Wait It Gets Better

The Dog Ears have been invited to create an evening of short plays by the Road Theatre in the San Fernando valley. But that is not what I’m worrying about.

There is a story that in someone’s mythology the world is supported on the back of a giant turtle. Someone says, “What’s holding up the turtle?” Someone answers, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Or they answer, “It’s turtle all the way down.”

When I first heard this story, it was the single turtle version. The mythology was supposed to have been Native American, the someone asking the smart alec question was supposedly European, and the someone answering it was a medicine man, who prefaced his answer by saying, “I know your tricks.”

The single turtle offers simplicity and elegance and has always seemed to me no better or worse an explanation for things than the Big Bang: “What’s before the Big Bang?” “It’s Big Bang, all the way down.”

Now I find I have been duped. In checking internet references, I note there are infinite variations on the story, it is a sort of internet urban legend, and nobody seems to know who said it first, or whether it was turtle or turtles. On the internet anyway, it’s stories, all the way down.

Surely, at some time and place outside the internet, some real person really must have said “turtle(s) all the way down.” But this assumes a reality outside the internet, and perhaps it’s internet all the way down?

Moral: Always google your stories before reporting them. Then make up your own.

Once upon a time I studied acting with Peggy Feury at the Loft Studio on LaBrea. From the moment I climbed the stairs to the Loft she became magnetic north in my creative life, and I am still digesting lessons she taught. Years later, after her tragic death, I started writing letters to her.

Dear Peggy,

You assigned a play, a scene from the play, and a partner. I read the play and the partner and I worked on the scene. Then we ran the scene for you and you spoke to us about it. We rehearsed more, brought the scene back, and you spoke again. This took two weeks. Then another scene, same process, then another, for three years, time off for vacation. Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov, Behrman, Genet, Pirandello, Albee, Miller, O’Neill, Wedekind, Brecht, Coward, Ibsen, Barry, Feydeau, Bergman, Pinter. Fifty scenes? A hundred? More than I remember. More Chekhov than I wanted. Not enough Albee. When you spoke, my ignorance stunned me. Not ignorance of myself; that was a given. Ignorance of the play I had read and worked on. When I thought a scene had been about A and B, it was really about C and D. Not probably C and D. Not a matter of artistic difference between you and me. A matter of seeing. Once you opened my eyes, the truth was plain and incontestable, right there in the lines: Martha hated her husband. The doctor knew he was a fraud. I read and re-read. Where had I been? Was I born so stupid? It brought me to despair. Once, thinking I saw a life raft, I asked you: Peggy, how many times do you need to read a play to get it? You told me the number, which I have never forgot, and I slunk away. Years later, thinking myself bereft of things to write about, sorry I had not made different choices, climbed other mountains, I found solace in Wallace Stegner, whose remark—any life will provide the material, if it is attended to—called back your answer: one time. That’s what you need, that’s what you have.