5 minute read
CALIFORNIA DREAMING
Doc Heide, Artistic Advisor & Co-Founder
These lyrics from a folk song in the 1983 Heritage Ensemble show Badger 49ers capture the thrill generations of Americans have felt seeking their fortunes in the Golden State. At the end of a summer performing in that show at Peninsula State Park, I joined their ranks.
I was launching a new career, teaching clinical grad students at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though I left that job last spring and moved home permanently to Wisconsin, what we now call Northern Sky Theater is still being significantly shaped by the Land of the Setting Sun.
By 1983 I’d been in the Ensemble for a decade, having joined during college at UW-Green Bay and returning here most summers from my Pennsylvania doctoral program to perform in it. In fact, I loved it so much that I negotiated with CSPP to let me leave a month early each spring so I could drive home to rehearsals.
The CSPP job was ¾ time, which proved fortuitous when Ensemble founder Dave Peterson asked me to write yearly shows starting in 1984. Working part-time allowed travel for show research to Wisconsin, Colorado, New England, Ireland, Belgium, and Scandinavia, as well as to conduct New York City auditions. California itself held riches such as the John Muir National Historic Site, useful in creating The Mountains Call My Name.
By the end of the 1980’s, Ensemble member Fred Alley moved to Berkeley to produce a CD of my original songs, which became Lessons I Learned from the Moon. He found a job selling stereos at a funky Telegraph Avenue store and soon befriended a recent arrival from New Jersey, Jimmy Kaplan. Fred and Jimmy’s first shows were written in California (e.g., this year’s Tongue ‘n Cheek, chockful of Wisconsin sayings and folksongs despite its West Coast birthplace). Many of their projects became icons for our newly founded American Folklore Theatre (AFT), including Lumberjacks in Love and Guys on Ice. And Jimmy’s sister-inlaw Claudia Russell (a Bay Area resident), became a valued contributor to our troupe.
Fred lived on and off for several years in the Bay Area, at one point crashing 6 weeks on the floor of my basement apartment. One night shortly before Christmas 1992, we watched a video of Oliver Stone’s The Doors. I was moved by how their lead singer Jim Morrison, for all his failings, at least followed his artistic dream (in contrast to my self-induced pressure to be an academic psychologist). Talking this over with Fred, he suggested writing a journal. I did. The logjam in my brain began to break up.
Then one morning that spring, Fred got frustrated because I was on a period of vocal rest and had to communicate by writing. While running in the Berkeley Hills, I had the quirky thought, “What if Fred and I had been reincarnated through eternity to resolve our conflicts together?” I came home and wrote the synopsis for Belgians in Heaven, eventually asking Jimmy to contribute music to that and other shows. A few months later, resting against a regal 2000-year-old tree in Sequoia National Park, the show’s opening scene unfolded in my mind.
Soon I’d also be collaborating with Lee Becker, whom Fred had hired to perform Mildred the Chicken in Belgians. To finance Lee’s trips to California to work on Packer Fans from Outer Space, we began teaching my psychology students improvisational acting skills we’d learned at AFT from Second City’s founding director Paul Sills. (At first, we had no idea why this was relevant to clinical psychology, but eventually realized that improv promoted everything from charismatic communication to mindfulness).
For the next 20+ years, Lee flew out to the Bay Area every spring for a week or two to work on our latest project. Our writing procedure was to stroll the towering bluffs of Point Reyes National Seashore or sit on a bench deep in Redwood National Park, inviting Nature to be our muse. We’d continue work over a dinner of hot Thai curry or sag paneer, then return to my Berkeley apartment to watch a video while the sun sank behind the Golden Gate Bridge.
The last time I saw Fred was in the spring of 2001. We’d gone to St. Orres, a resort he loved north of San Francisco, to work on a show to be titled Big Fat Liars. Fred passed away a few weeks later after returning to Wisconsin, and I transformed material from that unfinished show into Bob Dumkee’s Farm with help from Lee and Amy Chaffee (another Wisconsinite who found her footing in California). To this day California continues to contribute writers to our team who’ve generated shows such as When Butter Churns to Gold, Oklahoma in Wisconsin, and the forthcoming Love Stings.
As you see, California was the launchpad for much of our work. The gold we found wasn’t on the banks of the Sacramento River, but in the dizzying freedom to create, the inspiration from impossibly tall trees, the sense that anything was possible.
Long a refuge for dreamers and rapscallions, California opened its arms wide to our inchoate longings to be artists. Would we have written these shows in some other state? Perhaps. But it wouldn’t have been as half as much fun.
DOC HEIDE
Artistic Advisor / Co-Founder / Playwright
Doc, who’s been on the Peninsula stage since 1973, is co-author of 20 musicals including Belgians in Heaven, Packer Fans from Outer Space, and Guys & Does. He retired from fulltime teaching last spring at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco and now lives in Door County. This year he’s been supervising doctoral theses, publishing research, writing songs, and forgetting the lyrics of songs he previously wrote. He also presented online courses on mindfulness and self-compassion through Northern Sky and was the final performer (with his wife Jody) in our virtual Winter Season.
