True Collaboration

The definition of collaboration is simple enough. ‘Collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce or create something.’ Sounds simple enough and therein lies the gaping black hole of potential failure. What isn’t mentioned is the willingness of both parties to forgo personal ego and goals for a shared vision and outcome. Give and take must be part of that equation if any partnership or collaboration is going to work.

My experience up until now in the creation of music hasn’t been that successful. Over the years, I’ve enlisted the support of different musicians in creating a music for various writing ventures of mine. One of the first was a music video for one of my first novels and another for incorporating music into several of my plays.

Unfortunately, the outcome wasn’t very satisfying. I had envisioned working with the musician to write the music, melody and lyrics and then cooperate in the creation of different musical layers to fill in the bones of the song.

The artists I was dealing with saw our relationship first, as a solicitor of music (that would be me) and secondly, as a purveyor of music (that would be them.) And never the twain shall meet or at least it never did in my case.

Almost immediately, it became apparent that these musicians weren’t open to suggestions about the pace, mood, form or function of the emotion I was trying to capture for my work at the time. They saw themselves as creating the product and I paid them for it and they kept all rights to their work. No thanks to that.

Click here to buy AJ's album 'Town Boy'
Click here to stream 'Town Boy' on Apple Music

Fortunately, this pattern of one-sided venture-taking came to a halt with my introduction to a very talented singer/songwriter who ‘got it’ in terms of cooperation. The back story is simple enough.

My first job after college and a brief hiatus in Europe was with the Minnesota Department of Public Health as a staff writer. My first ‘real’ job came in the form of freelancing (for free) at the local public television station, KTCA-TV. I was working on the crew at least five nights a week.

In retrospect, I understand now that it signaled the ending of my ‘Lost Years’ and the beginning of a new life with a newfound partner in life and love. Working at the station, first on crew and then as a producer/director was fun, exciting and opened up a lifetime career in television and video production work. It also introduced me to a host of colorful characters who inhabited the studio chambers and work cubicles. Little did I know that it would become a veritable cornucopia of storylines just waiting to be told.

Eventually it became the basis for one of my plays entitled: ‘PTV.’ After completing my manuscript, I knew something was missing. The music. Music was a part of my life back then and still is. It also played a huge part on the lives of my associates at the station. I wanted to capture the mood of that period but with new songs instead of capturing the old ones we remembered. Thus began the quest to find a musician or two that I could work with to create these new/old songs of that period.

AJ Scheiber

True collaboration is really about finding someone who shares your vision for a project. Then working together to create that project to your mutual satisfaction.  In my case, it turned out to be with a very talented singer/songwriter by the name of AJ Scheiber. AJ does both solo work and plays in a band by the name of Wilkinson James. I would describe his work as akin to John Prine and Tom Paxton.

After a couple of meetings and AJ reading the script for PTV, it became apparent that he shared my vision for the play and the prominence of the songs therein. He introduced me to many different styles of music such as Texas Swing, Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, folk, Americana, Bluegrass, gospel, Appalachian, and a host of other similar styles of songwriting.

We followed a very simple route of writing the songs. I wrote the lyrics. AJ adapted, rewrote and tweaked the lyrics to fit into the rhythmic pattern (melody) that he had created for that particular song. I then reviewed his adaptation of my lyrics and if I felt they don’t fit the message I was trying to convey, we discussed those particular words and came to some kind of compromise. AJ got the words to fit his musical pattern and I was satisfied with the words chosen.

AJ wrote out lead sheets for each particular song. Lead sheets are tools used by songwriters to convey the basic structure of a song to musical directors and arrangers. The fun part (in my mind) begins in the studio when each song is layered with additional tracks of musical instruments. In my mind, the arrangement is everything.

Since I have a vested interest in the mood each song must convey to my audience, I see layering as critical to each song’s success in conveying that mood. In PTV, each song was written as another emotional cue to help the audience better understand my characters and their actions. It was imperative that each song emit that emotional reaction from the audience.

The marketing of PTV has begun. Once we’ve received inquiries, AJ can begin to upgrade our demonstrations of each song and share it with interested theatrical venues through a file-sharing system. My job is to keep fishing and hope to land a theatrical venue that can host the show.

I have no doubt that it will be a long and arduous process to find the right venue for this play and then to produce it in the right manner. If we can pull it off and the show resonates with the audience then the sweat, labor and tears it took to get there will have been all worthwhile.

Not for the faint of heart but then anything of value seldom comes easy.

Broken Down Palace; the Poems

A while back I wrote a blog entitled: Broken Down Palace. It was about the first apartment building I lived in after moving out of the only home I’d known for almost twenty years. The building was designed and constructed around the turn of the century for a prominent Minneapolis industrialist.  By the time I moved in, almost sixty-five years later, it was a rundown boarding house chopped into several apartments.

That period in my life encompassed what I now whimsically call my lost years; roughly from 1961 to 1971. It began with my high school graduation on May 31st, 1961 and culminated in my marriage on July 31st, 1971. Ten years of wandering and wondering about my life as it unfolded in twists and turns; some expected and others not so much.

It was during that latter period, in an old tired musty apartment, that my creative juices really started to flow. From roughly the fall-winter of 1967 through the spring of 1970, I found myself going through a furious writing phase.  Poems, song lyrics, outlines for novels and mind-stories poured forth, all captured with my ancient L.C. Smith typewriter.

My new job at KTCA television entailed some script writing and other journalistic endeavors. But more importantly it meant I was interacting with a plethora of wildly crazy, creative, free-thinking folks. It was the mid-sixties when almost anything was up for grabs and challenges. I was living the life and not focused too far beyond the next day.

People were coming in and out of my life. Some were fleeting moments whose names are still etched in my brain while others have long since been forgotten. The Triangle Bar became my refuge from reality; a place to toke in the shadows along with the stoners, drink cheap schooners of beer and leer lustfully at the University Coeds all lined up neatly at the bar.

Thoughts and scenes, feelings and emotions were coursing through my veins and piling up in my memory bank. I found a wonderful outlet for expressing those sundry images and imaginative scenarios on paper.

Writing poetry was incredibly liberating along with the song lyrics for which I had absolutely no skill whatsoever. Almost every night, I’d be hunched over my L.C. Smith, pounding away at words and verses, sentences and paragraphs that kept rushing forth.

It was like a euphoric rush of emotions spilling out of my consciousness. Most nights, I became incredibly high on endorphins surging through my brain matter. Good, bad, terrible and some not so bad material was captured on’ now’ old gray sheets of paper. That episodic flash of creativity ultimately lasted for only a short period of time. The resulting pile of papers were assembled, bound together and filed away. Then life took a turn for the wonderful and they were forgotten for almost sixty years.

A new relationship had gained traction, this one for good, and I was on a new path toward the future. Fortunately, those old stapled pages of poetry followed me around the country before finally settling into a filing cabinet in the basement along with other forgotten dreams and storylines.

Now fast-forward a lifetime of pecking away at writing and more recently, tackling just about every other means of storytelling from novels to novellas, plays to screen-writing, children’s stories to blogs and a new comic strip, it was time for something new…like songwriting.

That idea evolved out of a play I had written during the pandemic. ‘PTV’ is a semi-auto-biographical play about my own early television experiences. I tried to capture in my story-telling some of the antics, pranks, and true-life activities that went on behind the scenes. There were some wonderful personalities and characters that lived in my world at that time when the station was evolving from an instructional educational institution to that of a public television station. It was the mid-sixties and the vortex of the social, sexual and political upheavals of the time. I thought it would be neat if I could write some songs reflective of that period and the events taking place in and around the station.

I decided that the first step in that process of song-writing would be to peruse those song lyrics and poetry I had stashed away for all those years. I found the dusty faded gray papers buried in a file cabinet and began to study the material for anything I could use for PTV. But the more I perused those ancients words purged from my heart and soul, I realized that they really captured a ‘time in my life’ and weren’t appropriate for the songs I wanted to write today. But, I thought, they could stand on their own as a testament to the times and my life back then.

Hence was born the idea of a new book of poetry which is still in its infancy. I’m going through the musty old pages and selecting the most representative poetry of that period. Once chosen, I’ll have to assemble the pieces in the right order (a purely subjective exercise) and recreate the poetry and song lyrics in my computer. Vida, my editor can take it from there.

After more than fifty years of dormancy, it will be interesting to see those words carved from another life and time back in print again.

Homage to Glady

I guess she could best be described as this mirage I can’t get out of my head. But not really! And homage is probably a bit overblown for someone I hardly even knew. Nevertheless, Gladus (last name unknown) was one of those iconic figures that came into my life for a very brief period of time then disappeared just as quickly.

She was a woman far removed from my social-economic-educational background and career aspirations. Yet for some strange reason during those early cold months of March and April, we connected on a level quite different from my old romantic entanglements that I used to bench-mark as true love.

Even though she was ten years older than me, I found in Glady a kindred soul on a level I hadn’t experienced before with other women. The sad thing was that Glady had dried up and aged well beyond her years. Her eyes were a sometimes sad brown and there was a hint of early onset gray in her hair. It didn’t help that she favored thin cotton sweaters, even in the summertime, and thought of herself as long past a favorite with the boys.

It was spring of 1967. I had just returned from my short expat life in Europe. I was living in a depression era hovel on University Avenue, driving a used VW and had just started my first real job as a writer at the Minnesota Department of Public Health on the University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus.

Glady was the first woman who made me feel mature. She was attractive even for a middle-aged matron and we could talk easily about almost anything and everything. The problem was that in our office setting it was always awkward for casual chats under the constant radar of our boss, the notorious Dr. Marie Ford. Dr. Ford, was always on the lookout for fraternization among the troops.

On the University campus, Marie Ford had a storied history as the wife of a renowned college professor. She would occasionally talk about their life, living in Prospect Park, attending University functions and traveling with only the most accomplished of other college couples. It was after the war and the University was a buzz with ex-service men anxious to get a good education and ready to absorb all the information her husband could throw at them.

Marie had a stellar career in public health and held her own prominent place within their circle of intellectual health professionals. She and her husband were one of the post-war golden couples at the University.

Sadly, by the time I arrived on scene in early 1968, Marie’s husband had long since passed away. Marie had become an old, tired, chain-smoking relic of an era long since passed. She seemed to regret its passing and, almost like Glady, she had seen her future slowly come into focus. Both knew what the next decade held instore for them. An enthusiastic, energetic young man suddenly in their midst didn’t help when thinking about the future.

The fact that Glady was ten years older than me didn’t seem to matter to either one of us but our background did. Glady had grown up in a world totally different from mine. I was from tony Highland Park. She was from Northeast Minneapolis.

Around the turn of the century, the community of Northeast Minneapolis began to grow as an ethnic enclave supplying workers for the factories that lined Central Avenue and batched them in clusters throughout the neighborhood. There was a strong Eastern European influence in religion, social standing in the community and family obligations.

I knew little about Glady’s background growing up other than she had graduated from high school in NE Minneapolis and gone to work immediately. Like almost all of the young women her age, Glady still lived at home with her mother and would eventually became her mother’s primary care giver. There was never any thought as to her moving out and living on her own.

Her Eastern European roots and upbringing meant she was locked into a lifestyle she couldn’t break away from, even if she wanted to. It was understood that she would never leave home until both her parents had passed.

And I thought to myself: what then with little education and marginal secretarial skills? Glady was probably destined to spending the rest of her life in the secretarial pool at one University department or another.

In retrospect after reflecting on our casual verbal encounters, I think perhaps Glady was living her life vicariously through my many inane, sometimes sophomoric antics with fellow hippies, college dropouts and wandering young adults still unsure of themselves and their future endeavors. I remember she asked me a lot questions about living in Europe, my time in the service, who I was dating and other general ‘get to know you’ probes. She seemed to really care and that just fed my expanding ego.

One Monday, Glady told me in confidence that she had gone to the Triangle Bar and thought she might run into me there because I had talked about it so often. It never occurred to me that her venturing so far from her comfort level was anything other than a bar visit. What were her real intentions, if any, I have no idea?

I only lasted about a year and a half at the Health Department before getting my dream job at KTCA and ‘getting out of Dodge.’ I never saw Glady again. Her image and memory slowly faded away until some fifty years later when Sharon began taking art classes in Northeast Minneapolis. Once again I found myself in the neighborhood where Glady used to live.

But this time it was different than in 1968. Fifty years after the West Bank of the University of Minnesota harbored the disenfranchised, the hippies and other malcontents of a similar ilk; their decedents had now migrated to the Northeast part of Minneapolis. In an unplanned, almost organic metamorphosis of a cityscape, this unwashed morass of creativity had moved west. Old Nordeast, an eclectic enclave of blue-collar Eastern European nationalities, has become the new West Bank. It felt like Deja-vu all over again.

As I once again drove past those tired old dilapidated houses in a neighborhood with a church on every corner, I thought about Glady and whatever had become of her. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume she continued on as a secretary at the University and eventually retired to her mother’s home in NE.  Perhaps she became the classic ‘church’ lady or ‘cat’ lady and lived out the rest of her life as her heritage had dictated.

There’s a part of me that would love to believe that she finally found someone, after her mother passed, and she created a new life for herself outside of the drab, dreary lifestyle handed down to her by past generations. I guess I’ll never know. But I can imagine.

Of course, I’ve already outlined a story about Glady. It could be a play, a novel or a short story. It involves a man much younger than her. They fall in love but things don’t turn out as they had planned. The story is, at once, happy and sad, poignant yet realistic. A slice of life that might have occurred in a tired old building on the University of Minnesota campus between two lost souls; each seeking clarity in their patchwork lives.

PTV: The Play

They say history is what we remember of it. Of course, memories are fallible and oftentimes painted over with pastels of pleasantry that cover some of the harsh reality lingering there. Impressions of the past are both subjective and selective. They summon up what we want it to be as well as what it really was. So it was for the Sixties and me.  I’ve tried to capture that sense of an era in one of my latest play entitled PTV.

Like some old hard rock miner, I went digging a while back to unearth recollections and reflections of my first job in the real world. And what a gold mine it turned out to be! I unearthed rough-cut gems of wisdom and insight into a world long since gone. It was a work world laced with honesty and deception, tough love and forbidden love, betrayal and self-direction all collected in that wonderful time capsule from roughly 1967 through 1972. It turned out my first real career steps occurred during a historic and dramatic transitional period for educational television in the Twin Cities and nationwide.

I started working at KTCA television in the winter of 1967 after living in Europe for a while. I had a used VW bug, a bachelor pad (translated: a hovel on University Avenue) and a hunger for more. I had secured a full-time job as a writer at the Minnesota Department of Health but I needed something else to fill my evenings. 

The ten year old educational television station had no writing positions available but they offered to let me work for free as a crew member. The offer was to learn the many different aspects of television production and perhaps something might open up in the future. I took the gig and never looked back. 

My education began literally from the ground up, learning to string cable, set lighting, assemble audio equipment and handle the studio cameras. More importantly, I learned the many different skills entailed in producing a television program. They were the same techniques, routines and procedures that follow most video, film, cable and television productions. I still use many of them today in producing plays.

In retrospect, it was a very pivotal time period for the entire instructional television industry. There were storm clouds on the horizon hinting of major changes in programming and content philosophy that many in authority never saw coming. The ancient axiom of teaching principles were being challenged by new and sometimes radical ideas of learning.

Young Turks saw major opportunities in television entertainment and program distribution. Those who grabbed the opportunity rode an ever growing wave of exciting and sometimes radical new programming ideas and concepts. Woven into that earthquake of change were seismic events like the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the drug culture and a youthful challenge of parental and governmental authority. It was the best of times for some. It was the worst of times for others. That is the genesis for ‘PTV.’ Trust me; there was a plethora of material to work with.

That period of my life was a modern day soap opera lived through in a fog of growing up among creatives and crazies. The television station proved the perfect cauldron to observe emotions and angst, fear of the future and drug-induced raptures of imagination. Surrounded by the radical changes of the mid-Sixties, the station morphed organically into a mirror of youthful culture run amok.

The station had it all. There were marital dalliances, infidelity, and drugged out crew members scheming against wannabe Hollywood-minded directors. Rigid ivory tower professors railed against the subtle yet very real changes coming in education. Crafty entrepreneurs pushed their latest batch of Mary Jane. Those early educational TV defenders of the status quo shored up their academic defenses against the changes on the horizon. Off campus parties grew to legendary status.

It was a moment in time when the swirling currents of cultural, social, sexual and political events came together and made our television station a melting pot of change. For a playwright, that was a hell of a lot of wonderful material to work into a play.

‘PTV’ was a veritable trip down memory lane for me. The events, people and ever-changing political and cultural changes were based on some of my own experiences at KTCA over that critical period in my life. It included folks I knew well back then, others I was aware of, and still others who were there but never intermingled with me or the other crew members. Most of us were young, single, rambunctious, adventurous and always searching.

After volunteering on the crew for six months, I was offered a position as Producer/Director. Since it didn’t start for three months I returned to Europe for three months to wander and wonder. Then I began my real career in television and video production.

In retrospect, that turned out to be my wannabe hippie phase; a long stretch of soul searching with friends, especially Susan and ultimately a clearer focus on where I wanted to go with my life. That stretch ended with a simple “Got change for a quarter?” asked of the night receptionist and ultimately solidifying my future life with her forever.

Writing ‘PTV’ proved to be a cathartic romp back to a period of eternal, sometimes misguided, youth, romantic conquests, stumbles in time and falling forward. It was dancing with Mary Jane and sober analysis of future pathways. It hinted of writing and real estate, exotic travel and a place in that warm winter sun. It was a brief time capsule of radical change that fed me so many great memories. It predated Camelot out East but proved its own worthy mind bender.

Now my goal is to see if I can get the Minnesota History Theater to consider it for inclusion in their future play performance schedule. My proposal has just been sent in.