Trans For A Night?

This is Transexual Awareness Week. I am very proud of the trans dancing of our Randy character in my independent film, “Veil of Secrecy 2020”. I wish to share an experience that gives me insight into the obstacles trans people would seem to face in daily life.

By the way, there are many trans conversion autobiographies on YouTube. To watch them is to gain an understanding of chemistry, genetics and social development related to being trans.

But for now, I am posting a photo in this entry of me playing Dr. Everett Scott in a community theater production of “Rocky Horror Show”. I think it was early spring 2006 at The Onbroadway Theater in Coos Bay, Oregon.

The Actor’s Cabaret Theater in Eugene, Oregon had just produced that show the previous fall. The cast of the Coos Bay show decided to drive a couple of cars from the coast up to Eugene to see that ACT production.

We tried to dress and behave in character. As I had interpreted the Dr. Scott character, I followed suit (so to speak) and dressed in a white shirt, tie and sports coat above the waist.

Below the waist, I wore bright pink pumps, fishnet stockings and a purple ballerina skirt. We all fit right in. Nice show. A beautiful monster character served us cocktails during intermission. As I recall, his bare… Oh well.

Anyway, after the show, we walked outside to our cars, but I and the director were accosted by a dumb, young redneck cowboy, on his way to some western crap show at the McDonald Theater down the block.

I was pushing 60 at the time. He may not have been 21 yet. Perhaps he was headed back to the McDonald after retrieving his fake ID from his pickup truck.

Anyway, this little fucker kept shooting offensive innuendos at me. I was dumb enough to respond. Tony, our director, who was also a Federal Marshall chimed in with me. The kid was just too dumb to cum.

He finally backed down and went to the McDonald.

The sense of panic that I experienced that night must be a sense experienced by trans people on a regular basis. It comes from a sense that what you yourself are, is wrong and wicked, while you only know it as you, the person who occupies a body that’s a mismatch with the brain that controls it.

So, our Coos Bay production was quite successful, both artistically and financially. It was wild with audiences who were cult followers and who knew all of the obscene callouts.

I just thought about it and I will post a photo of the cast in two different scenes. Unfortunately, the cute boys in the band who had been placed on stage in a loft area above the set, and who pounded out great, live music, were forced to quit when their mothers caught them out after curfew. For the final performance, we had a Japanese exchange student live on his saxaphone while the audio accompaniment CD played.

I just thought of another thing. Not only was my son Jeremy’s assemblage of computer boards used in the set, my own painting titled “Hop Frog As 20th Century Man”, was in the set. I gave it away after the run to a young man in the chorus.

And then came Riff-Raf. So here I am pushing 60, hanging out with these college theater students. One night in the green room, Riff-Raff was getting dressed. We shared all dressing spaces on a unisex basis. I am sitting on a table, ready and waiting to go on. Riff-Raff backs in between my legs with his costume open in the back and signals for me to zip him up.

Temptation. End of tale.

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My Facebook Scam

This video describes my experience with a scam artist on Facebook who has hacked a friend’s account and, acting as my friend, has encouraged me to apply for a “federal grant”. BE WARE!

“Veil of Secrecy 2020”

I am lost in the maze. The Minotaur will eat me alive any minute. I am caught between HTML 4.1 and HTML 5; between Dreamweaver Cs3 and the Adobe Creative Cloud and between a homemade desktop and a Dell refurbished desktop.

I simply want to stream my film on my domain at http://www.thelemonaidnetwork.com

Competencies of Peignoir

It is Easter Sunday. I have been in total isolation for the past 32 days.In that time, I created The Lemon Aid Network. I started production on an isolation film as a new genre in which no one meets with anyone else.

Today is LAN Faith on You Tube. My handle there is dzinor61448. I recorded my personal Easter message to a world in isolation. I am nearly finished editing that file.

If you want to experience the presence of Christ in the world, look in front of you at the person standing there. You have found the presence of Christ in this world. 

Bleassings

The Dead of Spoon River: A Graphic Novel

This PDF file is the first chapter of my graphic novel, “The Dead of Spoon River”.

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The Micro-Photoplay

If the entire theatrical entity I am creating is called a photoplay, what does one call the segments making up the entire entity? These are created in a presentation mode using a presentation program such as Power Point; but one that can export a presentation as an mpg4 video file. Those video files are the components upon which the entire photoplay is based.

I have chosen to call these components micro-photoplays. Each contains a narrative in the form of an original epitaph poem and the visual content created to support and to enhance the poetic narrative. In the case of “The Dead of Spoon River”, and with the exception of the opening chorus titled “The Hill” and with the exception of the “Many Soldiers” chorus that I created, the other segments/micro-photoplays present individual characters who speak from a fictional cemetery about their own previous lives and about each other.

My script calls for six readers to read epitaph poems live while the photoplay of the entire adaptation plays on a large screen television with sound in the background. The value of creating various versions of this adaptation seems obvious to me. As an out-of-the-box literature unit, as an out-of-the-box acting unit or as an out-of-the-box community theater package, this project has potential for serving several educational and theatrical needs.

Edgar Lee Masters’ marker in the Oakland Cemetery outside of Petersburg, Illinois. The bronze plaque was placed there by Masters to honor his grandparents. Ann Rutherford’s marker is nearby.

 

“The Dead of Spoon River”: An Episodic Photoplay

I am revising micro-photoplay images so as to include newly acquired images and videos taken during my recent pilgrimage to West Central Illinois. At first, I did not notice the relationships among the various micro-photoplays in terms of an emerging pattern resulting from the creative process itself.

It now occurs to me that I have two acts for DSR and that each of those two acts is made of three episodes.  Those episodes are in turn made of aesthetically related micro-photoplays. The exact number of those micro-photoplays varies from episode to episode.

Act 1 has three episodes which I have titled –

1. Political/Social
2. Pantier
3. Military

Act 2 has three episodes which I have titled –

1. Fidelity
2. Respect
3. Wisdom

I have completed the Pantier episode first as of today’s date of November 23, 2018. I have published that episode on You Tube at the following address –

 

https://youtu.be/WJuiqmg9bHk

 

-James M. Kemp

Editor Whedon – Male Prostitute?

In Daisy Fraser’s epitaphian poem, the first fellow citizen she refers to is Editor Whedon. I have placed Whedon’s epitaphian poem immediately after Daisy’s.

According to Daisy, Whedon uses his position as a newspaper editor to accept bribes for supporting candidates for office, for writing editorials encouraging the public to invest in the canning factory (where Butch Weldy worked until it blew up), and for suppressing information about Thomas Rhodes’ bank when it was about to fail.

In his own epitaphian poem, Whedon like Daisy herself, justifies his actions by offering as a defense, his ability to see every side of every argument. That would seem to be a good quality for a newspaper editor to have. But Daisy’s accusations focus on Whedon’s accepting bribes to only publish one side of an argument; arguments which seem to have resulted in losses for some some Spoon River citizens.

Dr. Hallwas has researched these matters and offers an explanation about the circumstances of the real newspaper editor upon whom Masters based the Whedon character.

William T. Davidson (1837-1915), a Lewistown newspaper editor, was a political adversary of Masters’ father, Hardin Masters. Davidson seems to have been an advocate of the temperance movement whereas Hardin Masters was a drinker. On the current map of the Oak Hill Cemetery in Lewistown, Illinois, Whedon/Davidson’s grave is number 33 on that map.

One might infer from the Daisy poem that, at least in Daisy’s estimation, Whedon/Davidson in accepting bribe money, was as much of a prostitute as Daisy herself. Daisy also makes reference to two Spoon River clergy members, Reverend Peet and Reverend Sibley. Both are featured in my photoplay adaptation of “Spoon River Anthology” (SRA) titled “The Dead of Spoon River” (DSR).

Below is a vintage photo which supported the political view of the American Temperance Movement.

• James M. Kemp

Where Did I Put Ralph Rhodes?

Greetings. It is Friday. It is four days until I fly out of PDX and into O’Hare. While I have done that a lot in the past, I am older now… See, that Trump guy even has me doing …

I posted a list of the places in Illinois where I intend to take new high definition photos and video for “The Dead of Spoon River”. It was on my Facebook wall. At any rate, I am already envisioning the types of photos and video I will take. Where I have focused in the past on the big picture to get the sense of it all encapsulated within one photograph, I now intend to focus on the minutia within the same reality set.

Like I said, it is Friday. Today, I am doing whatever I please. I was going to continue my DSR blog with the next decedent’s epitaphian poem. Since Daisy Fraser seems to feel a good deal of animosity toward Editor Whedon, I have his poem after Daisy’s in DSR.

There was a real person upon whom Dr. Hallwas suggests Editor Whedon was based. Hey, Jim, are you going to do a DSR blog today? You said you would not. True. True. True. So what’s next? Add media to this and call it a blog?

Sure!

• James M. Kemp

“There She Goes” – Inside Daisy Fraser

Daisy Fraser is the second decedent to speak from the grave in my photoplay “The Dead of Spoon River”. In my three act play version (DSR1), the actor playing Daisy opens the epitaph with a raucous laugh. Daisy was a town prostitute who seems to have been arrested often and made to pay fines often.

Daisy’s monologue exhibits a criminal thinking pattern as we in the Oregon SUMMIT Program taught inmates about such thinking patterns. Daisy’s criminal thinking pattern involves “Justification”. In this pattern, a criminal justifies committing crimes by expressing a belief that many other than the criminal, who are considered fine, upstanding citizens for the most part, have really committed worse crimes without getting caught. Granted, Daisy’s crimes are more misdemeanors.

Daisy seems to complain about her treatment in Spoon River, noting that people shout out cat calls wherever she goes. Or at least, she believes these are cat calls.

Daisy’s soliloquy does make reference to other Spoon River residents whose own epitaphian poems appear in SRA. Most of those people seem to have been involved in bribery schemes of one kind or another from which they benefited financially. These others even include the local clergy.

Daisy however makes no mention of the thriving prostitution business just up river in the city of sin named Peoria. Peoria’s prostitution industry is notorious even today. Comedian Richard Pryor was born into that arena. Google “Richard Pryor” and websites come up that detail the history of Peoria’s prostitution district. One site even suggests that American hero Wyatt Earp and his wife, at an early age, were involved as pimp and prostitute in the Peoria prostitution industry.

But why would there be such an industry in what has otherwise been considered to be the heart of the Bible belt? Money! After the Chicago fire, Illinois realized wealth from insurance claims that turned Chicago into America’s second city for nearly a century. That money filtered downstream on the Illinois River to the extent that Peoria developed into a civic center that produced coal, whiskey and beer; in addition to heavy equipment. The factories of mass production along with the mining of coal, produced a population of young men who worked hard and played hard. Peoria offered a respite from the factory and the mine in the darkened rooms which must have resembled Daisy’s own establishment a little farther down river in Spoon River.

Daisy tends to take the high road in her discussion by reminding the reader that her fines always went to the school district coffers.

• James M. Kemp