Learn By Doing in Everyday Ramblings

A beauty berry bush down by the garden. I wandered down there on Friday to pick up blown oak sticks and weed a little in the plot. We are heading for a hard freeze at the end of this next week. Snow keeps moving in an out of the forecast. It is rare and debilitating here so one frets and tries to prepare.

Yesterday afternoon we showed the film (the board member I get along the least with chastised me for calling it a movie instead of a film, sigh. I can’t help it if I am a middle class crass American, so is he, but has airs to being more sophisticated) Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison at the Unitarian Church I am associated with and used to teach at. We had an overflow crowd, (which was way cool), but it meant I had to stand during it.

I was quite impressed that our senior minister (relatively new to us) stood next to me for the whole thing and stayed for the whole thing. She gets bonus points for that. Although the event was being sponsored by the church in that they gave us the expensive room for free and coffee and tea, without really trying we raised close to $1,000 for further distribution.

The film has won three awards at the film festivals we have gotten it into and was shown in Barcelona, Lebanon, and in a prison in Greece as well as a number of festivals here in the U.S. It really is quite moving, and we had five formerly incarcerated individuals at the screening who were in the film or in other Shakespeare plays put on at the same facility. The guy that played Puck came in costume.

One of the actors, (who continues to be incarcerated in prison there), was represented at our event by his mother who told us that they are still trying to get the film shown at the prison it was filmed at. There has been a change of leadership in the local men’s prisons in particular since the pandemic and they are not letting programs like this in anymore.

That said, there aren’t programs exactly like this because Walt is unique. Two of the additional actors are getting out soon, one this next week. Walt keeps up correspondence with them.
I had a chance to see four of my students in person at the event and to retrieve a couple of blankets I had left in a cupboard the last time I taught there just under three years ago.

The first time I saw the film was 16 months ago. I went on my own on the bus on a hot hot evening across town, terrified of being in a theater packed full of people. I barely knew Walt, just from an informal class I had taken from him on story telling years back and the online book group.

This time I was out front directing folks to the correct door, having met a number of people involved in the making of the film in the interim. I have learned the origins of the film, the finances of the film, the politics of distribution of the film and people’s hopes and dreams for the film. Or…movie as I call it.

They even pointedly made me stay for the group picture with the actors and makers and Walt at the end. And the fabulous donkey head that Walt’s partner made for the production. It really does hold up and doesn’t feel dated.

It was a kind of wow moment. Look at what I have managed getting myself involved in by showing up and being interested and sticking with it.

Today though I am resting my weary feet, (I walked home after standing for three hours) and getting ready for presenting to my “other” board, the League tomorrow night after class.

Wish me luck. Learn by doing I guess. Or as Theodore Roethke says in The Waking, I learn by going where I have to go. Or so it seems.

Last updated January 08, 2024