Catapulted Back in Time: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

We went this past weekend to see Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, expecting to see some kind of zany comedy because Tina Fey has the starring role.  It is not a comedy.  It is not what I expected.  And it surprised me in yet another way:  It took me back three and a half years, when I was in Afghanistan, and it stopped my heart, and it made me cry.  I had no idea I had been so profoundly affected by my time there.  But apparently, I had been.

The (supposedly mostly true) story focuses on a journalistic desk jockey, Kim Barker, who takes a chance to travel to Afghanistan to be a war correspondent.  The plot winds through Barker’s culture shock, her navigating her way around, and her eventual understanding that the rush of narrow escapes in war can be highly addictive.  The movie has received mixed reviews, probably because many reviewers may have assumed what I did – it’s a comedy.  Additionally, I’m guessing that most reviewers don’t have a clue that what they’re seeing about Afghan culture is real and, in some cases, stupefying.

The movie was filmed in New Mexico, and it mimics well the landscape of the places I saw in Afghanistan.  Mostly dry desert, Kabul is surrounded by, according to http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kabul-01-geography, the Hindu Kush mountain range, the peaks of which are usually dotted with snow; Kabul itself is at 8,000 feet elevation.  The movie also depicts well the dirt “streets” of parts of Kabul, filled with pedestrians, goats, and Toyotas, as well as the houses stacked on the hillside, most of which have spotty, if any, electricity, and no heating system.  Some have running water; some do not.

Kim finds herself living in the city in a dormitory of sorts, where all the journalists live, drink, party, and hook up, where bathrooms are shared and internet connections are intermittent.  She meets her team, consisting of a cameraman, a personal security guard, and an Afghan translator, who is supposed to be her connection to finding stories and meeting people who make the stories.  A typical Afghan man who was a doctor before he began working for the United States, the translator keeps his distance while helping her adjust to life in a truly foreign place.

Some of Kim’s story was totally different from mine.  I lived in a barracks camp completely removed from the city, but not necessarily removed from the violence of the country; while I was there, at least one other barracks camp was bombed.  Not too long before I arrived, another camp was bombed.  In fact, as I was undergoing training – which in no way imaginable prepared me for what I was to see – a security guard took me under his wing, instructing me as to what to do.  “I know you,” he said one day.  “A bomb will go off, and you will see people hurt, and you will try to help.  But what are you supposed to do?  What must you do?” 

“Walk the other way,” I said, looking directly at his face.

“Good girl.  Walk the other way.”

Scenes such as that one flashed through my mind as I took in the things that were happening in front of me on the screen.  One day, I met an appellate judge in his opulent, though garishly furnished, office; we had hot tea in glass mugs, just as Kim did when she met a member of the Afghan government.  I covered my head, just as Kim did, when I went out from the camp.  In Kabul, I went through steel doors when I left the compound, passing security guards holding AK47s at the ready; in Herat, I went through only one steel door, but we had to wind our way through concrete barriers to leave, while several security guards, all holding guns, watched from a high turret.  Kim lived in the city, so her steel door wasn’t quite as massive, and the security guard with a gun was an old man.  But when I saw her going through that door, I went right back to my own steel doors. 

Even though our stories were tinged with similarities, much of what Kim went through was different from my experience; for instance, I had a “wet hooch” – quarters with a private bathroom. Had I landed a job at Bagram Air Force Base, I would have had a “dry hooch,” with a bathroom for all located at least 100 yards away.  Fortunately, I didn’t land a job at Bagram.  Unlike Kim, the most raucous behavior I engaged in was dancing the night away to Frank Sinatra and The Big Bopper with two of my co-workers, one of whom was leaving the next day, the other of whom might have been gay, and both of whom were great dancers.  I know, however, that some of my other co-workers were a little more risqué in their behavior.  One was arrested and jailed when he returned home to Scotland.  It seems that he was more interested in child porn than in saving the Afghan justice system.

My translators in Herat were more progressive than most Afghan men; one even wanted his wife to learn to drive rather than relying on him to get her around the city.  Whereas Kim’s translator would not let her hug him and attempted a human gesture only by allowing their hands to barely touch as he handed her suitcase to her, I breached all sorts of behavior rules by hugging every one of our translators as I left Herat to go to Kabul.  In Kabul, however, I would never have even thought about hugging my co-workers.  They did not invite such forward and intimate gestures, even though we had very good relationships. 

Unlike Kim, thank goodness, I never saw combat or the effects of it.  But I saw a life that seemed to exist not a half a world away from my home, but on another planet, where men and women could not hold hands in public lest people assumed they were preparing to have sex, where men and women could not attend a wedding in the same room, where alcohol is illegal, and where, in some provinces, women cannot appear in public if any portion of their bodies, even face or hands, is exposed.  In that world, children and mothers with their children in tow beg in the dirt streets, cows and goats intermingle with traffic in the city.  In that world, progress is stymied by a group of zealots who believe that blowing up ancient Buddha statues is preferable to seeing idols to another religion, who blow up roads to prevent anyone from mining natural minerals that might bring some form of prosperity to the area, who believe that the way to power is through fear.

The odd thing is that I wrote about all these things while I was there.  I just went about my life every day doing what needed to be done, surviving in a culture that I didn’t understand.  I assumed that I was just experiencing life in a different place, seeing that things are done differently in different places, bringing a different worldview to my family and friends who read about my adventures.

Now, however, three and a half years later, I go to a movie and see that more than my worldview has changed.  My life has changed without my knowing it, and I am unable to ignore it.

A Little Travelogue - Including the Blackstone Hotel - Chicago

“The Windy City” comes by its name honestly.  By the time Max and I left Chicago on Sunday afternoon, the temperature was about three degrees, but the wind chill was well below that.  Fortunately, I had taken my big coat to keep me warm, and Max had taken his stocking cap; his head was more at risk than mine because he had to walk about a block to get the car in that frigid temperature.  We had parked at that garage because the charge was $30 per day while our hotel’s parking cost was $67 per day.  Regardless of the outrageous parking, that hotel, the Blackstone, was a lovely piece of Chicago history, including a hidey-hole for Al Capone’s Prohibition liquor!

Max and I had gone to Chicago with six of my William Jewell friends to see Terry Teachout’s play, Satchmo at the Waldorf.   Max and I had seen the play in Beverly Hills last summer, but Terry was going to be in Chicago for opening night, and we decided that it would be worth the trip to get to talk to him.

I got the tickets for the group, and then another friend told us that she knows the concierge at the Blackstone Hotel on Michigan Avenue.  We got in touch with her, and she arranged for us to all stay on the 19^th floor, overlooking, depending on which side of the hotel the room was on, either the City, or Grant Park and Lake Michigan.  Max and I drove, but the rest of the group, one from Springfield, two from Austin, Texas, and three from Kansas City, flew in.  The earliest arrivals scored a tour from Shannon, the concierge, who shared the hotel’s story with them.

Twelve presidents have stayed at that hotel, including John F. Kennedy, who didn’t stay very long; while he was there, he found out about the Cuban missile crisis.  A barber shop on the lowest level has a secret hatch leading to a hidey-hole for Al Capone’s Templeton Rye during Prohibition – and a hidey-hole for Al Capone himself when Chicago’s finest were out looking for him.  Movie stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Lena Horne stayed at the hotel, which opened in 1910; Enrico Caruso was honored at the hotel’s opening gala.  And speaking of movies, several have been filmed at the Blackstone:  The Untouchables, The Color of Money, Only the Lonely, and My Best Friend’s Wedding.   I would have liked to have been around for The Color of Money because Paul Newman was there.  I would have liked to have been anywhere Paul Newman was.

After we all arrived on Friday, we ate dinner at Seven Lions, which is about five blocks from the hotel.  It was fun to sit around and reminisce about the old days – which are, by now, about 40 years old.  How is it possible that we graduated so long ago!?  The food was good, but Max and I had brought munchies and wine, so we all had enjoyed a little cocktail party in our room before our 8:15 dinner reservation, so we were pretty full – of food.  There’s always room for more wine!

We did get to meet up with Terry on Saturday over lunch.  It was so good to see him and to hear how the play came about.  He had first written the book Pops, and someone he didn’t know sent him an e-mail saying that the book was good and that a play dwelled somewhere in the pages.  After a little research, Terry found out that the unknown encourager was a theater producer.  Terry figured that guy knew what he was talking about, and so over a period of four days, the first draft of Satchmo came into being.  From there, things fell into place quite nicely.

It was, while not like old times, lots of fun to eat barbecue (The Pork Chop) and drink Bloody Marys and talk about what’s been happening since 1976. 

Then we saw the final Chiefs game of the season at Jimmy Green’s, a sports bar around the corner from the hotel, and finally, the pièce de résistance, Satchmo at the Waldorf.  It was kind of cool to walk in and know the playwright!  And then, after the play, we met the star of the show, Barry Shebaka Henley; that was pretty cool, as well.  He was sort of nonplussed that we had come to see Terry first and him second.

All in all, our trip to Chicago was a nice little break in the day-to-day living of life.  The next time we take that trip north, however, I hope the temperature is more than three degrees. 

The Play's The Thing

Max and I don’t get to travel as often as we want to.  That work thing keeps interfering with that life thing.  But when we do get away, we have a great time finding new places to go and new things to do.

This past weekend, we went to Chicago by way of St. Louis to see “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” a play written by my friend Terry Teachout that is running for a couple of weeks at the Court Theater on Chicago’s South side.  The play is based on one chapter of Terry’s book Pops, a biography of the great Louis Armstrong.  We had already seen the play in Beverly Hills this past summer, but I wanted to see it in a different location with a different actor (it’s a one-man show) and a different director. 

While the feel of the Chicago version is similar to the Beverly Hills version, Barry Shabaka Henley inhabits all three of the play’s characters – Louis Armstrong, Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis – in a completely different way from John Douglas Thompson’s portrayals.  The stage is also different in this iteration; in Beverly Hills, the set was a replica of Armstrong’s dressing room at the Waldorf; in Chicago, Armstrong addresses the audience from a mostly bare stage, as he bares his soul to those who are listening.

What is not different is the poignancy with which Armstrong details the struggles he faced as a black man wanting to play music in a segregated society, and then as a black musician who won over white audiences to his cultural detriment; at the end of his life, Armstrong’s audiences were mostly white, as black audiences and other black musicians dismissed him as an old man with old ways who played to white America.  Armstrong merely wanted to play his music, and he tells of his puzzlement at the lack of loyalty from those who followed in his footsteps, those for whom Armstrong opened many doors.

The main conflict, however, exists in Armstrong’s relationship with his white, Jewish manager, Joe Glaser.  This conflict threads through Armstrong’s telling about his impoverished childhood, his very human foibles, his path to fame, and his love of music, until the conflict reaches its sad climax.  The play moves to denouement in very dramatic fashion, but what actually happened is a little less salacious (As Terry has said, this play is a work of fiction; if it isn’t in the book, it didn’t happen).  Regardless, Armstrong never knew exactly what happened between Glaser and him, realizing only that his own life was not spared one of the things that makes a good story:  betrayal.

“Satchmo at the Waldorf” is now playing at the Court Theater in Chicago, as well as at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater in San Francisco.  In May, Terry himself is directing the play in West Palm Beach, Florida.  I think I may try to go to that, as well!  Florida in May sounds much better than Chicago in January.  But it was well worth the weather risk – and we saw first hand Chicago’s reputation:  The Windy City.  And that’s another story.

 

 

New Year, New You. Ha.

I’m trying to get organized this year.  Why?  It’s never worked before!

I want to spend the next 365 days (well, 361 by now) focused on making some changes that might let me feel less stressed at the end of next year.  I would also like to practice the piano more than I usually do – which is not at all.  Before I went to Afghanistan in 2012, I played at least weekly as I accompanied the choir.  But after I got back from Afghanistan, I became the choir conductor as opposed to its accompanist.  I now find that I don’t just sit down and play very often.  I think I have to blame that stress component – knowing that I have lots to do makes playing the piano seem very frivolous.

Making lists should be first on the list of change-inducers; however, when I make those “to-do” lists, I get stressed because of the amount of stuff I have to do in any one day.  It makes me crazy.  What’s worse, as I get going on one of the items on my list, I find something else that should be done and get distracted, leaving my list and heading off into another direction. 

Feeling overwhelmed is not a good way to spend any day, and certainly is not a good way to spend every day.  The result of feeling overwhelmed is that very little gets done as I fret over the number of things left to do.

I want to be productive; more than that, I want to have a clean working environment.  Right now, as I write this, I look at piles of paper on my desk that have been there for so long that I can’t remember what is there at all. 

Perhaps I will have a better start tomorrow.  I certainly hope so!