Kelly McCullough – Page 70

A Brief Commentary On Time

You can learn to fly

1986 Kelly McCullough Plummeting

2012 Kelly McCullough Soaring*

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*You just have to have the right partner—that right picture is a clip from

my annual anniversary shoot with the brilliant and beautiful Laura McCullough

Photo credit 2012 Matt Kuchta. Photo credit 2006 ???????

I’ve just gotten home from a wonderful show at the Minnesota Fringe Festival created by Bob Alberti. The show is Principia Discordia. I feel like something of a grandfather to this show for three reasons. The first is this:

The second reason is that I get to take some tiny fraction of the credit for this marvelous thing that didn’t actually involve me doing anything new.

Third, there are three other obvious grandparents, in this case: William Shakespeare for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Edmond Rostand for Cyrano de Bergerac, and Oscar Wilde for The Importance of Being Earnest. This puts me in excellent company for very little actual work. Perhaps I should explain.

The play that Bob has put together is a beautiful little six character piece starring Eris, Goddess of Discord (Dawn Krosnowski),* Thalia, the Muse of Comedy (Lana Rosario), Ms. Black (Laura Cannata), Ms. Red (Susan Becker), Mr. White (Duck Washington), and Mr Gold (Bob Alberti). The run time is a bit under an hour, and they cover a lot of ground as they do scenes from Midsummer, Cyrano, and Earnest. The central idea is that Thalia is directing the scenes and Eris is balking her by randomizing the casting with the help of the audience so that no two night’s shows will have the same characters in the same parts.

This has a number of lovely effects and, as I mentioned above, means I get to play grandparent without having to have written any actual scenes or anything to do with the play at all. Really, the heavy lifting is done by anybody and everybody but me, starting with Bob and his players who did a splendid job. I just get to smile and be happy that other people are doing great work that puts me in the acknowledgements.

My focus coming into this was, of course, on Thalia, and even more on Eris. Anyone who has read the WebMage books knows that I have a huge soft spot for Eris.

So, Thalia first. Lana Rosario’s performance was absolutely delightful, a wonderful broad comedic take on the directorial thespian that reminded me in the best possible way of my own drama teacher and mentor Vaughn Koenig. Grand and melodramatic and hooray.

Eris, well, Eris was perfect. I will now picture Dawn Krosnowski when I think of her. She had the humor and the charisma and the absolute unholy glee nailed. There was a point in the show where she came around and sat in the seat behind mine with one hand resting on the rail—just in my peripheral vision. Knowing my Eris, the thought of having her behind me was really quite alarming, and she would know that, and know that I know that she would know and take delight in every bit of it, and it was all very very meta. I loved it and her performance, and, well pretty much everything.

The rest of the cast had to cover more ground as they played the major parts in the three scenes, so I don’t have as solid a reference for any of them, and that’s actually perfectly in keeping with the core of the play which is a full blown challenge to the idea of type casting of any kind, be it gender, size, shape, race, or some other factor. I think they did a beautiful job of it and said something that was not only entertaining, but also important, and that perhaps more than anything makes me proud to have had a tiny part in the genesis of this show.

I have to give Bob special props down here for the writing of the thing, especially with Thalia and Eris. He gave them lines that I could have written word for word, which is cool. He also gave them lines that I wish that I had written, which is absolutely awesome. Oh, and the ending was note perfect.

It’s really hard to express how wonderful and surreal seeing this show was for me. I feel like I just got to cross off a bucket list item I hadn’t even known I wanted. Simply knowing that I helped to inspire someone else in their own art makes me feel like I’ve done something very right in the world. That it was something so genuinely wonderful, well, that’s a gift beyond price.

If you get the chance, go see the show! It’s only playing through Saturday, and the quality of the show and the reviews that are going up at the fringe site suggests that you’ll want to move quickly.

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*Kezia Germ will be taking the role of Eris for show five.

P.S. for more on Bob Alberti, Tim Wick has written a lovely piece on him in his friend a day series which also featured me at one point.

In Memoriam—Vaughn Koenig (reblog)

We all have people we can point to who have changed our lives for the better. Parents, teachers, loved ones; the potential list is endless. Vaughn Koenig changed mine. I can even point to the exact moment that this wonderful teacher altered the course of my life. It was at the Saint Paul Open School and I was eleven. A couple of friends and I were skipping our classes together.

To this day I can’t tell you which class I was skipping. What I can tell you is which class my friend Tim Wick was skipping. It was called roving theater, and it was taught by Vaughn. The class was in essence an improvisational theater class that roved around the school building and grounds, taking advantage of the different spaces to help spur student creativity. On this particular day, the class had moved to the space that I and my friends had chosen to hide out in and play Dungeons and Dragons while skipping classes, though we didn’t know that until we came around a corner and ran smack into Vaughn and the class.

Tim rallied beautifully, spinning some story about being late and wondering if his friends could join the class for the day. I doubt that it fooled Vaughn, but she just quietly waved us into the next exercise, making sure to include the new kids. It was the first time that I’d ever had anything to do with acting or performance or really making my own art. I was utterly and irretrievably hooked. I never went back to whatever class I’d been skipping and I never skipped a day of roving theater.

In that class Vaughn taught me how to overcome what had up until then been a fairly shy nature. She instilled confidence in a boy who didn’t have a whole lot. And, most importantly, she taught me to value my own creativity as something I could share with others. For the next eleven years I was totally focused on the goal of making a life in theater.

I took whatever acting classes Vaughn offered from trimester to trimester, as well as anything else that she taught that fed my need for art and my sense of creativity, something in the neighborhood of twenty classes over all. I was only able to have her as my direct advisor for my last year at Open, but there is no question that she was my most important mentor during my eleven years at the school. My Open School graduation packet is heavy with theater-related material and I went on from Open School to get a BA in theater from the University of Minnesota. In addition to my Open School shows and classes, I performed or worked in quite a number of shows and festivals during those years.

At age 22 I took a sharp turn away from theater and into writing science fiction and fantasy and have stayed there ever since, making a career of it with sixteen novels written so far,* many of them published or forthcoming. But I’ve never forgotten or regretted a single moment of my theater years. Indeed, I have to credit them and Vaughn for fostering my skills at using language and story to evoke an effect in my intended audience, as well as shaping and training the creative and critical facilities I needed to become a successful novelist.

There is no question in my mind that I would not be where I am today, or what I am today without the loving guidance of an extraordinary teacher and woman named Vaughn Koenig.

Goodbye Vaughn, and thank you so very much. The world is a darker place for not having you in it.

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*21 as of spring 2014

(Originally published on my Facebook page on April 6 2011, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Money, Meet Mouth

My dear friends Michael and Lynne Thomas are kickstarting a new magazine called Uncanny. I think it’s going to be a pretty spiffy addition to the science fiction and fantasy world, which is why I’ve kicked in at the sustaining level. They currently have three Hugo awards on the mantel as well as number of additional and/or pending nominations. They’ve discovered some wonderful new writers in their years in the industry, as well as publishing a lot of old warhorses like me.

You could do much worse with your entertainment/art dollars than to throw some their way. At $25 you get a one year subscription that includes a hell of an initial table of contents including folks like Amal El-Mohtar, Sofia Samatar, Charlie Jane Anders, Liz Argall, Rachel Swirsky, Maria Dahvana Headley, Mary Robinette Kowal, Neil Gaiman, Scott Lynch, Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Cornell, Ken Liu, Kat Howard, Hao Jingfang, and E. Lily Yu in addition to whatever new writers they discover as they go along. I’m not currently in the queue and don’t have any plans to submit anything—in part because I’m not doing short fiction or poetry these days—so my interest is purely in seeing friends succeed with a cool new project that will broaden and deepen the field.

Consider kicking in. That kickstarter link again.