Notes for "Proclamation 4311"

My notes are only a guide.  Sometimes I follow them in some detail.  More often, they are suggestive and as I write, I create.


"Proclamation 4311" is a 10- minute surrealistic piece about Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States.

Below are the Notes I took for My Weekend Fling writing of the play which was performed at Out of Ink 2013 (June 20-22, June 27-29) in Austin, TX.

1) The play must contain or involve a photograph -- which two or more characters interpret the meaning of differently.

2) One character speaks only in commercial lingo, using known tag-lines or slogans.

3) The play must contain a gunshot or a birth.

Famous Photos:
Clarence Hailey Long, 1949
This is C.H. Long, a 39-year-old foreman at the JA ranch in the Texas panhandle, a place described as “320,000 acres of nothing much.” Once a week, Long would ride into town for a store-bought shave and a milk shake. Maybe he’d take in a movie if a western was playing. He said things like, “If it weren’t for a good horse, a woman would be the sweetest thing in the world.” He rolled his own smokes. When the cowboy’s face and story appeared in LIFE in 1949, advertising exec Leo Burnett had an inspiration. The company Philip Morris, which had introduced Marlboro as a woman’s cigarette in 1924, was seeking a new image for the brand, and the Marlboro Man based on Long boosted Marlboro to the top of the worldwide cigarette market.

Strange Fruit - Lynching 1930

Galloping Horse 1878
Was there a moment midstride when horses had all hooves off the ground? Leland Stanford, the railroad baron and future university founder, bet there was—or at least that’s the story. It was 1872 when Stanford hired noted landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge to figure it out. It took years, but Muybridge delivered: He rigged a racetrack with a dozen strings that triggered 12 cameras. Muybridge not only proved Stanford right but also set off the revolution in motion photography that would become movies. Biographer Rebecca Solnit summed up his life: “He is the man who split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting of the atom.”

Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire 1911
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company always kept its doors locked to ensure that the young immigrant women stayed stooped over their machines and didn’t steal anything. When a fire broke out on Saturday, March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the New York City factory, the locks sealed the workers’ fate. In just 30 minutes, 146 were killed. Witnesses thought the owners were tossing their best fabric out the windows to save it, then realized workers were jumping, sometimes after sharing a kiss (the scene can be viewed now as an eerie precursor to the World Trade Center events of September, 11, 2001, only a mile and a half south). The Triangle disaster spurred a national crusade for workplace safety.

Nagasaki 1945
Nothing like the mushroom cloud had ever been seen, not by the general public. It was a suitably awesome image for the power unleashed below. On August 6 the first atomic bomb killed an estimated 80,000 people in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. There was no quick surrender, and three days later a second bomb exploded 500 meters above the ground in Nagasaki. The blast wind, heat rays reaching several thousand degrees and radiation destroyed anything even remotely nearby, killing or injuring as many as 150,000 at the time, and more later. As opposed to the very personal images of war that had brought the pain home, the ones from Japan that were most shocking were those from a longer perspective, showing the enormity of what had occurred.

Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
This photograph. taken on November 10, 1962 (from less than 500 ft. altitude at a speed of 713 mph). Clearly shown are Soviet-built SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) in place at launch sites. It is claimed that this was President Kennedy's favorite photo of the installations, and was mounted in the oval office. He used this photo to demonstrate the nature of the threat that the offensive weapons provided. The pattern of dots surrounding the sites are claimed to be camouflage nets..

Earthrise 1968
The late adventure photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Captured on Christmas Eve, 1968, near the end of one of the most tumultuous years the U.S. had ever known, the Earthrise photograph inspired contemplation of our fragile existence and our place in the cosmos. For years, Frank Borman and Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 mission each thought that he was the one who took the picture. An investigation of two rolls of film seemed to prove Borman had taken an earlier, black-and-white frame, and the iconic color photograph, which later graced a U.S. postage stamp and several book covers, was by Anders.

What Teenagers Want:
Irreverence
Zaniness
Instability
Chaos
A frenetic pace
Lots of disjointed thoughts
In-depth info about music

Sic semper tyrannis - Thus Always to Tyrants

Fart and Chew Gum

Characters and Stuff -
Cheney - Chief
Rumsfeld - Chief, Defense
Squeeky
Sara Jane Moore
Jay Berwanger
Betty
Nixon
Warren Commission
Eniwetok
Kissinger
Bush - CIA
Rockefeller - VP
Reagan - Opponent

1. An offstage gun shot.
2. Jerry enters to “The Victors” and wonders if he has been shoot.
3.