Living at Homewoods on the Willamette

 The publication of this short story as the cover story in the Oregonian's Sunday supplement happened during "my high 1980s" as a Portland writer. Not only was the story featured, with cool cover art, but the same issue contained a rave review of Cocktail Suite, the first hyperdrama I had produced myself. My previous two hyperdramas had been commissioned, and I was eager to have more control over the outcome. The story itself was the result of spending lots of time in Joseph near Wallowa Lake. Quite miraculously, the public television version of my play Christmas at the Juniper Tavern had brought me many fans in Wallowa county, including an anonymous patron who let me use his lakeside cabin rent free for a month every Spring. Joseph almost became a second home. After listening for many weeks to local storytelling (most often in taverns), I told a local story of my own. https://youtu.be/1uk_OZqMTmg Back to top cdlivhw.blogspot.com

 How I arrived in Southern California in 1948 as a kid with a southern accent and left for Oregon in 1966 as a young man with no accent at all. https://youtu.be/-w6AVwg6l8I?si=rnAVfH5HwZh6FBpH Back to top cdlivhw.blogspot.com

 What I called my "signature scrapple recipe" was posted on my Writing Life II blog on October 25, 2012, the day before my birthday. This is not a recipe for authentic scrapple but for "a poor man's clone" that I developed from a love of scrapple and frustration at its rare availability on the west coast. Moreover, this recipe is neither difficult nor time consuming. Making authentic scrapple is both, as I learned in graduate school. I had a friend who lived in the country outside of Eugene and raised chickens and a few pigs. He had taken to heart my frequent laments that the west coast had yet to embrace scrapple as a staple, or even as a luxury item for that matter. Before Oregon, I had lived in New Jersey, Virginia and Texas, where stores often carried several brands of scrapple, it was so commonplace. In the west, at best, you might find it frozen or fresh in the deli of an enlightened cook. One day, I told my friend, I must learn to make my own scrapple. So...

    Folks keep living longer, and companies that cater to independent and assisted living seniors grow in kind. When we considered independent living in retirement after Harriet's heart attack, I was overwhelmed by how many facilities there were in the Portland area. We ended up touring 38 places (free lunch!) before making a choice. All of these places have a similar message in a style that ranges from enthusiastic to exaggeration to hype. At the Vineyard Place website you can read, " We are completely dedicated to making sure you or your loved one have fun, exciting days and nights full of life!" Your golden years await you! You find pop culture embracing the same rosy view, especially in music. Here's Kenny Rogers singing about how wonderful it is to grow old together: https://youtu.be/8LXKm1CJ998?si=dnhUBrTjYTw6jTCD But there are dissenters. Harvard math professor Tom Lehrer, whom I consider the best satirist since Jonathan Swift, brings his dark and politically i...

 I wrote a lot of non-fiction for a playwright. Pays the rent. In the late 60s, early 70s, I was a regular contributor to Northwest Magazine, a supplement to the Sunday Oregonian. It no longer exists. Two decades later, I contributed regularly to the online Oregon Magazine. Below are two favorite pieces. The Weight of My Father's Soul https://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/soul.htm Birthing Little Richard https://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/birthing.htm Back to top cdlivhw.blogspot.com

 Another extraordinary short story in my book. Like the Coover story mentioned  in an earlier post, this one rejects the rules of traditional narrative. I often quote the story's last line. The Moon In Its Flight https://youtu.be/zkGdsHpqT_s?si=HQqN3s0cPIkriD55 Back to top cdlivhw.blogspot.com

I'll never forget the day I first read this short story in the  New Yorker magazine. I was stunned. I was shaking. I had to reread it again several times to convince myself I wasn't hallucinating. Robert Coover, an American writer on the edge, had done it again. The story is brilliant.  I alerted several writer friends to the story, and they agreed. Coover had reshaped traditional narrative to show, better than any other literary work we knew of, how the mind works when under the influence of alcohol.This story doesn't describe what it's like to be drunk: it PERFORMS what it's like. And I am blown away again to find the story on the Internet in an excellent reading. Going For A Beer https://youtu.be/75KPZY9ftV0?si=LLb7YSdYvnqWNfA5 Back to top cdlivhw.blogspot.com

 The story of Dorothy Day https://youtu.be/BDBKRJyuuy0?si=Gs5V0CHLvYtRorNb Another Catholic activist was Ammon Hennacy, who ran the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City. He spoke at the University of Oregon when I was a graduate student. After his presentation, he said his next gig was in Seattle, and he needed $30 travel expenses. He literally passed the hat. It came back filled with money, probably hundreds of dollars. Hennacy dumped the money on a table, took out $30, said thank you -- and left! We were stunned. What do we do now? Back to top cdlivhw.blogspot.com

  Today my favorite musical genres are jazz, classical, folk, in that order. The only time I listened to pop was as a teenager, loving doowop. But in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, my favorite music was folk.  I performed folk music myself and always had my guitar at hand. At parties, at dinners, I arrived with guitar and sang for my supper. I first heard Elliott in the Army. I subscribed to the folk magazine Sing Out and responded to an ad for his first American album, Elliott sings Woody Guthrie. Playing the album, I became an immediate fan, an increasingly obsessive one. Elliott was ahead of the curve, peaking before folk music became popular in America. He went to England and made a reputation there. With the sixties new interest in folk, he returned to America. By the time I got out of the Army, Elliott was making regular appearances at the Ash Grove, a So Cal folk club. I was always in the audience. Why do I like Elliott so much? His performances blow me away. Here he covers a ...

 Chateau de Mort, Pittock Mansion, 1986. Commissioned. My first hyperdrama. About the adventures of bringing a new dramatic form to the Pittock Mansion. From Oregon Magazine: "Watch out, mama, hyperdrama's gonna mess with your Pittock Mansion!" www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/watchout.htm An introduction to hyperdrama (video) https://youtu.be/H9pYzjzKrvc?si=HlEbWYMqFcnGtlFe Hyperdrama archive www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/hdrama.htm Back to top cdlivhw.blogspot.com

  Folks keep living longer, and companies that cater to independent and assisted living seniors grow in kind. When we considered independent living in retirement after Harriet's heart attack, I was overwhelmed by how many facilities there were in the Portland area. We ended up touring 38 places (free lunch!) before making a choice. All of these places have a similar message in a style that ranges from enthusiastic to exaggeration to hype. At the Vineyard Place website you can read, " We are completely dedicated to making sure you or your loved one have fun, exciting days and nights full of life!" Your golden years await you! You find pop culture embracing the same rosy view, especially in music. Here's Kenny Rogers singing about how wonderful it is to grow old together: https://youtu.be/8LXKm1CJ998?si=dnhUBrTjYTw6jTCD But there are dissenters. Harvard math professor Tom Lehrer, whom I consider the best satirist since Jonathan Swift, brings his dark and politically inc...

 In the nine months we lived at Vineyard Place, part of the Holiday "independent living" corporate octopus, I formed a readers theater group that performed two projects. One was original and one was from a scrpt I had written for First Unitarian Church in Portland; and I also gave a literary reading. (I used to write and direct a couple "drama services" a year.) The literary reading was special in several ways. On the plus side, it was on my birthday and I wasn't selling any books. Literary readings usually happen at bookstores or universities and in the former venue, the whole point is to sell.  On the negative, a retirement community was far from the academic environment I had lived in for the past twenty years. I had noticed that the reading tastes here were focused on pop lit. I didn't see anyone carrying around Shakespeare or Moby Dick. I was a fish out of water. My motivation was different. I wanted to remind myself that I had a body of work I could be...