A play I don't remember at all. This must be the program. "A Coyote on the Stairs. A Speculative Horror Play," by Lee Kerwin. I didn't know Lee. I knew some folks in the acknowledgements. Enough for me to figure this is some kind of school (University of Wisconsin at Green Bay) production, perhaps. I like the scene descriptions. ACT 1 - I: Human meets beast, winter 2016; II: A new beast is born; III: The human/beast struggle or...The killing of Marcy Jennings; Act 2 - I: New tricks for old beasts; II: Death breeds life in bank city. Sounds heavy. Wonder if it was any good.
Thursday, July 31, 2003
Monday, July 28, 2003
Oops. I guess I no longer have a webpage. (Webpage referenced in the item below) That could be directly related to the fact that I no longer subscribe to the service that gave me a free webpage. Forgot about that. It's been awhile.
A friend thought I should publish this bio - should have done it at the beginning, but then the things I shoulda done.....
I wrote it as a sort of gag bio (although it's painfully true) to go on the flyleaf of any book I may have published in the near or far or nonexistent future.
Barbara Stoner was born in Los Angeles, CA in 1943, the daughter of a Norwegian-American mother and an English-American father, both of solid dirt-farmer stock and both of whom had migrated to California for war jobs. As one
African-American acquaintance told Barbara sometime in the sixties, "Let's face it. You're descended from syphilitic sailors off the docks of Liverpool." Barbara faced it, and got on with life.
Barbara spent her early childhood in a small Norwegian farming town of about 300 people, Badger, Iowa, where her mother had gone to live with her parents when her father was drafted toward the end of the war. When her war hero
father (he was idolized for organizing basketball games for the boys in Paris) returned home, he opened a small grocery store in Badger, and Barbara started school in the same two-room schoolhouse her Norwegian grandmother had attended. She held the school record for most books read in kindergarten.
When she was seven years old, she was yanked out of this idyllic childhood and moved to Decatur, Illinois, her father's hometown, where he opened a business making and selling concrete steps and septic tanks. In the meantime, her
mother was busy producing another daughter and four boys. She was a loyal Lutheran, and the children were raised on business and religion. Barbara spent the rest of her childhood reading, climbing trees and pretending she was
adopted.
After a tumultuous middle childhood and teendom, during which Barbara was nearly expelled from Girl Scouts for talking about sex and atheism, persisted in coming home with "does not work or play well with others" on her report card, and nearly getting black-balled from the National Honor Society by a group of teachers who questioned her sense of citizenship (she tended to ignore them and read newspapers and other outside material in class), she finally graduated
from Douglas MacArthur High School in 1961. It was widely believed that her father's presence on the school board at the time had much to do with her acceptance into the National Honor Society and the presentation of her diploma to
her on the stage by her father.
Barbara received a National Honor Scholarship (one of the minor ones) and a church scholarship to attend Carthage College, then in Carthage, Illinois. Her educational progress continued for the next 18 years or so. She lost her
National Honor Scholarship through a simple slip of the mind in the matter ofsending in the renewal forms. After two years at Carthage, she removed to Chicago, Illinois, where she attended night school at Loyola University. This ended
one steamy night in a small downtown classroom during a finals exam when she could not think of one single thing to say about the question, but decided to pull a Gertrude Stein and write a story instead about a woman she knew who had
lived next door to John Steinbeck in New York and whose dog ate part of the manuscript of "Of Mice and Men" when the galleys were delivered to John'sm door by the publisher. The professor was not William James. Barbara flunked an
English course for the first and last time in her life. She made another stab at college during a year's stay in St. Peter, Minnesota, where she attended Gustavus Adolphus College as the wife of a pastoral intern stationed there. Much
later, while living in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, she finally enrolled in the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. Having decided to drop English as a major, determining that she had only taken it up because she liked to read, she finally graduated magna cum laude in 1979 with a major in intellectual history.
In 1980, she was accepted at the University of Pittsburgh for the graduate program in history. She discovered quickly, however, that there was no longer any room in the university system for fuzzy absent-minded professors of history who just liked to read and relay interesting facts and ideas to students who may or may not be interested. One must now be competitive and choose career tracks that would land one a job in an increasingly diminishing field.Barbara was 38 years old, non-competitive, and tired. She sent them a letter from the log cabin she was living in that summer mumbling something about some kind of perceptual philosophy which might enable her to join the Flat Earth Society. She did not hear from them again.
Barbara has traveled extensively. She has been to Canada four times. The first was after attending a Luther League convention in Utica, New York, where she met a little darlin' from Washington, D.C. and spent the entire week making
out in the bushes. She spent the return trip through Canada dreaming about him and continuing to read Ayn Rand, so she does not remember much of that part of the country. The other three times were with boyfriends, but she spent
most of that time fighting with them, so her Canada experiences are a little dim. She spent one month in London as a university student with a group studying the arts and humanities. Barbara did her paper on alternative theatre, which
enabled her to visit many pubs and other interesting underground theatricals. She also visited the British Museum, several art galleries, Canterbury Cathedral, the grave of Karl Marx, and spent one afternoon combing the London School of Economics looking for the stuffed and mounted body of Jeremy Bentham, rumored to be displayed there. The figure she found, however, appeared to be made of wax. She has traveled cross-country on a Harley Davidson motorcycle (as
a rider) from Green Bay, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington. As a Deadhead, she has traveled throughout the United States somewhat. She has been to New Orleans once, New York twice, and Jamaica three times. Recently she made a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she went horsebackriding and fought withm another boyfriend.
She has worked over the years as a public relations secretary, legal secretary, temporary secretary, field hand, apple picker, and cherry factory line worker. For several years, she and an ex-husband owned and operated an organic
farm outside of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and she is proficient in milking goats, skinning rabbits, delivering piglets and making maple syrup from scratch. For the past several years, she has been a partner in a tie-dye tee-shirt business, Insanitees. She also types papers, résumé's, and business letters, and occasionally reads Tarot cards.
Her published works include: "Why was William Jones killed?" Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, Vol. 42, No. 8, September, 1971; "The Cherry Factory," Sheepshead Fiction, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, 1985; and "The
Blue Moon, Your Guide to Bohemia," sometime in the early '90's. She has written reams of other material, journals, travel stories, some other attempts at fiction, letters and thousands of lists. An essay on the death of Jerry Garcia and another describing her first trip to Jamaica may be found on her webpage at http://pweb.netcom.com/~lucelucy/index.html.
Barbara has been engaged four times, married twice, involved a few more times, and has two legitimate children and no illegitimate children. Christopher is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in computer science and currently works for the Madison School District. Caroline graduated from Middle College High School, and almost graduated from the culinary arts course at Seattle Central Community College. She did graduate from Bellevue community college, and has since complete one quarter as a junior at the University of Washington, majoring in anthropology/archaeology. She made the Dean's list that quarter, and is currently digging in the dirt on an uninhabited island nearm Kodiak, Alaska, with the University of Washington Archaeological Field School. She will return in two weeks, when she will resume working for a temporary catering service before returning to school in the fall.
Barbara still enjoys reading, writing, playing computer games, and dancing to Grateful Dead tapes. She lives in a small house with her daughter, where she is often visited by her daughter's many friends who grew up in her house because their parents didn't want them to come home. They are all doing well now.
She has three cats.
I wrote it as a sort of gag bio (although it's painfully true) to go on the flyleaf of any book I may have published in the near or far or nonexistent future.
Barbara Stoner was born in Los Angeles, CA in 1943, the daughter of a Norwegian-American mother and an English-American father, both of solid dirt-farmer stock and both of whom had migrated to California for war jobs. As one
African-American acquaintance told Barbara sometime in the sixties, "Let's face it. You're descended from syphilitic sailors off the docks of Liverpool." Barbara faced it, and got on with life.
Barbara spent her early childhood in a small Norwegian farming town of about 300 people, Badger, Iowa, where her mother had gone to live with her parents when her father was drafted toward the end of the war. When her war hero
father (he was idolized for organizing basketball games for the boys in Paris) returned home, he opened a small grocery store in Badger, and Barbara started school in the same two-room schoolhouse her Norwegian grandmother had attended. She held the school record for most books read in kindergarten.
When she was seven years old, she was yanked out of this idyllic childhood and moved to Decatur, Illinois, her father's hometown, where he opened a business making and selling concrete steps and septic tanks. In the meantime, her
mother was busy producing another daughter and four boys. She was a loyal Lutheran, and the children were raised on business and religion. Barbara spent the rest of her childhood reading, climbing trees and pretending she was
adopted.
After a tumultuous middle childhood and teendom, during which Barbara was nearly expelled from Girl Scouts for talking about sex and atheism, persisted in coming home with "does not work or play well with others" on her report card, and nearly getting black-balled from the National Honor Society by a group of teachers who questioned her sense of citizenship (she tended to ignore them and read newspapers and other outside material in class), she finally graduated
from Douglas MacArthur High School in 1961. It was widely believed that her father's presence on the school board at the time had much to do with her acceptance into the National Honor Society and the presentation of her diploma to
her on the stage by her father.
Barbara received a National Honor Scholarship (one of the minor ones) and a church scholarship to attend Carthage College, then in Carthage, Illinois. Her educational progress continued for the next 18 years or so. She lost her
National Honor Scholarship through a simple slip of the mind in the matter ofsending in the renewal forms. After two years at Carthage, she removed to Chicago, Illinois, where she attended night school at Loyola University. This ended
one steamy night in a small downtown classroom during a finals exam when she could not think of one single thing to say about the question, but decided to pull a Gertrude Stein and write a story instead about a woman she knew who had
lived next door to John Steinbeck in New York and whose dog ate part of the manuscript of "Of Mice and Men" when the galleys were delivered to John'sm door by the publisher. The professor was not William James. Barbara flunked an
English course for the first and last time in her life. She made another stab at college during a year's stay in St. Peter, Minnesota, where she attended Gustavus Adolphus College as the wife of a pastoral intern stationed there. Much
later, while living in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, she finally enrolled in the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. Having decided to drop English as a major, determining that she had only taken it up because she liked to read, she finally graduated magna cum laude in 1979 with a major in intellectual history.
In 1980, she was accepted at the University of Pittsburgh for the graduate program in history. She discovered quickly, however, that there was no longer any room in the university system for fuzzy absent-minded professors of history who just liked to read and relay interesting facts and ideas to students who may or may not be interested. One must now be competitive and choose career tracks that would land one a job in an increasingly diminishing field.Barbara was 38 years old, non-competitive, and tired. She sent them a letter from the log cabin she was living in that summer mumbling something about some kind of perceptual philosophy which might enable her to join the Flat Earth Society. She did not hear from them again.
Barbara has traveled extensively. She has been to Canada four times. The first was after attending a Luther League convention in Utica, New York, where she met a little darlin' from Washington, D.C. and spent the entire week making
out in the bushes. She spent the return trip through Canada dreaming about him and continuing to read Ayn Rand, so she does not remember much of that part of the country. The other three times were with boyfriends, but she spent
most of that time fighting with them, so her Canada experiences are a little dim. She spent one month in London as a university student with a group studying the arts and humanities. Barbara did her paper on alternative theatre, which
enabled her to visit many pubs and other interesting underground theatricals. She also visited the British Museum, several art galleries, Canterbury Cathedral, the grave of Karl Marx, and spent one afternoon combing the London School of Economics looking for the stuffed and mounted body of Jeremy Bentham, rumored to be displayed there. The figure she found, however, appeared to be made of wax. She has traveled cross-country on a Harley Davidson motorcycle (as
a rider) from Green Bay, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington. As a Deadhead, she has traveled throughout the United States somewhat. She has been to New Orleans once, New York twice, and Jamaica three times. Recently she made a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she went horsebackriding and fought withm another boyfriend.
She has worked over the years as a public relations secretary, legal secretary, temporary secretary, field hand, apple picker, and cherry factory line worker. For several years, she and an ex-husband owned and operated an organic
farm outside of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and she is proficient in milking goats, skinning rabbits, delivering piglets and making maple syrup from scratch. For the past several years, she has been a partner in a tie-dye tee-shirt business, Insanitees. She also types papers, résumé's, and business letters, and occasionally reads Tarot cards.
Her published works include: "Why was William Jones killed?" Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, Vol. 42, No. 8, September, 1971; "The Cherry Factory," Sheepshead Fiction, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, 1985; and "The
Blue Moon, Your Guide to Bohemia," sometime in the early '90's. She has written reams of other material, journals, travel stories, some other attempts at fiction, letters and thousands of lists. An essay on the death of Jerry Garcia and another describing her first trip to Jamaica may be found on her webpage at http://pweb.netcom.com/~lucelucy/index.html.
Barbara has been engaged four times, married twice, involved a few more times, and has two legitimate children and no illegitimate children. Christopher is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in computer science and currently works for the Madison School District. Caroline graduated from Middle College High School, and almost graduated from the culinary arts course at Seattle Central Community College. She did graduate from Bellevue community college, and has since complete one quarter as a junior at the University of Washington, majoring in anthropology/archaeology. She made the Dean's list that quarter, and is currently digging in the dirt on an uninhabited island nearm Kodiak, Alaska, with the University of Washington Archaeological Field School. She will return in two weeks, when she will resume working for a temporary catering service before returning to school in the fall.
Barbara still enjoys reading, writing, playing computer games, and dancing to Grateful Dead tapes. She lives in a small house with her daughter, where she is often visited by her daughter's many friends who grew up in her house because their parents didn't want them to come home. They are all doing well now.
She has three cats.
May 1981. My future ex and I are still in Pittsburgh, trying to finish a quarter of graduate school. Neither of us will return. Our friend Elaine writes from Green Bay. She is graduating and thinking of taking a job for a private company doing mapping for a Defense project in Florida, and moving to Tampa. "What's next?" she writes. "Voting Republican?! NEVER"
I don't think she got the job, since she was still there when we returned and lived above the paint store about six months or so later, and another disastrous venture, which I suppose I will write about sometime down the line. Elaine had even worse luck with men than I did (I realize later in life that I've made a kind of collection of women friends who outdo me in the disastrous relationship line. I could think of healthier relationships, but I can't help but empathize, even as I keep thinking, "but at least, I never did THAT!").
Here she has just gone through another breakup. "Steve and I still love each other but..."
Story of my life.
I don't think she got the job, since she was still there when we returned and lived above the paint store about six months or so later, and another disastrous venture, which I suppose I will write about sometime down the line. Elaine had even worse luck with men than I did (I realize later in life that I've made a kind of collection of women friends who outdo me in the disastrous relationship line. I could think of healthier relationships, but I can't help but empathize, even as I keep thinking, "but at least, I never did THAT!").
Here she has just gone through another breakup. "Steve and I still love each other but..."
Story of my life.
