I pored over the bizarre customs and beliefs in The Golden Bough, James George Frazier's tour of the world we'd all come from. I memorized Greek myths, filling the hole left by my secular youth. Though I concentrated on English and history in college, I found myself studying mythology and folklore on the side. I knew none of the steps but I was hooked. The songs weren't just in 3/4 or 4/4 rhythm, but in 7/8 and 11/16. The small room was packed with college students dancing in snaking lines to music from Bulgaria, Israel, Sweden, French Canada. The same impulse must have led me to attend my first folk dance. I watched my neighbors and did what they did, fumbling to find the hymn that was being sung, dropping down onto the kneeler when they did. Every house should have a shortwave.Īnd so it was that in high school I began slipping into churches for the first time in my life and sampling their services. Listening to languages I didn’t understand showed me the purely musical side of words, something that would inform my writing decades in the future. I heard programs from Norway in praise of saunas and Radio South Africa's explanations of the many benefits of apartheid. Each station was its country's chamber of commerce and culture. I listened to the latest Beatles hits on KRLA but also to music from the Middle East with its foreign, captivating scales. My classmates got their news from Walter Cronkite I got mine from the BBC, Radio Peking, Radio Australia. Suddenly my world's boundaries shot outward. At ten years old I received a shortwave radio. Everyone lived in the suburbs, didn’t they? But then other possibilities presented themselves. We were "the people," confirmed by the programs we watched on TV. Many are the societies whose name for themselves means "the people." I accepted unthinkingly the white, upper middle-class world of Santa Monica, California that I grew up in. Immersed in them, we can't get an objective view and tend toward thinking they're universal, or should be. "A man is known least to himself," wrote Cicero. In truth the book came from far in my past, and all our pasts. With its braiding together of creation motifs from around the world, First Light, First Life might seem to have been rushed into print to counter the nationalism and religious intolerance that's erupted into American political life. Information and resources on the plays and playwrights spoofed in the play
How the book about the founding of a community garden came to beĪn excerpt from my Anne Carroll Moore Lecture, describing my career as a teenaged printerĪ piece published in "Shouts and Murmurs" in the New Yorker The first scene, showing the spoken musical style
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