Wading Through Creative Media: One Writer Spreads Her Talents, or Gorilla Not In The Zoo
Alison Schaumburg -- June 12, 2005
The gorilla has nothing to do with this piece except to dilute the all-about-me-ness. In college I had a summer job where across the street a young man wore a full gorilla suit to advertise for the Zoo Restaurant. Several times he crossed the busy highway and visited my tiny office. He never removed his mask. I never saw his face. It haunts me to this day.
This could also be called Follow Your Blisses.
I suppose one is born to write or to sculpt. The diversions along the way, the forks in the road, will contribute or detract. I was writing sappy poetry in that agonizing year called Seventh Grade. Of course it was all about unrequited love. I left one poem blowing in the grass in front of the Baskin Robins ice cream store where he worked. I remember the pathetic last few lines:
As the flies buzz over my grave
The sky turns to brilliant blue
And then you.
Just awful. But the Chinese say you have one thousand bad paintings (poems) in you.
In seventh grade I also won first place in an art contest sponsored by Sears and Roebuck. The pastel was a slightly abstract still life. The prize was one hundred dollars. I immediately used it to purchase (from Sears) a golden Sting Ray bicycle with a leopard-patterned seat. My pride and joy until it was permanently borrowed from our driveway two years later.
On to Catholic high school. Nuns, uniforms and more love poems.
Next, as an English Lit major at UC Irvine, I was lucky enough to study
with the poet James McMichael. For a decade or two life gets in the way
of writing and then writing comes to my rescue as widowhood finds me. I
turn to my writing partner, a dear friend ready with a challenge. You
know something about American Indians after those years in Northern
Arizona; you grew up riding horses. Want to write a western movie
together?
From poetry to screenplays. We had taken several screenwriting classes from UCLA and spent a formidable weekend studying story structure with the infamous Mr. McKee. So we didn't exactly leap unprepared into the world of film writing. My partner's father is also a well-known cinematographer.
The first screenplay is a natural high to write, about the Pony Express and some unrequited love. Six months of research as we even 'walk the ground' in northeastern Nevada where Pony Express stations still stand untouched on the loneliest road in America. The next six months we spend writing, becoming the 'two-in-one-brain' writing partners form, while I'm also learning single parenting and replaying the dating game. The following year we write another screenplay which is the story of four 1928 New York City orphans who are sent to the Midwest on Orphan trains to be adopted by farmers.
Next thing you know, I move north and with new territory you tend to try new things. I enter a local paper's short story contest. The editor calls me to ask me to revise the ending. Something about it being too suggestive. I refuse. Still, I find myself one of five final winners.
Signing up for a three day poetry workshop, old emotions find new batteries for expression. Five formidable new poet/friends kindly include me as we form a monthly writers group; and now the poems are flowing. Wasn't it Jack Kerouac that said, "Art is the Holy Spirit flowing through your soul?"
Meanwhile, after multiple screenplay rejections (the screenplays are still out there) I finally decide there are many more opportunities to drink champagne if you celebrate the rejection letters instead. Cheers!
And off to vacation in the Caribbean. What a place to find a muse! My daughter and I create giant sand dragon sculptures. Soon I evolve into sculpting larger-than-life mermaids as the beach walkers comment in such a way that I decide on the trip home to rent a studio and follow through on a three-year old idea to sculpt one-thousand paper mache Salvation Army angels with fifty per-cent of the profit going to that charitable organization. I do believe this idea was somewhat inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez' short story titled A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.
The wire armature at first refuses to cooperate. Soon, the wings emerge. The bodies are covered in torn strips of old New York Times Sunday editions The faces are covered in a collage of French letters circa 1750 - 1835 which I purchase on Ebay. I tear the words carefully before arranging them on the face. Ghost-like xeroxes of antique photos peer out from the skirt folds. The images are often too strong, so I dip tissue paper into the glue and one out of five times it doesn't disintegrate and then becomes a gossamer fragment of the skirt, subduing the images. The first sculpture has Abraham Lincoln dominating the wing with photos of various slave, Confederate and Union soldiers hiding in the skirt. She's a prototype and each angel is a bit easier to do, and more polished. As always, there looms the challenge of self-discipline and not enough time. But nowhere to be found is any hint of unrequited love.
As I write this I'm gallery- sitting where my first sculpture is in a show. And, lo and behold, today this gallery is also the forum for a reception honoring the first Latin American to win a Nobel prize for Literature, Gabriel Mistral. Our local poet laureate is here. I feel like saying, 'The muse went thattaway!'
I often wonder if, suffering from multiple muses, you miss out on that singlemindedness which truly driven talents use to succeed. I also note that each of these creative endeavors I've chosen offers the constant possibility of rejection. So I order up another case of champagne.
I have seen the bumper sticker that says whoever dies with the most toys wins. I have heard a philosopher friend rebuke with whoever dies with the most stories wins. I counter with only if there is (or was) someone to listen. And if, by chance, the boy who wore the gorilla suit on the corner of Jamboree and Pacific Coast Highway in Corona del Mar in the summer of 1972 happens to be listening in cyberspace, please email a photo. A picture is worth a thousand words.