A trip through time and space

I am trying to fully understand the trip Jack and I just took, the people, the places, the events, past and present. It encompasses so much, the details of it are overwhelming. Just traveling from Oakland, California to Cape Town, South Africa is a monumental task. You are literally moving through space and time and you feel the enormous weight of them both as you make that trip. It was as if we moved from the here and now of our lives in America through space not just to another spot on the globe, but to another time, another era.

The effect of so much of what South Africa was is still present, you can see, hear, smell, and touch and be touched by it. I know that every place holds its history. If it is not immediately evident, with a little digging it can be revealed. But in South Africa all one needs to do is turn a corner, glance out a window, or look into the eyes of the person you just asked for directions and you can feel the weight of the past pressing in on the present. The present is such a fragile thing, and so many people must work so hard to make sure the past remains in the past. Navigating the present and mapping the future are serious endeavors that are not taken for granted, because every moment in the present is so delicate, so valuable, so precious. We don't have that sense of time here, we walk over, around, and through our history as though it never happened. So many of us take today for granted and assume the arrival of tomorrow without reflection and only a little worry about those things that matter the least. As we go about our daily lives, as we move through space and time ignoring the weight of our collective past and indifferent to the fragility of the present, we are putting off a task that only grows larger the longer it is ignored.

The Blood Knot is a journey through space and time, it began with our trip to Cape Town, South Africa. Right now I am not sure where it will lead or when it will end, but I look forward to the rest of the journey.

Townships-Day 2, September 4, 2007

Townships, Day 2

(1) Waiting for Songs. People going to work. The market across the street already set up. Cabbies waiting for a fare and playing cards using a dumpster as their table. Traffic and pedestrians daring the traffic to hit them.

(2) And once again, a warning to be careful. I know we are old, but do SAJ and I look vulnerable? This is vanity speaking.

(3) Miles of settlements and poor black townships lining the highway. It’s overwhelming. It’s numbing. The highways littered with everything. Garbage and thousands of old tires. Horse drawn carts picking up scrap metal. Songs says it is a common living here. Cages of chickens and women butchering them on the side of the road.





(4) Cape Flats, the area between the Table Mountain and the ocean. It stretches out for miles. One black township with 1.4 million people. Mainly one, sometimes two-room shelters crowded right next to one another – it just seems to go on forever.



(5) It’s so….and I can’t think of another word, numbing.

(6) I tell Songs I need to see the ocean. It is breathtaking. Cape Town is a city with a sea, flat lands, hills that lead to highland vineyards and mountains in the distance. It should be the sister city of San Francisco.

(7) We visit Rodney, also a musician friend of Songs, in the “coloured” township of Bellville South. It’s like a gated community compared to informal settlements or black townships. Kitchen, bath, living room, two bedrooms, garden in front, back yard with a garage and chihuahua that jumps all over the place. It’s the family home and he lives with his parents. Hell, I wouldn’t want to leave home neither.



(8) The disparity of life because of color… tint…hue… the spectrum of the rainbow…

(9) In America, there is this thing called “white guilt.” I experience that. And in South Africa, I think there is this thing called “coloured guilt.”

(10) Coloured, coloured, coloured
Black, black, black
White, white, white

(11) Raymond makes a lovely cup of tea.

(12) Raymond’s house has a wall between the toilet and the bath/bathroom sink. I use the toilet and upon exiting, his mother points out the bathroom door, and says, “wash your hands.” Moms are universal.

(13) Raymond talks about “coloured indifference” and “coloured fear.” He admires blacks. He claims they are fearless. When do generalizations become bigotry, even when they are meant to be compliments?

(14) So many questions about the play are being answered. If not answered, then recognized. SAJ and I are already arguing about who the “good guy” is in the play.

(15) That’s a joke.

(16) Culpability…who is responsible? How far back do we go? What is retribution? What is forgiveness? Can we forgive others? Can we ever forgive ourselves?

(17) Blood, family, blood, humanity.

(18) It seems to me that this play is eternal.

(19) Songs suggests we tip Raymond. I ask should we have tipped Nkululeko? Songs says no, not really.

(20) There is a black woman washing the windows for a coloured family across the street.

(21) SAJ is my brother. I can’t wait till he meets mom back in Kansas.

(22) Lunch at Tiger’s again. Even better! Sitting at the patio when 20 – 25 pale…and I mean Nordic white tourists walk around the corner. SAJ jokes that my presence must have confused them. I get the joke but what am I, but a tourist.



(23) In the play, SAJ’s character talks about the bar he used to frequent before my character’s arrival. SAJ suggests we visit such a bar.

(24) And against my better judgment we head back to Nkululeko’s house and “his” bar next door.

(25) You can’t buy a “single” drink here. You have to buy a bottle. It’s like blue-law dry Kansas.

(26) Well if you gotta buy a bottle, you gotta buy a bottle. When in Rome…

(27) Recording everything

(28) A last drive around and I hope pictures and voice recordings come out. They ARE the record.

(29) At dinner, a 27-year old South African white female bartender claims we have seen more of Cape Town than she has, and she has lived here all her life. Why?

(30) Tired. Still bad TV. And I’m still looking forward to breakfast.

Informal Settlements - September 3, 2007

(1) Songs is our guide. A large African man with a great laugh… Reams of knowledge and the wisdom that seems years beyond his age. Without him, this trip would be meaningless. Thank you, Songs!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(2) Informal settlements…squatters’ land. Lean-to’s, shacks, shanties, made of scrap metals and salvaged woods. Tarred paper roofs held down with old tires. One door and no windows. A communal water well and a common area for washing clothes. Rows of porta-potties that are blocks long. Stray dogs everywhere. Dust, dirt, litter. No electricity. Large campfires for cooking. A dozen cattle being herded down the dirt road on which we are driving. Where do they graze? Even Songs doesn’t know the answer to that. Tables, set up on corners, that sell “smilies”… sheep heads that are roasted and considered a delicacy. I suggest we get one, but SAJ wisely talks me out of it. People sitting and staring. Children moving dirt with their toes as if it is a game. Clothes and bedding hanging on fences that separate these settlements from more affluent townships. A dirt road that separates one settlement from a township area nicknamed “Beverly Hills.” Beverly Hills is a neighborhood in Langa consisting of one – to two-room bungalows. And believe me…compared to the settlement, the name is fitting. Row upon row of these shanties connected by a common wall, because that means one less wall to build. Most times, connected in the back, too, because that means two less walls to build. These settlements are found throughout Cape Town. They have no names. Children are born here.





(3) And yet people smile and wave.

(4) We re-visit the black township of Langa and home to Songs. He takes us to meet Nkululeko, a musician friend of his. Nkululeko is a percussionist and marimba player and this morning he is terribly hungover. Man, artists are the same everywhere.



(5) Nkululeko’s favorite bar is right next door to his house. Cool.

(6) There is a tour bus on Nkululeko’s street. Tourists having lunch at a restaurant there.

(7) Nkululeko plays some of his latest music for us. It is a DVD recorded in Japan. He shows me a picture of his Japanese girlfriend. I show him a picture of my Japanese wife.

(8) Lots of laughs and jokes at each other’s expense. It’s like hanging with Judd and Rene.

(9) Back on the road. The mass transportation system here seems to be all privately owned. Vans and buses pick up people at collection spots in townships and drive them to Cape Town proper or its suburbs.

(10) All public school students wear uniforms. As a child of the 60’s, surprisingly, I like that they do.

(11) I just saw a dog scratching his back on the front bumper of a Volks Wagon.

(12) Langa has a population of little over 170,000. It is the smallest and oldest of all black townships in Cape Town. Songs seems to know every one of those 170,000 people. Waves, yells, honking horns. We are in the capable hands of a rock star.

(13) Lunch at Tiger’s…A long connected 3-room heaven! You buy your meat (lamb, beef, pork, chickens, sausages, and variety types) in the first room, a butcher shop. You then season it with assorted spices. Songs did this for us. You then give this platter of meat to the cook in the second room. And while he is grilling, you proceed to the 3rd room and come to the lounge and an outdoor patio. The patio is a concrete slab facing the street with cars parked about 6 ft away. Order a few beers and wait for the food. Watch Songs greet everyone and introduce us to them. Everyone knows everyone. All are kind and welcoming. A school bell goes off across the street. Then the food comes on a large tin tray with one knife. It is placed on a chair between us, and it’s every man for himself. Grabbing, pulling, tearing the meat apart and tasting the best food I think we had in Cape Town.



(14) And not one vegetable in sight. Not even a lamb-flavored potato chip.

(15) Recording and filming everyone and everything we can. I hope these machines work.

(16) More black townships. Alive with people and activities. Interactive…not just people rushing home to work, to home. Laughter. The joy of a common struggle?

(17) Back at the hotel, and the woman at the front desk seems genuinely shocked that we spent a day in Langa. Crime, gangs, drugs, etc. She is “coloured.”

(18) Terrible television in South Africa. 5 stations and 3 of them show soccer. The other two, old reruns of American soap operas.

(19) Consciously observing is exhausting. Night, night.

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Visual tour of the township:

Jack Reporting #5

(1) Boys and girls… I just found a mall! So western…so modern…so comfortable. And it's at the pier that takes you to Robben Island. How perfect.

(2) We meet Ivan and Fanny. They are wonderful to us. SAJ will elaborate.

(3) We take naps every day. God, we are old.

(4) Dinner at an Irish Bar in South Africa.

(4-a) The doorman says “ no smoking” but everyone is smoking. It’s just like Summers Place or High Tide.

(4-b) Beautiful Africans dressed to the nines. I mean really beautiful men and women in stylish attires. It could be SF or NYC.

(4-c) Moroccan architecture and sturdy furniture.

(4-d) High tech sound system with all kinds of music. Not just “Oh, Danny Boy.”

(4-e) Menu that features “Irish Stew.” Everything else is sports bar food. We settle for the appetizer platter of ribs, buffalo wings, chicken strips, fried mushrooms, potatoes, and onion rings with various sauces.

(4-f) Most beautiful smiles here.

(5) Going to bed early. I have church tomorrow.

We get by with a little help from my friends...

I made arrangements to meet Ivan and Fanny LeKay at the Clock Tower and from there we would all go to lunch. It's Saturday Sept. 1st and it is cold and rainy, but these are warm, generous people who have helped us enormously in our effort to learn the complexities of race and color in South Africa.

Jack and I get to the water front a little early. The Clock Tower is a well known local landmark on the Cape Town waterfront. It was once an industrial and commercial waterfront. Goods, including slaves from the Malay peninsula and Madagascar and central Africa came and went. There is an actual clock tower facing the water, now it is the hub of a lot of the tourist activity and a lot of commercial activity in general. Read that as SHOPPING, BIG TIME! Hotels, shops, restaurants, a trip to Robbin Island (we'll go Wednesday), water taxi tours, a little outdoor amphitheater. All kinds of street acts performing as you walk by. You name it, it is there. My friends arrive and we start walking across the waterfront to a large mall. We pass a lot of street performers, singers, dancers, a comedy act at the amphitheater, but one catches my eye and ear. He is a black African guy sitting against a wall playing a wooden flute and shaking a gourd. He is barefoot, and where he is it is particularly windy and cold. I notice him as we pass on the way to the mall. We get to the mall and it is large and bustling. We proceed to a very nice seafood place and we sit out in the mall so we can see the people pass as we eat.

Ivan and Fanny are wonderful people, they tell us about growing up colored in South Africa. Ivan tells a story about his parents, one dark and one very light. His mother has not seen her sister in years, after a lot of negotiation it was agreed they would meet at a hotel in Durban. Now Durban was a good distance from Ivan's rural home in the western Cape, but his dad agreed to take his mom to Durban. They drove to the hotel in Durban and he dropped his wife off and went away, he had to leave because it was a colored hotel and he was too dark.

Fanny has a similar story involving her mother and her mom's sister. They have not seen each other since their early adulthood. Fanny's aunt is about to marry a white man, she is light enough to pass for white, and has. After some very intense negotiation, it is decided they will meet at a colored hotel and the Aunt's husband to be will not attend. If he did there would be no wedding. They meet and just as in the case of Ivan's mom, the two sisters never meet again.

I hope I don't sound like a broken record, but race and color are the thousand pound gorilla in the room, and in the U.S.A. we act like he isn't there. We continue to talk and eat, I talk about Blood Knot, the plot and characters, I mention the locale of the play, the township of Korsten. I refer to it as black, Ivan says no, it's not black it's colored. I am momentarily stunned. I realize I am still viewing the play through the prism of my experience with race and color at home. They are very similar, but the details are very different. That is why Jack and I are here, to learn the details of the world of Blood Knot. That is why I am so indebted to my new friends in South Africa, who lived colored, who lived black, who lived through Apartheid and are willing to share that with us.

We finish eating and talking and we leave and start to go back towards the clock tower and Ivan and Fanny's car. Then Jack realizes that he has forgotten his jacket and starts back to the restaurant to retrieve it. Ivan and Fanny say their goodbyes and leave and I am alone on the waterfront. I am watching the people and the water, feeling the brisk wind and enjoying the smell of the sea, and then I hear it, the sound of a wooden flute and a gourd. I look towards the shrill melody and the rattling rhythm and there he is. The black African guy. Still sitting and playing in the cold. I see a young girl stop and give him some coins, but mostly people ignore him. He's not colorful or showy or friendly, or funny or charming. He looks poor and like he might smell a bit. Jack comes hustling back into my sight line and I hail him and we start back to where we can get a taxi. Jack is walking a few paces ahead of me, he is always a few paces ahead of me, and I notice the gourd and flute guy again. I am right in front of him, and just on impulse I stop and drop a few rand in his basket. We don't look at each other and I walk on, telling Jack to slow down. We hail a taxi and head back to the hotel.

Blood Knot, race and color, the U.S.A., South Africa, poverty, religion, sex, education, family, all that makes up life. As an old friend once said, "don't go, we have to figure this out."

Jack Reporting #4-2 District Six Museum

(1) 15 Rand to enter the place. Quiet. Reverential. A woman at the reception desk looking happy to see us. A sign in visitor book. Typical museum stuff.

(2) We meet Noor…our guide. He’s busy and asks us to wait for a few minutes. So we look around.

(3) A pyramid of street signs from the destroyed streets…saved.

(4) A map on the floor with names showing where the displaced used to live.

(5) I’m sure SAJ has done better at the history of District Six, so I’ll just add these few observations…

(5-a) I am reminded of Japantown in SF.

(5-b) Noor’s grandfather had 30 children. What’s that about!?

(5-c) A remarkable installation of a District Six home and its artifacts that have been semi-plastered into a wall with Apartheid laws printed over it all.



(5-d) Stairs…

(5-e) and this is it. In the back, a daycare. A museum with a living daycare center. Children at lunch singing their grace… Laughing and eating their meals to the sound of their teacher singing, “food is good, we love food.” The past and the future all in one.

(6) What is “Colour”? There was a black police force, a coloured police force, and a white police force all enforcing the Apartheid law. District Six was raised by the people of colour against the people of colour. That’s a hard one for me. I am so American and white.

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Video tour of District Six Museum:

Jack Reporting #4

(1) Just saw a commercial on TV that started with "Are you South African and still having issues with colour? Then get this issue of STYLE!" And they showed pages from the magazine and talked about articles concerning fashion, interior design, and this year's style trend. You gotta be f@#%ing me.

(2) What is "Colour" and what does it really mean to us? I mean REALLY?

(3) They just announced on South African News that the cost of anti-viral AIDS drugs are expected to rise 500% over the next few years. It's just another form of genocide if you ask me.

(4) Bacon is still great.

(5) The hotel we are staying in makes us turn in our room keys before we leave the building and the locals are telling us to be careful on the street.

(6) I get what they are inferring, but it doesn't seem that dangerous.

(7) SAJ needed to do currency exchange and it's like Fort Knox at the banks here. You push a red button, and wait until it turns green and then the sliding door opens and then you walk in and the door shuts behind you. You then push another red button and wait for the light to turn green and then another door opens and then you enter the bank.

(8) And then they tell you that they don’t do currency exchange.

(9) So you try to leave but there are more buttons and two people can never be in the same cubicle at the same time. What are they trying to say?

(10) Just passed a South African Woolworth. It reminds us of the lunch counter arrests, boycotts of Woolworth and the United States of the 60’s.

(11) But this is a very upscale Woolworth. They sell lattes.

(12) What was the other five and dime? Kreisges?

(13) It took us a while, but we find the District Six Museum.

Jack At Last! #3

(1) Feeling better but where do these market people come from so early in the morning? And where do they go to with all this stuff? Townships are miles away. Displacement...Urban renewal? Cabrini Green?

(2) I can't imagine working as hard as they do.

(3) I never worked as hard as they do.

(4) I don't know what hard work is. Not like that.

(5) F@#& it. We are going to the beach.

(6) Beautiful beaches and the coastline. We will send pictures.

(7) We park on a street in an obviously white beach town and are met by young men and women of color wearing T-shirts proclaiming that they are "Beach Road Parking Security." Apparently, they will protect our car while we eat lunch. Upon asking a waiter, I am told to tip them 5 - 10 Rand. This is their job.

(8) Women on the corners waiting for the buses or vans to take them from their housekeeping jobs. They are in clothes that are almost Amish in nature. But they laugh, sing and whistle as we pass.

(9) Men in hard work clothes walking against traffic on major throughways. And we drive past.

(10) I am told that South Africa’s greatest employer is self-employment.

(11) It’s a beautiful landscape…scarred.

(12) The disparity of weath is unbelievable. Ghastly and sinful.

LATE NIGHT EDITION!
Okay, this is the truth. I am having an anxiety dream about the blog with Carey and Pink and Janette telling me I need to do it and with me quitting and with my wife saying “Just do it.” And I wake up in a sweat.

There has to be a better way.

The District Six Museum

Today we went to the District Six Museum and we met Noor, the founder of the museum. So what, or more appropriately where is District Six? District Six is now a large empty area on a hillside in Capetown, it was a thriving neighborhood. Noor is a South African man of Indian descent. He is sixty two years old, his story and the story of District Six are inextricably linked.

District Six was a place where all kinds of people lived. Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, Colored, Black, but no one who was White. That was the problem. The area was a prime location, looking out over Cape Town towards the water. In the early Sixties the government sent out notices to the residents of District Six that they were living in violation of the law and that the district was to become an all white area, they were told to move, they had lost ownership of their property, and it would be bulldozed. Now the impact of that is a bit abstract, until you talk to someone who experienced it.

Noor was born in a house in District Six. This house was his family's home in South Africa since they had been here. His entire life was contained in this area. He stood across the street and watched as the bulldozer came and transformed his family's home into a pile of rubble. He wept as he watched all that his parents had worked a lifetime to build being destroyed. He spoke of a time when people of different religions all celebrated their friend's holidays, how they attended the various places of worship and prayed together out of mutual respect for the religious beliefs of their friends and neighbors. He told how families were broken up. A Colored man is married to a black woman, they have three children, the children are dark. The Colored father is moved to a Colored township, his Black wife and Black children are moved to a Black township, to visit them he is required by law to go to the police station and get a permit for each visit. This is the madness of Apartheid, this is the world of our play.

There is enormous irony here, today South Africa wants to be a kind of multicultural model and yet they had that model in the early sixties in District Six and they didn't value it, in fact, they destroyed it. The demolition of District Six is the backdrop of the world of The Blood Knot. The world of our play is a world in which color means everything. Where you can live, what you can do, who you can see, also how you are seen by the world. Black people were required by law to carry a "passbook," other people carried identification cards indicating their racial category, and this was required of all South Africans, but for black South Africans the circumstance was a little different. If you were black you had to have your passbook on your person at all times. If a policeman asked to see it and you didn't have it, you were arrested and fined, and if you couldn't pay the fine you were imprisoned until it was paid. Your skin color was the fence around your life, you couldn't go over it or under it, you had to live inside that fence.

Today District Six is an urban wasteland, no one lives there. Many want to see it established as a monument park, so the injustices of the past are never forgotten. Perhaps they will succeed, perhaps not.

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Pictures from the District Six Museum:

Jack At Last! #2

(1) Man, South African bacons are the best bacons in the world. They put out quite a breakfast spread.

(2) 8AM, I wake to the sound of shopping carts rolling down the street, which is cobble-stoned street. And it is the beginning of another day at Green Market. The entire place is erected from scratch - poles, ropes, awnings, tables, and lots of "stuff" that you could find in Berkeley or on the Lower East Side of NYC.



Tourists and Commerce... I guess it's everywhere.

(3) Out on the street, eerie. Am I experiencing white guilt??

(4) Found a great music store and want to spend a day there. Lots of American, and African Jazz, Blues, Ska, etc. And hand-made instrument that I must consider buying.

(5) SAJ walks slower than I do.

(6) But he's much smarter than I am.

(7) Found a liquor store. Thank Allah!

(8) So we are walking along, looking at the Table Mountain, and noticing that there is a Turkish bath in the neighborhood. We turn a corner and are confronted by St. George's Cathedral. This was Tutu's Cathedral. It is like being in Atlanta at M. L. K.'s Baptist Church. And remarkably there are protesters. Schoolgirls, singing and walking and dancing and clapping in a circle. Their issues? Health! AIDS!! Beautiful young women and great sounds. I am humbled.

(9) SAJ said there are cops everywhere...taking pictures...making recording... which is exactly what we are doing.

(10) He really does walk slow, but he is really smart.

(11) Relics of oppression everywhere. Jails, courthouses. You can feel the hurt everywhere.

(12) Still being called “Boss,” and being told where the good times are. His name is Kev. And if I mention his name, I get a discount and he gets a commission.

(13) Tired, tired, tired.

(14) Lots of local history. Just waiting for the personal stories.

(15) Feeling sick. Going to bed. Early. Night, night.

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Table Mountain in Cape Town:



SAJ looking out over the coastline:





Coastal resort in Cape Town:

Day #2 - We meet Songs and talk to Ivan

The virgin blogger is online again. SAJ coming to you from Cape Town, South Africa. Today started at about 6:30 a.m. No matter how far I may travel, I am never far from A.C.T.'s conservatory and our beloved MFA students. I did some work on the upcoming second year production of The Roundhouse. Then I had breakfast and I had to change rooms because my old room was a wifi deadzone. No wifi hotspot, no blog, and we couldn't have that, so I moved all my stuff to another room and all is well. Last night I had to blog from the hotel lobby (oh my, oh my). I am willing to do a lot of things in public, but blogging is not one of them. Now I can blog in the privacy of my room.

I got on the phone and rang up (their term not mine) a number of contacts I made on a previous trip, among them a man named Songs Ngcongolo, a Xhosa gentleman with a vast knowledge of the history of The Struggle and of township life. He came and met with us and we arranged to spend two days with him in various townships. Songs lives in the township of Langa. I also spoke with another friend I made from a previous trip, Ivan Le Kay. Ivan is my age (don't ask) and under Apartheid he and his family were classified as Cape colored and his first language was Afrikaans. He also speaks English, of course, and he told me that he made a point of sending his children to English language schools because he viewed Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor. He now refers to himself as a Black man, something we have in common. Under the old system Songs was classified as Black, he and Ivan and I are all very similar in skin color. Ivan and I shared many stories about our family histories and we discovered many similarities around issues of race and especially skin color that we had in common. In short, darker was bad and lighter was good, and with this distinction came privilege. This was true in South Africa and the U.S.A. We agreed that to a certain extent this is still true.

Think about it and be honest, we respond to skin color, don't we? Forget about what we say publicly, you know in your heart of hearts that you respond to skin color in large and small ways. That idea lies at the very center of Blood Knot and I want to get inside it, eat, sleep, and breath it, so it guides me in my work on this show. I want to confront the truth of that, and take the audience with me eight times a week. I want you to hear the voice of Songs Ngcongolo, he is singing "the Click song." I hope I can download this for you.

Jack At Last!

(1) Long and restless flight. World is made for small people... At least airplanes are.

(2) When you really think about it, this is a weird excursion - Halfway around the world for research on an obscure South African play that hasn't been produced for 30 years. Hopefully we'll do everybody proud and justify ourselves with this opportunity.

(3) Trouble with car reservation. Dianne, don't worry. We can fix it. We shouldn't have called you, but actors can be such a p@$$%s.

(4) Traffic, traffic, traffic. And the gears. Steering wheel and roads are all backwards. Foreigners, huh! Pedestrians everywhere walking on the sides of major highways and crossing right in front of you almost begging to be ran over. They make New Yorkers look like p@$$%s. If we don't kill someone or ourselves or cause an accident, it will be an act of a benevolent god.

(5) The hotel is great. Thanks, Dianne and Caresa.

(6) Great currency exchange rate. Thanks, somebody?

(7) These mechanical digital toys are pain in my a$$. But we will figure them out.

(8) Staying awake on doctors' orders and getting really f@%&ing stupid, slap happy, goofy, and dumb. I just asked somebody where to buy "lamps" and what I meant to say was "stamps."

(9) Cocktails and smokes are quite affordable. Thank you, god!!! No, REALLY! THANK YOU!!!!!! See you guys at A.C.T. in 2008. I'm not coming back.

(10) I look like a cop.

(11) So does SAJ.

(12) There is a private club called "Paradise." I'll bring back the card. I am being solicited constantly and called "Boss." It's a little disconcerting.

(13) Looking at faces.

(13-a) SAJ has a whole thing about faces of colors. He will elaborate.
(13-b) I'm looking at middle aged white men and seeing Foster everywhere. Where were these middle-aged men then and what did they do during The Struggle?
(13-c) I look in the mirror and see my dad, and am therefore forced to ask the question..."Where would I have been and what would I have done?"

(14) They have beef-flavored potato chips. WHY??? Lamb-flavored, too. Really, WHY?

(15) I have to wrap my mind around this "Coloured" thing. It seems so completely different from Jim Crow. This is absolutely pivotal to the production. Coloured, coloured, coloured! I must keep pondering that. I must force that word. That enigma into something actable.

(16) As a baby boomer, and the frequent viewer of post-WWII films made in the US, I have always had an aversion to the German language and its subsequent dialect as performed by badly trained American actors. It is like the dialect of Bull Conners, George Wallace or Lester Maddox and that ilk. It seems like it was made to oppress.

(17) I'm getting a little drunk.

(18) Just had dinner at this authentically touristy African menued restaurant. Great beans & rice. Great spinach & squash. And great Ox tail and Lamb. Soul Foods? Go figure!

(19) Cuban cigars and scotch at a bar in Cape Town with SAJ... What could be better?

(20) Gene pool - gene pool - think about gene pool.

(21) Sitting with SAJ at a cigar & scotch lounge in Cape Town Center, minding our own business. When 4 (count them closely) German women of the holiday variety sat across from us, smiling and chatting. We talked about cigars, and the Cuban boycott. We talked about scotch and its many qualities and how it is almost an absolute universal icebreaker. We talked about traveling around the world, and about the many places we have been to. They then asked us..."so are you in South Africa for business?" And we said, "yes." "What kind of business?" "We are actors," we beamed.

And they didn't talk to us for the rest of the evening.

The 1st day in Cape Town

Well this is it, we arrived at 5:00 a.m. this morning. This is the longest trip in the universe, we were absolutely a complete and total mess after 23 hours in the air. But miraculously we got the rental car and drove to the Tudor Hotel in downtown Cape Town. It's not bad and it is located in the heart of town. We walked around the area. This city is filled with people who speak the most amazing mix of dialects and languages, it dazzles the mind. Speaking of "the mind" my mind is fried, we have been up all day, so we're going to go eat and then I expect we both will call it a day. Until later.............