That Would Be Me (dot net)

It didn’t take the movie The Italian Job for me start coveting a Mini Cooper. The first time I saw one, I decided it would be my very next car. I was then driving a black 1988 Nissan Sentra, a wholly practical, dependable, sensible, staid box of a car. I loved my Sentra, who I named Sebastian, but had ridden him hard and long for almost 20 years with only spotty maintenance and care. It is a miracle (and testament to Nipponese technology) that the poor thing had lasted as long as it did, but it had gotten to the point where everything was bent, corroded or falling off. I held up the driver’s seat with a big plastic crate in the back seat. Really. Without the crate, I would have had to drive in the luge position.

Once I became aware of them, I started noticing Minis everywhere. It was funky, odd, more in keeping with how I was beginning to see myself. I set my sights on a red Mini and began to save. Then I saw a review of the new convertible which said, “they’re so cute you want to pinch the fender.” I went onto the Mini web site and “built” my own, personal car - convertible, bright orange (a new color for them, then, even more funky then the red I’d planned on), with white wheels and bonnet stripes and lots of internal customization.

Of course I’d never been in a convertible, much less driven one, and didn’t want to spend all that money and decide a month later that I hated the thing. I found a car rental place that had one on it’s lot. It was even the same color I wanted, bright orange. No bonnet stripes, but that was completely beside the point. I rented it for a week. Two minutes off the lot, I knew I had to have that car.

Sebastian was well past the need for retirement and I finally had the money, so I had a friend drive me down to the Mini dealership. They had one on the lot that was very close to exactly what I wanted. The rag top color was wrong and it had a few extras I wasn’t interested in, but it was the end of the month and they wanted to get their stats up so I was able to negotiate them down to a very nice price, insisted they make a couple of modifications and wrote a check for the down payment.

A week later another friend drove me back to the dealership. There, in the showroom, was my car. Bright orange with a black top, white bonnet stripes, white wheels and white mirror covers. It was delightful. The salesmen were standing around it admiring the white mirror caps saying I wasn’t crazy after all. I walked around it, got the “new owner” talk, named it Nigel, put the top down and happily drove it away. The only time after that that the top is up is when it’s raining, freezing or the car is parked.

A year later I took a cross-country trip in Nigel. On the way back, I stopped in St. George, Utah, a fair sized town on the far western end of Utah’s stretch of Highway 70. I was sitting in the car writing down the mileage in my little notebook, but the door was open. A thin, older fellow in worn jeans and a dim white tee shirt looked over my way and said, “What the hell is that?” “A Mini Cooper,” I informed him. He shook his head and said, “I’d rather be shot dead than be seen in something like that.” He was smiling, but I didn’t believe it.

What an extreme reaction, I thought, and considered asking if he wanted a test drive. “It’s a cool car,” I said, completely unruffled, returning his smile. He looked in and studied the dash board. He seemed fascinated and slightly repulsed, like just looking might somehow make his feminine side bubble to the surface. “Does it really go 150 miles an hour?” he asked after seeing the speedometer. I let him know that it did indeed, that they raced them in England where they were made. He shook his head and said, “It’s just wrong, somehow,” and walked away. He had the same crooked smile the whole time, as if to say, “I really don’t like your kind, but this is a bright, public place and I can’t get away with stomping you.”

What a hoot. If I hadn’t already loved my little car I did then. It makes small minded people uncomfortable. It would really be poetic if I then sang sixties folk songs for the next twenty miles. I didn’t, of course, but my heart cockles were warm.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

It would probably come as no surprise to anyone who knew me that I’m a college graduate; I’m fairly well spoken, fairly well read, use multi-syllabic words and have a subtle air of pretension that precedes me into any room. It may come as a surprise, however, to know that not once in the thirty years (!) since I graduated has it made any difference that I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree. In fact, no potential employer, potential business partner, potential casting director, potential arresting officer or potential date has ever even asked if I even attended college. It was all, it seems, entirely solipsistic. (Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll try to behave. Solipsism is a theory that the self is the only reality, so a solipsistic experience is one that only matters to the person who experienced it. But you knew that. And it doesn’t matter.)

This is not about that, however. It’s about my experience getting my degree at a small, private, liberal arts Catholic girls’ school. Okay, so it was no longer a girls’ school when I attended, they had started letting boys in a few years before. They also closed down a few years after I graduated. They’d been having financial trouble for years, a circumstance that I assume contributed to both milestones.

Fort Wright College was run by the Sisters of the Holy Names and was housed on what at one time had been the base and barracks of the famous Indian killer, Colonel George Wright, on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. I first became aware of it the summer out of high school while performing a very small role in a play at a local civic theater in Spokane called Spokane Civic Theatre. The two leads in the play were the couple who ran the drama department at the Fort and I fell instantly enamored of them. They seemed to know things about acting and theater in general that I had never imagined.

I applied, and with government grants, work study and a job at the campus cafeteria in hand, entered academia. The school was very progressive; most classes were “pass/no pass” with evaluative comments that went on your permanent record. You could request actual grades, of course, at the beginning of each term, which most of the math and science students did and few of the art, music or drama students did. The Sisters of the Holy Names were a fairly liberal order, few of them wore habits, those that did either very old or very Korean. In fact my English professor, Sister Jean Concannon, often said she feared sounding too “nunny”. She needn’t have worried, of course. She taught Dylan, both Thomas and Bob, and Joyce, both James and Carol Oates, who have all been accused of everything from sensualism to obscenity. One professor, who taught math, had been kicked out of several African countries for agitating. I liked it there.

There was a subtle tension between the nuns and the lay faculty (I wonder if they’re called that because they’re allowed to get laid. I digress) and all but one teacher in the drama department was lay, so it was natural that there was tension between our department and the rest of the school. (That one non-lay teacher moved to the English department after only a year with us, poor thing.) The year before I got there, they were preparing to mount a production of The Marat/Sade, a play in which, among many other questionable activities, the inmates of an insane asylum attack and rape a bunch of nuns. The college didn’t demand they not do the play, but made their life so miserable they closed down the production and instead did the “happy and likable” James Thurber comedy, The Male Animal. The nuns were quite pleased, saying that it was a grand show and exactly what should be being done. They entirely missed, it seems, the theme of the play, which was a plea for academic freedom and against censorship.

I was one of perhaps three people in the drama department, students and teachers alike, who didn’t smoke. I was one of very few students who didn’t also smoke pot, drop acid and sleep around. (It was, after all, the Seventies.) I was the only one, as far as I can tell, who didn’t drink. I was naive. (Least you think me unnecessarily pure, I assure you I made up for lost time in the Eighties.) Even so, my four years at the Fort were a happy blur. I fell tragically in love with one of my roommates, a big, burly straight man who always smelled slightly of marijuana, spent hours upon hours every day in the ramshackle theater building that always smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke, successfully straddled the divide between “us” and “them”, making lasting friendships in and out of the department, acted in four or five plays a year, started classes most days at ten and finished rehearsal most days at midnight, learned so much about so much and graduated never having had to write a single term paper.

I say I’m a college graduate, but I barely remember our actual graduation. It was in the Commons building, I remember, where the cafeteria was, one of the very few “new” buildings on campus. I also remember one of my classmates, that same burly roommate, getting angry upon hearing someone say “now we enter the real world.” “No,” he insisted. “This is the real world. This is as much the real world as any place you will ever find.” I also remember the party afterwards, at the house of Chris and Heather Welch, a couple who had actually been married, where we all helped to prepare and bake a huge tray of “Nachos Especial”, everyone ate and everyone else drank and we never thought to say good bye to the Fort.

In the thirty (!) years since then I’ve moved to Los Angeles, owned several businesses, had several careers, grown slightly less neurotic, loved and lost, written and published, loved and gained, made up for lost time and, now, on an almost daily basis, get email come-ons to get my degree on-line. I would consider it, of course, but no one would care.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

As a young boy in the remote New Jersey town called Flatbrookville, I hated peas, those grey-green orbs piled on my dinner plate threatening to roll over into the mashed potatoes (a favorite) and pollute Grandma’s wonderful pot roast.  They smushed on my tongue into a slimy mess that tasted unnatural with an undercurrent of vaguely chemical sweetness.  And heaven defend us when they appeared surreptitiously in an otherwise wonderful beef stew, nestling among the carrots.

I was not a picky eater.  Both my mother and grandmother were wonderful cooks and I liked almost everything they made, except fish (more to do with small bones than flavor), Brussel sprouts (everything wrong with a cabbage, condensed) and, of course, peas.  I ate everything put before me, I was, generally, a well behaved child.  I have fond memories of most meals: pasta with summer sauce, home-made ravioli stuffed with spinach and cheese or luscious Italian sausage filling, corned beef, venison, al olio, pasta con pesto.  The simple mention of these staples make me salivate.

But occasionally my dinner plate was offended by peas.

One morning when I was, perhaps, eight or nine, I “lost” my breakfast and had to stay home from school.  My mother had planed at day trip to visit our Aunt Lou, a two hour drive in each direction.  The other kids were in school and Grandma had the business to run, so I went along for the visit.  Shortly after we got there, it became obvious that I didn’t have a typical flu and Aunt Lou insisted we visit her doctor.

It was acute, gangrenous appendicitis.  I was rushed to the hospital and prepped for emergency surgery.  I was told that my appendix actually burst in the doctor’s hand as he removed it.  I’d been twenty minutes away from major complications or even death.  But I was kid from a large Italian family and all I knew was that I was getting individual attention from doctors, nurses, and even my mother and Aunt Lou.  It all seemed a fair trade.  

A day or so later I was lying in bed, one vestigial organ lighter, when the doctors started me back up on solid food.  The vegetable in my first dinner was peas.  But they were unlike any pea I had ever encountered.  They were bright green, almost shiny, a pat of butter was melting on top of the small pile, its edges taking on the contours of these tiny marvels.  I tasted one.  No smush!  No slime.  It actually popped when I bit down on it.  And the sweetness.  The wonderful sweetness.  I pondered this for some time, then finally asked my mother.

“Well, they were probably frozen,” she said.

Frozen.  We didn’t get frozen vegetables at home.  We either got fresh (corn or green beans from a neighbor’s garden) or canned.  It was a different time.  Even my Italian grandmother used canned vegetables.

I haven’t allowed canned vegetables in my house since I moved out on my own.  And peas are still my favorite meal-time treat.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I think the whole “six degrees of separation” theory is based on faulty science, but has become so ingrained in the American Zeitgeist that anyone daring to disbelieve it is at best considered an idiot and at worst labeled a heretic.

That being said, I recently had a series of “small world” experiences.

I decided to join the social netorking site MySpace, in part to promote our book, and in part to see what all the hoo ha was about.  Not knowing quite how to build a circle of friends, which you need to survive on a social networking site, I’m told, I did a search for gay men in Los Angeles that were around my own age. I looked at their profiles one by one and those that seemed interesting I sent friend’s requests to. After the initial contact, I corresponded with very few of them. So much for social networking.

One, Peter, had been in my friend’s list for quite some time when he posted a bulletin regarding a blog in which he had linked a video discussing a conspiracy about possible government involvement in 9/11. In his blog, he was skeptical but intrigued by the notion. I sent him an email with my thoughts on the matter - there was a loud rumor that Roosevelt knew ahead of time that the Japanese were headed for Pearl Harbor but did nothing so he could have an excuse to enter World War Two. If we can believe that, why couldn’t we believe that at least someone in the government may have known about the imminent attack and not only did nothing but prevented others from doing anything in order to start, say, a war over oil - and he wrote back.

We started a delightful correspondence having little to do with politics. We talked about pop culture, travel, our lives thus far. And we made each other giggle. At least he made me giggle.

Shortly before this, my writing partner Steve and I went to a marketing seminar where we met (among other people) a movie director named Marc Rosenbush, who had made an independent movie called Zen Noir. I talked with him, picking his brain about movie making. (I’m picking the brain of anyone I can about movie making these days.) When he put up a MySpace page for his movie, added that to my friends.

One of the Zen Noir page’s friends was a strange fellow called The Alien. He was so weird, surreal and wonderful, I had to have him join me and invited him to be my friend.

Back to Peter. One afternoon, feeling I knew him well enough, now, to ask personal questions (we still hadn’t really met, mind you) I asked him if he had a boyfriend. He said he did, and that his boyfriend was one of my friends, The Alien, whose real name was Jon Harris and who was one of the actors in Zen Noir.

Well. I’m not done, yet.

Peter, Jon and I decided we should actually meet at some point, so I joined them for lunch at a charming little café in West Hollywood. During lunch our conversation was so easy and our sense of conection so strong, we all decided that we must have known each other through several incarnations. We were talking about our travels and lives and Jon told a story about when he lived in Seattle. He directed a play there and in it was this wonderful actress who made him laugh. Her name was Therese Diekhans. Well, I dropped my teeth (which is fairly amazing considering they’re all originals). I went to college with a wonderful actress named Therese Diekhans! We were both founding members of the original Interplayers Ensemble in Spokane, Washington. (Really. I still have letterhead.) Jon went outside for a moment and when he came back, he handed me his cell phone and said, “It’s for you.” It was Therese! We chatted briefly, caught up and have kept in touch since.

I now have two wonderful new friends who came at me from entirely different directions and have been reacquainted with an old friend who I cherish!

Small world.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

There is a dentist who has an office just under ours in the building where we have our office. He has a late model BMW. Not even a particularly nice late model BMW. Whenever he drives it to work, he spends several minutes putting a custom fitted cloth covering over it. The covering has snug little mittens for the side-view mirrors and a little plastic window for the licence plate. I wonder. Does the cost of this cover and the time it takes to put on and take off every day really make up for not having to take the silly car to the car wash every few weeks?

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“

I recently moved from a little guest house that I’d been living in for fifteen years to a two bedroom house with a great, rustic, overgrown back yard complete with brick patio covered with wood trellising, a quaint seventies type rock fountain and a kidney shaped pool. Just to the side of the patio is a raised area that could be used as a garden and on the other side is a tiny little pond. The pond had originally been built with a small wooden foot bridge over it. Very quaint.

For some odd reason, the previous tenant decided to fill both the raised garden and the pond with sand and had removed the foot bridge from the pond. The landlady said she’d wanted to make the place look like Tahiti. I thought it just made it look silly, so I made an agreement with the landlady that I’d remove the sand and refill the pond with water if she had the foot bridge replaced.

Two weeks ago I finally got around to begin digging the sand out of the pond. Not sure what to do with the sand once it wasn’t in the pond, I figured I’d just put it in the black trash bin that the city provides for each house in Los Angeles. After a short while, I got tired and my back began to ache, so I gave up for the weekend. The trash bin was only about a quarter full of sand. I get tired very quickly these days, it seems. I guess I am fifty-one after all. I wheeled the bin out front for trash collection day and all was well with the world.

This week, I decided it might be best to just hire a day worker to dig the rest of the sand out. I brought the trash bin out back and in very short order the young fellow had filled it to the brim. I helped him drag it out front for collection day and got out big lawn bags for the rest of the sand. He filled about five or six of them, smartly about a quarter full each so they could be picked up with out bursting. I told him to leave those in the back and I’d decide what to do with them later. He was done with the entire task in about an hour and a half. Clearly, he is younger then I.

While dragging the trash bin out front, I thought it may be way too full and therefor way too heavy. I had a vision of the big forked arm that lifts the trash bins up to empty into the top of the garbage trucks straining, and possibly even breaking, from the weight and strain of it. I considered calling the trash department and telling them there was a bin full of sand and getting their recommendations on disposing of it. I also considered taking some of the sand out so it wouldn’t be too heavy. I didn’t do any of these things.

Driving home from the office last Friday sometime after eight p.m. I wondered what I would encounter. Pulling up to my driveway, what I encountered was the black trash bin tipped on it’s side, sand pouring out of it, one wheel broken off and the lid snapped off and laying in the street. I tried to lift the bin up so I could at least drag it from the curb, but it was way too heavy. I briefly considered just leaving it there and going in to get a stiff drink. Of course, it was kind of hanging over into my neighbor’s driveway, so I couldn’t do that. I thought about just shoveling the sand onto the parking strip so I could lift the bin, but then what would I do with the sand. Again, the whole neighbor thing. I’m new in the neighborhood and want to reveal myself more subtly than that.

Finally, I called my writing partner Steve, who came over and helped me scoop sand out into more lawn bags until the bin was light enough to lift to an upright position and drag up my driveway. (Good old Steve.) We also scooped and swept most of the sand from the parking strip and my neighbor’s driveway. I wonder if they or any of the other neighbors were watching all this. I wonder if they were amused.

Now I have five or so garden trash bags full of sand in the back yard, perhaps ten bags full of sand at the side of my driveway, a broken, city supplied trash bin still a quarter filled with sand at the side of my driveway and I haven’t even begun to remove the sand from the little garden area in back.

And the pond still isn’t a pond. I haven’t put any water in it, yet, because the bottom of it is cracked.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“

Christopher Fry’s delightful verse play, The Lady’s Not For Burning, opens with young, pretty Alison Elliot, having recently been let out of the convent to marry, entering the town hall sun blind. “I am all out at the eyes,” she says. “I have a winter blindness.” Richard, the clerk, sees her, is instantly smitten and lets go with a string of “God, God, God” or some such exclamation of shock. Allison, who was told no one would be there, cries, “Oh! They told me no one would be here.”

“That would be me they meant,” Richard replies.

My first encounter with this play was as a very young man. My mother had a recording of the Broadway production starring John Gielgud (pre knighthood) and Pamela Brown. An actual album of five or six records consisting of the entire play, along with a copy of the script. I listened to it raptly more often than one may suspect a toddler would want to. It probably goes a long way to explain my love of all things theatre and especially all things Shakespearean theatre. (Yes, I spell “theatre” with an “re”. I am pretentious and gay. Join with me or move on, I say.)

Several years later, I wrote for, then joined the cast of, then became director of a long-running scripted cabaret show called Tony Mack’s Swingin’ LA (not the least Shakespearean, I’m afraid) about several Gumbas trying desperately to become the Rat Pack and failing miserably. There were torch singers, a swing band, variety acts. It was all very grand. The fellow who was playing the Dean Martin wannabe was married to the very beautiful, sexy lady who played the silent but buxom show girl. Once, during a rehearsal, someone farted. (If I really were pretentious, I would say “passed gas” but farted is so much more earthy, don’t you think?) The lady playing the show girl thought it had been her husband and, in order to humiliate him in front of friends and family, said, “Who let one?”

I looked over at her and said, “That would be me.”

I had, actually, let loose. I have no problem admitting my sins, but wouldn’t normally have done so at that particular moment, but I saw why she had asked the question and wanted to spare the poor sap some grief. In fact, the show girl, not the husband, became very embarrassed, and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Really. I thought it was Johnny! Sorry!” It was a proud moment.

Ever since then, my writing partner, Steve Mancini, reminds me of the incident by randomly looking over at me and blandly saying, “That would be me.”

Welcome to my blog.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“

And what the hell is a continental breakfast? Where did it come from? Which continent? It sounds vaguely European, but somehow I doubt that they only serve Cherios, cornflakes, waffles, orange juice and coffee for breakfast in Brussels.

Yesterday at a rest stop, I climbed a steep hill (a triumph in itself) to look over into the rough cut valley of a Utah canyon. On the way up, I passed a small mound of sand in the rocky path that was swarming with red ants. Almost at the top of the hill there was a hole in the path that was swarming with large black ants. I predict a war in the near future.

Las night I actually sat in the Jacuzzi and swam in the indoor pool at the motel I was staying at. It was run by a handsome young Indian man (from India, not a Native American, who should be called Native Amercanian or something to avoid all the confusion. Or, perhaps, they should just be called “The People.” They were, after all, here first) and the pool area looked neat and clean. Shortly after I got there, a nice Morman family joined me. They may not really have been Morman, but when I asked the father where they were traveling to, he said, “We’re from Salt Lake City. We’re going to Moab,” so I assumed they were. The youngest son was the first into the Jacuzzi. I chatted with him for a moment, then went into the pool. He seemed to want to show off for me, diving and jumping and splashing and always looking sort of slyly my way to make sure I saw. Starved for attention? A budding actor? His older brother was much more reticent. Teenager, you see, and much too cool to care what some long haired stranger thought.

This morning, when I left my room to pack the car, there was a family of small lizards skittering around on the hot sidewalk outside my room. They were tan with a subtle striping and their tails were blue! Some just a dull blue-gray, some quite a bright, almost teal. They ran and jumped ahead of me, staying on the sidewalk, but seeming to want to get away from the large human with the suitcase pursuing them. When they ran by the door to the motel lobby, they jumped up against the door jam as if they knew somehow that it was sometimes open and they were able to get out of the heat that way. They did this to the door to my room, also. In fact twice, when I opened the door, one would get in. It wasn’t hard to get him out again, I simply stood by the corner he ran to (under the air conditioner both times) and he would run the other way and out. It was a different one each time, the first one was a little bigger and darker brown. I didn’t really mind them being in there, but thought if I left them there, they’d either stave to death or the next tenant in the room might be a skittish little girl and I didn’t want to be the indirect cause of any hysterical shrieking. I want my shrieking to be direct, by golly.

So far, besides the two heavy storms during the seminar, it has rained three times on this trip. Once going up the Rockies on the way east, once going up the Rockies on the way west and once in the middle of nowhere in the Utah desert. (Everywhere in the Utah desert, of course, is in the middle of nowhere, but this short, heavy storm was in the middle of that.) When the rain started in earnest in Utah, I took in the smell. For some reason I love the smell when rain first hits hot ground, an earthy smell, like dust. It seems both dry and wet.

Shortly after that last storm, I pulled into a View Area to put the top back down on the car and had a lovely conversation with a nice couple from somewhere back east who traveled around the country converting Thrifty Drug stores into CVS Drug stores. They were headed for a short stay in San Diego, then an extended one in Los Angeles. We chatted a while, I told them about the La Brea Tar Pits, which was near where they were staying, and told them about our book, Weeping Willow, and gave them a card. (I tell almost everyone I meet about our book, Weeping Willow, and give them a card. Have I told you about Weeping Willow? Would you like a card?) The woman seemed impressed and promised to look the site up. The husband seemed kindly aloof and smiled. I suspect he won’t be looking up our site.

This time through, Eastern Utah doesn’t seem quite so foreboding. It still feels alien, mind you, and empty of life, but I can more see how someone might actually like it. Someone weird. An antisocial loner. You’re not from Eastern Utah, are you?

Okay, I’ve been sitting at this rest stop long enough for one black leather clad motorcycle lad to come and go (how the hell can he wear black leather in this heat?) and another two motorcycles both doing double duty carrying quintessential biker dudes and their biker chicks to stop to stretch their legs. I should wrap this up, now, and finish it when I settle in tonight. I could slog through all the way to LA tonight, but I’d probably get in after midnight and what’s the point of that? One more day on the road should be a nice capper. And now I go. The road beckons. The land pulls me. The wild calls.

It’s seven o’clock, or there about. I’m at a Best Western somewhere off the highway near Lake Mead. Not sure how I got here, I pulled off to find a place to go pee and the road kept going and going. The sign had said “Gas, Food, Lodging” but hadn’t mentioned how far off the road said amenities were. The town I went through (once there was a town) was actually kind of nice. Green lawns and quaint houses. Horses. Cows. Trees. Didn’t seem like Nevada at all. I didn’t realize how hot I was until I got into the motel room and turned on the air. My skin instantly became soaked. I must have been perspiring the whole day, but it was so hot and dry, and windy with the top down, I didn’t notice it. I should have; I’ve been drinking a ton of water and barely needed to relieve myself.

I stopped in St. George, Utah, a fair sized town on the far western end of Utah’s stretch of Highway 70. I was sitting in my car writing down the milage in my little notebook, but the door was open. A thin older fellow in worn jeans and a dim white tee shirt looked over my way and said, “What the hell is that?” “A Mini Cooper,” I informed him. He shook his head and said, “I’d rather be shot dead than be seen in something like that.” He was smiling, but I didn’t believe it.

What an extreme reaction, I thought, and considered asking if he wanted a test drive. “It’s a cool car,” I said, completely unruffled, returning his smile. He looked in and studied the dash board. He seemed fascinated and slightly repulsed, like just looking might somehow make his feminine side bubble to the surface. “Does it really go 150 miles an hour?” he asked after seeing the speedometer. I let him know that it did indeed, that they raced them in England where they were made. He shook his head and said, “It’s just wrong, somehow,” and walked away. He had the same crooked smile the whole time, as if to say, “I really don’t like your kind, but this is a bright, public place and I can’t get away with stomping you.”

What a hoot. If I didn’t already love my little car I would now. It makes small minded people uncomfortable. It would really be poetic if I then sang for the next twenty miles. I didn’t, of course, but my heart cockles were warm.

I go, now, to wipe the sweat off my brow. And nose. And neck. And arms. And legs. Sheesh, I’m sweaty.

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Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

Second Day Back, Saturday, August 19, 2006

The seminar was wonderful, informative and powerful. I am a changed man. The very foundation of existence has shifted. Life as we know it on the planet will never be the same. The universe has shifted three degrees into the blue. God wept. Okay, enough of that, this is a travel journal, and, although the seminar was a journey, the signposts of that journey will have to show up on their own here, I won’t consciously try to insert them. I did meet some great people who I think will be around for a while. That would be nice.

The seminar ended Thursday afternoon and Thursday evening four of us went into downtown Minneapolis to see a play at the Guthrie Theater. The Guthrie is one of the premier theaters in America and I’ve always wanted to see something there, but it didn’t even dawn on me that it would be right down the street (so to speak) until a friend back in LA said, “You’re going to Minneapolis? That’s were the Guthrie is!” So. I mentioned this to one of the guys at the event and he said he’d get tickets. We got directions from the concierge and four of us set off on our adventure (with a side trip to a good sushi restaurant for a little raw fish and saki). The directions were wrong. Seems that they’ve built a new Guthrie Theater, that this is the first season at the new theater, this the first play there (The Great Gatsby) and that most people in Minneapolis were unaware of this. Everyone we stopped to ask gave us a different idea about just where the place was. We traveled all around downtown Minneapolis until we stopped by an odd fellow who looked slightly off, friendly buy possibly schizophrenic, possibly occasionally homeless. He very clearly knew right where the place was.

By the time we found it, parked and picked up our tickets, we were about fifteen or twenty minutes late for the opening curtain (a misnomer, of course, there is no curtain on a thrust stage and the Guthrie stage - old and new - is about as thrust-y as you can get) so we quietly found our seats. The theater was amazing, large but intimate if that makes any sense, a wonderful facility. I’d love to work there. The play was good, a few of the actors were “acting”, the guy playing Gatsby was very good, the guy who played the gas station owner was amazing. Daisy was cute and alluring, but I couldn’t imagine her as someone who three men would destroy their lives for. The sets were great. They used very little to suggest the setting but did it in a very effective way. It even included a simulated swimming pool where Gatsby floated around on a rubber raft. Very cool. In any case, the experience was what counted and the experience was grand. The building has one long arm jutting out of the fifth floor, a cantilever that hangs out over the river (which someone on the balcony at its end told me was the Mississippi and I have no reason to doubt him) that was a highlight of it.

Back to the hotel, drinks with several of the seminar participants (one of whom was a handsome straight man who had thought he had lost it because I hadn’t flirted with him. After that I made a point of flirting with him whenever I saw him. What fun - safe flirting - who’da thunk?) then bed. Left the next morning after lunch with two of my theater companions, then on the road.

In the movie The Secret, Jack Canfield talks about driving from Los Angeles to New York at night. You can see about a hundred feet in front of your car. And yet, only seeing this much, you can make it all the way. He’s using it as a metaphor for life - know your destination (your goal) then just take the next step, don’t worry about the next two, three or fifteen steps, they’ll take care of themselves. This, maybe, is why I like driving. I know where I’m going, know I can get there even with a detour or two, and all I have to worry about is what I can see right in front of me.

Okay, philosophy aside, the parking lot of the motel I stayed at last night was full of small beetles. (I almost spelled that “beatles” but that would have been wrong, wouldn’t it?) The room was clean, but I got the sense the beetles hadn’t stayed outside. (The beatles probably did, though, I never saw any of them.) The clock wasn’t plugged in, so I had to pull the little bed side table out to find the outlet and noticed part of the cord was stuck in this little plastic tray filled with something sticky, and in the something sticky were more beetles. (Ringo may have been there, I didn’t study it long enough to find out.)

I thought about being creeped out but decided if I want to get any sleep I’d just have to come to terms with my roommates. I asked them all pleasantly to leave me alone while I slept and left it at that. The only one I actually saw (besides the unfortunate few in the sticky tray) was walking along the edges of the floor in the bathroom in the morning while I was sitting there voiding and reading. He circumambulated the room a couple of times, then disappeared into some crevice or other. I only bring this up because, as I sit at this rest stop in the middle of Nebraska (the motel was in Iowa) a lady bug decided that the top edge of my computer was something needing exploration. She (he? Who knows the sex of a lady bug. There must be guy lady bugs. Do they, like the one in the bug cartoon, have issues about that?) made the journey several times, decided she’d (he’d?) gleaned all she could from it and flew off. Normally I would have shooed her away as soon as she landed. I don’t mind lady bugs, mind you, but the instinct is to shoo away anything not congruent and lady bugs are not congruent with the top edge of a laptop. After all the beetles last night, bugs not nearly as pleasant as this little orange and black dainty, I realized that, if I can sleep with them in my room, I can let one explore my laptop.

It has been cloudy since I left Minneapolis. It rained for about ten minutes late yesterday afternoon, but I was on the highway and it stopped before I was able to pull off and put the car top up. It wasn’t raining very hard and was actually kind of pleasant. The wind is blowing a bit, now, and I’m trying to decided if I want the top up on the next leg of the journey or not. I will decided after I start the car. Perhaps, if I remember, I’ll record which way I went. Perhaps not. Some things need to remain a mystery to preserve that sens of wonder in the reader, don’t you think?

Since there is no Internet connection at this rest stop (did you know all the rest stops in Iowa have wireless Internet? Very twenty-first century, I must say. I didn’t use it at any of them because you only got a small, finite amount of time before they started charging and it seemed, somehow, pointless) I will post this once I touch down this evening. Til then, the road beckons, the next hundred feet await.

I took the top down. So much for mystery and wonder. I’m at a motel in Brush, Colorado run by a young, blondish poor-white-trash woman and her poor-white-trash husband. She has two young poor-white-trash children and most of the night’s tenants are poor-white-trash. The main exception being the oriental family two doors down. (I leave it to you to decide about me.) My immediate neighbors are a thin, blond grandmother, her two small blond grandchildren and at least two rowdy and possibly drunk men who I haven’t yet seen. I did hear them arguing with each other about how to use the key card to open the door, with a lot of back and forth about the timing of the little green light and turning the handle and a large double “Whoop!” when, I assume, they got it right.

The Internet connection doesn’t reach to my corner room, so I’m sitting in the gazebo between the parking lot and the pool, my blowing coyly in the evening wind, typing furiously, trying to get this written and posted before my coy hair drives me nuts and I have to go inside, away from the wind.

Ah, travel. There’s a Chinese restaurant with a bar right past the pool. Perhaps I’ll have a small drink before retiring for the evening.

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Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

Second Day - Wednesday, August 10, 2006

Utah is in a different universe. And as you go further east (at least on the 70) it gets more and more alien. The western end has green and looks normal, but it starts to get strange very soon. I was told that, as you travel along the way, you go through every geological era. It’s beautiful, breathtaking, actually (how often will I use that word?) but off-putting. I can’t imagine living there. There is a stretch of the 70 highway where there are “no services” for over 100 miles. It’s no wonder. I can’t imagine any sort of people who would want to populate it enough for there to be services. When you cross the border to Colorado you are instantly transportede back into our universe, there is green and houses and people and horses. The only animals I saw in Utah were lizards.

Half way through Utah, I realized that a friend I haven’t seen lived somewhere in Colorado. I remembered the town Carbondale and looked at the map. It was only a few miles from the highway I was on. I had my little phone book with me. I called the last number I had for her and her husband. It was Michelle’s voice on the answering machine, but they weren’t home.

Just outside of Colorado, I stopped at a rest stop because the wind was so strong I had to put the top up on the convertible. Good thing I did, it started raining shortly after that and rained the rest of the day. Driving in the rain is a whole different experience. You can’t see as far ahead and the rhythm is different. I even think th e rhythm of my breathing changed a little. Slowed down or something. I could be wrong, perhaps I’m just trying to be poetic.

I called Michelle and Marvin again just inside of Colorado at Grant Junction. They were there, live in Paonia not Carbondale, they would love to see me and it would take me about two hours to get there from where I was. I had to go. They live in a small geodesic dome that they built as a “temporary” house while they built their big dome. They’d planned on being in the small one for a year. Well, Marvin’s job got exported to India, then he fell off the roof one winter and was in the hospital, so the big dome never got started. Until last May, seven years later. It’s pretty great, actually, very exciting. I took some video of it. (Yes, I finally started taking some short movies at rest stops, etc. Didn’t take me long to get off it…) I spent the night in their very funky home and visited.

Marvin’s network wouldn’t talk to my computer. Is it because I’m gay?

Third Day - Thursday, August 10, 2006

This morning, I got up and went into the big dome. The floor is still bare plywood, but most of the inner roof (ceiling?) is in place, as are the windows and a counter that will be the kitchen. Except for one corner that will be the bedroom, there are no inner walls, so it’s a huge open space. When I walked in, I felt dizzy. After a moment, it passed, but later Marvin insisted that the dome was on a vortex and that, when he was digging the basement, Michelle couldn’t stand in it because the energy was so strong she would almost faint. I’m not sure what to think of that, I’m one of those skeptic believers. I want to believe things like vortexes, even have some experience of things like that, but a big part of my mind says, “You were dizzy because you didn’t sleep well, silly.”

I had breakfast with Marvin and Michelle, then hit the road at about 10:30. While eating, they had the news on and it was full of reports of all the nonsense at the all the airports all over the country. Okay, yes, they captured a bunch of suspected terrorists. In England. Because the precautions being taken are working. So America responds with its normal, rational, considered reaction and goes nuts. I cannot convey how glad I am that Steve talked me into driving to my seminar. I was anyway, but now it seems more than propitious. Of course, I imagine certain people are ecstatic about the airport craziness. Divide and conquer, rule by fear.

I took the back highway from Paonia to Carbondale. Colorado is magnificent, beautiful, grand, green, immense, overwhelming. Driving down the twisty road listening to Beethoven’s Fifth is the only way to do it. Until Beethoven’s Sixth came on. Perfect. The fifth, so dramatic and grand, was the best way to see the mountains and the river by the road, the Crystal River. The sixth, the Pastorale, was then perfect for the lower end of the highway through the communities of local coal miners and hippy artists. The music ended just as I got to Carbondale and back on the main highway. Synchronicity, anyone? Of course, beautiful Colorado is also the state that voted in Proposition 2 all those years ago. Go figure.

I’m at a rest stop outside of Glenwood Springs. If I’m not too tired, I’ll write more this evening.

Fourth Day, Friday, August 11, 2006

Two nights with no Internet. Can I survive? The eastern end of Colorado is much more even, still beautiful, but it’s a gentler beauty. I’m now in Nebraska. I was told Nebraska would be boring. Flat and boring. Not true. Yes, it’s flat, but that makes it easier to drive, and it is lush and full green with lots of trees. The landscape is varied and very interesting. A lot of insects, though. I crossed the border at night and every time I passed a stand of trees I heard this arrhythmic whining buzz and clicking. After hearing it several times, I figured out it was some type of bug. Locusts? Who knows. I also kept colliding with bugs, and my windshield was a mess when I stopped. This morning when I cleaned the windshield off there were five dead bees and a wasp on the hood. Bees and wasps! I’m sitting at a beautiful rest stop with a thick lawn and tall shade trees with a stream running through it and the constant buzzing sound from the field behind me. And I’ve been bitten by at least six ants and a spider or two.

I think I’ve trained my bladder. As soon as I see a Rest Stop sign and decide to stop, it starts aching, as if it now has permission to get ready to void. Very odd. Useful, though, in a strange way.

I keep seeing signs for Buffalo Bill’s ranch, and there have been some highway-side attractions with tee-pees and covered wagons and it makes me wonder about the fortitude of people who traveled the same distance I’m traveling (in the other direction, of course) with their whole families and all their belongings and it took months and years. And there were no highways or rest stops. (Of course, if you think about it, the entire way was one big rest stop. When you have to relieve yourself just stop, go behind a tree and “rest”.

Last night the moon rose very late. It was completely dark and I saw this weird glowing orange dome on in the distance directly in front of me. I wondered what building would be lit like that. As I got closer, it got bigger and I realized it was the moon, huge, orange and distorted. When it broke the horizon, it looked like a glowing squashed pumpkin. It looked like that for about fifteen minutes until it was fully up in the sky.

I still don’t know why I love traveling so much. I was saddened that I would be going by myself and tried to think of a way to get a traveling companion, but I’m so glad I didn’t. Being alone on the highway is the point. I think. I’m trying to figure what it means to me. Maybe I shouldn’t try and just enjoy it. Today, I sang. For over an hour. To Simon and Garfunkle. It’s a good thing I am alone, probably.

I’m at a Best Western in Williams Iowa. Internet at last! (Oh, what a modern drone I am.) Iowa’s air is damp and dirty. I expected the damp, it’s high summer and this is the Midwest. But I didn’t expect the dirty part. During the day there was a faint brown hue to the horizon and as it turned to dusk, the air got damper and difficult to see through. Not like a smokey room, but dense and grey.

Nothing philosophical tonight. I stopped earlier than I expected and am just relaxing. I only have about a hundred and eighty miles to Minneapolis. I’m looking forward to the last leg of this part of the trip. I don’t know how many posts I’ll be able to do while the seminar is raging, but if the spirit and the opportunity present themselves simultaneously, I’ll write. If not, I’m sure there’ll be plenty on the road home, what with processing everything from the week and all.

Til then.
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Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.