The mother Earth Cafe was written in 2000 and was my second serious effort to write a play specifically for theater. The inspiration came from some moving back and forth between Wisconsin and New York. Why was I going back and forth between Wisconsin and New York? Well, I seem inexorably tied to both but satisfactorily to neither. That’s pretty writerish.

The story has to do with a romance I ran into while staying in Vashon Island in the Puget sound near Seattle Washington. I was enjoying this day. It was at a youth hostel and for the most part, I was camping there. But there were a lot of people. I had internet access. There were one or two nice girls hanging around and I was working some kind of building job during the day. It was actually kind of cool needing to take a ferry to and from my spot every morning. I don’t think I could ever have afforded living out there but I quite enjoyed it. And, the road around the island is a fantastic bike ride.

Well, there she was. I can’t really say that our initial meeting, which was back in Oregon at the beginning of my amazing journey, was really that. I don’t remember that we spent a lot of time together. In fact, I think it had more to do with her liking me but me not particularly being moved by her problem. I’m not saying this correctly. She was on a hippie trip and she was using a hippie manner of travel to try and get home. There was one guy who was taking care of two women. But one I think was his personal girlfriend and the other was my girl. I think she picked me but I never got the idea that I was truly being picked. So, there was a moment or two which happens when a girl really wants a guy to pay attention to her and then she left and I went back to being me. That is actually how it goes if you don’t really worry too much about emotional involvement. Or if you’re incapable of it. Always a thought.

Nowadays it’s called emotional investment. Keep that in mind.

But here we are several years later and she is showing up on Vashon Island with a friend of hers. She’s on another sojourn, this time a little bit more realistic because they had a car and suddenly, she was standing in front of me.

It’s me, she said.

It’s you.

She said her name. And then she just stared at me. And I stared at her. It took a moment for the wheels to get turning. We didn’t get very far. I asked her if she could go a little deeper. She told me it was Eugene Oregon and she said her name again. Now it was a little bit more specific. The wheels were turning and suddenly there was a tunnel forming in front of me. I slid down it like a water slide and suddenly found myself talking to this girl while she sat on the hood of a car and sharing an emotional moment.

Oh my God! It’s you. It was her. I remembered.

It would take way too long to go through all of the many details of the relationship. Needless to say, we shared my tent and then of course she left the next day. That’s the way these things go. A little while later, my fortunes changed for the worse And I put in a call to my friend from Eugene and ask her if she wanted a guest. Was I moved by my love for her or was I moved by my change of fortune? Was it just something to do in a rather empty life? That could be true. But then again, it would be true for both of us.

I could spend 20 pages talking about the ride I took and the girl I took it with to get there. We could probably make a movie that would be pretty much par for the course for Hollywood. I don’t need to go there at all. All I know is I showed up it her apartment and that apartment became our apartment very quickly.

Okay, this is a much younger version of me. I’m on a bicycle now. I’ve been to New York and I’ve been across the United States on a bike. I’m not really so fat anymore. In fact, I’m kind of hard as nails. It means something. To be In my mid ’30s, unmarried and either working construction jobs or riding bicycles, I was hard. I’m only saying this because this relationship was a deeply emotional sexual escapade. I could spend more pages writing about this. I could write up a whole book about writing this darn play. Instead I wrote the play.

The plate itself was actually written back in New York. I had some time because I got hit by a bus while riding my bike and it tweaked my leg pretty badly. I wasn’t riding and I was living with a friend in Gramercy. He was a vegan by the way, one of the first serious-minded vegans I ever met. Looking back, I recognize his clarity and bravitas. I myself wanted to go for it but I just couldn’t get over my burger and hot dog addiction. I just couldn’t get it out of my head that I didn’t need to eat the meat. It probably would have changed my life drastically if I had been serious about it. Nevertheless, I was trying to help out a vegan newsletter, living with my friend and drinking coffee at cafes and writing on my very first computer. An IBM something running Windows 97 and I was typing away.

The actual life story was just that we were too bombastic to be to each other what we needed the other to be. Or, if I didn’t say that right, we had no particular ability to communicate honestly with each other outside of bed. We had this sexual currency going on. I was rich in that department. But we didn’t have a lot of money and I really didn’t even have a job in Wisconsin. I couldn’t even get a job in Wisconsin. I mean, I do look Jewish and I was too hard to push around. There is no way to get a job in the Christian Bible belt and I can attest to that personally.

So he said, she said, one war after another. All the emotional roller coaster riding you could possibly want and then in one moment, I walked out of an argument and got on a Greyhound bus with my bike. By the time my girlfriend thought to ask me where I was, we had mobile phones by then, I had to tell her that I was already in New York. If she wanted to come out, she could. I had all the work I needed in New York. If she could see fit from leaving Wisconsin, we could give it a try. She never even showed up. And after this, we stopped talking.

But that was the inspiration for this play. It’s a story about a young couple trying to come to grips with an uncertain future. The girl works at the absolute end degree of vegan cleanliness and political thinking possible. A lesbian establishment run with the fierceness of a Midwest tornado. Heather runs the place, Alex is her woe begone table wiper and April is the beautiful but somewhat confused girl who is about ready to leave to go to school. Leaving for school however is not going to be with Ben, her bike champion boyfriend who cannot for the life of him understand why they cannot stay together.

Into this mix for reasons I made myself never understand, Henry Miller, Anais Ninn and Henry’s wife June Mansfield come by for a cup of coffee and something good to eat. I don’t want to give away everything about this play but yes, this is Henry Miller from probably 1928 and he is, I at least hope that the time, who he was supposed to be. The music of the play is played by a single guitar player named Joe.

Arguments ensue. Sexual freedoms? The limitations of marriage? The limitations of individual relationships? The monetary system? The cleanliness of our food? The cleanliness of our rhetoric and ability to speak to each other? All of these arguments run through the course of the play. I’m not sure if I couldn’t cut even 30% of it out if I wanted to but I’m not going to. There’s a good reason why not. It’s actually pretty funny.

Okay, I will be fair. It’s not funny all the way through. Some of the rhetoric and argument is pretty serious and hopefully thought-provoking. The only reason it would be dated might be because of people’s access to media and how much Christian conservative anti-semitism we are forced to swallow every day. There is a methanthropic evil to the ruling political parties and blood-soaked pavement is everywhere and people seem to think this is normal. Bad training.

But if its time was from a much more open and friendly place in history, I was at least physically content with my life in New York. In fact, had this girl actually showed up, maybe things would have been different. This is moot. Moot means arguable and that’s in the play too. It is a moot point not because it goes against the actual history but because they stole some airplanes and knocked down the World trade Center and destroyed New York and my bicycle business with it. Forgive me if I’m not paranoid but nevertheless take things very personally. Even if we stayed there, we probably would not have stayed in New York.

So if you are ready for lesbian political correctness, here is a play for you. If you’re ready for some serious arguments about individual rights and freedoms and how we should be allowed to express ourselves, this is the place. If you like some tight wit and clever writing, This is it.

I did a clean up edit and I laughed a lot, I did not really manhandle the original text. I just changed the form to something that looks more like a script should look. At the time I was in love with ellipses, those three dots at the end of sentences, I had a hard time discerning between then and than and I was in love with Russian versions of commas. I don’t think I was trying to speak Russian but 99% of the cleanup was just changing the grammatical marks in the form. I think I might have changed one or two words but everything you see is what is there.

If I have anything else I want to say about this play it is that I put it away almost from the moment I finished it and didn’t look at it again. Maybe it had something to do with my disbelief of getting anyone to pay attention to it in New York. When I was in Vancouver, I had access to lots of artsy friends. I had a really hard time connecting in New York. It’s too big. It’s too many people and I just wanted to ride my bike or fix bikes and not much else. And I don’t know why but I always thought that it was trash. That was exactly up until right now. I just read it from cover to cover while doing the touch-up edits and I think the writing is actually pretty good. It is long-winded but it’s crisp. And other than those small mistakes I mentioned, not only was it intelligent writing but it’s the same ideology and worldview that I have now. All of the things I believe about living in the world well are right there and this is exactly what I write about 20 years later.

If you’d like to have a look at the mother Earth Cafe, send me an email and I’m sure we could talk about it. I’m really big on talking to people. I’m not really so fond of the automatic world and I don’t feel like throwing this out into the public eye without at least having a conversation with the people who want to read it or play it or something. Or money, right? The war’s got to end sometime, right?