Category: Stories

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Degrees of Separation–Lateral and Ladderal

Many of us are familiar with the “six degrees of separation” theory.  This is the idea that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by no more than five other living people, including strangers, who have social connections with either you or the others.  In the culture this theory has taken root in the parlor game, “Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon,” for the movie industry.

There is some support for this theory.  So you should be connected to both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump by some combination of five or even fewer others.  Our politically divided population is more deeply connected than we could have imagined.

But I have been thinking about a different version of this lateral idea, which connects living people to each other at one point in time.  I am thinking that the theory can be revised to address degrees of separation over time.  That is, a connection I might have made years ago is connected to a recent connection through an improbable series of links.  Let’s call this ladderal degrees of separation,1 in contrast to the lateral theory. Continue reading “Degrees of Separation–Lateral and Ladderal”

  1. A play on words, “ladder” here representing the movement of time as climbing from past to present,[↩]
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Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968

     I was still too young to vote.  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer.

The convening of the Democratic National Convention last night in Chicago takes me back more than five decades, to that other Democratic Convention in Chicago.  It was August 1968, and I was 18 years old that summer before my sophomore year in college.  I was just coming of age politically.

By that August, 1968 had already been a very rough year for the nation.  Martin Luther King, Jr., the country’s civil rights and moral trailblazer, had been assassinated on April 4, shocking the conscience of the country.  Two months later, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, just a day after he had seized the momentum in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.1 The country–and the Democratic Party–were splintered by nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality.  More than 100 cities had erupted into riots and arson after the King assassination.

I was a high school freshman when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, an unimaginable event.  Perhaps I was too young then–13–to feel the full effect of that national trauma.  But the events of the spring and summer of 1968 had landed more heavily against my idealistic self.

I was still too young to vote.2  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer. Continue reading “Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968”

  1. On June 4 Kennedy, who had announced his campaign only that March, won the Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota.[↩]
  2. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution changed the legal voting age from 21 to 18 when it was ratified in 1971.[↩]
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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity

The last of four parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here]

Broom Street Theatre reconnects with the University. Author again in the back row of photo.

Soon after our return to Madison, we began a series of performances there, along with a few around the state. In Madison we played three shows a weekend for three weeks in October, all of them in the large hall at the Eagles Club.  We also did a live, in-studio two-hour radio interview and demonstration for the Madison affiliate of NPR.  I thought the radio show was going well until the host asked which one of us had never acted before.  He knew damn well, and I hesitated to answer, instead preferring to avoid the subject.  My castmates interrupted the brief silence by whispering loudly and in unison, “Peter.”  I don’t recall the host’s follow-up questions or my answers.

But I did pass that doctoral qualifying exam despite all.

Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here]

We looked pretty much like this.

We left Madison August 28, 1976, nine people in a white van pulling a trailer with our props, costumes, clothing and camping gear.  We would average almost 500 miles a day over four days, and camp in tents three nights along the way at such locations as Billings, MT, and Coeur d’Alene, ID.  Our technical director, John Miller, did most of the driving.  In the rows of seats sat Joel and six of the actors: Kelly Henderson, Max(ine) Fleckner, Melanie Sax, Frank Furillo, Gary Aylesworth, and Adrienne Rabinowitz.  I resided mostly on the platform behind the seats, at the very back of the van.

I hadn’t been consigned to that space.  I had asked for it. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here]

Joel Gersmann addressing the audience before a show, and soliciting contributions to Broom Street Theater

In addition to our cast-in-waiting for a play to do, we had one of American experimental theater’s magicians.  Of course I had no sense of this as we gathered for those first meetings.  Truth be told, I knew very little about theater at all, let alone this new experimental form that had bloomed around the country as part of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s that had shaken many of our institutions, from art to politics to religion.  But given that we needed a finished play in a little over two months, I thought that we were dithering in those first meetings. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play”

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My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet

In celebration of the passion of our younger family members who are currently pursuing their love of theater in venues ranging from high school and summer shows, through national tours, to Broadway: Ezra, Chloe, Lizzie, Allison, and Julie. And in fond memory of Joel.

The first of four parts.

Broom Street Theatre bought and converted an old radiator repair shop on Madison’s Williamson Street in 1977, where it has operated since.

One sun-filled day in June 1976, near the beach and sailboats of beautiful Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, I suggested to a friend that we walk over to watch auditions scheduled that day for the city’s prominent experimental theater group, Broom Street Theatre.  I had never seen one of its plays, but I had read and heard that it was a gonzo outfit producing plays ranging from wild adaptations of classical scripts to outrageous original satires of the human condition.  I was not aiming to audition myself.  Instead, I simply wanted an inside look at this operation during its audition process.  At age 26, I had just completed my third year of doctoral studies in sociology at the University and, after having colored for so long between the lines, I was hoping to have a look at some measure of creativity, even if only briefly. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder

Until recent years I had never thought much about spirituality, let alone my own, whatever that might be.  Instead, I have spent more time thinking about organized religion, and about my flight from it that evolved over my early decades.  As I have described that journey in the earlier essays in this series, from my teen years onward I increasingly experienced the Catholicism that I had been taught to be a source of personal unhappiness rather than liberation from it.  This experience certainly did not seem in line with the Resurrection story.

But what would fill the space in my life created by my abandonment of the faith of my youth?  That I never thought to even consider this question is itself worth considering.  My exit from religious practice and my growing agnosticism could have left me alone in the existential sense.  What to believe in if not my Church and its creed?   What to think if the Church shamed members for sexual orientations and identities, condemned them for marrying outside of the faith, and forced females into second class status?  If the religious guidance that had been drilled into me since age five was no longer meaningful to me, what was to direct and even comfort me on life’s infirm road ahead?  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part III: Exit

The priest and I sat for an hour in his well-appointed office of the Catholic Chaplain at Yale University.  It was the Spring of 1981.  I was an assistant professor of sociology at Yale, and I was preparing to get married in August of that year.  I had asked for our meeting to see whether it would be possible for him to be the co-celebrant at the wedding.

Kathy and me at her Yale doctoral graduation, Spring 1980

I went into the meeting visualizing any number of barriers to his participation.  But I was doing due diligence on the possibility because I knew it would please my mother, a devoted Catholic.

The problems were several.  My fiancée was Jewish, as would be our co-celebrant.  I told the priest that I was no longer a practicing Catholic, and that I could not commit to bringing up any future children in the Catholic faith.  I kept waiting for him to draw the line against his participation at any one of these conditions, but he did not.  To my surprise, he kept indicating that he could work with them.  I was pleased because I knew my mother would be.

As I stood up, something off-script entered my mind, and, thinking it really irrelevant, I nonetheless thought I should double check.  Just in case.  I said, “Oh, Father, there’s one more thing–it’s probably unrelated.  My fiancée was married earlier and is now divorced.”  He was halfway out of his chair when my comment caused him to slump back into it.  “That’s a problem.” Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part III: Exit”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part II: Discovery

The first preadolescent thought that I had about my received Catholic faith’s relationship to the outside world was this:  Gee, my friends–Jeff, David, Don, Mark, Tim–are all going to hell when they die.

My family was the only Catholic family in my wooded country neighborhood among the corn fields and pastures outside of town.  I had learned that all of the several other families there were Protestant.  According to what I was being taught in my religion classes at St. Margaret Mary elementary school, since my friends had not been saved by Catholic baptism as babies, they were all condemned to an eternal afterlife of hellfire.  I was pretty sure that they did not know this.  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part II: Discovery”

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How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit: Part I

I was about as perfect a little Catholic boy as one could find anywhere.  I can say that now, in retrospect, although I had no awareness of this at the time.  I prayed fervently, took Communion on Sundays, and gave my coins to the Missions (in exchange for time off in Purgatory, I must confess).

In fifth grade I learned the Latin Mass by rote and became an altar boy.  Apparently even a star altar boy.  I say so because in that first year in this elite young male crew I was selected to be one of the four boys serving at the Easter Sunday Midnight Mass.  I was the only fifth grader on the altar with the older boys at one of the two most important and heavily attended masses of the year (the other being Christmas Midnight Mass).

I never felt closer to God than when serving on the altar in my altar boy garments: the black, floor-length cassock topped by the white surplice with the billowing sleeves.  They even had a distinctive smell redolent–to me at least–of the Holy.

I imagined becoming a priest, and even a pope.  The Church and its teachings had completely caught my imagination.

So much so that soon I experienced losing my mind.  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit: Part I”

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