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It is 8:30am on closing day of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 90th season. Last night I finished a 97-show run of As You Like It as Rosalind (would’ve been 98, but we had to cancel one). Today we will wrap up Julius Caesar after 119 shows, four of which I missed due to a pulled tendon and exhaustion. It’s been the most challenging and fulfilling 10 months I think I’ve ever experienced. I didn’t sleep well last night. The celebratory cocktails and bone-weariness conspired to keep me up with a stomachache and racing thoughts. I wouldn’t change it for anything. So now I’m really up for the day, puttering but not too hard. My YouTube feed produces a 12-minute Dick Cavett clip of Orson Welles. He’s describing hiking the Tyrolean Alps in his youth. Also a dinner party in Innsbruck with an utterly forgettable Adolph Hitler:  Ken Albers as Lear and Ray Porter as Kent, OSF 2004 Welles’ distinct baritone washes over me, his jocular haughtiness, his masterful control of narrative and punchline. Just as he’s mentioning how proudly uneducated he is, I find myself thinking of an interaction I had outside the theater on the previous day. A young woman who works in the box office named Samantha caught me to pay a compliment. She said “I can only imagine what your training must be”, to which I replied “I never went to college, I grew up here, my father was an actor in the company.” Now I think it might have sounded like a boast, but that’s not how I meant it. What I was trying to say – what I wish I’d said was: “I didn’t go to college, I apprenticed myself here at OSF.” I’ve been very lucky. I grew up in dressing rooms, backstage and in the booth, watching rehearsals and playing with Ben Nye bruise wheels and stippling sponges since I was very, very young. When I skipped out of Bennington after just 3 months to do Idiot’s Delight at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I received no real pushback from my artsy parents. The theater was calling, I had been promised an apprentice’s stipend, and I had everyone’s blessing in pursuing the opportunity. And I believe, having started in this way, that if you really want to do this, you can learn the ropes without putting down tens of thousands of dollars for a higher education. Primarily watching, listening, being in the company of actors and theater artists. That’s what I did for 20+ years at OSF and elsewhere. It seems to have worked out, as it did for thousands of actors over thousands of years before educational institutions (corporations?) began selling the lie that they know best how to prepare a person to do what we can all do naturally – think and feel. It's a message I’d like to spread, but I’m wary of being irresponsible. How many theaters these days will take a chance, however small and spear-holdery, on someone who hasn’t been through a professional training program? OSF doesn’t do it anymore, and in fact they only used to offer apprenticeships to Southern Oregon University students here in Ashland. They made an exception for me, because my father was an actor in this company. And there’s the NEPOTISM I’ve been trying to justify with hard work my whole life. The word blinks on and off in ten-foot-tall neon in my mind’s eye. So it’s complicated. But wouldn’t it be a way to pay back my good fortune if, one day, I could take on an apprentice myself? I’d invite them to come with me to rehearsal, observe backstage, understudy my parts. Learn by doing, in a real, professional theater… Orson is still going on, now about Cornelia Lundt (I make a mental note to look her up, it sounds like her life is the stuff of a musical), and now about how Churchill once helped him get a film financed. It feels like coming home, listening to him talk. He reminds me of Ken Albers, the person to whom I really apprenticed myself. A giant of the theater (and Wellesian in stature), a rarity who could direct and act with equal genius, Ken would pace back and forth in the moat of the Elizabethan theater, chain smoking and bellowing notes of pure gold. He took me under his wing. He kissed me on the mouth every chance he got and it never bothered me. He got me drunk on deliciously strong margaritas and told me stories of going up sky high and breaking and backstage shenanigans. He gave me encouragement and advice and a geode, flattering me by saying it was like what I’d done with a bit part in his adaptation of The Visit – taken something rough and unremarkable and turned it into a gem. I keep the stone on my dressing table wherever I’m staying when I am working on a play.  Ensemble, Ken Albers' production of The Visit (OSF. 2004). I'm in braids and pleated skirt, left. Ken is gone now, as is his darling wife Catie. I found myself slinking into their estate sale in the Spring, searching for unwanted copies of his adaptation of the Dürrenmatt play. Just as I was about to give up, overwhelmed by the morass of mementos and memories, I found two. One for me, and one for Linda Alper – another great who still does the Herculean lift of 8 shows a week while offering kindness and encouragement to those coming up in the company who are much younger. There were so many like Linda and Ken, who helped and encouraged me along the way. Who taught me what to do by their brilliant examples. The truth is, I want to be like Orson Welles (just not as swollen). I want to direct, to write, to act. I admit to being proud that I’m formally uneducated, as he was. I want there to be a path into our strange world that doesn’t involve debt and delay, for those who hear its siren song. Money shouldn’t be an object for anyone who wants to be a priest or priestess, which is what my husband insists I’m doing up there on the stage, bless his heart. Money wasn’t an object for Welles, or at least he didn’t let it stand in his way. But then again, he had Winston Churchill backing him up. And I had Ken Albers.  Me and Ken, 2013
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 Our short documentary Bear People is an Official Selection of the Tacoma Film Festival, October 9-13th! Bear People started out as a simple oral history project. Our original aim was to collect the stories of environmental activists attending a Grizzly Bear conservation event in Idaho in the summer of 2023. Three subjects volunteered to sit for interviews with Kevin, and everyone seemed to have a great time. A year later, while cutting their interviews together, we began to realize that a narrative was suggesting itself. Around the same time, we learned that footage of the events described by our subjects was sitting mostly ignored in the Internet Archive. The real kickers was that most of this footage was shot by folks we know, including our pal Mike Mease of Buffalo Field Campaign, and Kevin's late friend Ritchie Doyle. In addition, the Earth First! Journal Archives, digitally housed within the Environment and Society Portal of the Rachel Carson Center, backed up our subjects' stories with articles and images written during the Cove-Mallard Campaign, a major topic of conversation within the interviews. Suddenly our first documentary short was coming together as if by magic. The FilmFreeway page for the project is here, and our quick trailer is below. Thanks to old pal Megan Isser and new friend Gary Kout, who are connecting us to the film community here in Ashland and advising on putting a Digital Cinema Package together for Tacoma. We're grateful to TFF to be able to bring these stories to a wider audience in the Pacific Northwest, where our subjects' Actions contributed to the preservation of the Cove-Mallard Roadless Area in the 90s.  Our Special Boy has passed on. He went naturally and quickly in our home, in our arms, on the morning of June 18th. As Kevin said, quoting a friend, "he taught us how to love." Gently and steadily. We hope to embody his lesson and carry it forward. Oh how we miss him. And how lucky we were to have him in our lives for as long as we did. Run on, Wilton -- in the wind, the flowers, the bees, the trees...  Screw Netflix, Prime and all the monolithic, mega-corp streaming platforms out there. This week I watched The Edge of Paradise on Plex for free with a shit ton of unforgivably timed commercial breaks. The upshot was not having Jeff Bezos' oily, rapacious maw in the back of my mind. Totally worth it. A quick search brought me to an Open Culture list of other streamable documentaries available on non-subscription platforms. Rah rah free media. As I scrolled through, I was surprised to see a familiar name in one of the descriptions: Death Mills -- Free — Billy Wilder’s documentary in German showing what Allies found when they liberated Nazi extermination camps. (1945) I adore everything of Billy Wilder's I've ever seen. My country is handing the reigns to a would-be authoritarian regime in a couple of weeks. Death Mills sounded relevant.  Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe on the set of "Some Like it Hot" (1959) Side note: For most of my adulthood I've been able to keep certain aspects of my day-to-day reality neatly compartmentalized. Uncomfy stuff like what I pick up about American politics goes in a box to "examine later" (more like "never" if I can help it). This now seems like a luxury. A privilege I didn't realize I was receiving. Until 2020 I didn't wring my hands at every election. I just voted and coasted on with a vague but sure-enough sense that everything would work out. That when it came right down to it, I wouldn't actually lose my rights. I wouldn't be putting myself in danger of physical harm just by walking down the street. Yeah, privilege is definitely the right word. Since November 6th an increasing number of individuals out in public seem to be exuding a palpable tension. This is energy of a very particular tenor, it's on the offensive in the extreme. I don't think it's because I smoked that one joint and got a little paranoid. There's hard visual evidence too. Traveling from Southern California to Southern Oregon last week I passed someone wearing a "FUCK YOUR FEELINGS" t-shirt, a private property sign reading "TRUMP WON - FAFO", and a large confederate flag billowing from a pick up truck emblazoned with the message "I'M NOT COMING DOWN". Those were just a few of the beauts glimpsed on my trip up the Left Coast. I've also spent time thinking about how some history gets "memory-holed". I'm working on a short documentary about environmental activism in the 90s, and I know from interview subjects that particular direct action events were covered by major news outlets, but said coverage is nowhere to be found in online archives. Possibly just not digitized -- more likely trashed, taped over. Maybe simply to make room for new news. To whit, we didn't always have the seemingly-limitless storage capacity of the cloud. Occasionally the fat had to be trimmed, as I understand from the elders. But I wonder if the nature of its content doomed some slices of recorded history. Maybe whoever was doing the culling just didn't like the look of that 20-year-old hippie getting her head bashed in while u-locked to a logging truck. A little tasteless. A little embarrassing for a particular corporation or individual or mindset. So into the bin, and over the fine line of suppression. And these are just the sins of omission -- let's not even talk about outright AI historical revisions, complete with their hyper-real composited images (aka hard visual evidence). Reality is subjective. Certain trees fall in the forest -- unless, of course, all the witnesses are dead, never told their stories, or the tape just doesn't exist. I recently learned of a belief that if you can do nothing else, simply bearing witness is a crucial part of activism. In light of where we are, where I am, and where we may be headed after January 20th, I decided it was a fine night to witness one of the most heinous atrocities in human history with Billy Wilder holding my hand. I also had no idea he'd made a documentary about the holocaust and was simply curious.  "Death Mills" - come for the Wilder, stay for the face of fascism Half of me wishes I'd never seen this thing. The other half of me is pretty sure it arrived right on time by Provident Magic of the Universe. Death Mills is a reality check of the highest order. Although I've been fearful these past weeks, seeing ultranationalism's end-game was clarifying. As in: I have no other option but to resist this horror in every way within my power and personal value system. And resist it to the death -- since what's on the line, ultimately, is our lives. This unhumorous irony is what Wilder's film (if it can be called his) shows. Death Mills is composed of footage taken by US Armed Forces cameramen at the liberation of Dachau on April 29th, 1945, as well as other concentration camps. Its 20 minutes are a fraction of the 37+ hours of footage held by the National Archives, according to this article by their Motion Picture Lab preservation supervisor Criss Austin. Regarding the provenance of the film, Austin's article cites an affidavit by Isidore Siegel, Chief of the US Army Pictorial Center Legal Office: "Footage utilized in said documentary was originally photographed by Armed Forces Cameramen in the European Theater of Operations and shipped directly to the U.S. Army Pictorial Center. The footage was edited into a documentary film at the U.S. Army Pictorial Center. Subsequently, the film was loaned to the Office of War Information which re-edited the same to produce the German language film, ‘Todes Muhlen.’ The said film without additional editing was rescored by the U.S. Army Pictorial center into the English language film entitled, ‘Death Mills,’ which is also known as ‘Mills of Death.’ "  A liberated child shows their identification tattoo in "Death Mills" According to Criss Austin's article referenced above, Todes Muhlen or Die Todesmühlen (the original German version) was "written and directed" by Hanuš Burger (or Hans Burger if you're looking at IMDB). At the time the film was made, Burger was 36 years old. Online English-language sources are rather thin, but there is a German article from the DEFA-Foundation on his fascinating, brave life here. What follows is a brief recap: Born in Prague in 1909, Burger relocated with his family to Germany when he was 11. In Frankfurt am Main he graduated high school and quickly ditched a shoe-making apprenticeship for the theater. There his interests in design, dramaturgy, directing and writing flourished. In his early 20s he worked professionally as a dramaturg, stage designer and theater director, also penning plays and at least one screenplay. He mingled with left-wing actors and co-founded a Bertolt Brecht club as well as a club for Czech-German stage employees. He explored the experimental theater scene, was active in the Czechoslovakian Communist party, wrote articles about his experiences in theater, became the editor of a journal, and worked under a pseudonym as a courier to Berlin. At 29 Burger collaborated with American documentarian Herbert Kline on Crisis (1939), a film documenting the 1938 German Reich's annexation of Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and the resistance response that followed. After the footage for Crisis was shot, Burger participated in smuggling it out of Czechoslovakia. The film was completed in New York in 1939, and swiftly named best picture of the year by the National Board of Review. One of the first anti-Hitler documentaries ever made, Crisis has since been restored by the MoMA and is available for purchase on Blu-ray with a short clip online here. After fleeing Europe in 1938 Burger taught at NYU and continued to make documentaries. An application to the US army was initially rejected because of his known communist activities, but he was later drafted and served overseas in the Propaganda and Psychological Warfare Detachment. He eventually turned his experiences with the army into the non-fiction novel 1212 Sends. After winning an Academy Award for his documentary short First Steps in 1948, he continued to direct throughout the 1950s and 60s, even as he left America to avoid scrutiny by HUAC. In 1965 he helmed the feature Nichts als Sünde (English title: Nothing But Sin), a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which he had originally directed for the stage. He was still working in television as late as 1977, and died in Munich in 1990 at the age of 81. And after typing all that, I still think it doesn't do justice to what I read in the DEFA-Foundation's article about Burger. Let's just say he was an artist, an activist, a teacher, an army man, an ex-pat. An enfant terrible, a polymath. A virtuoso.  Hanuš Burger And yet, Billy Wilder is "often credited as the director of the English version" of Death Mills, according to Criss Austin. Also according to Austin, it's likely that Burger and Wilder collaborated on editing Die Todesmühlen, although the DEFA article suggests that Wilder was only brought in later to supervise. The internet is a bit murky on how the two really partnered up for Death Mills. Perhaps it's covered in a Wilder biography, or perhaps it's in the ol' memory hole. Billy is known to have travelled to and served in Berlin at the close of WWII "as a colonel in the US Army's Division of Psychological Warfare charged with helping to assess and rebuild Germany’s film industry," according to this paper. He was also on a personal hunt for information about his mother, grandmother and step-father, all of whom lost their lives to the Nazis' juggernaut. As for the footage in Die Todesmühlen, Austin asserts that it was taken as "a record of events, for troop education, use in war crimes trials, and for other educational purposes." Like teaching those of us privileged not to know, what genocide really looks like. Death Mills is relentless and hallucinogenic in its brutality. It is a parade of human skeletons, some living, some dead, some somewhere in between. Orphans raise their sleeves to show tattooed identification numbers as a voiceover intones that many of them have forgotten their own names. Death chambers abound. Despicable signage. Vats of wedding rings, watches, dentures and gold fillings, ripped from their owners' hands, wrists, mouths. Piles upon piles upon piles upon close-ups of faces in piles upon piles of corpses. So many heaped dead that I found myself choking on demented near-laughter -- how can this be real, this is absurd, a trick of the camera, there can't possibly be that many bodies, it must be fake. It's not fake. This is real news, baby. It all really happened.  Female survivors in "Death Mills" I can't imagine Death Mills garnering less than an NC-17 rating if it were shown publicly today. Except for the most tame excerpts, I can't imagine it being shown at all, which is why I think it's worth watching. It tells the fate of the frog sitting in the pot of water -- the frog who starts to perspire uncomfortably but never gets out to see that the burner's turned all the way up. Let's not memory-hole the past. Let's not sugar-coat the present or look the other way in the future. That's why Die Todesmühlen was made in the first place. To show us, lest we stray again, how our humanity is at stake. Stream Death Mills on an empty stomach and for free through the National Archives: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/36082  Opening titles of "Death Mills"
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