Silence Day Six

Through various circumstances too dull to relate I was walking through my neighborhood yesterday carrying my daughter’s lunch box and odds and ends from school. My daughter was not with me. I began thinking what an odd sight I might appear to anyone of a suspicious mind. What is this grey haired man doing with the paraphernalia of a schoolchild? Where did he get those things and where is the girl to whom they belong? I wonder if there are people whose first thought is – Oh, there’s a nice man, he’s found some child’s stuff and he’s trying to get it back to her or her family. I doubt it. I am not given to such thoughts though neither am I particularly given to suspect dark motives in those I pass unless they are drunken youths since I was once a drunken youth. My lack of voice and the various diagnoses that have gone along with its deterioration are the reason I was walking alone with my daughter’s things, (as I noted, very dull) and I couldn’t bear watching others eat pizza while I sipped water or chewed lettuce. My shadowed thoughts are a result of the several times I have been accosted by various authority figures questioning my relationship to my child who is adopted and looks completely unrelated to me. Were I a fully functioning individual my daughter and I would have been walking together, chit chatting, making our usual observations and, though some uniformed person might question our association, no one would find it odd that I was carrying a child’s lunch box and composition book. This lack of a voice is beginning to make me view the world quite askew. I am now envisioning myself in some dank police cell, gesticulating at an investigator because they have taken away my pad and pen in which are written such strange things as “tazer” and “Alice killed him”.

I don’t really know exactly how silent monastic orders operate, the degree to which the silence is observed. Presumably talk is allowed when they are trying to bake their daily bread and orders have to be given and acknowledged and the various functions of the monastery have to be carried out. One of my favourite jokes is about the man who joins a silent order which allows each member to speak once each ten years, only to the abbot (if that’s what a chief monk is called). After ten years the monk enters the abbot’s cell and the abbot indicates permission to speak. The monk tells the abbot that he finds the heating inadequate but otherwise things are going well. Ten years later the same ritual occurs and the monk says he finds his mattress a bit hard but otherwise all is fine. After thirty years the ritual is repeated and the monk tells the abbot he wishes to leave the order. Fine, says the abbot, all you’ve ever done anyway is complain. What I am realizing over these few but seemingly endless days is how much our personalities depend on our voices. This is true also of those whose voice is sign language since each person’s signing is differently expressive. We all react to an adult, man or woman, who has a very high voice. Similarly we have prejudices about deep voices. The monks, though, rarely register the way a personality is expressed in speech yet I assume they have deep friendships and notable likes and dislikes within their group. I find myself now unable to contribute to any conversation, in fact I avoid most social situations because they are so much work. I do listen, however, and even though others are sadly missing out on the enlightenment I usually bring to any given subject, I at least am learning something. Speech tells others a good deal about how your mind works. This allows those engaged with you to adapt their conversation to suit the way in which you seem to perceive the world. This to and fro is the basis of change for those of us who are changeable, which includes the great majority of us. The other apes don’t change much because they have no significant discourse (all PETA members can find a link to opinions that suit them better). We are discursive apes. We are self reflective apes. This is linked to brain size, which is linked to vocal chord usage and so on but the basis of our success as a species is the ability to communicate in very sophisticated ways. While this ability has led us to the brink of the destruction of our own and many other species it is also what gives us the capacity to save ourselves. I wonder if our exasperation with politicians lies in their speech. It is unchanging. Their way of speaking, certainly the unvarying way they have of addressing the public, is ape-like. They are grunting at the faction that already agrees with them because they know that’s where the next banana is coming from. To speak in a flexible way, in the way most of us speak in our daily lives, taking in information and adjusting to it, might alienate their supporters and there is no guarantee that the people whom they have earlier opposed, and to whose view they might be leaning slightly, will throw them any fruit. I am probably gravely insulting other apes, particularly those who watch cable news. I am sure that monastic life has changed over the centuries but probably not by much. This, too, might be the result of not speaking. Much as the world might benefit from the study of the monastic life I think I will stick with mouthing off and leave that to some quiet academic.

Silence Day Five

I know people who have had far more serious conditions than my loss of voice and once in a while I have had a taste of what truly changes a life unbidden. I have lost a piece of me to a machine, fortunately it was a piece of the little finger of my left hand and I am right handed. For a few moments now and then, though, such a thing gives a glimpse of what true damage would mean to someone who lost several fingers or a hand. I was paralyzed temporarily down my left side by a spinal dislocation and was not certain for a while whether the damage was permanent. Now I see people in wheelchairs after accidents, unable to move below a certain point and that helpless feeling returns viscerally. An undiagnosed exploded appendix brought to mind a friend who went in for exploratory surgery and did not come back. When darker thoughts overtake me, usually in those minutes before the day has really begun, lying awake trying to keep the clock from moving forward to the struggle to get the child out the door and the even greater struggle to find things to do that will keep me from writing or reading or something equally significant, like paying the credit card bill, I fear for my ability to deal with a less than perfect outcome. I see my neighbor barreling along in his wheelchair after a motorcycle accident, his garden planted with trees since the accident, the child he and his partner have had and I cannot imagine I could ever recover my spirit to such a degree. Most of us are defined by two things: our relationships and our work. I remember the times my dad was out of work, that creature of the workplace always slightly ill at ease in the house, a man who took joy in looking at blueprints, who to this day stops at building sites to watch others work, still talks of how much he wishes he were still out there hammering and sawing. Those days of unemployment were a torture to him, leaping to the telephone each time it rang, hoping it was a contractor who needed him and his immense skill. Though I inherited almost nothing of my dad’s aptitude I do share his view of work. It isn’t simply a way of putting food on the table, as important as that is. It defines us. He was only ever two things, a blacksmith and a carpenter. He did other things to get by, he picked potatoes, did a few pick up jobs in factories, but he almost exclusively became a carpenter after he moved from Ireland to England. I worked with him several times and it was as important to him that a concrete pour be perfect as it is for me now to get a phrase right, to write or speak a sentence with such clarity and force that it will say something about who I am and what I am. Having a mellifluous speaking voice is pure happenstance. I got it from my family whose voices are deep and resonant, it’s pure genetics. Using it well is work. I can write good prose and dialogue on occasion partly because I spent my youth listening to Irish people tell stories that changed the hardship of impoverished rural childhoods and the difficulties of immigrant life into the magic of Story. I find myself now, in the waking minutes, wondering what I would do if my voice does not come back fully, remote as that possibility is. I like to think of myself as someone who is not ruled by fear, but neither am I immune to it. While I have the imagination to create a world and people it, to interpret the worlds of others and convey those worlds to listeners and watchers, I cannot imagine what I would do other than this strange thing called acting or this even stranger thing called writing. Of course I would find something, there is food to be bought and a house to maintain. I think of my father and what might have happened to him if he had ended up in a factory, as many of his contemporaries and several of his family members did. There would have been food on the table and the house would have been paid for but that man, prowling the house waiting for a call that would take him out into the rain and the wind, would have been less, a shadow, Sunday night a dread of Monday morning rather than a day off that got him back up to speed. Over at UCLA some of the best physicians in the country tell me with absolute confidence that all will be well and I believe them but now and again I find myself in a dark place, remembering all those things I have done for a living that sucked the life out of me. If anyone thinks I am a dyspeptic curmudgeon now they should see me when I am temping.

Silence Day Four

Each school day morning we drive three children from three families the short distance to their school. One of the children is the daughter of a couple that speaks very little English. The child herself is bilingual and even though she is sometimes called upon as interpreter we try hard to communicate directly with her mother who brings her to our house five days a week. Her mother is a delightful and very funny woman and it would be very amusing to watch us trying to understand each other with her shards of English and my wife’s schoolgirl Spanish and my smattering of Spanish words. Somehow we have managed to become great friends, we’ve been out to dinner with them, we get each other’s jokes. It isn’t that much more difficult communicating with these friends without speech. It reminds me a little of when I was hitchhiking through Europe and trying to tell French and Italian and German drivers where I was headed. Some things can be easily understood: the very first person who ever picked me up was a man who propositioned me with a mixture of French and fingers and whom I politely declined, choosing to be dropped in the rain next to a public toilet in which I spent the night. One of the difficult aspects of our friendship with the smattering of English/smattering of Spanish friends is that they feel some debt is owed to us because we own a car and they don’t and they seem to feel that we are doing them some great favour. This results in their sweeping leaves up around our yard as some sort of recompense and generally trying to clean up. It so happens that my mother spent much of her working life cleaning and serving and I am very sensitive to this. I find myself wanting to say – Stop, you are not my employees, you are my friends, you owe me nothing. I do in fact say “!Para”, Spanish for “stop” and this seems to have little effect. I now have no voice and when the daughter started to sweep leaves this morning I simply walked over, grabbed the broom and threw it down the length of the yard. Sometimes the inability to speak is quite liberating.

The instinct for speech is very strong. Even encountering the dog I can feel myself about to greet her and banter with her. She can no longer hear anything other than a shrill whistle and is blind in one eye and I find myself approaching her without her being aware. Despite her advanced age and her near deafness and blindness she still loves to walk. She runs, well, totters about, like a deranged puppy with motor function difficulties and will stagger around the neighbourhood for as much as an hour, sniffing everything, finding out who has passed by recently, smelling the trail of a skunk or that annoying inbred midget dog from across the way. Mostly she is searching for two things: food that has been cast aside and cat feces. Dogs love to eat cat feces. This trait in our dog has become quite pronounced. Perhaps it’s the equivalent of soft food for old people. Along the way we encounter other dogs and their owners (sorry, guardians) some of whom have been watching me walk the dog with my daughter for more than ten years since we first moved to this area, some encountering us for the first time. They are always astonished that Daisy the Dog is still alive or mystified by how that creature manages forward motion. Those who do not know Daisy ask how old she is. The answer to this now entails reaching into my pocket and pulling out my notepad, finding the page on which is written, “I have had throat surgery and cannot speak” and using my fingers to indicate eighteen years. Then I have to point to the dog in case they think I am barred from speaking for eighteen years rather than indicating the dog’s age. All this could be avoided if I were a rude person. If I were the sort of person who considers small talk beneath him. I sometimes wish this were the case but I am a polite person in a superficial sort of way and I end up in conversations with people I barely know whose obsessions and concerns are understandable but not of the least interest to me. At least for now I can avoid conversation with the woman who is in the awful process of getting her child into school and addressed the subject with me, assuming that I would be of help, having a child in school myself. She is not to know that I find that particular subject less interesting than my dog’s bowel movements and, again, I show good manners by engaging her. It turns out that she knows of my daughter’s school and has been there to take a look. She does not think she will send her child there, she says. I imagine that this statement is intended to draw me into a defense of the school, some attempt to convince her that where my child goes is better than where she might otherwise send her child. In reality I could not care less. My failure to jump to the defense of my daughter’s school elicits, unbidden, the reason she does not feel the school is right for her family. There is not enough shade. I will repeat that for those who are staring at the page wondering what the woman actually said, rather than the silly words that I have clearly put in her mouth. She said, there is not enough shade. Yes, there is someone in this world, probably not alone in her worry, whose major criterion for the choice of her child’s school is that it should have sufficient shade. My first thought might have been something along the lines of, I wish I could develop a growth of some sort on my vocal chords so I never have to engage in this sort of conversation again. In fact I believe it was more in the vein of, Daisy’s feces looked good and solid today, that’s encouraging. That my thoughts were not on this woman’s concerns for her child’s risk of skin cancer probably registered with her and we parted, mutually bemused I expect, she by my unconcern, I by the ever increasing amazement that overwhelms me whenever I am forced to talk to people about their children.

Silence Day Three

I rarely remember my dreams but last night, though the details are unclear, I spent my time dreaming that I was speaking and then being brought up short by the realization that I shouldn’t. I wonder if I was making noises in my sleep to match my dreams. I went to the movies last night (Moneyball, very good) and as I left I accidentally clipped the heel of the man in front of me and automatically said, or sort of aspirated, “oops, sorry”. First of all a dread descended that I had just ruined my voice by that simple utterance and all this surgery and silence was for nothing. Then I began to wonder why the clipping of a stranger’s heel elicited sound while dealing with my daughter’s moods or the necessities of daily life do not. We seem to be programmed as a species to be more concerned with what strangers think of us than what our family and friends think of us. Is it that we fear the stranger might turn on us while our families generally realize that the clipping of a heel is simply ineptitude or accident? Presumably the family, knowing they are stuck with us and we with them, let such things pass and we generally know the limits of patience of those closest to us. The stranger, however, may be volatile, perhaps he has had a very bad day and might decide that my clipping of his heel is the last straw and all the frustrations of his day will come bursting forth in an attack on the heel clipper. He might be particularly angered by a clipper of heels who blithely continues on without a word or, worse, a possibly lunatic clipper who is gesticulating meaninglessly, trying to communicate through signs and gestures in the middle of the entrance lobby of a large movie theatre while hundreds watch the strange pantomime, an embarrassing farce for all concerned. Far more likely that we utter apologies left and right because we know that it helps grease the wheels of our days and costs us little. Apologies within families are delicate negotiations, upon them depends the fragile balance that is required to keep the whole strange edifice standing, or at least no more than tottering.

I have noticed that people start whispering sometimes when I indicate that I cannot speak. I went into the convenience store over the road from our house and let the owner know I am not speaking and he seemed apologetic and started to whisper. He accompanied this whispering with a sort of cringe, a bowing of the body and a slight shuffling as though he was in thrall to my reduced condition. I could not work out if this was because he feared a loud voice might shatter something in me or worsen my condition even though it is in no way connected to my ears. His is not an unusual reaction though a little emphatic perhaps. Those who know me usually laugh. Someone as opinionated as I ought to be the butt of jokes at a time like this. I caught a snippet of Sacha Cohen’s movie “Borat” the other night and remembered my reaction to it which the snippet confirmed. Americans, or more specifically people in the United States, are unfailingly polite to strangers or to those they do not know well. Familiarity breeds mockery. The man in the store knows me and my family as the buyers of bottles of wine and beer, occasional junk food and emergency toilet paper and he does not speak much English. The people at my local coffee shop, those behind the counter and the drinkers, know me and my daughter as voluble and garrulous and sarcastic and react accordingly. All are sympathetic, of course, but sympathy can come in the form of quiet glee at my condition, an opinionated man free with his theories and notions brought low by a small growth that might have been designed specifically to humble him.

As I drove home this evening I saw a billboard for the local television news and I realized that if I had a voice and another person in the car I would venture the question: Why does anyone watch local television news? It is beyond awful. I mean Maury Povich is awful, a lot of the Disney Channel is awful, the E channel is awful but Povich, Disney and E are awful in a thrilling, truly exploitative way. Maybe not Disney. You should know that I think Jerry Springer is a genius, by the way. Local news, though. Who still watches it? Millions, I presume, who want to know how the latest supermarket opening went, how the junior high basketball team fared in Nowhere Suburbia. I can sort of understand why someone might watch the weather forecast in Chicago or Denver where they actually have weather, but why would you care about the weather forecast in southern California? I can give it to you now. Warm and sunny. Besides you can get the weather forecast any time you please on the internet without the dancing bear and the smug commentary from surgically enhanced nincompoops who think Johnny Carson was the height of western culture. Don’t get me wrong, he was very good was Johnny Carson, but you know what I mean. The reason that local news has prodded me into ranting opinion is that while not talking I notice things more. Self help books seem to advise that we should all notice the world around us more, take time to look and listen. I have lots of looking and listening time and it’s not a great improver of life. It’s mostly billboards advertising local news. Mind you self help books also advise letting go of your anger and that’s the last thing you want to do. Greatest force for change in the world. Maybe it will force me to campaign to get rid of billboards with people who have had plastic surgery.

Silence Day Two

In this silence I communicate mostly by notes. I carry a pad and pen. Here are some of the scribbling from my first full day of not speaking:

Bathroom

Steroid tomorrow or today?

I have to eat.

Spit does not hurt so much.

Surgery was very successful and I will feel well.

You need sleep.

I have often played charades and quite well.

Another cop. His friend.

Alice did it.

Tazer.

I sent her to bed.

Uli.

Confusing.

More pills than an old man.

3.30 a.m.

I moved the seat. Try it.

If they enclose the dog will you go?

We rarely remember much of what we say, I know I don’t, and now the reason is clear. It’s usually not worth taking up brain capacity for the odd little things we seem to care about. That might be the great lesson of these ten days: a good deal of what we say is just space filler. There is the Pinter view of conversation as pure power negotiation, the need to dominate or gain concession. So far silence is not getting me closer to dictatorship even within my own family. I am now much closer to ape than I was two days ago. I have banged the dining room table with my fists several times to express the common emotions of the average parent, raging fury and incoherent rage. We men are always being told by the women in our lives and in our reading material that we do not express our emotions enough. After all these millennia of coupling and parting, of raising children, of grappling together and apart with life the truth of the matter is that men are either happy or enraged and women do not like that. Men are binary creatures and any attempt to make us anything else is futile. Now that I am silent I can indulge my binariness and ingest Vicodin, take my steroids and my antibiotics and smash my fists on the table. Fathers have the great advantage over mothers of not worrying that their children like them. Or perhaps that’s just me. Mothers so want their children to like them while fathers want to do enough to get them a few moments of peace and quiet regardless of what their children feel about them. Much like the binary nature of men this is something that cannot be changed. This is not some startling insight that has come through silent contemplation. I have noticed this element of family life from its very beginning and now have nothing but time to spend writing it down. I should write that child rearing book I have been threatening so long wherein parents can learn the value of more television, the stupidity of homework and general parental amnesia. For some reason most parents have forgotten how dreadful much of childhood was – and I had a relatively happy childhood. I never ask my daughter how school was. I know it was tedious beyond description. It was, is and will be forever dreary. I ask my daughter if school was just as boring today as everyday and occasionally she surprises me by telling me, no, it was quite good today. Her favorite part of the day is always recess. So was it for us, so will it be for our grandchildren. All you out there spending hundreds of thousands on that fancy school, don’t kid yourselves. The paint job is nicer but it’s all a grind.

I began this odyssey to speechlessness with a diagnosis (almost certainly accurate) of acid reflux damaging my vocal chords and was put on a radical anti-acid diet. No alcohol, no coffee, no tea, no dairy, no tomatoes, no herbs or spices of any kind, no red meat. An endless lists of No. There came a point where my weight loss was so great it exceeded that of cancer patients (I kid you not). While I have been on this diet many friends have asked me if I feel better. No, I do not. I am not more energetic, I am not calmer, I am not more relaxed or more inclined to exercise. I am hungry. Get thinner, by all means, if that’s important but do not buy into the notions the experts sell that it will make your life exponentially more anything. Washing up is not more interesting when you weigh less, neither is making your child’s lunch or attending back to school night, the dog is still ancient and deaf and blind and falls over when you walk her, the things that annoy you about other people and the things that you love and adore about them are no different. You really are just hungrier.

Silence Day One

I am sitting in imposed silence. I wish I were sitting in imposing silence. Perhaps following some quietly but ferociously delivered command to my daughter who weeps and wails but nevertheless does as she is told, not because of the ferocity of my delivery but because of the bottomless depths implied by my silence. No, my silence is imposed by a surgeon who today removed a cyst from my vocal chords. The saga of the temporary dying of my voice is not the point of this exercise but suffice to say that an actor losing his voice is a deeply disturbing experience, particularly when said actor has no other skills in the world than those that allow him to stride a stage, interrupt light between sun and camera and talk into a microphone. More particularly so when this individual has had, for some considerable time, the great blessing to have earned his living acting rather than doing the awful things which once put food on the table and coffee in the cup. Some consider office temp work the very lowest rung and I have done a lot of temping and it is a sucker of the soul but I have worked the night shift in a razor blade factory, changed light bulbs forty hours a week and cleaned Greek toilets, the last of which gained me the grand sum of a bed for the night in a youth hostel. If you think the Greeks’ inability to pay their debts is their biggest problem you might want to test (or avoid) the quality of their plumbing. This surgical silence will last for ten days and I have decided to make a daily record of what it is like, firstly, to be someone who speaks both for a living and at great length in his normal life and, secondly, to negotiate life in one of the world’s largest and busiest cities without a voice. I should also mention navigating the ins and outs of spouse and ten year old child. My wife has already commented that I must be terrible at charades. This is a deeply humiliating opinion to offer to an actor. It does not help that my handwriting is not the most legible. Somewhere in all of this I have to go and have dental work done and I suppose I should be grateful at not having to respond to the dentist’s chit chat with the usual incoherent grunting while she has a suction pump and a tooth prong in my mouth. I imagine dentists do not call any of their tools tooth prongs but I am only an ill informed former temp worker and bog cleaner.

Today has been a half day of silence since I did not emerge from surgery and anesthesia until the early afternoon. I awoke with a very sore neck, more specifically a sore cervical spine. In order to get a scalpel – apparently a very tiny scalpel – down my throat my head had to be kept at an extreme backward angle in order to make my trachea into something resembling a straight line. Unfortunately, many years ago, I had a bone graft in two dislocated cervical vertebrae and my head really doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore. However, necessity and all that. The tip of my tongue was numb apparently from a topical anesthetic. Presumably used to ameliorate the pressure from some sort of clamp that held my tongue as far out from my mouth as possible. Or does someone just hold it for an hour? When the painkillers wear off my throat is very sore and I find it hard to swallow. When I take the painkillers, though, the pain is minimal and I am amazed at how well all this seems to have gone so far. I won’t mention the book narration I was offered last night that was both a fascinating subject and worth several thousand dollars and which I had to turn down. I hope no one from my mortgage holder is reading this. I would have said “my bank” but the notion of a bank actually holding your mortgage for longer than the time it takes for the ink to dry on the documents or the length of time it takes to say “mortgage backed security” is laughably old fashioned. And now, silence. My high school (actually a secondary school since it was in England, let’s not let enforced silence muddy our accuracy) was odd in so very many ways and each Easter Week we entered upon a Retreat. Three days of silence which were dedicated to contemplation, prayer and reflection and even more church services than usual. I loved the Retreats. I observed the silence, I prayed fervently and at the end of it I felt renewed and full of spiritual and mental energy. Truly. I sat through meals during which the only sounds were cutlery scraping and one of the students reading from Scripture. It was the oddest experience I’d ever had and, at the same time, seemed uniquely inspiring and uplifting. I admit three days was plenty but I grew to understand the monastic impulse and it returns very strongly when life becomes fraught, the noise level within and without my house grows intolerable and I desperately need some time to write (I was not sufficiently underemployed or impoverished as an actor and decided writing would drive me into the poorhouse). Unlike those Retreats this silence is mine alone and not shared with other adolescent boys and I will report how it goes. I am hoping it will teach me to listen, a skill I failed to pick up early enough for it to make an impression. I imagine the script on which I am currently working will be a polished masterpiece ten days from now. I don’t know what will replace prayer, something I gave up long ago. I’m not really given to meditation, something of which I had my fill while lying immobilized in a hospital for two months with the aforementioned dislocated spine. Perhaps the hefty tome on European history I am reading will finally be finished. Such possibilities.

Yesterday a question was answered and normally the answered question is a reason to celebrate or at least to be relieved that Ignorance has met its match temporarily. However, in this case, the question was: What makes Art possible in the modern United States? People will suggest artists themselves, obviously, working away for little material reward. Or patrons, those with wealth enough to spare some for their passions and sometimes those passions include theatre or painting or dance. The enthusiastic public, of course, why else do we do it? I have the double privilege of knowing the answer to the question and of having been the beneficiary of that answer. I also have the terrible misfortune to have been told that what, or who, makes Art possible in this country has gone from us. She was Melissa Hines, and I know that she made Art in this country possible because we will feel the lack of her drive and her determination immediately. When I first worked in theatre it was in the administration of a wonderful place by the name of The Empty Space, a legendary spot in Seattle that did what all good theatres do: tottered on the brink of extinction while producing work to make the gods weep. Partly because I was young and drank a lot the years at the Space were among the most joyous of my life. I took tickets, I swept floors, I ran the box office and then I did something truly stupid, I decided to cross the divide and become an artist, first as a dialect coach then as an actor and finally as a playwright. In all those years the rock upon which the Space survived was Melissa Hines who was the Development Director or, as I like to think of that position, beggar-in-chief. No one could write a grant the way Melissa could; no one thought so deeply about the reason theatre mattered to a community; no one made a potential patron understand why his or her donation mattered the way Melissa did.

She was much more than a grant writer and an intellectual presence. She baked cookies for the crew on all-nighters as opening approached, she hammered scenery, she swept the lobby, she changed light bulbs that were blown, she was always the last to leave and the first there. While I was faceless in the bar across the street (oh, the Comet, how I loved you) Melissa was tapping away at the very first of what were then known as word processors, the Selectric reserved for fancy letters, not quite obsolete but headed the way of the fountain pen. I rarely saw her flustered, almost never heard an angry word from her. This may have had something to do with her drinking prodigious amounts of coffee. I mean chain drinking coffee. When it was discovered that the Empty Space spent more money on coffee than on new play development I remember thinking, well, that’s Melissa dealt with but what is everyone else drinking? I do remember once when she finally demanded that her vast array of responsibilities be acknowledged in some way. Theatre has a simple way of rewarding people: there is never any money and so a new title has to be invented. This explains the vast number of associate thises and assistant thats. The managing director of the theatre, a great friend, couldn’t believe that even Melissa Hines was complaining, surely this was the end of civilization as we knew it? I suggested that Melissa be given the title, “Melissa Hines: Genghis Khan, Ruler of the Mongol Hordes”. He put this to Melissa, she laughed and left it at that. There was, though, more than a touch of respect in my suggestion because no one I knew then or have known since has ever done as much for the likes of me as Melissa Hines. My various jobs in theatre were subsidized by the money she raised, various buildings in which I worked were rebuilt and paid for by patrons persuaded to give by her dedication and relentlessness. She eventually took over the management of the Space and, in spaces around Seattle, the theatre continued to produce very fine work and I was lucky enough to be in a couple of productions under her leadership. There were still cookies being baked, Melissa still wielded a broom on occasion despite her having the title she had wanted and fully deserved. In her spare time (ha!) she translated and adapted Moliere and saw her work produced. Now, like the Empty Space Theatre, she is gone and our world is smaller and darker and more pedestrian than it was. I shall raise a glass in the Comet Tavern when next I am in Seattle and remember that once that glass was filled with beer partly paid for by Melissa Hines.