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(Upon receiving our new passport photos.)

THE WIFE:  This is awful.  I look like an ax-murderer.

ME:  I look like a bored ax-murderer.

THE WIFE:  (Looking at my picture)  Yeah, they’re not even letting you on the boat.

I did an interview a while back with the website Awesomegang.com. You can check it out at this LINK.

Here are the finalists for Longwood University’s 0 to 60 Ten Minute Play Festival:

Cupid’s Beau by Babs Lindsay
Raghead by Tom Coash
The Wedding Night Tweets by Daniel Guyton
Santa Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Patrick Gabridge
Fargo 3D by Eric Fritzius
Superiority Complex by Jack Karp

On June 8, 1996, Ben Folds Five was to play the New Daisy Theater in Memphis, TN.  I was working in college radio at the time and our station had been given a supply of free tickets.  Unfortunately, I had no car.  Fortunately, I had several friends who did, so I proposed we all make a road trip to Memphis to go see the show.

My experience at WMSV (91.1 FM) out of Mississippi State University, from 1994-1997, was a formative one.  Not only did it finally allow me the experience of being a DJ (which had been a longstanding dream of mine since being told by multiple people in 1989 that my voice would lend itself to a career in it), but it exposed me to a lot of music I would never have heard otherwise. It helped shape my musical taste to a large degree.

I was already a kid who was more at home with Paul Simon than Poison, but getting force fed a steady diet of Live, Dave Matthews Band (and a few years before the rest of the country had heard of them), Ani DiFranco, Barenaked Ladies, Moxy Fruvous, Sarah McLachlan, Phish, the Eels, Aimee Mann, Joan Osborne, Jason Falkner, Primus, Trout Fishing in America, the Subdudes, Taj Mahal, October Project, Ben Folds, and so many others, helped refine my musical taste and send me off in different directions. Most of these acts seem like no-brainers now, but at the time I’d never heard of most of them, nor, in many cases, had much of the rest of the country.

Now Ben Folds and his band the Ben Folds Five went on to have some top 40 hits in the later 90s, but in 1995, with their debut album, they were new to the national scene.  I can even recall the first time I played a song by them, which I believe was their song “Philosophy.”  It was a revelation to me because it sounded like the guy who used to do the old Kleenex Says, Bless You jingles from a decade earlier was now writing awesome rock music using primarily piano, bass, and drums.  (For the record: not the same guy.)  Also the fact that they were called Ben Folds Five and there were only three members in the band was something I found superbly charming.  I played the ever-loving-snot out of that CD on the air. In fact, I played songs from it so much that Ben Folds Five began to encroach upon the play numbers of my standard regular overplayed airshift band, They Might Be Giants.  “Philosophy” was my favorite song on the album, but “Underground” came a close second, and “Best Imitation of Myself” probably third.  Folds and the band had a definite sound that I had heard nowhere else.

So when, in 1996, I heard they were going to be playing at the New Daisy, it seemed a done deal that I would be there to see the show.  After all, we’d done a similar road trip with folks from the station–spearheaded by our fearless leader and general manager, Steve Ellis–back in December of `94, to see Milla Jovovich and Toad the Wet Sprocket.  (Yes, THAT Milla Jovovich.  Check out her album, The Divine Comedy.  It’s good stuff.)  The only difference was that this road trip wouldn’t be a university sanctioned event, and we’d have to carpool it rather than ride in an official MSU van.  It would be awesome!  And it was free!

I got no takers.

Nope.

Nary a soul among my crew of nerd herd friends seemed at’tall interested in attending Ben Folds Five in concert.

So we stayed put in Starkpatch, ate pizza, and probably watched old episodes of Red Dwarf instead.

Now, I didn’t know this until this morning, but it turns out that our staying put was probably a good thing.  Apparently the concert had to be cancelled. One site I found which reprinted old newsgroup posts noted that someone in the bad had gotten sick and they had to postpone the concert indefinitely.  So this puts the resentment I’ve held toward my friends at this missed opportunity in a bit of a different light for me.  It would have been awkward to have made that journey only to learn there was no concert at all.  We would have been left with no recourse but to consume our weight in barbecue and craft beer.  Yeah, that would have been a terrible time.

I kept up with Ben Folds Five after college, as I have many of the college radio bands I became a fan of back then.  My favorite album of theirs is probably The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, which I hold is a masterpiece, though it was a critical and commercial failure at the time.  The band broke up not long after its release and it took a few years before Ben began releasing his amazing solo work, with Rockin’ the Suburbs.  I’ve picked up most everything since, though I’ve not yet delved into all of the side projects he’s done, such as The Bens, or quite all of his work with William Shatner.

After a semi-bitter 20 year wait, I finally got to see Ben Folds in concert last week when he played at the Clay Center in Charleston, sans the Five.  In fact, the tour was called Ben Folds and a Piano.

I got to town a little early because I wanted to check out Lost Legion Games & Comics, the Rifleman, a comic store on the south west side of town.  It’s the parent store to the one I used to go to in Princeton, but I’d never visited it.  Turned out to be a great shop and very busy for a Thursday night.  My plan was to next head back down town to Graziano’s Pizza.  Unfortunately, there seemed to be some sort of parade or gathering of marching bands and ROTC kids going on near the comic shop and this had brought traffic to a halt.  It didn’t look like anyone was going to clear out any time soon, so I decided to stay.  The Happy Days Cafe was next door to Lost Legion and they had an open-faced meatloaf sandwich on special with mashed potatoes and gravy as a side.  I asked if they would substitute french fries for the mashed potatoes, but keep the gravy–as gravy fries are one of my all time favs. They were spectacular.

Traffic jam having passed, I headed over to the Clay Center for Ben’s concert, which was also spectacular and nearly everything I could have asked for in a Ben Folds show.

Nearly.

After the first song, Ben talked to the crowd a bit, noting that half of his family comes from West Virginia.  He wasn’t sure from where exactly and was awaiting a text reply from his father to find out.  But he said that between his relatives from WV and NC his redneck street cred was pretty strong. It made such lyrics as “my redneck past keeps nipping at my heels” from “Army” ring even more true.

The concert was wonderful.  Ben talked between most of the songs, telling stories–sometimes song origins and sometimes funny stories that resulted from songs–and being the personable dude I’ve heard in his appearances on podcasts like Nerdist and Adam Carolla.  He even enlisted audience participation, such as having us do four part harmony in the bridge to “Bastard.”  Then, after an audience member shouted out a request early on, Ben noted that we were welcome to shout out whatever we wanted to, but he was going to stick to the set list on his paper.  However, we should stick around, cause at the middle of the show shit was going to get crazy.  And he was not wrong.

Just before the last song of the first half of the concert, he explained that during intermission we were all welcome to go into the lobby where we would be given sheets of paper upon which we could write our song requests.  We were then welcome to fold those pieces of paper into airplanes and, upon the resumption of the concert, we would be invited to launch them at the stage and Ben would play the rest of the concert based on those suggestions.

Unfortunately, I could not find paper in the lobby.  Everyone was walking around with multiple pieces of it, but I couldn’t locate the central paper distribution point.  I could have asked someone, sure, but that involves communicating with humans.  I figured it would be fine even if I didn’t get paper, since there was no way the song I wanted to request, “The Luckiest,” wasn’t going to be requested by multiple other people.  Chances were high it would be sung.  Also, my seat was far enough back that there was no way I could engineer a paper airplane that would make the journey to the stage without some added ballast to carry it.  (My seat mates caught a glimpse of the mailing tube my recently purchased Ben Folds tour poster came in and thought for sure I had a brought some kind of paper airplane bazooka.  In retrospect, I could have used the poster to make the biggest paper airplane in the room, which would have certainly drawn the attention of Mr. Folds.  It would also have cost me $30 to do it, but how awesome would that have been?)

Ben came back from intermission and gave us the countdown for the launching of the planes.  Maybe ten percent actually made it to the stage.  Many immediately nose-dived back into the crowd.  There followed much relaunching and re-relaunching until more had made it.  True to his word, Ben played the rest of the show from the request planes, including a few songs that weren’t even his to begin with.  He did a great version of “Tiny Dancer,” a song he had learned for some concerts he’d done with Elton John in Australia.  Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” he claimed to know not even a little of, then played a respectable version that he just made up lyrics to as he went.  Then Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” was requested, which one of Ben’s crew said he’d played once before.  He didn’t know the lyrics, though, so he just sang phonetic gibberish for the whole thing and it sounded perfect.  And, of course, someone had to request Ben’s beautifully arranged cover version of Dr. Dre’s rap song “Bitches Ain’t Shit” from his Magnum Opus album The Chronic.  With a title like that you can probably guess the Joseph Campbell Heroes Journey it’s going to take you on.  If anyone there was shocked at the first verse, they were probably even moreso by the second, which around another third of the audience sang in unison without Ben’s vocal assistance.  (He explained that he doesn’t like to sing that verse, probably due to all the racial slurs, so he was going to let us do that.  I was not among the “us,” though, because I don’t have it memorized and am pretty sure that’s a good thing.)  I imagine there were those present who were shocked by the content of the song, regardless of the beauty of the melody.  Some might have even wondered why Ben would have covered it in the first place.  I think the Village Voice sums it up nicely:  “The greatest way to show up musical misogyny for the absurd bullshit that it is, is to break it down into a ballad and have it gently sung by a charming nerd. Here Ben Folds takes a super-sexist, curse-laden track, flips it on its head and makes Dr. Dre look like an idiotic buffoon. What’s more, taking gangsta speak and enunciating it like a middle-class white guy is always going to be comedy gold…”  And comedy gold it was, even if not everyone in the audience was in on the joke.

At one point during the second half, I thought my unlaunched request for “The Luckiest,” was going to be played when Ben picked an airplane featuring a short letter from a girl in the audience.  She wrote, and I’m paraphrasing, that she didn’t want to be the typical white girl who requests “the Luckiest” but she was attending the show with her man who wanted her to feel like the luckiest woman there.  So Ben used the content of that letter as lyrics for a song he improvised on the spot.  I figured that he’d just blend that beautiful and funny tune right into “The Luckiest” afterward.  Nope.  He’d honored the letter of the request and moved on–probably confident that it would turn up in a future airplane.  Sadly, it did not.

It was a great show.  And when Ben returned to the stage for the encore, he announced that he’d received a reply from his father and that his family was from Webster county, which is about as hinterlands as hinterlands go in this state.  His final song was the aptly chosen “Army.”  Once again, his redneck past keeps nipping at his heels.

On September 2, 1985, 31 years ago, I turned 13.  In addition to becoming a teenager, I became a man.  A giant nerd man.  Why?  Because it was for that birthday that I got to see “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert for the first time.

His breakout album, In 3D, had only been released the previous year, ramming his “Beat It” parody, “Eat It,” into the ears of popular culture.  I never purchased the album–at least not with money.  Instead, I traded a cassette of it from my friend Bo.  I forget what he got out of the deal.  Probably some comic books.  But I got the better end of the bargain, for In 3D was a towering achievement to my 12-year-old brain.

“Eat it” might have been the most famous song from the album, but it was loaded with greatness.  I wasn’t always even familiar with the songs and artists he was parodying, but it definitely put those artists on my radar when later I would hear “The Safety Dance” (“The Brady Bunch”) or “Our Love’s in Jeopardy” (“I Lost on Jeopardy”) or “King of Pain” (“King of Suede”).  It also introduced me to the concept of stylistic parody, where Al did not parody a specific song by an artist, but parodied the style of the artist instead.  “Buy Me a Condo” was a basic Bob Marley reggae, without parodying a specific song.  “Mr. Popeil” is a brilliant sendup of the B52s–a realization that only hit me this year when it got stuck in my head one day and I had to stop down and try and recall who it was parodying.  It’s so obvious now.  Sadly, I didn’t know who the B52s were in 1984 and wouldn’t for another five years.  But maybe my favorite song on the album was the final track, an epic five minute long rock tale of about a horror movie called “Nature Trail to Hell.”  The song, I think, is a general parody of heavy metal music–possibly with an eye in the direction of Black Sabbath. Funny thing, though: because the cassette listed all the songs on the album at the bottom, and because of “Nature Trail to Hell” featured the word HELL prominently, and because we were Southern Baptist, I knew there was no way I could ever play that song in my dad’s presence.  I also decided to manage his inevitable unhappiness with my listening material by “accidentally” spilling green metallic paint pen ink all over the bottom of the cardboard insert.  In retrospect, I could have achieved the same effect by spilling it on the clear plastic cassette cover.

While my dad would have had a negative reaction to his son listening to songs with the word HELL in the title, all I really needed to do to counteract this was let him listen to the other songs, which I did.  And thereafter he was a Weird Al” fan too.  When Al was going to appear on the Tonight Show in July of `85, I got to stay up and watch it.  I wondered what song he would do.  Probably “Eat It,” but maybe “Rocky XIII,” I thought.  What I didn’t realize in that moment, though, was that Al had a new album out, that was only a month old, called Dare to Be Stupid, and the song would be from that.  He came out, with his Stupid Band (as were called) and did a parody of a song by the Kinks’ I was unfamiliar with then called “Lola.”  Al’s version was the now classic “Yoda.”

I lost my damned mind.  Not only was Yoda one of my favorite fictional characters, the cleverness of the song just fractured my 12-year-old funny bone.  I told EVERYONE about it.  (And forever after, whenever I heard “Lola” on the radio I was disappointed, because it wasn’t as good as “Yoda.”)

DIGRESSION:  Okay, I just went and looked up the lyrics to “Lola” to see if it was as nonsensical as I remember.  WOW!  That song’s about things 12-year-old Eric didn’t realize it was about and 44-year-old Eric is shocked it took him this long to realize it.  Don’t let the weak-sauce spell-singing put you off as it did me.  That song’s both layered and in-your-face all at the same time.   Pretty impressive, Ray Davies!

Turns out I only thought I lost my mind then.  Not too long later, I learned that “Weird Al” would be appearing in concert on the Mississippi State University campus, scant miles from my house, and BOOM it was gone again..  Not only that, but the concert would be in early September, just in time for my 13th birthday.  Dad said that not only could I go, but I could have a sleepover party and invite all my friends to go as well.  Why the heck not?  The concert was free!

The concert was in a big open grass space in front of Frat Row on the Mississippi State campus–an actual amphitheater is located there now, but in those days it was just open space.  We got there extra early, because it was all lawn seating so we needed to get a good spot.  Then we abandoned this idea to instead go hang out near Al’s tour bus in the hope of getting a glimpse of him as he ran to the stage.  And after much waiting, out he flew and we were mere feet away from “Weird Al” himself.  Then we booked it back around front, as close as we could get for the concert.

The concert was everything I wanted it to be.  He played lots of stuff from In 3D, but also a good mix from Dare to Be Stupid.  (This isn’t from memory.  I found his set list online.)  And there I was, with fingers crossed and prayers uttered, that one of the new songs would be “Yoda.”  But he finished out his set without it, and he and the Stupid Band left the stage.

Being a fairly new concert goer at that point in life so I didn’t know much about encores.  (I’d been to some gospel and contemporary Christian shows and about five Tammy Wynette 4th of July concerts in Malden, MO, but I somehow didn’t know from encores.)  But everyone stayed put and continued to clap and cheer until Al took the stage again and finally graced us with “Yoda.”  And I lost my damn mind again.  It was one of the most satisfying things I’d experienced in my life to that point.  Before leaving, I purchased one piece of Al memorabilia, a “Weird Al” button.

Cut to this past summer, when I learned that Al would be playing the Clay Center in Charleston, W.Va., a scant 112 miles from my house, as part of his Manditory Fun tour.  As soon as tickets went on sale to the public, I was on their website.  The wife, unfortunately, could not come with as her new job didn’t let her out until 6p, leaving us not much time to get to Charleston by show time.  She liked “Weird Al” well enough, but is not the life long fan she agree to marry nearly 17 years ago.  As much as I regretted the wife not getting to go, running solo meant I could buy a better seat because the only ones we could have gotten together were in the far back.  I picked an aisle seat, midway back from the stage.  Turned out to be a good choice.

Cut to last night.  I turn up to Charleston, eat some excellent pizza at Graziano’s down town, and make it to the theatre.  I hung out in the lobby for a while, looking at all the other tubby white guys with facial hair.  Some people wore aluminum foil hats.  Some–I believe the ones who had been to the special Al signing beforehand–wore red revolutionary berets.  Some people were dressed as the Amish, I presume either as costumes related to Al’s Amish Paradise, or perhaps the real Amish are just fans.  Regardless, I saw more than one instance of other attendees being extra polite to those dressed like the Amish, which amused me.

I went to find my seat, but went down the wrong corridor and wound up behind the box seats.  I turned around and went back, moving past some nice wooden wall-paneling in the process, then found the left rear entrance to the theatre, which led to my seat.

The show began with the band taking the stage as “Fun Zone,” an instrumental track from UHF, played.  Then a screen lit up above the stage and Al could be seen walking out of one of the other smaller theater spaces at the Clay center and into a hallway, singing his “Happy” parody “Tacky” to camera.  As he moved down the hall and into another lobby area, I began to recognize some of the guts of the Clay Center building itself.  I’ve performed there on a couple of occasions before and have been all through it.  Then I saw a familiar looking area with steps leading up to box seats and then the familiar wood paneling of the corridor leading there and knew Al was approaching the lobby of the main theatre itself.  I think I was one of the first people to turn around and see him come in the back doors of the theatre on my aisle, the camera man and cable tech moving just ahead of him.  Once again, Al passed within mere inches of me on his way to the stage.  Part of me wished that I’d taken a picture or even video of that, but the rest of me told that part of me to shut up and enjoy the moment.  I’m sure the moment was captured by one of the 300 other phones being aimed at Al anyway.  That wasn’t going to be the only brush with Al of the evening, though.

The concert was spectacular though, much like when I was a 13-year-old, I was often unfamiliar with the music being parodied, now due to the fact that I simply don’t listen to the radio.  And between many of the songs were intermissions featuring video of Al from other media throughout his history, such as his appearances on the Simpsons, Scooby Doo, My Pretty Pony, etc., or clips from the ALTV takeovers of MTV.  Usually these would thematically lead into the next song, and gave he and the band time for some pretty impressive costume changes, including into a fat suit for “Fat.”  One of the intermissions featured a very funny ALTV interview with Eminem as the lead in to “Word Crimes,” which may be my new favorite Al song ever.   But it was his song “Wanna B Ur Lovr” that brought him out in a sleazy pimp outfit, then down into the aisle again, where he proceeded to sing directly into the faces of a number of ladies, climbing onto the seats on occasion to gyrate in character.  He continued on up the aisle, singing to ladies along the way, until he past my seat again and began singing cheek to cheek at the girl directly behind me.  And she could not have wanted the attention less.  Which he sensed.  So he kept coming back to her with perfect comic timing.  Every time she thought he was finished, he would press his microphone between their faces and sing away again.  It was fabulous.

The songs were great and a nice mix of classic and current.  And even old standards like “Eat It” were spruced up a bit by being sung in the acoustic style of an MTV Unplugged concert, complete with candles.

Al ended the evening with “Amish Paradise,” said some slow goodbyes and left the stage James Brown style.  (Though, unfortunately, not with the accompanying “Living with a Hernia” which would have made me even happier to see.)  The crowd stood and chanted “Weird Al!  Weird Al!” until at last his band filtered in, dressed in Jedi accouterments.  Then a variety of storm troopers, what looked like a female Jango Fett and Darth Vader himself filed out as backup dancers for Al in Jedi robes, singing “The Saga Begins.”  And this, of course, led right into “Yoda” which made the 13 year-old-boy inside me lose his damn mind all over.

September 17, 2016– (Sydenstricker Cabin on the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Museum)  Eric will be conducting a workshop on memory mining for fiction to take place at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Museum.  See poster below…

In last night’s dream state, my recent RV trip to Alaska was replayed as a Wes Anderson movie. My mother-in-law, Susan Holloway, was played by Anjelica Huston. Actress Imogen Poots also had a prominent role, except everyone kept calling her Imogen Poots instead of her character’s name, cause it’s just fun to say Imogen Poots. The RV’s interior dimensions did not always match its exterior, which looked like a hand-crafted toy model of a 1960s era Winnebago. And the title of this little road movie kept changing from scene to scene, yet consistently contained the word “Coterie” (as originally used in the brilliant SNL Anderson parody, “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders”).

This is what I get for watching The Royal Tenenbaums and eating pizza after 8 p.m.

Wes Anderson – The midnight Coterie of sinister intruders from MisterB on Vimeo.

August 5 – 6, 2016– (Lewisburg Literary Festival in Lewisburg, W.Va)  I’ll be attending the Lewisburg Literary Festival (August 5-6, 2016) as an author, playwright, and member of the LLF planning committee.

• Throughout the weekend, I’ll be selling and signing copies of A Consternation of Monsters at the Literary Festival Bookstore, located on West Washington Street in the Greenbrier Valley Visitor’s Center.  Lots of authors, publishers, and booksellers will be on hand there, so please drop by.

• On Friday, August 5, at 9:30 p.m., my short play, Playing Cards by Twilight’s Shine, will be performed at Hill & Holler Pizza, on Jefferson Street (the old Fort Savannah Location, for those who’ve not been here in a couple of years).  The 12 minute play, co-starring Dr. Larry Davis, Chally Erb, and myself,  will kick off an evening of improv comedy from the Wilmington, NC, comedy and film-making troupe, LosCaballeros.  Come on by for beer and funny in equal parts.

Photo credit: Amanda Carper

It’s been a week.  I should have written something before now, but we’ve been a little busy.

As some of you may know, my wife and I live in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, which, along with many other counties in the state, was hit by severe flooding last Thursday. They’re calling it a 1000 year flood.  We were getting up to five inches of rain an hour at times, sending sheets of water down the hills, causing the creeks and rivers to flood, filling up the lowlands and washing away hundreds of homes. And some of those creeks and rivers ran through towns, which has been devastating. I’m able to report, though, that we, our home, and our animals are all safe and got through the flooding largely unscathed.

The wife called me on Wednesday of last week to let me know a derecho was predicted for the early hours of Thursday morning.  Derechos are fast moving lines of storms, often with tremendous winds.  We take predictions of them seriously, because pretty much our whole state was affected by one back in 2012, and were completely unprepared for it.  The result was over a week without power for our area, with few gas stations able to pump fuel, let alone sell us any, most stores only taking cash, people holding freezer parties to eat the food they had been saving before it all perished, a blistering accompanying heatwave, and my wife and I with long vehicle journeys to make with only the gas we could siphon from the lawn mower.  After that experience, we put preparations into place to prevent us going through the worst of what we did then–such as keeping multi-gallon water jugs at hand, a generator (purchased during the last derecho), fuel, a Berkey water filtration system, extra food, the whole works.  The wife basically became a prepper, though just what she was prepping for was indeterminate.

On hearing the news from her on Wednesday, I gassed up the cars, got a chunk of cash from the ATM and began battening down the hatches.  I even did all my prep for the writing class I was to teach on Thursday, at the Federal Prison in Beckley, just in case we lost power and I was unable to print handouts.  We would not be caught unaware.  This was so much worse, though.

We watched the news coverage on the Weather Channel.  They seemed to be burning a lot of calories in putting the fear of the storms and tornadoes into folks in the Chicago area.  Some twisters were sighted, but the big weather they were predicting didn’t seem like it was happening at quite the level they were trumpeting.  The graphic “60 Million in Danger Zone” was a constant presence on the screen, but the wife and I were starting to feel like this whole thing was going to amount to some thunderstorms and not much else.

Around 2 a.m. on Thursday, the lighting began.  No thunder yet, just lots of lighting.  I unplugged everything and went back to sleep.  The derecho was supposed to hit between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.  Not much happened, though.  Some rain.  Some more lightning.  Some more rain.  No real wind to speak of.  I gave a sigh of relief.  The wife rose and went to work.

The rain continued to increase in intensity.  We had some pretty severe downpours before 1 p., to the point that I had to go check the basement to make sure we weren’t taking on water.  There was a little coming under the basement door, but it hadn’t even made it to the drain.  Our house is up on a hill and nowhere near a creek or river.  So I hadn’t expected much.  Every hour or two, though, another huge downpour would hit us, lasting 20 minutes at a stretch sometimes.  We began to get flash flood warnings, continually updated to increase the time we would be under them.  I wasn’t really concerned, though.  To me flash floods mean a little water might cross a road here or there.  The river might rise a little.  We get that sort of thing every year and usually just results in the Ronceverte Island Amphitheater being submerged for a couple of days.

My wife kept me updated with what she was hearing on the police scanner at her clinic.  Folks in lower lying areas, like White Sulphur Springs, Rainelle and Richwood were being hit the hardest.  A dam near Richwood had failed and there was flooding in town, but I didn’t know how bad yet.  I was supposed to leave for Beckley by 4.  At 3:30, the wife called and demanded I call ahead and make sure all the roads were clear, because she didn’t want me washing away like some of the people she was hearing about.  I called the prison and, in an unprecedented event, someone answered.  They said the community college teacher had cancelled his class because part of the interstate was under water.  He’s at least twice the man I am, so I said that was good enough for me and cancelled my class as well.

By late afternoon, images began to appear online of the flooding in White Sulphur Springs, a town not far away.  When I saw the video of a burning house floating along a road, then crashing into a bridge, I knew shit was officially bad.  It wasn’t the only image of houses washing away or cars being buffeted by currents.  White Sulphur itself basically only has three roads leading into it, all of which were now under deep water.  Emergency crews couldn’t get in or out.  My later wife told me heartbreaking stories of listening to the scanner and hearing the rescue workers who had made it in before the flood grew too high.  They could hear people screaming for help, but couldn’t get to them because the available boats were all busy rescuing others elsewhere.  They were begging for boats, or even just rope.  The high water rescue crew that had been brought in could only do so much.

After 5p, we got another torrential downpour.  I went to check the basement.  Water was pouring under the door and the small pond it was making had now passed the floor drain and was spreading toward the water heater as I watched.  I splashed in to see the drain was clogged with some leaves that had blown in the door last fall.  I flung them out and it started draining just fine.  I imagined the drain outside the basement’s exterior door was also full, so I opened it to check, only to find that around six inches of water had built up on the other side of the door, much of which spilled into the basement before I could get it shut again.  I had to go back upstairs, then outside in the downpour, and around to the door with a rake to get all the mulch and debris out of the drain and out of the sloped basement descent.  Water was still running down the yard and right down the slope, though, carrying more debris with it.  So I found a shovel and dug a trench in the ground to lead the water away from the basement.  I hoped it would work.  It seemed to do okay.

The rest of the evening was spent trying to follow the news online and via my wife, who kept me updated.  One friend had to brave waist deep water, carrying her children, to get out of her home before the flood waters reached it. Fortunately in that case, a man with a backhoe happened by shortly afterward and dug a trench to divert the water away from their house, and it was not damaged. But it was a very close thing by about two inches.  Her house survived.

I also texted our friends Rebecca and Chester to see how they were faring down their twisty windy road.  They said they were fine and invited us to come over for stew and Coronas to wait out the storm.  An hour later, Rebecca texted back: “Update… Ok, so we have NO road.”  Their driveway, the culvert beneath it, and much of the road they lived on were gone, washed away in what she described as a raging river.  “All is well, just won’t be leaving for a while,” she said.  Not long after that, a maple tree fell across both of their vehicles.  In a miracle, it didn’t crush their vehicles, but lodged against the hill beside their house in just such a way that it simply lay above them.  A week later, they’re still stranded there, though they’re able to climb out and catch rides with their kids, who came to help.

Reports are that there are only around 23 dead following the storms, but reports also say there are close to 200 still missing.  The death toll will rise, I’m sure.  My wife has already learned of three of her patients who were lost to the flooding.  A few people in the area who were feared dead, though, have turned up alive.

There are many nonprofit organizations on a state and national level who are doing a lot to help.  Churches have become shelters and base stations for disaster relief efforts of the Red Cross and the Southern Baptist Convention Disaster Relief.  The United Way has teamed with St. James Episcopal to help distribute food and supplies where needed.  Mud out crews from around the state are streaming in to help tear out drywall and carpeting from homes that were damaged by flooding so that they can possibly be repaired by contractors later.  My wife and I joined such a crew based out of our church and helped clear out the basement for an elderly couple in White Sulphur Springs, and removed soaked carpet from another house.  We were not, however, in the most damaged areas of the town, but in a place where the flooding did not reach, but which was flooded all the same by the failure of a storm drainage system.  We’ve been to Alderson to deliver food.  The damage there is not as visibly bad but there are lots of mud-filled homes along the river, whose residents are now displaced to the community center.  Whole families are there, sleeping on cots.  Donations of clothing from the area had been delivered before we arrived and the outpouring of support there was impressive.  Now that FEMA is involved, there’s a coordinating organization that’s designed to get help where it’s needed by working with all the other relief organizations already in the area.

The major damage to something that affects me personally, however, did not involve endangered lives, but the Greenbrier Valley Theatre, where I often act.  They took on nearly six feet of water in their basement, submerging the costume shop as well as their stock of costumes, props, furniture and set pieces.  It’s been pumped out now and a disaster cleanup team has been working diligently since Monday.  But I spent last Sunday down there, splashing through stagnant water, helping haul out 40 years worth of costumes, props, and furniture.  There were a lot of people helping including every member of GVT’s staff, equity actors and community actors alike, the GVTeens group, musicians, and community volunteers.  The GVT staff were the hardest workers of the lot.  I don’t know where they found the energy.  After four hours, my fat ass was about to drop.  But thanks to in-house cooks and massive food donations from restaurants like Del Sol Cafe, we were able to keep fueled and I was able to do seven hours.  Since then we’ve been helping to launder as many costumes as I could fit in my car, hoping to save it from mold, mildew and flood water riest.  So much of it will still be lost.

It’s been a strange and sad week.  And it’s going to be years before everything in the area can be restored to normalcy, if such a thing can be achieved for even half of the affected people.

It’s so very odd to feel guilty that we personally escaped harm, but I somehow do.

I will be one of the writers reading during the monthly Writers Can Read event at Empire Books and News in Huntington, June 20 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.  The event is hosted by author Eliot Parker (Fragile Brilliance).  

The featured readers of the night will be Bram Stoker award winner Michael Knost and Brian Hatcher, both of Woodland Press.  If you’re in the Huntington area, please stop by and say “howdy” and hear some great horror readings.

We’re just 20 days away from the Opera House PlayFest, a festival of seven 10 minute plays to be performed at the Pocahontas County Opera House in Marlinton, which I am directing.  The festival features the works of playwrights T.K. Lee, Chris Shaw Swanson, Brett Hursey, Tom Stobart, Jonathan Joy, and myself.

As you may have gathered from the Actual Overheard Conversation I posted recently, we have indeed returned from a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico.  It was a fantastic experience all around, though, as with many of our trips, was not without its hiccups.

We flew to San Juan for a medical conference at which my wife was an attendee and at which I had no responsibilities, but to turn up for the President’s Banquet and any other food and booze-related events there might be.  Beyond that, I was a free agent in a beautiful country.

The adventure began before we even left, though.

A few days before the trip, the wife was checking our plane tickets online via her iPad.  “Hey,” she said.  “They’ve booked us on separate flights.”

“What?” I said.  “The whole trip?”

“No.  We fly together from Charleston to Atlanta, but then you’re on one flight and I”m on one that leaves half an hour… no, mine leaves first and yours flies out half an hour later,” she said.

“What the hell?” I said.  But in my mind I was already in paranoia mode.  Two separate flights.  That had to mean one of them was going down, right?  We both had to make the trip, but fate was going to deal one of us a bad hand Final Destination style?  Why else would tickets we booked at the exact same time get split up like that?  And the more I dwelt on this the more I began to quietly accept it–no matter how insane that might seem.  In fact, I even went to the higher power about it.

Heavenly Father, I prayed. If one of our planes is destined to crash, please let it be mine, I selflessly continued.  Too many people rely on Ashley and if one of us has to die please let it be me, I magnanimously finished. Amen.

The night before our flight, I happened to mention something to the wife about our separate flights from Atlanta at which point she quietly said, “Oh.”  And then she began to smile.  “About that…”

I instantly knew.  “You were lying?” I said. “You lied about the separate flights?”

“Only a little.”

I should have known.  After all, the wife has a tell to let you know when she’s lying: it’s when you can see her lips moving as she speaks.  And her flip-flopping about which of us was leaving a half-hour before the other was too good of a specific detail.  She at least had the decency to look embarrassed through her amusement.

“I forgot I hadn’t told you we really weren’t flying separate,” she said.

“I prayed about that,” I said.  “I was convinced it meant one of our planes was going to crash, and I prayed that if one of them had to that God should let it be mine because too many people were relying on you.  And you lied.”

“Sorry.”

We rose at 4 a.m. on a Monday, drove to Charleston, did not have time for breakfast, managed to remember to bring proper identification and to park in long-term parking, boarded the same plane and made our journey to Puerto Rico.  The waters were sufficiently blue-green as we descended over San Juan.

We taxied to our hotel, the Acacia in the Coronado district, a lovely little self-described boutique hotel within a 45 second walk to the beach.  And after check in, we headed to said beach where there were to be found a goodly number of beautiful people wearing an insufficient amount of beachwear.  As well they shouldn’t!  If I looked like them, I’d be shucking clothes and thonging it up, too.

Last night I dreamed I was being slowly-yet-diligently pursued by an undead Nancy Reagan.

Now, I say Undead Nancy Reagan, but Nancy wasn’t gross or rotting or anything, as zombie symptoms can present.  No, she looked pretty much like she always did–red dress, pearls, what have you.  Regardless, in the dream I knew that she was undead because she never spoke a word, but, instead, doggedly pursued me at a pace slightly slower than walking–though never at anything approaching an undignified shamble.

Her face, during her leisurely hunt, remained a mask of resigned bemusement, as if she were stalking a stray jelly bean that had rolled out of Ronnie’s grasp, or perhaps an errant coffee stain left on a side-table in the East Room by, say, Casper Weinberger.  I knew with certainty, though, that if she were to ever catch up to me I would meet my end.  Perhaps she would bite me and then I too would become an Undead Nancy Reagan, forever cursed to stubbornly and with delicately measured steps, prowl after new victims.

I’m here to report that Undead Nancy Reagan was pretty easy to evade, though her tenacious trailing of me, as well as my hard rule against whacking former first ladies with a cricket bat, left me with little choice but to trap her in a series of rooms; only escaping through another door or a window, myself, when there was not space enough to otherwise slip past her.  And there she would remain for awhile–Undead Nancy Reagan trapped in a bathroom, or Undead Nancy Reagan trapped in a walk-in pantry. (When did I get a walk-in pantry, anyway?)

And life otherwise went on for me in the dream, and there were other dream-life concerns to attend to that did not involve the mother of “Just Say No” (and Patti and Ron Jr.)  But always in the back of my head was the knowledge that at any moment some fool was going to hear her scratching and let her out, and then once again I’d have to not-particularly-briskly flee from Undead Nancy Reagan.

I’m sure Walter Mondale used to have this dream, too.

I just learned that three of my short plays have been chosen for production as part of the upcoming West Virginia Playwrights Festival in Clarksburg, May 20-22.  Perhaps ironically, that’s the same weekend as the Opera House PlayFest, a play festival I’m directing at the Pocahontas County Opera House on May 20-21.  In fact one of those plays, “…to a Flame,” will appear in both festivals, potentially competing with itself.

I’m thrilled my plays (also including “A Game of Twenty…” and “Fargo 3D”) will be a part of this first inaugural event honoring playwrights of the Mountain State.  We’re not a state that’s known for its drama, and yet an awful lot of it is produced throughout the state, and has been historically. Time to change some perceptions.

And I’m doing my part with the Opera House PlayFest, which will feature three WV playwrights, including myself, as well as playwrights from Mississippi, Ohio and Virginia, too.

More information will soon be posted here.