Letters from Lisa

Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World

First of all, any book organized around the number 13 gets an automatic point, as far as I’m concerned. Second, I love the idea of the book — bringing to light the stories of obscure, unsuccessful (or successful in their time, but unsuccessful in the long run) individuals, whose lives are just as interesting as the folks whose biographies currently grace bookstore shelves. It’s witty, intriguing, and provides a neat window on what makes famous people famous, and what gets into history books (and doesn’t).

Or, as Paul Simon put it, “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts…”

I’ve gotten through about four chapters so far. I’ve met John Banvard, who for a brief time was the richest and most well known artist in the world due to his moving panorama of the Mississippi River (downfall: competing with PT Barnum and spending an exorbitant amount of money on a blinging estate). Then there was William Ireland, the “dullard” who forged papers, letters, and even entire plays by William Shakespeare in a misguided attempt to please his father.

My favorite (so far) is Jean Francois Sudre’s musical-visual-manual language Solresol, which was a comprehensive attempt to use a seven-tone musical scale as the basis for a language. It would be a fascinating thing to have a working knowledge of this musical vocabulary, walk into an orchestra performance, and start finding all sorts of hidden messages. (The book’s example is one individual who thought the Ode to Joy was singing about “Wednesday”.) Sudre also attempted to translate his language into colors, shapes and hand positions. Even numbers! It’s a paranoiac’s dream — everything in the world is trying to tell you something!

Another Solresol link — by the way, if you are interested in Tolkein languages, this site, langmaker.com, is an EXCELLENT resource.

This site has some nice demonstratory graphics

If you type “Lisa Fischler” into a search engine, what you get are a number of links to the Lisa Fischler who is a professor of Asian studies, and possibly a couple of hits to my old website (long defunct). Although, stupidly, the address of this website is lisafischler.com. Search engines aren’t quite bright enough to realize that. If you search “lisafischler” as one word, you might hit this site. Otherwise, no luck.

Until now. Because now this website will be indexed for content, and I may end up generating a search engine entry for myself.

Ugh, the stuff a girl’s gotta do to get herself noticed around here!

Meet Lucky Jr.!

Lucky in his tank:

A closeup of the shell:

I inherited this tortoise from a coworker. He’s going to live in my classroom next year.

I’m writing the new musical for next year’s production, and I think I have the first song that is actually decent enough to make it into the script (after several attempts). So it’s a start. I’ve adapted lots of scripts, but I’ve always revamped the story and dialogue — I’ve never started in this way, with the story basically intact but with no music to draw upon. Oddly, I like working this way. I hated the songs from the past several musicals we’ve done, although I loved the stories and dialogue, so now’s my chance to change the thing that’s always bugged me.

Plus, it’s the only thing I haven’t really tried. Which alone makes it worth doing.

By the way, my mission for this show is for everything to be as completely silly and ridiculous as possible. It’s a fairly straightforward school story, and works great in novel format, but for the stage we have to ramp it up about seven notches so that it stays interesting enough for little kids to watch. Oh, and if I don’t get bored while rehearsing it for months on end, that’s a plus, too.

So since I’ve never really written any upbeat, catchy music before, my basic strategy is to listen to endless amounts of upbeat, catchy music in the hopes of drumming some kind of upbeat, catchy code into my head that will then allow me to tap into that whole upbeat, catchy thing. Any suggestions? (Except one… if you say the Numa Numa dance, I will make you regret it!)

I just received my Australia visa and ticket receipts!
I’m going! I really am!

(very excited)

Q: So… how are you this morning?
A: Oh, I’m fine. A bit tired.

Q: You’re tired a lot, aren’t you?
A: Well, yeah. I’m not even sure why. I could have slept later this morning, and instead my body decided to wake up at 5:30. Maybe it thought I was going to work.

Q: You wake up at 5:30 to go to work? Are you crazy?
A: Let’s keep the tone of this conversation polite, OK?

Q: Sorry, it’s just… 5:30?
A: I know, I know. Hey, in a couple of days I’ll be done with work for the summer. I’ll be sleeping through the morning in no time.

Q: But you’re not going to do that in Australia, are you?
A: Heck no! I’ll be way too busy for that.

Q: You get asked this a lot, but I’ll ask also since everyone wants to know: why travel alone?
A: Well, I do like traveling with other people. Last summer I went to Scandinavia with Chris and approximately 20 other people on a big tour. So I’m not averse to traveling with friends or even in a big group. But this trip is my dream trip, and I didn’t want to arrange my travels according to what a tour company thought would be a good idea. And I didn’t know anyone who would be willing to do the type of trip that I’m doing.

Q: Rumor has it you’ll be sleeping in a tent?
A: For the first two weeks, yes.

Q: Are you crazy?
A: Okay, did we or did we not talk about keeping the conversation polite?

Q: Sorry, it’s just… a tent? You’re not all that outdoorsy, are you?
A: Put it this way — I am now!

Q: But you blow up like a balloon every time you get a mosquito bite. You were popping Benadryl like candy on your last Earthwatch trip… and you were only walking on the beach at night, not sleeping there!
A: Well, that is why I am packing lots of lightweight long-sleeved clothing, so no one has to look at my overzealous immune system in action. Plus the sun is really hot there, and I don’t want to get skin cancer.

Q: This is sounding more and more stupid all the time.
A: On the plus side, there aren’t many highly poisonous jellyfish around during that time of year.

Q: I understand it’s winter in Australia now?
A: You are a genius, aren’t you?

Q: I thought we talked about keeping the conversation polite.
A: Whoops, sorry. Yes. It’s winter in Australia. But I’m going to be very far north, where it’s tropical year-round. In fact, during my tour of Kakadu National Park and Arnhem Land, I’ll be going to some places that are inaccessible during Australia’s summer season because it’s the wet season up north.

Q: Are you going to do the Bridge Climb in Sydney?
A: I’m still thinking about it. On one hand, it looks extraordinary. On the other, I’m only in Sydney for a few days, and the Bridge Climb takes several hours.

Q: Could be tricky. Because you’re definitely going to the opera, aren’t you?
A: La Boheme!

Q: Isn’t that the story that Rent is based on?
A: You’re a clever one.

Q: Are you going to see any performances or shows when you get back?
A: I’m dying to see Spamalot.

Q: Think it’ll be as good as Avenue Q?
A: Can anything be as good as Avenue Q? Hmm. I mean, I’m a huge Monty Python fan, so I have some faith in Spamalot… I’ll let you know after I see it.

Q: I’d like to have an argument, please.
A: Honey, if you get me quoting that sketch, we’re going to be here all day.

Q: Oh, all right. Any final thoughts before we conclude?
A: What am I, Jerry Springer?

Q: You’re no fun anymore.
A: Right, now stop that! This is getting far too silly!

You wouldn’t necessarily know it from my everyday behavior (or you might, depending on where you see me) but I’m pretty shy. It seems contradictory, given that my voice is naturally loud and I’ve been a performer all my life, and part of my job is getting up and talking in front of people. I’ve never had a problem with public speaking, as long as there is an audience ready to listen to what I have to offer. But if I met one of those same audience members at an informal event, I’d be nervous just saying hello, never mind offering my opinion or asking a question. Sometimes I probably come across as unfriendly (or just really, really unobservant). It’s not that I don’t like people or don’t want to talk to them — I do. It’s just really scary.

Some people have natural self confidence — they assume that everyone is friendly and receptive, and don’t find it particularly upsetting when someone is unresponsive, figuring that person is preoccupied or having a bad day. I, on the other hand, have had experiences that have taught me otherwise. I never assume that someone will want to talk to me or be interested in what I have to say. I think my questions are silly-sounding and naive. If someone is unreceptive, I almost always assume it’s something I said, or the ugly sweater I’m wearing, or who knows what, but it has to be my fault somehow. Even when someone is actually friendly, I have this suspicion that they’re inwardly rolling their eyes or laughing at the ridiculous thing I said, or just feeling irritated that I was bugging them at all.

Is this starting to sound a little paranoid? Maybe it is. It’s not based on any recent experiences, but on incidents that have accumulated over the course of my life. Most people I encounter these days are friendly and polite, and if they’re ever tempted to roll their eyes at me or tell me to go away, they’ve been sparing my feelings pretty effectively. I’ve gotten better at hiding my awkwardness, too. Although it’s hard, I try to make eye contact. I laugh a lot, even at stuff that’s just marginally funny. I’m OK with conversations as long as there aren’t too many people talking at once. Under limited circumstances, I can even make small talk.

So what’s the problem? I can never get comfortable. It’s easier for me to contemplate flying thousands of miles to Australia by myself than walking up to a stranger and trying to start a conversation. I’m terrified of rejection, but suspicious of compliments. I think I can tell when someone is being sincere, but there’s this nagging doubt.

So… I don’t know where that leaves me. I’m not necessarily interested in becoming super social, just… less freaked out. I think I’m making a good start, because I walked out of our staff party today not feeling exhausted. Usually I leave big events with lots of people milling around feeling tired and teary, though I’m careful not to show it.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: the common myth that people only use 10% of their brains.

Now if you’re, say, watching Britney Spears videos, I can see how that would seem logical. There certainly is plenty of evidence that everyday life and culture often occur in the absence of higher-level thinking. To be blunt, sometimes people make stupid decisions, both professionally and personally. The revelation that we use only 10% of our brains would certainly seem to explain that.

And it really is a comforting belief, when you think about it. Maybe we still have war, poverty and disease because we aren’t (yet) using the vast brainpower we have to prevent those things. Maybe, more to the point, we really are just as smart as Einstein or Stephen Hawking, or we could be if we learned how to use our brain capacity in the same way that they did. Maybe, even more to the point, we could all be computer tech support or cranky college professors — IF WE WANTED TO. It’s a safety net for our egos to think that we could do anything we wanted, IF we chose to use our brains to their full capacity, which we apparently aren’t.

It’s an expression of good old American equality, isn’t it? You were born with a great brain — how you use it is up to you. The tarnished side of the coin is that if you’re struggling or failing, then you’re just not accessing that 90% — maybe you’re lazy, willful, or otherwise morally flawed.

Only trouble is — it’s WRONG.

Common sense should tell you it’s wrong. For example, let’s say that a person is riding along in a car one morning and the car gets into an accident. The person’s head is thrust into the windshield, and brain damage occurs. Let’s say, taking this to its logical extreme, that 90% of the person’s brain is damaged. What do you think this would do to the person’s functioning? I mean, couldn’t the person have lost the 90% that she wasn’t using? Maybe she’d come out unaffected.

We don’t have to use catastrophic examples to illustrate the point. We can simply ask ourselves — what part of our brains are we NOT using? Which part is hanging around, twiddling its dendrites?

It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Your brain uses up vast quantities of oxygen and energy. Its large size creates danger for mothers during childbirth, and its long period of development in childhood makes human children helpless and dependent for far longer than babies of other species. Basically, having a huge human brain is an evolutionary risk. There is absolutely no reason why we would have evolved a brain that we barely use.

Neuroscience is still a developing field, so of course there is a lot we don’t know about brain functioning. But we actually know quite a bit. And much of what we know comes from studies of folks who have suffered accidents, seizures, tumors, lesions, or diseases that affect the 90% of their brains that they are supposedly not using.

I could go on endlessly about this topic, but instead I’ll leave you with some eloquent links that discuss this issue:

A Thorough Explanation and Debunking

The Ten Percent Myth from snopes.com

Neuroscience for Kids — explains it well

Feels like I’ve exploded in a lot of different directions. Might be good. Stay tuned.

Directions: Finish the sentence using the answer that best fits.

AOL Headline: Bush Will Go To Vietnam

a) …now that there’s no longer a war there.
b) …to find Weapons of Mass — No, wait. Wrong country.
c) …Bush jokes are way too easy. Isn’t there an extra credit question?

AOL Headline about the Backstreet Boys: Their Career Was Incomplete

a) …because it lacked any singing and songwriting talent, until — well, actually, that hasn’t changed.
b) …because they hadn’t embarrassed themselves quite as badly as New Kids on the Block.
c) …because there will always be a demand for boy bands and their sappy, over-a-cappella-ed power ballad drivel.

Headline: Cranky Teacher Up Too Late

a) …because the rest of her family is flying cross-country and she won’t be able to get to sleep until she hears from them.
b) …because yes, 27 year olds CAN be afraid of the dark. (I’m a little less freaked out now that I know the thumping, clanging noises were coming from the apt. next door and NOT from some intruder in the next room.)
c) …because it’s addictively fun to create versions of people you know in the Sims 2 and then watch them set the place on fire as they attempt to cook macaroni and cheese.

Bonus Question: I dare you to come up with a sentence, any sentence, that uses “over-a-capella-ed” in it.

It’s actually not that hard, considering it isn’t even a real word. For example, where I went to college, there were a cappella groups singing in every archway just about round the clock. To this day I can’t hear “Angel is a Centerfold” or “Carry On, My Wayward Son” without getting an instant mental flash of the groups that sang those numbers. In fact, if I squint a little, I can actually still hear the vocal arrangements, which included percussion and guitar riffs… Yeah. Scary. This is totally a college phenomenon, so thankfully there is little danger to the general public.

OK, see what just MENTIONING the Backstreet Boys did to this entry? Bad. Bad!

After some assistance from my cousin Ashley, and an unexpected bonus from the music dept., the kids’ CD is ready for assembly. All I need to do now is download a few remaining songs into the computer and whip up some cover art… and presto!

Don’t think I’m doing this for my children. I am doing it to get a very, very good laugh.

Q: Where do I buy clothes?
A: NOWHERE!

Let’s take a brief tour of your average women’s clothing store, shall we? On the left, we have vibrant 80s fuschia and neon lime green. (Which is flattering to about 30% of the humanoid species on Star Trek, but no one with any skin colors that I’ve personally encountered.) On the right, long ruffled skirts straight out of my elementary school production of Oklahoma! Take a few steps forward, and you’re all ready for a dinner at Maharishi’s compound with profusely beaded and sequined tunics worthy of Sir Elton John in his glory days. Finally, for your more casual moments, you can buy flimsy swaths of terrycloth fabric that cover approximately five square inches of your upper body (and not the right five inches either…) if you are going for that Pretty Woman look, and I don’t mean the scene where she goes to the opera. And all for the low, low price of HUNDREDS of DOLLARS!! (wild audience applause)

If you are a clothing designer and happen to be reading this, please take pity on us and come up with something that we’d be proud to wear in public, even when we’re not playing Dress Up (any version of Dress Up, thankyouverymuch).

Q: What is currently on my bedroom floor?
A: Everything I own.

OK, it’s gotten a teeny bit out of control. It started with a few notebooks — various projects I’m working on — then extended to some books I’m reading, and I read 3-4 at a time so OK, whatever. But now there are old books of mine that my sister found while cleaning out her stuff, plus not-quite-junk mail and info about my trip, and a whole bunch of scrapbooking supplies and — You get the idea.

My motto: When in doubt, make piles.

Child: (noticing my shirt) Paul Simpson… is that Jessica Simpson’s father?

Me: SIMON. It’s Paul SIMON.

(shudder)

Driving home with my dad through the streets of my hometown, where I’ve lived my entire life, it suddenly struck me that I find the place rather… ugly. Nondescript. Ramshackle hardware stores and abandoned homes alternate with boxy brick storage units and unartful glass paneling. The “downtown” area suffers from an utter lack of coherence or personality.

Perhaps I notice it so much because I’ve traveled to some places with very distinctive, and rather lovely, main streets with very recognizable architectural features. Bergen, Norway comes to mind. It’s a teeny city in a country with a population less than that of New York City, but it has a row of wonderful little wooden houses that date back hundreds of years. Walking through, you barely notice that the buildings are old and teetering in places. Even the newer structures around town are pleasing, mainly because they look like they’re part of a single community. They belong together.

My trip to Scandinavia also included stops in Stockholm, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark, which were both full of neat buildings.

Maybe I just like older buildings, but the “old city” in Stockholm was my favorite section. It was a pedestrian island filled with winding streets and cute little squares like the one in the picture. It had a very homey, intimate feel to it. I didn’t feel I was walking through Random City, Europe at all.

Nyhavn was once the red-light district in Copenhagen, and there are still some remnants of that, but basically it’s utterly overrun with tourists. Again, a pedestrian area with lots of places to mill around and sit outside, and pleasant buildings to look at.

Oddly, there were other, more “official” buildings in Scandinavia that I thought were absolutely ugly. The town halls, for instance:

Moral of the story: if you want a nice, community-looking building, ask a bunch of common folks to get together and build some houses, rather than the high-falutin architect!

Seriously, though (I don’t mean any offense to architecture… just THAT architecture) what I find ugly about my local, suburban America is that everyone seems to be building solely for their own pleasure, with absolutely no regard for what the town as a whole looks like or even what the street will look like. That, and the total homogenization of American business, so that there’s a Duane Reade and a McDonald’s on every corner (at least in this region). Each new addition makes the neighborhood less interesting. It’s definitely attacked my own hometown, where a large number of local businesses that were around since I was a kid are now packing up and leaving for nicer looking, more pedestrian neighboring towns. The town can’t be a “destination” when it has exactly the same stuff that every stop along the highway has, with nothing else to distinguish it.

There are definitely other reasons for the decline of the main street in America besides our irrational love of franchises, but I for one would love to see its return. Food courts and drive thrus do not build cohesive communities or encourage the patronage of local efforts. And isn’t it possible to have the Dunkin Donuts or the Burger King in a nice-looking building rather than a concrete monstrosity? I desperately hope so. If I want to appreciate the service station look, all I have to do is hop on the turnpike.

Maybe if, as a culture, we were less likely to knock down buildings after 30 years to build new ones, we’d be more interested in creating nice-looking architecture in the first place. But being as we’ve got that “everything is disposable” mentality, that creates difficulties too… For all of America’s bravado and “manifest destiny”, I sense a huge amount of insecurity about our long term future and a sense that we must push ourselves to secure our legacy. It’s like a cloud of impermanence hanging over our heads. Perhaps it’s because the country is still young. (To put it in perspective, when I was in — I think Denmark — there was a local company celebrating its 400th anniversary! Their sense of history is a little different than ours.) We can’t fathom anything that has lasted or has the potential to last for a long time. But building a better, more beautiful infrastructure would be the ultimate vote of confidence in the country’s future.

Speaking of impermanence, the “n” key on this keyboard just popped out again. Things REALLY aren’t built to last, are they! Grr…

My cousin Ashley had her senior prom last night. She looked gorgeous!

Ah, to be 17 again…

Actually, my own prom was an adventure that I would not be terribly interested in repeating. (One of my friends cracked her knee and went to the hospital, for one thing) Besides, I hate shopping for dresses and shoes, and I’m terrible at maintaining dramatic nail polish, and my hair does whatever it wants. I just went through it for a friend’s wedding (minus the dramatic nail polish) and was so irritated by the whole thing that I told my family I would like to have a barefoot wedding on the beach! At which time my mother pointed out that then people would be obligated to go bathingsuit shopping, which is probably the worst kind of shopping there is.

So any weddings occurring on my behalf will have to involve jeans. Y’all heard it here first (-:

Well, the secret’s out, at least to some of the kids — my farewell gift to them is going to be a soundtrack of all the wacky songs we’ve sung and loved this year. I feel very fortunate to have had such a musical group, even though they won’t always acknowledge themselves as such (it’s so pronounced — we put on the Star Wars soundtrack and suddenly “cool” boys are singing soprano!)

The whole plot began to unravel when our student teacher left, and we gave her an abbreviated version of what is destined to become the single weirdest mix CD of all time. Secrecy further deteriorated when a kid from another class borrowed my CD containing the Numa Numa song. I’m very much hoping to track down some final last-minute additions (R-E-S-P-E-C-T, which they sang in chorus this year, and a song or two from the Disney CD that all the girls love, and the opening bars of Livin La Vida Loca — preferably in Spanish to avoid some unnecessarily salacious lyrics, thankyouverymuch) I may even torture them with some stuff from the Willy Wonka soundtrack — because if I’m forced to have it stuck in MY head, why should they escape a similar fate?

Now don’t worry — I’m highly aware of the hazardous nature of what I’m toying with. To counteract the earworm potential of this mix, I’m (quietly — it’s early) blasting the Rolling Stones.

After about five months, I finally heard from the publisher where I sent my first novel. It’s a rejection, of course — after five months I wouldn’t have expected anything else. I was irritated mostly that it took so long, and also that I am now unsure as to where to send it next. I submitted to this particular publisher based on a recommendation by someone in the industry, because it specializes in the subject matter that the book is about. So, now what?

Does a book exist if it’s only on some photocopied paper on the floor of my bedroom?

You know how you get certain songs stuck permanently on feedback loop in your brain? Thanks to certain children, my temporal lobes (or thereabouts) are now the proud home of the Star Wars Gangsta Rap. Or actually, this piece of it:

Darth Vader: No, Luke… I am your father!
(rapping)I’m — your father
I’m your father (group of hand-waving stormtroopers joins in)
I’m — your father
I’m your father
I’m — your father
I’m your father
(etc.)

Arrrgh!

You can see the whole thing here, but I’m warning you, you WILL get it stuck in your head.

Congratulations to the cast & crew of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! You did an amazing job!

(if I do say so myself)

The story of musical theater at our school is quite interesting. It all started back when I was a first-year assistant and putting on a small, 7-person production with my reading group to get deeper into the book that we were reading (which happened to be Les Miserables, which can be a musical but wasn’t performed as such). One of the students, embolded by the process of writing and performing the show, decided that the elementary school should have a musical theater production, just like our middle and high schools. She chose Oklahoma!, which she’d recently seen on Broadway. I told her that if she took the initiative to approach the principal, I’d be willing to help. You just can’t say no to something like that.

So I adapted the script (and story) of Oklahoma! for elementary school students, and six months later, we suddenly had a success on our hands. Enrollment in the club more than doubled for our next production, which was my odd adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. (We had only two large sets, but three Alices) Last June, my reading group and I started to do the storyboards for this year’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I cast the show in September, and now the cycle is complete.

I have no idea what we’re doing next year! For now I’m just happy with what we’ve done.