long time my dreams and my future were again one.
(“An Accidental Diary” is also available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.)
