Blow Out Your Candles, Laura

The audience applauded vigorously and the house lights were coming up. The cast for Edgewood’s production of Urine Town was making its way off stage and people were starting to chat happily and head for the doors. I sat quietly for a moment marveling again at the power of the theatre. A couple hundred people had just spent two hours thinking they were watching a comedy before realizing the joke is on all of us.  Only the theatre can present such a bitter pill with so much fun and laughter. I love that Cassie enjoys performing and was part of this show. It’s hard for me to remember all of the times I have been moved by plays either as an actor, a director, or a viewer. But I can remember the very first time a play worked its magic on me.

            Being a farm kid in southern Wisconsin in the early 1960’s had lots of advantages, but access to excellent theatre wasn’t one of them. Access to any performing art, excellent or not, was limited. We had a few country western bands and the church choir, but that was about it. I grew up doing farm chores and playing in the woods. In school I had learned to hide my insecurity behind the mask of the class clown. My handwriting might have been embarrassing and my clothes might have smelled like wood smoke, but if I could make people laugh things were ok. I had a loud voice which often got me parts in some skits and programs we did at school and in 4-H. I even got to play the lead in our Junior High production of  The Little Man Who Wasn’t There. I think I was a Martian who was invisible or something. To me “a play” was a little show that made people laugh. Was I in for a surprise.

            One day during the summer before I started high school, my older brother Glen suggested we drive to the big city of Milwaukee to see a play. I want to remember this as a spontaneous act, but in retrospect, Glen must have had some plan. I do remember being excited as Glen, my mother, my sister Karen, and I packed into the car. (I don’t know exactly why my dad didn’t go, but he wasn’t along.) Somewhere along the way I came to understand that we were headed to the Fred Miller Theatre* in downtown Milwaukee to see a production of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. I had never heard of Tennessee Williams or his play, but I was up for anything. The Fred Miller Theatre was a rather small, reconverted space, but I clearly remember the stage surrounded by the audience. (I would not know it was called “theatre in the round” until much later.) As I said, I didn’t know anything about the play, but when Tom Wingfield, the young writer who feels trapped by his life, stood on stage in his pea coat and watch cap smoking a cigarette, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I was a thirteen year old farm boy who wanted more than shoveling manure and feeding cows. I understood when Tom shouted about hating his job and hoping for something more. I understood  how guilty he felt for wanting to leave when others might be left behind. It was like Tennessee Williams was reading my thoughts. When Tom comes to the end of the play and says, “ I didn’t go to the moon. I went much further - for time is the longest distance between two places”, I wept. I was too young to understand then, but watching The Glass Menagerie that night would change the course of my life. It helped me understand why theatre is so valuable in our society and why studying this art form is a worthy pursuit. It gave me the courage to tell my father – a factory machinist and a farmer who wanted me to be a lawyer – I wanted to study theatre in college. What a night!

I came to know Amanda, Laura, and Tom Wingfield much better as the years went on. Also Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois and many, many others.  I even directed a production of The Glass Menagerie at Parker High School. I tried to help my students feel the power of the theatre the way I did so long ago. To this day I can’t walk into any theatre without seeing Tom in coat and cap centered in a pool of light with cigarette smoke swirling around his head. I believe he is still talking to me.  We all are trying to make sense of the world we live in and the life we are leading. How lucky I was to find Tennessee Williams on that summer night so long ago.

*The Fred Miller Theatre would become the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre in the mid 1960’s.

 

Chickens, a Dog, and Home

     This is the story of Jeanette and the chickens. One day my lovely wife said, “I think we should raise chickens.” Knowing her sense of humor, I responded, “And kangaroos, too.” When I looked up at her, she had tipped her head slightly forward and was glaring at me in a way that signaled a tactical error on my part. It appeared that she wasn’t kidding. Maybe she had forgotten our last attempt to raise poultry when we had gone through the “five acres and freedom” stage many years ago. It was right after we moved to the country and we decided we would sustain ourselves by producing food from our own land. Both of us had been raised around livestock and gardens, so we figured we could pull it off. I thought it would be good to raise chickens for meat. Let’s just say that idea didn’t work out too well. I had forgotten how many other critters like chicken, and how hard it was to protect a bird that is clearly stupid. I also thought the butchering part would be easier. I remember how easy my mother made it look. She could dispatch a chicken, scald and pluck it, and have it simmering in hot grease in a wonderfully short time. This skill had apparently skipped a generation. Of the six dozen baby chicks we retrieved from Farm and Fleet, more than half went to the raccoons, weasels, owls, and even a stray cat. A few seemed to give up the ghost for no obvious reason. Of course Jeanette regularly reminds me of my own bewildering attempt to “harvest” the flock. I’m sure the image of me racing across the yard with a fish net trying to catch a wayward bird was amusing. In the end I found a place that would butcher and pack chickens for the freezer. I think we ended up with twenty five roasting chickens. I’m sure it would have been cheaper for us to eat at KFC for a month, but live and learn.

“I don’t mean to butcher; I want to have fresh eggs”, she explained, thankfully avoiding a reminder of the past fiasco. “I don’t want to see you flailing around the yard again. You might hurt yourself.”

     Thus began the second chicken adventure in our family. We live on five acres surrounded by farmland and we have a long, one story barn that was used to raise hogs, I think. Since it appeared that “we” had already made the decision about the chickens, I suggested one of the compartments inside the barn could be easily transformed into a henhouse. This was another error on my part. I had not noticed that books and magazines that Jeanette had been reading that explained how to construct “deluxe portable henhouses for the backyard.” She wanted the chickens to reside in a portable henhouse so they could be moved about the pasture to “free range”. When I pointed out the expense, I got the stare again. 

“Can we see how this might work before we build a parade home for the chickens?”

She did not appreciate my wit, but she agreed to start small.

     We decided to start with six chickens in a Farm and Fleet coop that I assembled in an hour or so. We got the 6 week old youngsters from Jeanette’s younger brother who had quite a flock of his own. The chickens went in the coop and the coop went in the barn. The free ranging wouldn’t start until they were bigger. All went well at the start. The chickens seemed to like the barn and they grew pretty fast. We wanted to have 5 chickens and 1 rooster. My only demand was that we have a rooster because I am comforted by the sound of a rooster crowing in the morning. Do you know how hard it is to tell the sex of a baby chicken? I didn’t either, so we waited to see what we got. The problems began when it became clear this henhouse could not house 6 adult chickens.

“There’s no place for the hens to roost in there,” she said.

This was patently false. There was a very obvious and well constructed roost area just inside the entry way. Of course there wasn’t room for ALL the chickens, but if they took turns each could lay their eggs in comfort. The problem, of course, is that your average chicken has a brain about the size – well, of your average chicken. They are not capable of working out a schedule.

“I think we should put them in the barn and I can build enough space for all of them”, I suggested.  I was certain my idea would get shot down, but Jeanette surprised me.

“Okay. But only until we can decide what outdoor henhouse we want.”

     The next day I got some – you guessed it – chicken wire and enclosed one of the abandoned hog pens. I thought I had done a fine job. I even built nest boxes for each chicken and hung them on the wall. We released the chickens into their new home and all seemed well, except they didn’t seem to want to use my home built nest boxes. I tried various strategies to coax them in, even manually inserting one or two. They didn’t like the nests.  About this time I began to notice how much I was TALKING to the chickens. This unnerved me. What would people think if they heard me insulting a mentally disabled chicken?

      One day shortly after Jeanette heard me complaining about the “stupid chickens”, she pulled into the yard with two commercially built nest boxes she got from a friend who had them lying in the barn. It was obvious they had been used and rust had rendered a few of the boxes useless. When I suggested my home made nests were better, I got the stare. 

“I will put this one in the coop, but this other one is just too rusty.”

“Just make sure it’s secured to the wall.”

      Again I did the work in the chicken coop and damn if those stupid chickens didn’t prefer the rusted metal nests to my fine plywood. The hens started laying and things seemed good. I should have known better.

     It wasn’t very long before Jeanette announced, “One of the chickens is missing.” I resisted the urge to say, “I’ll alert the media” because it should be known that Jeanette had raised this alarm before only to realize one of our feathered friends preferred to roost high in a maple tree near the barn. Instead, I went in search for the wayward creature. When I found a pile of feathers scattered across the edge of the field, I knew some varmint had discovered our henhouse.  I know we have raccoons around, but I figured an animal that can fly has an advantage. Still, we decided to marshal our defenses and set a plan to capture or kill any wayward raccoons.

     We put live traps around the barn and loaded them with marshmallows. (I was told raccoons could not resist marshmallows.) Apparently these raccoons preferred chicken to marshmallows because all we caught was one rather crotchety old possum. If our chickens could not figure out how to escape a creature that moves at the speed of paint, we were doomed. We removed the possum to parts unknown – no, I did not dispatch the old coot – and we continued our vigilance. It was not long before we discovered our surprising culprit.

    At this point in the story, permit me to introduce my faithful hunting companion Emma, the Yellow Lab. She is the most gentle, laid back dog I have ever owned, loving and cuddly to distraction. She is well behaved and relatively well trained. At the start, her behavior around our chickens was polite and guarded. Then hunting season came. Being my first fall in retirement, Emma and I filled many hours chasing pheasants around the nearby fields. Emma was always thrilled when I picked up my shotgun and headed for the fields. One day, returning from our romp chasing pheasants, we came home to discover a chicken inside the garage. (This is the same chicken that roosted high in the trees and flew like a real bird.) Having a chicken in the garage seemed to alarm Emma and having a dog stand in the door clearly alarmed the chicken. Luckily the chicken could fly, and it fluttered up to the rafter. Emma was VERY agitated and I needed to put her in her kennel before I removed the chicken from the garage. Using a long broom and some creative name calling, I finally compelled the chicken to flee the premises. I probably should have realized sooner that Emma apparently was no longer able to distinguish “chicken” from “pheasant”, but the instant I opened her kennel she raced out the door chasing our chicken. . Now remember, this is the hen that could easily fly to the top of the barn, so I assumed the bird would flee to the heavens and leave Emma barking on the ground. Silly me. This chicken, realizing a howling dog was after her, decided not to fly, but to hide in grass no taller than my ankles. One moment I’m smiling to myself thinking how Emma’s gonna get burned, the next I’m racing across the yard trying to avoid the inevitable. Too late. In one chomp and a twist of her head, Emma has sent this chicken to the next world. She proudly stands with the dead bird in her mouth and looks at me. Well, at least I know what’s killing our chickens.

     I wish I could report that keeping Emma away from the flock has completely solved the missing chicken problem. It has not.There still are villains after our chickens, including two red-tail hawks that spend way too much time in the trees overlooking the yard. But the six birds that have survived into the winter are plugging along in the henhouse producing enough eggs for our family. And every once in a while, I can hear that rooster crow in the morning. I’m sure there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is yet. Did I ever tell you the story of Jeanette and the honey bees?