THE PLAYS (1990s)

My first husband Dace Seitzinger and me (we took Edie on a cruise in 1990)

A friend asked about my play THE OPENING, which he has read. I wrote him this reply.

BACKGROUND:

 

It all started in Oregon... I had a goal, write a play (and get divorced.) I have a BFA in Theatre (1978). So I kinda wanted to use my degree. They say a playwright's work is respected and left unchanged when it comes to production - not so with film.

I wrote APPLE on the Oregon Coast 1994-5; I lived alone in a Rockaway beach house and worked part-time for Special Olympics.  My divorce was finally final in 1995 but we had already been separated a few years.  Apple is a two act (not three)... I have to find it since there were many early drafts.  That is the challenge of saving stuff then not finding the final final version. I do LOVE this play.

I also wrote a series of children's stories in 1991-2 (living in Seattle) and called them RED MAN: Through the Eyes of Many - that is when I started going to Pine Ridge South Dakota (Oglala Lakota rez) every year and met my sister/relative Ellowyn Locke.  They adopted me.  She approved of the stories content and her artist brother even offered to illustrate them - but it didn't happen. A Montana publisher (The Council on Indian Education) even accepted them but then they folded (lost funding). I hung onto the 7+ children's short stories and really like them a lot but I can see they need an editor - maybe someday they will see the light.

1995 and divorced, my cottage lease was up (one year) and so I moved to Jackson Hole Wyoming in 1995-1996. (I had lived there before in 1983 and had friends there.)  I wrote The OPENING and a few others there.  I drafted a few one acts, thinking I'd get into a play competition and wanted to have a few things ready. But I never did enter any contests. (I was a mess being so f*cking poor again after the divorce ...being a so-called writer.)

Then disaster happens - my adoptive mom has breast cancer - not fatal and a quick surgery took it out but she was a mess so I moved to northern Wisconsin in early 1996 (it was not my plan to ever live there again) and luckily soon I was hired as an editor of a weekly newspaper then I went to the national Native newspaper (twice a month paper) - my time was limited for writing a play.  

All this was my ultimate goal: to write full-time and support myself.  It had to work this way, to get all the life experience I needed. (Even a really bad horrible first marriage (1984-1995))  

The turning point was also living and working as a Native writer, which I am.  I met my birthdad in 1994 in Illinois. He told me about my ancestry - all I thought was true.

I reread The OPENING (one act play) before I sent it to you. It is dark. It's about my fascination with cheating priests, and I knew many. SEVERAL - not just the ones from our parish.  And how a young man could already be a priest at 17. 

I was raised Catholic. 

On the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1985, I find out I have the exact same size hands and feet as Marilyn Monroe!

I also read every book about Marilyn Monroe in the 1980s and she influenced me a lot.  This play is a culmination of lived experience I think.  I have a dark side!