New Work In Progress - Notes, 16 Feb 2019

Stick Chart

I make notes before I start to write.  Some of the stuff is major, some trivial.  They are taken in more or less in chronological order.  I keep a list of titles at the top that expands as I research.  (An asterisk marks those items that came from my "ideas for plays" list.)  An ever changing character list is always at the bottom.  I know as I make this list, that probably only 25 or 30 percent of what goes into the notes will ever make it into the play.  Some of the notes will simply be ignored, others will become a small reference, or make some small change to the direction the play moves forward in.  Notes may run from a couple of pages to a couple of dozen pages.  These notes represent about a week of work.

I will continue to post my ever expanding and changing notes as the work progresses.

My own personal struggle is always with plot.  I often turn to mythology.  I've loved mythology since I was a boy.  I also like fairy tales.  The negative about these is that my own education is/was Euro-centric (i.e. priviledged white male,) so my awareness of other mythologies and other children's stories is limited.  The internet helps, but, having not been enculturated with them, I don't have nearly as good a feel for them as those I grew up with.

NOTES:
Titles - The Daughters of Hiroshima, Shadow Maidens, Hibakusha, Disfigured, In-Between People, Blind Horse, The Society of Keloid Girls, The Kids in Art School, UnDark

The Goddess who wanted to be human - Villain?
Feet of Clay - sore feet, disabled
Climb down from the mountain top
her people need her
she wants children and a quiet life
She fears she will pass on being a goddess to her children
angry that her people need her
tired

*Focus on “The Broken Toy”

*Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar." —Jeff Foster

*As a person with a disability, what is my vision and my relationship to God.   “ the Hiroshima maidens got burned and disfigured, there's a word, "disfigured," because of, why? Because—They were in Hiroshima. They were too close to avoid the fire, too far to be consumed. If I was five seconds earlier or later I wouldn't have been hit by a car, my life would be on some different time line, it was an accident, it had nothing to do with whether I was a good or a bad person or just an in-between person, we don't live in an ordered universe.”  No one as Nasty - Susan Nussbaum 
“The Hiroshima maidens provide both writers with a potent figure to counter the moral and medical construction of disability. Faced with the horror of the external event of the atom bomb, any interpretation which fixes responsibility for disability on the disabled person becomes obscene.” The Dramaturgy of Disability - Victoria Ann Lewis  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0037.318;view=text;rgn=main;xc=1;g=mqrg
Nancy Becker Kennedy said in Tell Them I'm a Mermaid, "I used to put on the Nancy Fabulous Show. Keep them laughing so they wouldn't feel so sorry for me."

The women (Hiroshima Maidens) had all experienced similar lives following the war, such as being hidden from view by parents, stared at when they ventured outside, unwanted by employers, and rejected as potential wives for fear they were genetically damaged. 
the Society of Keloid Girls
genbaku otome, or "atomic bomb maidens"
Tanimoto was the subject of the US TV program “This Is Your Life” on May 11, 1955
Miyoko Matsubara - didn’t come to America for surgery

A crazy cult that has set up a village on the perimeter of  the concrete dome covering an atomic bomb site. Runit Island, Enewetak Atoll.  OR maybe Trinity Site, New Mexico.
Or Bomb shelter.

The horses were used for playing polo. Trinity

Jumbo containment vessel.

Radium as a miracle cure.  1920’s

A wink and a nod
'a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse'

Character wants to go home

Tiny Tim

Veterans

The Ballad of Charles Whitman

St. Julia of Carthage

"La casa no descansa en la tierra sino en la mujer" o "El peso de la casa no recae sobre la tierra sino sobre una mujer"  "The house does not rest on the ground, but on a woman."

"jolet jen Anij" (Gifts from God)

Stick Charts - The charts represented major ocean swell patterns and the ways the islands disrupted those patterns, typically determined by sensing disruptions in ocean swells by islands during sea navigation.

Apocalypse - a feeble fizzle rather than a serious of extraordinary disasters.

Mirrors

A conversation with death

Characters:
1. Goddess with bad feet, disabled, POC.  She is not the leader.  She is broken and depressed.  Pregnant.
2. Tiny Tim (Timothy) - formerly a precious touching symbol of innocents of the disabled; now, angry, hostile, frustrated.  Suffers from Marfans
3. Inventor - Jacqueline de Vaucanson, young woman, descended from Jacques De Vaucanson
4. Duck named Cover.  A Duck One footed Duck - Vaucanson, a one-legged robot duck in a wheel chair that thinks its a real duck
5. Daughter of Hiroshima maiden - she has been a pariah her whole life because her mother was a bomb victim.
6. A local effected by bomb testing.