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Listen to Paul’s interview.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players… One man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.  And then the whining school-boy… the lover,  sighing… a soldier, full of strange oaths… the justice, in fair round belly… The sixth age shifts into… the pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side… Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion: sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” 

— Shakespeare

Welcome

Although I’m calling this website “a personal memoir in flux,” it is also my hope that the various sections will be of interest to people, whether they know me or not. “Out on a Lim” shares short observations on day-to-day life. “Limerances” chronicles longer remembrances of things past. “Limoscenes” presents descriptions of the plays I’ve written to date, with production photos. “Images in Limbo” shows pictures of the aging process, of me with family and friends. “Limpets” are the non-human dogs in my life, and “Limitations” are tributes to people who are no longer with us. So here I am, past imperfect, present progressive, future tense. Let me know what you think. — Paul

Remembering “Cappy” Hurst

(Note:  When I was preparing my brief remarks for the informal memorial service being held on 24 July 2016 for George Cameron Hurst III in the Lawrence residence of his son Ian, I went on the internet to study the speeches of Melania Trump, to see if there’s anything I could borrow, but there’s nothing there, no there there, so I’m left to my own devices.  Here’s the text of what I wrote and shared with Cappy’s family and friends in Lawrence, KS.)

Reading Cappy Hurst’s obituary in the Lawrence Journal-World reminded me of the fact that Cappy and I both arrived at the University of Kansas in the hectic and tumultuous days of 1969. Because Cappy and my good friend Grant Goodman were both Japanologists, Cappy was among the first people I met socially.

He was trim, tanned, athletic, good-looking, the very picture of the Golden Boy from California. If I remember correctly, he also sported a gold tooth which, whenever he smiled, sparkled and twinkled, like the romantic heroes in the Hollywood movies of a bygone era.

Cappy loved the movies, but the movies we talked about were not Hollywood movies. They were, not surprisingly, given his scholarly academic publication on The Armed Martial Arts of Japan, and his own personal achievement as a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, the movies he loved were the Samurai movies of Mifune, directed by Kurosawa, films like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress.

Unlike many gathered here today, I did not manage to keep in touch personally with Cappy after he left Lawrence and the University of Kansas in 1995. What news I had of him and his failing health in recent years, came from Grant Goodman. And when Grant himself passed away in April of 2014, I no longer had any news of Cappy, until I saw his unexpected obituary in the local paper on 10 July 2016.

My best memory of Cappy goes back to 1978, when I needed a young child to pose for a poster for my play HOMERICA, which was being presented with great fanfare in the ballroom of the Kansas Union. I asked Cappy if we could borrow his son Ian for the picture, and Cappy not only agreed, he himself accompanied Ian to the photo shoot. I looked at the poster again today, and was startled to see, not Ian, but Cappy staring back at me, reminding me of what the poet William Wordsworth said, that “the child is father of the man.”

HOMERICA Poster

Precisely because I did not see Cappy after 1995, I have no visual image of him in my mind after 1995, of when he was no longer young and vital. The obituary in the paper said he was 75 years old. That can’t be true, because for me he is, in the words of Bob Dylan, forever young:

“May God bless and keep you always; may your wishes all come true.
May you always do for others, and let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars, and climb on every rung.
May you stay forever young, forever young, forever young…
May you stay forever young.“

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21 June 2016: Melania’s Memory Loss

Here is part of Meredith Melver’s statement about the role she played in writing Melania Trump’s now infamous plagiarized speech at the Republican Convention in Cleveland:

“In working with Melania Trump on her recent First Lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people.  A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama.  Over the phone, she read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech as examples.  I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech.  I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches.  This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama.”

So, if Melania actually read some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech over the telephone to Meredith Melver, and these were the passages which were subsequently included in Melania’s own speech in Cleveland, did Melania not recognize the very same words that she dictated on the telephone to Meredith Melver?  At age 46, is Melania already showing signs of memory loss?  Should she be tested for Alzheimer’s?

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17 July 2016: Trump/Pence Slogans

The Republican Convention is upon us, and I’m looking forward to being swamped with new Trump/Pence slogans.  Here are a few which come to mind for the T/P ticket:

T/P:  A Royal Flush!

T/P:  No Shit, Just Hits!

T/P:  Winning with Home Runs!

T/P:  Go with the Flow!

T/P:  Wipe America Clean!

T/P:  Toupee Totally Two-Ply!

T/P:  Let the Good Times Roll!

T/P:  LET My People TOIL! 

T/P:  What a Dump!

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22 June 2016: My Birds of Yesteryear

I was ten years old in 1954 when I saw, in a dark air-conditioned theater in Manila, the movie adaptation of Sigmund Romberg’s operetta, The Student Prince.  I thought Edmund Purdom was remarkably good looking as the prince, and Ann Blyth passing fair as the barmaid he wooed but could not marry.  The songs from the show were all quite memorable, but “Serenade” was the one I liked best.  It was the first real pop song I learned to sing by heart, and I still, on occasion, sing the first stanza to myself:

“Overhead the moon is beaming,
White as blossoms on the bough;
Nothing is heard but the song of a bird,
Filling all the air with dreaming.”

Also in 1954, I saw, for the first time, in the hot and crowded gymnasium of the Jesuit elementary school I attended in Manila, the 1939 movie adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.  When Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow” in the movie, I started to cry.  I was ten years old and, until that moment, I had not realized that I was unhappy.  I was an only child because my two older siblings had both died during the war; I had no friends or playmates because my parents were overly protective, afraid that I too might die. I had lots of toys and comic books, but I was sad and lonely.  The lyrics of the song reinforced my longing for a life elsewhere:

“Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow, why then, oh why, can’t I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow,
Why, oh why, can’t I?”

It’s hard to believe that Judy Garland died 47 years ago today, and that I have now been living in Kansas for 48 years.  She died the year after I left the Philippines for the United States, on wings which flew me first to San Francisco, then New Jersey, and finally to Lawrence, Kansas.  Both “Serenade” and “Over the Rainbow” are songs I still listen to because they are on my iPhone.  But there is another one on the playlist I am fond of, also from childhood, about a pair of yellow birds, one of which flew away, leaving the other one alone:

“Yellow bird, up high in banana tree,
Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me.
Wish that I were a yellow bird,
I fly away with you.
But I am not a yellow bird,
So here I sit, nothing else to do.”

What life has taught me, now that I am 72 years old, is that being alone can be a blessing, not a curse.  I lived with a good friend from 1968 to 1985.  They were good years, but then I decided to buy my own house, which I eventually populated with a dog, an aquarium full of tropical fish and, yes, half a dozen caged birds.  I retired five years ago.  Although I continue to see many friends and colleagues on a regular basis, I also love the quiet moments alone, the solitude.  My parents eventually had three more children, but they arrived when I was already in my early teens, so in my mind I have always been an only child, alone, with just my birds of yesteryear for company, taking me along on their incredible flights of fancy.

“Lullaby of birdland, that’s what I
Always hear when you sigh;
Never in my wordland
Could there be ways to reveal
In a phrase how I feel.”

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My Birds and Bees.

A while back, I decided to convert one of the bedrooms in my house to a combination exercise, reading and music room.  Besides a bed for the occasional out-of-town guest, the room also contains a treadmill which I hardly ever use, a writing table piled high with books I have yet to read, a big boombox on which I play mostly classical music when I’m reading the local morning paper or the Sunday New York Times, and two fairly large bird cages.  My father used to raise large Brazilian parrots, but I am not quite as ambitious.

Up until a year ago, I had four lovebirds, a pair in each one of the cages, but then the older pair, whom I named Papageno and Papagena (from Mozart’s The Magic Flute), suddenly died within months of each other, perhaps because they were truly inseparable.  And then, when the younger pair, whom I named Gustav and Alma (Mahler), went through the motions of procreation, I placed a nesting box in their cage.  Soon they were in and out of there.  After a couple of weeks, I checked, and found three eggs in the box.  Another five or six weeks went by, with lots of activity, and then I sensed something was terribly wrong when Gustav and Alma stopped popping in and out of the box.  With great trepidation, I opened the box, and found that only one of the three eggs had hatched.  The baby bird was about two inches long, was partially covered with feathers, but it was clearly dead, even though its little body was still warm to the touch.  I felt remorse and guilt about having named the parents Gustav and Alma, because in real life the Mahlers also lost one of their young children, for whom Gustav wrote the very sad Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”), based on the poems of Friedrich Ruckert.  These days, Gustav and Alma continue to be very affectionate with each other, grooming and feeding each other, but I don’t see them mating anymore.  Perhaps they are still grieving over the loss of their one and only offspring.

Meanwhile, I could not bear to see Papageno and Papagena’s cage sitting sadly empty, so a couple of months ago I went to a local pet store  and bought, not another pair of lovebirds, because Mozart’s lovebirds could never be replaced, but four parakeets instead, two of them blue, and two of them yellow.  I’ve never had parakeets before, but I liked the way they chirped when I approached them.  The two blue ones already seemed to be a pair, so I named them Robert and Clara (Schumann).  The people at the store said one of the yellow ones was definitely a male, but that the other one was still too young to determine its gender, so I named the male Frederick (Chopin) and the asexual one George (Sand).  Whatever gender George might turn out to be, they also seemed to be a pair.  And now my house is filled once more with the songs of nature. The birds are happiest when I am in the room with them, reading the paper and listening to classical music.  They like whatever music I put on, but definitely seem to favor Vivaldi’s guitar concertos, and old Maria Callas recordings of Puccini arias.

I am now glad to report that George is, in fact, female.  But something strange is happening in their cage.  While Robert and Clara (Schumann) continue to spend a great deal of time together, as do Frederick (Chopin) and George (Sand), in recent weeks I’ve noticed George in flirtatious dalliance with Robert, to the annoyance of both Frederick and Clara.  But George always returns to Frederick, and Robert to Clara, then all seems well again, though only for a while.  I really have no idea what’s going on with these parakeets, but I’ve now also put two nesting baskets in their cage, in the hope that they might soon produce baby parakeets.  Will these be blue or yellow, or green if of mixed parentage?  Just like America itself, divided politically into red and blue states, with the odd purple one emerging hither and thither.

In any case, if I do get baby parakeets, of whatever hue, and they start to make their sweet baby chirps, maybe the grieving lovebirds will be inspired to give it one more try.  The nesting box is still in their cage, and maybe enough time has passed so that the scent of untimely death can now be replaced by that of new life.

 

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2 February 2016: Mourning Becomes the Electorate!

In his holy acceptance speech for being the godly winner in the Iowa caucuses last night, GOP presidential nominee Ted Cruz quotes a verse from Psalm 30:  “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”  Is this meant to be proof of his divine mission, or is he trying to console the losers last night, promising them a better tomorrow?

In any case, this being a democracy, we all deserve the officials we vote into office.  To borrow a page from Eugene O’Neill’s Electra playbook, when this is all over, I hope the electorate will also welcome whatever “joy cometh in the mourning.”

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1 February 2016: My Mouth Is Golden!

After five visits to my dentist, spread out over two months, to initiate and go through all the stages of a root canal, today the gold crown was finally installed with great fanfare.  When the assistant who was helping Dr. Charlie first brought the gold crown in, she exclaimed, “This is so heavy!  Do you want to feel it?  It is so heavy!”   When I demurred, she repeated, “Are you sure?  It is so heavy!”

For the next 15 minutes or so, as she continued to do the prep work for Dr. Charlie, putting the gold crown in, then taking it out, then putting it back in, then taking it out again, all I could think of were the gruesome pictures I had seen of mounds of gold fillings which the allies had found in the various concentration camps after World War II.  Were these extracted before or after the Jews were gassed to death?  What was the Third Reich going to do with all these gold fillings?  And then I started to cry.

“Am I hurting you?” the dental assistant inquired, sounding really alarmed.

“No,” I mumbled.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, quite sure.  I’m just thinking about what all this gold is going to cost.”

“Oh,” she laughed.  “You’re such a joker.”  And then Dr. Charlie came in to do the final art installation.

My mouth is now golden.  But will I be able to chew on my new crown without thinking of those mounds of gold fillings, ever again?

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Living in the Shadow of Affirmative Action

Perhaps because I am not Caucasian. some friends and colleagues have been asking for my opinion on the broiling brouhaha over the whitewashed Oscar nominations for 2016.  To one such query, I replied cryptically, “People should stop whining, and just get on with it.”   Not surprisingly, my politically incorrect response was met with uncomfortable silence.  Truth of the matter is, I have kept quiet about my own encounters with affirmative action for thirty years.  I have managed to “get on with it,” but I think perhaps the time has now come for me to tell my story.

Up till the mid-1980s, I was content to be a “lecturer” in the English department at the University of Kansas, because the half-time appointment gave me a lot of time to pursue my own writing.  However, being on half-time also meant that mine was not a tenure-track position, that there were only a limited number of courses I was allowed to teach, mostly classes in Freshman/Sophomore Composition & Rhetoric,  with “Introduction to Drama” occasionally thrown in as a reward.  This went on for a number of years, and then an opportunity presented itself in the mid-1980s.  There was suddenly an opening for a creative writing position in the department.

Although I was known at that time primarily as a playwright, having written nine plays, one of which had been presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and two of which had been produced Off-Broadway in New York, I had also already published a collection of my earlier, prize-winning short fiction.  Out of curiosity, I asked the chair of the department if I should apply for the creative writing position, because I could teach playwriting as well as fiction.  “Why not?”  he smiled amiably.  “You have all the right qualifications.  Besides, it would make Affirmative Action happy.”  Although I was startled by his remark, I tried not to dwell on it.  So I applied for the position, submitting all the necessary documents required—samples of my work, reviews from the press, student evaluations, letters of recommendations from peers and colleagues, etc.

Weeks went by. I heard that there were a lot of applications from all over the country, but that the committee in charge had narrowed down the list of candidates to six, who were all going to be interviewed at the MLA convention in December.  My name was not on the list, but I was told that I was still being considered.  “Should I go to the MLA convention in Chicago?” I asked.  “No need,” a member of the committee reassured me.  “We know all about you and your accomplishments, so there is no need for us to interview you.”

At the start of the spring semester in January, the department was told that two of the applicants who had been interviewed in Chicago were being invited for campus visits for further scrutiny and evaluation.  No more was said about my application, so I simply assumed, quite correctly, that I was no longer being considered.  The two candidates who were brought in were Carolyn Doty and Tom Lorenz, both of whom were novelists.  When their campus visits were over, the department was overjoyed to learn that the administrators in Strong Hall had been so impressed by both Carolyn and Tom, they had decided the department could hire both of them, even though only one position had been advertised.

Another couple of years went by.  After I turned 44 and had given up all hope of ever teaching anything beyond Freshman/Sophomore Composition & Rhetoric, with “Introduction to Drama” occasionally thrown in as a reward, K.U. had a new chancellor, Robert Hemenway, who was very concerned about the lack of diversity among the faculty.  He sent out word that anyone of color who was already on the periphery at the university, should be brought into the fold quickly, bypassing the usual national search.  The same English department chair who had encouraged me to make Affirmative Action happy, now took it upon himself to champion my cause with the new chancellor.  Thus, in 1989, I stopped being a “lecturer,” and became a legitimate tenure-track professor at K.U.  Another lecturer with whom I had been friendly, a lesbian from Australia who was also a novelist, confronted me at a party shortly afterwards and said drunkenly, “I may be the right gender, but my skin is the wrong color, and my eyes are the wrong shape.”  I don’t know how many others in the department shared her opinion.

So that’s how I was hired, in my mind not because I was good or because I had invaluable experience to offer my potential students in creative writing, but because I was a person of color whose presence on the faculty would prove that the University of Kansas was a colorful oasis.  Feeling very much like a second-class citizen, I was determined to prove my worth by working harder than anyone in the department.  In 1989, when all this happened, I convinced my good friend Grant Goodman to fund not only the first Asian-American Festival at the University of Kansas, bringing in an astonishing array of Asian-American artists and scholars for a week-long celebration the likes of which has never been rivaled at the university, but also the creation of English Alternative Theatre (EAT) to produce the plays yet to be written by my future playwriting students.  Sometime in the early 1990s, Carolyn Doty took me aside and said, “Stop doing so much.  You make the rest of us look bad.”  In the intervening years, even though I have won every single teaching award the University of Kansas has to offer, it never seems enough, because the feeling of being a second-class citizen has never gone away.

When I finally decided to retire in 2010, there was a great deal of controversy in the English department as to whether another playwriting teacher should be hired to replace me.  By then, Carolyn Doty had died, and Tom Lorenz argued very persuasively that there were more students interested in fiction writing than in playwriting, so it was more important to hire someone in fiction.  The new chair of the department was caught in a dilemma, and she asked me if I knew of any young playwrights of color who could be hired the same way I was hired back in 1989, bypassing a national search, so the department could have its cake and eat it too.  A former student told me about Darren Canady, a young African-American playwright originally from Topeka who had moved to New York but who still had strong ties to Kansas. I put forth his name, and he was hired after a whirlwind campus visit and interview.  Darren has not kept in touch with me since he was hired five years ago, so I have no idea how he feels about the way he was hired.

But, back to the broiling brouhaha over the whitewashed Oscar nominations for 2016.  I have yet to see Chi-Raq or Concussion, so I have no opinion about whether or not these movies or anyone involved with their creation should have been nominated for any Academy Awards.  Having lived all these years in the shadow of Affirmative Action, forgive me for thinking that the brouhaha is brouhohum.

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23 January 2016: Westerns, Easterns, and Northerns

First we had “westerns” from Hollywood, which mutated into “spaghetti westerns” from Italy.  Then came the “easterns” by way of samurai movies from Japan, which in turn mutated into the high-flying martial arts movies from Hong Kong and China.  And now we have the “northerns.”

There may be earlier “northerns” than The Savage Innocents, which I found absolutely absorbing and mesmerizing when I first saw it in 1960.  Directed by Nicholas Ray, it’s about an Eskimo (Anthony Quinn) in the early 1900s who, true to the rules of hospitality in his culture, offers a stranded white missionary (Peter O’Toole) not only a place to sleep in his igloo, but his wife (Yoko Tani) as well.  When the missionary is horrified by the offer, the Eskimo is gravely offended and, in the ensuing scuffle, accidentally kills the missionary.  The Eskimo flees into the Arctic wilderness with his family, and the rest of the movie shows the cavalry and/or police in hot pursuit.

Now comes The Revenant (2015), directed by Alejandro Inarritu, in which a frontiersman (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the 1820s, having been mauled by a bear and left for dead by avaricious members of his own hunting team, somehow manages to survive against great odds.  He decides to pursue and confront the evil men who tried to bury him alive just so they could profit by his death.  The narrative is riveting, the cinematography spectacular, the acting flawless, and yet…

The Savage Innocents won no awards in its day; the movie came and went without much notice, and only recently did it become available on DVD.  The Revenant, on the other hand, has already won three Golden Globes (Best Movie, Best Director, Best Actor), and we are just waiting to see how many Oscars it will take home (it has been nominated in twelve categories) at the Academy Awards.  It certainly deserves all the awards it can get, but in my mind, The Savage Innocents was the first “northern” I saw, and I remember it now, more than fifty years later, more vividly than The Revenant, which I saw only a couple of weeks ago.

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Grant Goodman Exposes Sex Slaves

Nearly two years after his death, Grant K. Goodman’s scholarly research on the subject of “comfort women,” a euphemism for the sex slaves working in the official brothels established throughout Southeast Asia by the Japanese Imperial Army for the pleasure of its soldiers during World War II, continues to provide key evidence that such atrocities occurred even though the Japanese government continues to deny the truth.  The most recent account of Grant’s role in exposing all the details of this lurid chapter in Japanese history appears on the front page of the The Lawrence Journal World on 17 January 2016 (http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2016/jan/17/document-proving-wwii-comfort-women-now-home-ku-li/).

Another story which Grant frequently told, but which is not mentioned in the Journal-World article, is that Gen. Douglas MacArthur was believed by many Japanese to be a deity for having defeated the divine Emperor and the Japanese Imperial Army.  Thus, hundreds of young Japanese women wrote letters to Gen. MacArthur after the war, offering to bear his children because he was “a god.”  Grant translated all these letters, along with the incriminating documents about the sex slaves, and turned them over to the war office.  He kept a copy of “Research Report No 120: Amenities in the Japanese Armed Forces” locked up in his safety deposit box but, unfortunately, he did not keep copies of any of the letters.  But they are there, buried somewhere among the archives, waiting to be discovered by the next generation of historians and scholars.

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