(My) ICON Magazine October 2016 Theater Reviews

The Philadelphia Fringe Festival might as well be called Fringe Subsidy Publishing, LLC.  

Participating "artists" pay an entry fee and then rent a venue space, meaning that moneyed people with

minimal talent can become temporary ‘artists.’ The big challenge is coming up a zany, absurdist

 skit and  then getting your friends to be actors. Fringe Arts founder Ezra Buzzington, formerly known

 as Jonathan Harris, likes to say what the Fringe is not: sloppy, late, unprofessional, ego-driven

 or amateurist. This is definitely true in an alternate universe.    

Playwright George Brant says he spent 5 months researching his play “Grounded,” about drone warfare. “I wasn’t expecting to write about pilots,” he wrote, “but during my research I was struck by the fact that during Obama’s

first three months in office, he was using three times as many drone attacks as Bush did.”  Grounded became an off-Broadway hit in 2015 when Oscar winner Anne Hathaway was in the pilot’s seat. Philadelphia goes ‘drone’

 when director Kathryn MacMillan teams up with actress Kittson O’Neill for InterAct Theatre’s production of this famous one woman show (until October 23). O’Neill plays the pilot who bombs targets 12 hours a day without ever

 having to leave the Velveeta cheese comfort of her Air Force trailer.  How will all this armchair warfare affect

 the psyche of this hard working woman?  "What makes Brant’s play exceptional is its driving,

white-hot sense of identification with a woman who is not, on the face of it, a sympathetic character,” Scotland’s Scotsman reported.    (http://www.interacttheatre.org/2015-2016-season/)

The fish that audiences will see fall from the sky during the Wilma’s production of

 When the Rain Stops Falling has a counterpart in real life: the foot long (smelly) catfish dropped

 by a bird of prey that hit a woman in the face in Fairmount Park. You might as well call this bird

 That Stupid F*cking Bird, also the name of an adaptation of Chekov’s The Seagull by the

 Arden’s Aaron Posner. This irreverent, contemporary madcap take on The Seagull promises
 a lot of direct audience “addresses” and (according to a

2015 American Theatre Review), “rants about the uselessness of contemporary theatre” where “the

 word ‘sucks’ comes up often as does the F word that rhymes with it.” The play goes much deeper than

 hipster cur     the rants, however.  Scripted by Posner in 2013, TSFB has played all over the US to generally good reviews if

 only because there’s no subject like unrequited love to get audiences to shed a tear or clench a fist at

 their personal, unpleasant memories.   

  England’s Spectator magazine calls George Bernard Shaw “a smug and
 overrated babbler,” whose

 plays are “like reading a billion tweets at one sitting.” But this “nimblest of
 storytellers” continues

 to hit pay dirt with his classic Mrs. Warren’s Profession, about a high
 class prostitute and brothel

keeper played by 5 time Barrymore Award nominee, Mary Martello,
 who’s reunion with daughter

 Vivie (Claire Inie-Richards) at The Lantern (until October 9) sets off a
chain reaction with a number

 of predatory men. The legendary Martello delivers a flawless performance; she’s also fun to watch

 as she dons big Victorian hats. Inie-Richards captures the soulless quality of the unforgiving Vivie

 when Mrs. Warren comes clean about her job, though Vivie becomes human when she sheds a few

 tears. Vivie may be Shaw’s New Woman but she lacks her mother’s there there. David Bardeen as

 the blunt-to-the-bone, hyper masculine Mr. Praed gives the play its finest dialogue. Actor Daniel

 Fredrick as Frank Gardner becomes the classic image of the  beautiful Victorian lad in the style

 of Brideshead Revisited, while John Lopes as the Rev. Samuel Gardner and Andrew Criss as

 Sir George Crofts keep the acting levels in Mrs. Warren’s Profession pretty much close to perfect.   

      

The American classic, Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific has been packing them in at The Walnut Street Theatre. Catch this time capsule gem with powerful musical lyrics and surprising literary references (Andre Gide and Marcel Proust) before October 23.  This impeccable production is a credit to WST’s Artistic Director, Bernard Havard, and writer James Michener's 1947 novel, 'Tales of the South Pacific,’ from which the show is based. 

     

 

        

Philly Theater Reviews, ICON Magazine November 2016

                                      (My)  ICON  Magazine Theater Reviews November 2016 

   ‘Impressive’ describes Interact Theatre’s production of George Brant’s Grounded, a one woman show directed by Kathryn Macmillan starring Kittson O’Neill as The Pilot assigned to operate a fighter drone in the Middle East from an office in the Las Vegas desert. O’Neill is brilliant as she takes us through The Pilot’s various mental states, from delirious boredom when nothing happens to Zero Hour mania when she presses the deploy button obliterating her human targets. O’Neill is even better conveying The Pilot’s slow psychological deconstruction while spending weeks tracking a major terrorist leader. Her obsession with the target affects her marriage and invites a nervous breakdown: she is ultimately unable to kill the terrorist because his daughter, a mirror image of her own child, awakens her mother’s instincts. An unsentimental male colleague is then forced to complete the execution. Feminists may hate this play because it shows the vulnerability of a mother when it comes to emotion and the language of the heart.

 The little theatres in The Drake on Hicks Street are attracting a fair amount of attention. The petite Louis Bluver Theatre hosted Azuka Theatre’s presentation of How We Got on by Idris Goodwin, an 80s ode to teenage angst and rap. The Proscenium Theatre will present another world premier. Douglas Williams’ Shitheads (February 22-March 12), about a once popular Manhattan bike shop that is losing its customers to a competing business across the street. In yet another world premier, Azuka will present Philadelphia playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger’s  The Arsonists (May 3-21), a Florida swamp based story about a father and daughter inspired by the Greek tragedy, Electra.  Azuka Theatre is the first theater company in Philadelphia (and the nation) to offer Pat What You Decide (PWYD) for the entire 2016-17 season.  

      When Bruce Graham’s RIZZO premiered at Theater Exile last fall, reviews were good but mixed. PTC’s production of the play with the same cast (Scott Greer as Rizzo) was much improved, thanks to PTC dramaturge Carrie Chapter. The new production incorporated many references to the current presidential race.  The PTC Rizzo was an even more divisive and controversial figure than his Theatre Exile counterpart. At the Rizzo press preview, Executive Producing Director Sara Garonzik, who will leave PTC after the 2917 season, introduced former Governor Ed Rendell, who reminded the audience that Rizzo was a product of his times and, like everyone, a combination of both good and bad traits.   Philadelphia will never see another Frank Rizzo. Intensely charismatic on a personal level, the former mayor was half in love with tyranny, police raids, and police wagons roaming the streets picking up anyone who looked suspicious or out of the ordinary.    

 

Jen Childs, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of 1812 Productions looks great in a fat suit, especially when she’s playing Chris Christie. Childs has also invented her own character, Patsy, a South Philly stoop lady who dispenses bits of wisdom in Philadeliaeese. Patsy illuminated 1812’s 2016 version of its oft repeated show, This is the Week That Is, when she compared Hillary Clinton to “the Iggles” and Donald Trump to “scrapple.” The bi-partisan spoof no doubt “upset” political ideologues who want satire to reflect a particular bias. The non-stop laugh-a-thon starred Scott Greer and Alex Bechtel as Trump, and had skits on Vladimir Putin, climate change and Obamacare,

 Sharr White’s plays include Stupid Kid, Sunlight and The Snow Geese. The award winning playwright’s The Other Place premiered at The Walnut’s Independence Studio on 3. The unsettling drama about a successful neurologist, Juliana, who battles a failing marriage and a crisis involving her daughter, holds yet another nightmare: the fact that she may have the same kind of brain tumor that killed her mother. Independence Studio 3 lightens up somewhat with the Irish Repertory Theatre of New York’s adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales (Nov. 15-Dec. 23).  The New York Times writes:  “Thomas’s work is a cavalcade of imagery and sensation — the snowy sights, smells and sounds that marked the Christmases of his boyhood. “  Figgy pudding for all! 

    

    Great Valley High School 50th Class Reunion Talk

               October 15, 2016

   Imagine glider flying into the past. Silently, gracefully, going from present time into the mist of past decades till finally we hover over a stretch of Chester County farmland… losing altitude till we hover over the mark: Great Valley High in September, 1962 or opening day….as below us hundreds of kids swarm into a building thick with the smell of new construction.

    Remember the aroma of new wood piled near the almost completed auditorium?

    In the coming weeks this space would serve as a study hall monitored by the stern Mr. Richard Ramsey, overlord extraordinaire, looking over the rim of his glasses at whisperers, gum crackers, mash note passers, or those induced to sleep or doodle or read B novels like William Goldman’s Boys and Girls Together or the revolutionary The Catcher in the Rye while class assignments like The Taming of the Shrew or Beowulf were shoved under three ring binders.  It was in this auditorium that we would hear why Cookies for Vietnam was such a great success; it’s also where we would watch William Francis, Deborah Stearns, Joan Cotter, Joann Haas and William Hammond in the senior class play, Molier’s The Imaginary Invalid.

       Who we were: We were popular & unpopular, loners, joiners, athletes, extraverts, poll vaulters, cheerleaders, football game cow bell ringers, marching band members, compulsive pie eaters, teachers pets & hoody boys in pointy shoes, bleached blond hair and tight white pants hitched up way above the belt line. We were kids with fresh outbreaks of acne figuring out where we belonged, trying out this group or that or becoming loners in the library in the dim light of winter afternoons.

     The Yearbook says we were the energetic students of Great Valley, always ready for action and innovation: the yearbook shows….

 Mike Searcy at a Singer sewing machine hemming a garment or two

            Karen Pyne in a wide legged scissor jump, the only gym class levitation in Chester County

             Loraine Hampton hamming it up with Dave Gallup

             The shirts on/ shirts off agonizing ritual of gym class team selection; the last one picked wore the Scarlet Letter

              Jeff Slabodian’s sweaky  shiny loafers

               Karen Armstrong crowned Miss Cross Country

               The happy days when basketball shorts didn’t hang like kitchen curtains way down below the knee caps.

              Craig Marshall dressed as a French existentialist bohemian making eyes at Connie Cunningham

                Bill O’Brien’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ dance band, the Senior Prom, not quite Led Zeppelin but not Lawrence Welk either

 And, of course---The collective sigh of relief from female grads when realizing they escaped having a quote by Wordsworth put next to their yearbook picture.

               How we dressed: we wore tennis sweaters, madras jackets, white socks, oki dokey farmer plaid shirts, short tight dress pants, conventional jackets and ties, hoop earrings, pearl necklaces and plenty of hair spray on a variety of bouffant hairdos, some shaped like Utah’s beehive, others teased in a variety of ways, blown out on top then hanging straight down against the head before evolving into two small cheerleader flips at the end.

      Joanne Polomski probably had the best bangs in the class although Anne Bernardian and Eleanor Rost rate a close second while Sandra Carr and Debbie Scott cultivated a Veronica Lake look. Ron Dill’s bangs were legendary; they nearly touched his eyebrows while Dan Sipe’s and Jeff Slobodian’s had the look of an expertly trimmed lawn in Haverford. For the high hair effect, we must defer to Dale Weber and Beverly Yorkey: they resembled gunslinger girls in a Gunsmoke episode. “You want water with that bourbon, sir?” Wink, wink. D. Kingston Owens’ cut was straight out of Brideshead Revisited while Bruce Maxfield’s smooth blond top mop had the look of a freshly minted coin.

 

   We hailed from General Wayne Junior High and before that Katherine D. Markley Elementary or from isolated parochial schools where the tyranny of the school uniform was king.    

     We lived in split level homes, ranch houses, trailer courts, Andrew Wyeth style old stone mini mansions or exotic zoo farms like the Daniel P Mannix Social Register homestead in Bacton Hill where Elizabeth Taylor once stayed while filming National Velvet. We brought with us certain influences from our private family life, the whims and biases of Mom and Dad (because that can’t be helped). You see, we weren’t quite complete human beings yet but we were on our way.

   That mayhem filled first week of school!

  Yours truly walked through a floor to ceiling glass panel window on a first floor staircase landing thinking it was an unfinished doorway. Shards of glass rained down on all sides of me but, miraculously, there was no injury. There was Homeroom and the Pledge of Allegiance and then each of us taking turns reading a passage from the bible. By sophomore year the bible readings would morph into a moment of silence: we bowed our heads and meditated on something philosophical—the cat and the hat, the Beatles, Snoopy let your hair out-- though most of the time we worried about upcoming quizzes, or untoward comments in the latest slam book.

 The slam book was the adolescent version of adult character assassination:  So and so is fink, stuck up, or even, God forbid, a skank, meaning I suppose a possum like creature running from woodshed to woodshed. Remember, we weren’t complete human beings yet, so these faults can be forgiven although in retrospect I must say that if a female student can be a skank then so can a male student—it goes together like Yin and Yang, North and South, Great and Valley and Candy Kane and Mr. Kane, GV’s Vice Principal, may they both rest in peace. 

  Remember the very Harry S. Truman look of Principal Mr. Mark Jacoby in his suit and tie although he was not as well dressed as the dapper Mr. Richard T. Brooksbank in his Brooks Brothers tweed, 5-tiered corded belt and 100 per cent calf skin leather loafers sans a tucked in penny.

 Great Valley as a big fashion runway:  Algebra teacher Mr. Edward Eill in his big suits and garish ties; or Louise Einoff, teacher of Spanish and French, meticulously dressed and topping it off with a  pair of stilettos, her beautifully sculpted eyebrows like Greta Garbo’s in an old Hollywood film.  Martha Shelita, queen of guidance counselors, sporting a feminist look before there was a feminist look (some say she even wore sneakers). The sleepy eyed, rumbled looking Harvard educated Mr. Peter Erskine, the original bed hair hipster, so soft spoken and totally non threatening as an authority figure but outdone in personal theatrics by that Hungarian tornado, Mr. George Dobash, who once turned over a trash can in his Problems of Democracy class to illustrate a political point or two…

   Okay, so let’s talk about Dobash. I met him years after graduation while sitting nursing a draft in a Center City bar. I heard a voice that had POD written all over it. “Excuse me, is your name George Dobash?” I said. He raised his cocktail in a toast, blinked twice then commented, “Oh God, your class was one of the best. How’s your sister, what was her name?” “Susan,” I offered, “How could you forget?” He went on to tell me a variety of things-- inside stories about GV teachers, stuff we were not privy to as kids. These soap opera tales increased the temperature in the bar so that I had to open my shirt collar.

    GV’s two science gurus, Mr. Rocco and Mrs. Bravo introduced us to the joys of dead frogs--- no, not as Kentucky dish delicacies but as cold specimens for sophomore biology dissection. This project caused a slight panic, especially when laying the frog on its back, spreading out its limbs and then pinning it to the tray. The unseemliness of it all caused Sue Whitcomb to faint before she could extract anything, alerting Mr. Rocco to the fact that there might be a collective student reaction, as in students fainting en masse and being taken out on stretchers to the football field where they’d be resuscitated by cheerleaders and Band Majorettes.

     High School Biology frog dissection was a classic rite of passage but it’s not done much these days. It takes too much time and there are just too many horror stories of frogs coming back to life.

    Mention trays and the needle points to GV’s venerable cafeteria ladies and their hot serving spoons.  I remember some of them wearing white hair nets which gave them a grandmotherly appeal although they were much younger than we are now.

  And what about those GV hallways… alive with the sound of students and teachers going from class to class…  

   There’s Mr. Kessler. Remember when he took his art classes to the Barnes Foundation? Mr. Kesslser was the quietest of men, the virtual opposite of gym teacher Al Como, and brother of the famous singer Perry. Al loved to line up the boys who had bleached their hair blond, the daring fashion of the day, and giving them a swift swat from a paddle as punishment… something that in today’s world would be seen quite differently with Al probably being put on some kind of list. In many ways, yes, the old days trump the insanity of the present. 

  There’s Mr. Procopio whose name comes dangerously close to Pinocchio’s. Or poker face Social Studies teacher Mr. Sapone. Look, its Mr. Brooksbank again, this time walking with Alger C. Whitcraft, the Business Education teacher. Richard is preparing to tell his English classes another joke:  “Why did the couple get married in the bathtub-- because they wanted a double ring ceremony.” Forget I said that. Other faces are surfacing: the benign Janet Baldwin, GV librarian; Mr. Hennessey, as tall as Frankenstein who taught Driver Ed (what school today has Driver Ed?); Mr. Kadyk, the leader of the band; Mr. Molnar; Miss Smith; and the erudite “Have you read your Beowulf?” Mr. Hickman. But all this is old school. Students today don’t call their teachers Mister anymore and they don’t use Miss or Mrs. either.  Today everything is ground down in an equal playing field.  Yes, we lost something there…

   

   Time to head out to a Saturday football game as Deena Jordan, Doris Kraus and Sandra Carr work the crowds with pom poms, megaphones, jumps and double hooks, …not quite a human pyramid but still daring for its time as Don Broome (What man dare, I dare) and Mike Searcy (There is nothing like fun, is there?) score yet another touchdown …a real Vitalis, Jade East moment or better yet Canoe because with a canoe we can row over to see the other sports, namely cross country where Ed Zacarais is leading the pack again, running, running, running straight into the stopwatch arms of Mr. Kellerman who taught math when he wasn’t noting times in his blue sweats. It was Kellerman who told yours truly after a horrible cross country fall onto a shard of glass (I still bear the scar) that it’s time to shower up, another thing I hear they don’t do in high schools anymore.

     GV was classy. We had Arnold Palmer golf, Dave Steinback Wimbledon-style tennis, folksy Sue Hess Lacrosse, gymnastics (Terry Donnelly and the formidable Mike Talley) and Greco Roman wrestling where Ed Conaway and Dan Rossi (Thoughts shall fly in the twinkling of an eye) almost always pinned their opponents.  Basketball got a 4 page spread in the yearbook (remember Randy Cummins?), while baseball (Gary Brag and Ed Jackman) held its own but without all the chewing tobacco and spitting. 

   Oh no, how did this happen?!  Now we’re smack in the middle of a hallway without a hall pass and the hall monitor is gunning for us. We’ve run out of excuses but the good thing is Dave Pieri has just been elected class president so the atmosphere is hardly like Stalinist Russia.

    We’re allowed to go on our way and look for lost or forgotten classmates, and there are many of them, yes, too many. Where did they go? Richard Henry, Toni Holman, Roger Harris, Michael Mark, Christine Koehler, Charles Kern, Denise Miller, Barbara Darling, Pam Perugi, Roger Peterson,  Howard McCall, Marion Pulls, John Tate, Walter Smith (rest in peace), Bob Terry (rest in peace), Harriet Thomas, Mark Washburn, and Robert Thompson.  I’ve only touched the surface, of course. A few I’ve encountered through the years:  I met Kingston Owens in Boston when he was going to MIT. I ran into Daniel Norris several years ago at a trade show in Center City. Norris was a classmate of mine in parochial school and he used to chase me around the schoolyard in comic bully fashion. We laughed about the chase over trade show coffee. The last time I saw Ed Conaway was two summers after graduation. He was crossing Lancaster Pike in Paoli holding hands with Joan Mitchell. Candy Kane and I became friends in the 1970s. I was introduced to her husband, a likeable guy; we hung out, told stories, then Candy fell ill and I didn’t see her for a very long time. Rest in peace. 

   After graduation I would revisit the GV campus and drive around and relive old memories.  I’d visit to the little creek oasis near Rt 29 where Mr. Kessler used to take his art classes. I’d ponder the track, recall where we held Cross Country practice, and remember all the walks home from school past Memorial Park cemetery as wind gusts opened our books and scattered our papers.

  Uh oh. I’m hearing a call, class. It’s a call to return to that glider and take up our lives again…up, up and away… in the spirit of hope and confidence of course because the passage of time and a 50^th reunion doesn’t have to be a scary time…it can be, as the yearbook suggests,  both an end and a beginning     

        

      

Social Justice Warriors on American Campuses

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      Milo’s fans are generally right of center politically although large numbers of politically progressive students agree with some of his views. Milo’s liberal fans may not like Donald Trump (Milo supports Trump) but they are avid free speech advocates and want to hear what he has to say. Most of Milo’s fans are heterosexual students, especially fraternity types: the male jocks even cheer when Milo makes a “gay pass” at a male in the audience, or when a sexy African American student stands up and asks Milo out for a date. This kind of gay liberation dynamic in a predominately macho male straight audience is about as rare as a moon landing or ice floes in the Delaware. After all, tradition tells us that it is from this generic pool of straight macho types where many gaybashers come from, but instead we find them cheering the faggot and even passing him mash notes. It’s a curious once in a lifetime phenomenon.   

       Milo is not popular with the LGBTQ community because his views don’t match the official slate of beliefs that every good gay man or lesbian is supposed to hold. Since it was the political Left that gave birth (or aided) the modern gay movement, the Left continues to hold the bulk of LGBTQ loyalty. This is understandable even if the Left is changing.   

      We can see that the Left is changing because of the effects of the (left leaning) word policing as described in the first paragraphs of this column. There was a time not so long ago when only the right wing was crazy over censorship. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, it was conservatives who banned books and movies and even speakers (Communists, etc.) from college campuses. Today it is the Left. That’s why the term regressive left has come into vogue. A regressive leftist can be described as someone who has an inability to listen to contrary, uncomfortable viewpoints without throwing out accusations of bigotry, racism and white supremacy. All too frequently these words—racism, bigot-- are thrown out without any accompanying dialogue. Use of the word alone is supposed to shut down all debate. It’s what philosophy professor Christina Hoff means when she says, “In their war against intolerance, they take on the extremes of intolerance.”

      Hoff also adds, “It’s going to be hard for future historians to understand what happened on American campuses in this decade.” This is true because freedom of expression on campus is being replaced by the right to feel comfortable.    

         It is true that sometimes Milo’s narcissism and showmanship can be off putting. It also doesn’t help that he is not always a nice person. He’s unnecessarily hard on fat people but he makes sense when he comes out against the body positivity movement. The body positivity movement teaches that you should love your body type no matter what size it is. Yes, being 300 pounds is beautiful and you don’t have to change a thing, even if weight that high puts you at risk of death. 

             Milo says there’s no such thing as a lesbian because so many lesbians have had affairs with men and seem to be able to move easily from one gender to the other.  This view, I might add, is not that far reaching because I once heard a former editor of the Philadelphia Gay News say the same thing.

               Milo does not believe in gay marriage and says that homosexuality is caused by a mix of nature and nurture. Born that way is crap, he says; it’s a political line invented by the gay lobby.  He has little respect for so called third wave feminism (which seems to obsess on trivial issues like man spreading (when a man sits in a bus or subway with his legs spread far apart) or when a man tells a woman that she “looks nice today.”

            He views Islam as the greatest threat to Western civilization and says that as a gay man he cannot live in any “moderate” Islamic country because he would be subject to the death penalty.

                   Milo has no respect for Black Lives Matter and calls the organization “a bunch of black supremacists.” (Milos’ sexual preference, by the way, is for African American men).

         It’s my belief that Black Lives Matter would be greatly improved if they had a change in leadership.

      Overall, Milo isn’t the issue here, it’s the contagion known as political correctness. The chronic emphasis on political correctness in society has helped create Milo, just as it has propelled so many people to support Donald Trump. The fact is, people do not want to be told what to think or what they can and cannot say.   

            Take the word racist, for instance. ‘Racist’ is so overused that it is beginning to lose its effectiveness. The word should be reserved for true racists, not for polite women speakers who talk about being the black sheep of the family. 

       

            

           

Mother Teresa, an Enemy of the Left

THE LOCAL LENS

THOM NICKELS

  When Pope Francis canonizes Mother Teresa on Sunday, September 4, one man will be smiling more than most in the sea of people in Saint Peter’s Square.

   His name is Michael Collopy, one of the preeminent portrait photographers of our time. Collophy was Mother Teresa’s personal friend and official photographer for fifteen years. His 224 page book of photographs, Works of Love are Works of Peace (Ignatius Press), contain more than 180 fine art quality tri-tone images, along with writings by Mother Teresa. One of Collopy’s images of Mother Teresa has been chosen as the Catholic Church’s official portrait of the new saint.  Collopy’s photograph was the basis for a painted portrait of the nun that will be unveiled to the world on September 4. .

    Collopy, a mostly self taught photographer who studied under Ansel Adams and Richard Avedon, resides in San Francisco with his wife, Alma and their two sons. He    has photographed a lot of famous people, including Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, but he says that no subject affected him as much as Mother Teresa.  As a personal friend of the saint’s, he also spent a lot of time driving her around Calcutta to her various appointments.

     “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of something she said,” he tells me by phone from his home. “She was very mystical. She could ‘read’ you in a way. She had these deep penetrating eyes and she often gave me spiritual advice that was straight on.”

   Collopy also wants me to know that Mother Teresa “had the ability to see goodness in each person without judgment.”

   The most extreme example of this is the love that she and her Missionaries of Charity sisters showed to gay men dying of AIDS in the Bay Area in the 1980s and 1990s. Collopy’s book contains a number of startling images from the sisters’ Gift of Love San Francisco AIDS Hospice. These black and white images are images of AIDS patients close to death... Some of the men are photographed as they lay dying. In one striking photograph we see Hospice patient “David” surrounded by sisters and staff as if cocooned in a loving circle. As Collopy wrote: “His name was David. Like the other men whose photographs appear in this section, when David found out about this book project, he wanted to be involved. So we were there at a most intimate and profound—his death.”

    One image shows David in repose in a small cot, a white sheet up to his neck near an open window with white curtains and a white statue of Our Lady of Fatima looking over the scene.  

   “I got to know all of these guys quite well,” Collopy says. “Mother was one of the first to really have a home for men suffering from AIDS. I met so many men there who were rejected by their families because of who they were, so many beautiful people that I got to know.”  Collopy adds that David told him that while living in the streets he didn’t feel like he had family or friends but that in the hospice he was surrounded by friends.  

   “Mother had complete trust and confidence that the men in the AIDS hospice were all going to heaven. How intimately God loves each one of us. Mother also made it a point never to judge anyone, and she once told Michael, ‘Oh no, I never judge anybody because it doesn’t allow me to love them.’”

   “Not having this judgment,” Collopy adds, “allowed her to love the individuals she cared for. Mother had the ability to see goodness in each person, without judgment. There was a lot of love and laughter in those hospices.”

    How did Mother Teresa become Mother Teresa?

     She was born in Albania as Ganxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu and had an older brother and a sister named Aga.  The family was well to do. Her mother, an Orthodox Christian, was very religious while her father was very active politically in the local City Council, a position that probably led to his death, or so Collopy believes, as he may have been poisoned. By age 18, the future Mother Teresa was already leading a devout religious life and reading books on India because she had a desire to work there. She wanted to devote her life to the poor as a nun and the only way to do that was to join the Catholic Sisters of Loreto (there were no Orthodox missionary nuns in India at that time).

     Collopy says that Mother Teresa received the call to work with the very poor during a train ride to Darjeeling in 1946. “At that time she had a kind of interior locution, a vision of Jesus and Mary. She was suddenly looking out over a sea of dark faces of the poor and in the foreground was Jesus on the cross,” he says. After entering the convent, she became a geography teacher and the principal of a girl’s school in Calcutta.

   Collopy tells me that Mother never liked to talk about herself and never accepted any kind of praise. When she started her work in Calcutta, she was on her own and absolutely alone. It wasn’t until British writer Malcolm Muggeridge discovered her work in 1969, leading to a BBC report on her work that resulted in world wide attention. 

   Deceased writer Christopher Hitchens, author of a book on Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position,” says the BBC report was the beginning of “the Mother Teresa media myth.” Hitchens called Mother Teresa an “ally of the status quo,” because of her readiness to meet infamous world dictators to further her work. Other critics of Mother jumped on the bandwagon, including journalists who insisted that her Missionaries of Charity homes for the dying in Calcutta and elsewhere were understaffed, provided bad medical care, were too crowded and had insufficient pain killers and food. Mother’s Missionaries of Charity were also charged with gross financial mismanagement.  Krithika Varagur of the Huffington Post went out on a limb when she wrote: “…Mother Teresa’s imminent sainthood is freshly infuriating. We make god in our image and we see holiness in those who resemble us. In this, Mother Teresa’s image is a relic of white, Western supremacy.”  These and other critics who criticized Mother Teresa’s looks as well as her stand against abortion were taken aback when she was awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and the Medal of Freedom.   

    Collopy says that when he and Christopher Hitchens were in Berkeley at the same time, somebody tried to get them together for lunch. “I had a conversation with him on the phone, and he was very nice, very articulate, but his criticism of Mother certainly wasn’t accurate based on my 15 years with her.”

   The aged nun, after all, lived in a simple room without any amenities, wore broken sandals that were five years old, refused to use the telephone longer than a few minutes because poor people in India had no access to phones.

      “I never met anybody who was that selfless. Her life was a life of selfless service. She did not desire publicity or fame. In fact, she had a deal with God that for every photo taken of her a soul was released from purgatory. You know, when you consider the life of Jesus—he did not hang out with the best of characters—a far more difficult pain for him to accept other than the physical pain he experienced was the pain of rejection from the apostles at the Garden of Gethsemane. This really corresponds to the poverty of sorrow that Mother saw in the West. It was the poverty of being unloved and uncared for that made the poverty in the United States much more difficult to care for. But she was called to attend to that.”

   Collopy tells me of the time he was driving Mother to one of her appointments when they came upon a group of electricians working on electrical wires. The scene moved Mother to say, “You have to be the empty wire and allow God to be the current that runs through it.”

   I ask about the photographs of Mother’s feet and hands. The images of Mother’s feet are shocking to look at because they do not resemble feet but, as Collopy says, “tree roots.”

   “Yes, the sisters used to encourage me to photograph Mother’s feet. She never used to wear sandals in her house in Calcutta, because the poor didn’t have sandals. She had an extra toe under her right foot. That must have been very painful. But her feet looked like tree roots. There were notches on her ankles from the way that she prayed, the prostrations and so forth…”  

   He says there are many times when he feels Mother’s presence. In one instance a good friend of Alma’s announced that she had breast cancer. Because the woman was very distraught, Collopy immediately drove to her home to give her a small medal of Our Lady that Mother used to hand out to people.  Mother would kiss these medals individually then distribute them to pilgrims and the sick. Sometimes she would leave them on the property of buildings that were for sale that she wanted to buy. According to Collopy, “99.9 percent of the time after she would get that house.”

      After delivering the medal to his wife’s friend, Collopy tells me that the very next day the more than grateful woman drove to the Collopy home to make an announcement. She said that when she received the medal on the previous day, she saw Mother Teresa standing in the room.  Shortly after this, his breast cancer vanished completely.   

   Collopy reminds me of something that Mother once said: “I can do much more for you in heaven than I can on earth.”     

   The San Francisco photo-journalist is currently working on a new book, Courage, portraits of people he feels have exhibited courage in their field of work, including Nobel Prize Laureates, Civil Rights heroes, and of course the Dalai Lama, who once rubbed Collopy’s shoulder because he said he needed the healing presence of Mother Teresa’s love.       

    

The Homeless Will Help Us After a World Calamity

THE LOCAL LENS

THOM NICKELS 

   They come to the neighborhood in droves. Sometimes they come as couples and occasionally they have a dog in tow. They set up camp in the strangest places: in front of convenience stores, pizza shops, Dunkin Donuts, and dollar stores. They canvass traffic at stoplights with large cardboard signs. Talk to them and you’ll find they have slightly different stories. Some come from good homes, like Anthony X who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs where he played the guitar and sang so well that his music can still be seen on You Tube. Anthony studied film production in LA and produced a number of short films before his life crashed.

   His life crashed because of heroin. Anthony left LA for Philly where he met a beautiful girl who had a knack for making a quick buck under the El.

   Couples bonded by heroin addiction rarely celebrate 5^th or 10^th anniversaries. Heroin is a jealous mistress; it wants no other lover. Anthony and his girl soon planned a road trip to Texas where they dreamt of a bohemian existence with Austin’s music community. The road trip began with a bang. They posted Facebook photos of themselves eating tacos on Greyhound, and then Texas photos showing them bathing in a creek. Anthony’s girlfriend then met a man with a lot of money and Anthony was history. Devastated, the former film student disappeared into that overcrowded nightmare known as the state of California. 

  

       Most but not all of the homeless are drug addicted. Some homeless people are just down on their luck and rebound quickly when offered a job and a place to live.

   Some of the homeless are road trippers who travel from city to city. Like the legendary American hobos of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, they ride the rails and sleep in boxcars, following a rustic tradition that has its roots in American literature. The poet Carl Sandburg and the novelist James Michener, for instance, both lived as train hobos for a while. Generally, road tripper types have no intention of settling in Philly. Consider the case of Garth, 25, a native of Vermont, who came to Philly with his guitar because there was trouble at home. Garth is a light party drug type (no heroin), but his lifestyle has made him homeless. Maybe it’s his long hair, but Garth says that cops will ask him to leave popular panhandling spots while ignoring born and bred Philly homeless who panhandle for drug money.  

       He complains that everyone he meets assumes that he’s on heroin. He also doesn’t like it that people seem to not like him because he’s not “from around here.”

    Recently I introduced myself to two homeless guys after telling them that I was writing a book on the homeless problem 

   The two men, Chris and Ron, said they usually hang out in lower Kensington by the Somerset El stop where they panhandle for drug money. Chris, 28, has a beard that’s reminiscent of Francis of Assisi. He looked quite at home perched on top of a metal recycle bin as he told me that he had just come from a hospital where he tried to get himself committed. As if to prove his story, he showed me the hospital Johnny under his shirt. He tried to commit himself, he says, because he’s tired of life on the streets.

    Chris has been on the streets for 3 years although he says he showers and keeps himself clean when he visits friends or finds a hospitable spot to wash up. Chris’ friend, Ron, who has been on the streets for a year, grew up in the Northeast.

   Chris says he misses his family “something awful” though he’s careful to add that his family problems have nothing to do with his drug addiction. Ron won’t even talk about his family. His eyes tell me that it’s just too painful to go there.

    Both Ron and Chris love the idea of getting clean. This comes into play when a guy their own age walks by and hears them talking, then offers Chris a job as a dishwasher for ten dollars an hour at a local Fishtown eatery, Chris asks how he can apply. “Online,” the manager says, “It’s easy.” But it’s not easy. How is Chris going to get access to a computer unless he goes to a city library? Gone are the days when you could just walk into a place and fill out an application. He would also have to get clean before he starts work. One of the disadvantages of being homeless is that you are always losing or getting your state ID stolen.  “Well, maybe I’ll see you,” the manager says, “Remember, ten dollars an hour!”

 

       Chris and Ron continue to talk about making ten dollars an hour long after the manager leaves. Chris says he would save his money and find a “nice place to live” but Ron doesn’t say much. Perhaps Ron sees that housing in today’s world is just too expensive for people with low income jobs.   

     We are joined by a homeless man with a black eye (he just had a fight with his girlfriend) who’s pushing around a set of golf clubs.

     The scene is becoming as bizarre as an independent foreign movie.

    The man trying to sell golf clubs obviously stole them. At least that’s what Chris thinks. “Who golf’s in Port Richmond,” he says. “Nobody here wants golf clubs!” Chris is right, of course.  Port Richmond and Fishtown have nothing in common with Haverford or Bryn Mawr. Besides which, the clubs look like really cheap golf clubs. “This might work if they turned Cione Park into a golfing range, “ Ron scoffs.

      The man with the clubs dusts off all the knobby tops like they are Lions Club trophies. He looks around the parking lot for potential buyers but there are only a few people headed to their cars drinking Big Gulps and ten Puerto Rican kids riding by on bicycles with their front tires in the air. The golf guy reluctantly shoulders the clubs and leaves but no sooner does this happen than he’s replaced by a pretty woman with braided hair in green camouflage pants and a corded vest that must have once been on the racks at Nordstrom’s. .

       She has a striking profile and, together with Chris—after a hot shower and a pedicure—they could make a living as Calvin Klein models. The girl sits down by the front door with her change cup as another homeless person comes up from the rear. I ask Chris if this is some kind of homeless convention and if he knows any of these people. He shakes his head no. The newcomer carries a triple tiered knapsack straight out of the Apollo Moon Landing. It’s a wonder he can move under its weight. There isn’t enough time to get his story, but I introduce myself anyway and tell him that I am gathering stories.

   The whole world seems to have gone Mad Max. Suddenly there are more homeless people at this convenience store than there are customers, but I’m glad the police aren’t chasing them away. Still, I can empathize with the police: if 100 homeless people came here, would that be good for business? I think not. 

    Life gets stranger when another homeless man approaches and asks if anybody has a cigarette. He’s a tall guy with a scar on his right arm and, lighting up after finding a butt on the ground, tells Chris and Ron (the girl won’t join us) his story. He says he’s the only person to ever survive jumping off the Ben Franklin Bridge.

  Ambrose Bierce couldn’t invent stories like this, but what I’m telling you is true.

   

   He lifts his shirt up and shows everyone the scar on his stomach from the operations he’s had since he jumped. Everyone wants to know how he survived the long drop to the water. He says he lost consciousness immediately after jumping and “woke up” underwater with his shoes planted in the mud on the bottom of the river. Somehow he managed to free himself and swim up to the surface where he saw a patrol boat. Lucky for him, the people on the patrol boat saw him jump, so they were ready. He says all the nurses and the doctors at the hospital call him the Bionic Man whenever he goes for checkups.

  

    Surviving two or three years as a homeless person in the city is an endurance test of the highest order. But if there’s anything “good” about being homeless, it’s this: If ever there’s a world calamity, it will be the homeless who will lead the way because they’ve had so much practice surviving on the streets. They will become survival mentors for the rest of us, showing us how to pitch a cardboard tent in an alley, how to make a bed out of newspapers, how to brush your teeth with your index finger, or how to select “safe” dumpster food from the nasty stuff.

   They will be the masters of the new age. 

    

  

  

   

      

        

The Hipster Commune Goes Bust

     THE LOCAL LENS

THOM NICKELS  

Let’s consider the empty house on the street where I live.

    The house is empty because the owner, Sammy, a guy about 30, suddenly moved out after living in the place for 3 years. I remember the day he moved in. He came with his cars and bikes after his suburban parents bought the house for him. During his first weeks here some of the neighbors went out of their way to say hello but Sammy was aloof. He obviously didn’t want to be bothered to get to know the people on the block.

    What Sammy did for a living was a mystery, but his pattern was to leave the house everyday around noon and return in the early evening. 

    Sammy could have been living on a mountain top because he never made eye contact with neighbors. You could pass Sammy in the street and he’d have one of those Village of the Damned ‘straight on’ stares like he was sleepwalking.  

    Sammy’s house was a large space with interesting room patterns. I know because I used to be friends with the couple, Walter and Betty, who lived there before their move to Washington State. Walter, Betty and I didn’t become friends until their last two years on the street. Who knows why it took us so long to strike up a friendship. One day they invited me to dinner so I got to sample Walter’s gourmet cooking. On warm summer days, Walter would invite me over for a swim in his pool. The pool was a fairly deep above ground monstrosity with a sturdy wooden deck, set among some of the largest trees I’ve seen in the neighborhood. After a swim, we’d catch an iced tea during which Walter would talk about his favorite poet, Gary Snyder.

  

    I wasn’t happy when Walter and Betty announced that they were moving west. I was getting used to going over there for dinner and swimming in their pool, and then inviting them over to my place for patio parties. Friendships like this don’t come easily. You can say hello to neighbors, even chat with them on the street for years and still never be invited over to their place.

   When Walter and Betty moved out the house wasn’t empty for long. One day I spotted a suburban looking couple talking with the realtor. The couple had driven up in a Lexis, which spelled m-o-n-e-y. A week or two after that a big moving truck appeared, and Sammy appeared with his bushy black hair and an army of friends. The friends, all men, were scruffy in a hip way although they all had the same type of manufactured beard.

    They moved in quickly and within days held a massive outdoor party around Walter’s old pool. Sammy’s friends built a large bonfire and started a barbecue. The party lasted until the wee hours. Then at 4 or 5 am I was awakened by a suburban girl, one of Sammy’s party guests, crying under my bedroom window.  She was so drunk she found it hard to put together sentences however I tried to make out what she was saying. In the end, I couldn’t decipher her drunken valley girl ‘up talk’ although it seemed that some boy had dumped her.   

    I was curious about Sammy for a short time but after a while I stopped caring. There was no reason to say hello, especially if his response was going to be something like a smug nod.   

     Sammy’s outdoor parties were becoming more and more frequent. Party guests, driving in from the western Main Line, were double parking on our tiny street. Sammy acquired strings of Japanese party lights and strung them along the tree branches so that from my house his yard looked like a massive house boat in New Orleans. The parties got progressively louder and wilder yet it was fascinating to see how every party began as low key events but as the night wore on, and as more alcohol was consumed, the voices got louder and louder. Eventually the voices became so pitched it sounded like twenty men screaming at one another. 

    If the screaming prevented me from falling asleep, I assumed that many of my neighbors were experiencing the same thing. I’d turn on the AC or put fans in my bedroom window to muffle the noise but like the racket from a plague of locusts, the voices would always resurface.

     And among these voices there would always be the sound of a woman crying. .  

   “That makes 4 crying women in 30 days,” I’d tell friends. ‘What do they do to women over there?”

    Sammy acquired a succession of roommates to help pay the mortgage. Generally the roommates were in their twenties and never stayed long. At first the roommates were part of Sammy’s social circuit but then I noticed a change. They seemed to be living independently, especially the lost looking Irish guy who seemed to be terrified of strangers and whose large dog seemed to be his only friend. He would sit glum faced on Sammy’s stoop staring into space. For a time I thought he was hearing impaired.  

   Some of Sammy’s roommates moved out in the middle of the night although they were very quickly replaced with new roommates. At one of the parties, the invited guests double and triple parked on the sidewalk up and down the street, upsetting the neighbors.  Somebody called the police, and ten of Sammy’s party guests got parking tickets.

   “These people have no idea how the city works,” I told a friend.

    Sammy acquired so many roommates I lost count of them. Prohibitive housing and rental costs were really impacting people in their twenties, and Sammy’s house was proof of this. Nobody could afford to live on their own. I called Walter and Betty and told them that their former home had become a gigantic hipster commune complete with dogs, motorcycles, bonfires, and beautiful white women in long dreadlocks. “It’s a sight to behold although nobody on the street has made friends with them because they don’t   seem to want to get to know anybody.”  

   I told Walter and Betty that Sammy had decided to get rid of the pool and chop down the oldest and grandest tree on the property. Walter and Betty were meticulous home owners, but very soon Sammy began to let things slip. After all, it really wasn’t his house. His parents found the house for him. They were the ones who appreciated the house but they probably had high hopes that Sammy would come to appreciate it someday.   

   It wasn’t long before the house began to look shabby, although all the women who visited or lived there seemed to be the same type: they were tall and elegant looking with long beautiful hair. They also dressed like fashion models, mostly in long flowing dresses. Even if beautiful women are not your thing, no one could deny the astounding beauty of these creatures. They seemed to go in and out of Sammy’s house at all hours.

     The men, by contrast, were doughy looking with thick Clark Kent glasses and hairy necks. “This is proof,” a comedian friend of mine commented, “that pretty women like money and power.”

     For a period of a year, especially in winter when there were no leaves on the trees, anyone walking on the sidewalk could look right into Sammy’s front window and see somebody watching Homer Simpson.

         

   The parties continued, the beer kept flowing, and the male chorus of voices kept getting louder and louder. Sometimes I could make out what was being said. There were stories about work but more often than not there was no smooth narrative at all, just discombobulated half sentences with long pauses as well as the overuse of the word ‘like’ (let’s not forget beer burps), and finally unexplained yells as if someone had inadvertently sat on a possum. 

   “Like…I mean, but like….Yeah, you know. What the fuck!”   

     (Repeat 50 times and you have the party conservation).

    A few neighbors, eager to build bridges, continued to attempt to make contact with Sammy, but to no avail. 

        

    Two weeks ago in a bizarre replay of 3 years ago, the suburban parents returned in the same Lexis. Standing in front of the house they whispered to one another before knocking on Sammy’s door. The parents had to knock a long time before one of the roommates answered although he didn’t open the door but talked to them through an open slat.

  . Some sort of negotiation seemed to be in progress, but what?  

   The very next day at least two of the roommates moved out and the day after that it was Sammy’s turn. Sammy left on his bike, never to be seen again.