Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker subscribed to that popular view that all roads are connected, somehow, somewhere. However, she didn’t believe that they all ran through the same world at the same time. Some roads ran through several, and you might journey through some very strange hinterlands indeed if you were careless. Others ran on the edge of other worlds, the way they might run on the edge of an amusement park – you weren’t driving between the rides and the midway, but you could smell the popcorn and see the lights. And sometimes, hear the screams.

She always claimed to be on the lookout for places on the road where the fabric of the world  was thin. “People are looking very strange hereabouts,” she might say. “Let’s turn west for a few miles somewhere – I always feel safer going west.”

Or: “See the windows on that building on the ridge? They were square last week and now they’re arched. Wonder if it moved or we did? Don’t you wonder?”

“Oh, screw you,” I would reply wittily, peering  uncertainly into the rear view mirror. And Kage would laugh.

I left Los Angeles early today, under a morning moon. It hung in the west, shedding no light but luminous nonetheless  in the early sunlight. That always looks unreal to begin with, the big pale shard of crystal in the bright blue sky, looking like someone has whacked a clear marble with a hammer. You have to doubt the reality of that view, just seeing it.

There was snow above the highest passes in the Grapevine – the more distant peaks and canyons were all gleaming white, improbable frosting above hills still the pale gold of autumn. The trees are still burning  in fall colour along every canyon, beds of embers; but above them, the snow had extinguished and stilled the mountains tops. You are acutely aware of the Edges of things when you see that.

Last week’s field of tumbleweeds had been ploughed clean. Burned and frozen, too, by the look of it: like a field where nothing has grown for a decade instead of one thick with a live, if improbable, crop only a week before.

There are stockyards here and there along I-5; the biggest is at Harris Ranch (known to Faire People as The Sea of Cows) but they are all along the road. Last week, most of them were full of black cattle – Angus, probably, popular and common beef steers in Central California. Today … pen after pen was filled with snow-white cattle, bowlegged and dewlapped, the very Cattle of the Sun in the heart of Winter. Who changed them out, and how, and why?

And just north of Kettleman city, where the hills rise up and bunch close together like a sleeping lions, a figure was standing on a berm above the road. It was the middle of the road, too, in a place where I know the south-bound road on the other side lies yards lower than the north-bound,  steeply overshadowed by the rise of the hill. He was scowling, arms crossed, legs spraddled, staring down at the traffic with a look of pugnacious dislike. He was dressed all in black, except that pulled down over his forehead was a red cap …

What was a Red Cap doing on the side of I-5, frowning at the human traffic?

I’ve never been sure how -or if – I would know if we’d strayed over the Border …

Today’s entry is dedicated affectionately to Steve Skold, who (with his wife Carol) invited me to come have Thanksgiving dinner with his wonderful family today. He did me the great honour of reminding me to make time to blog today. I give thanks for the gift of knowing someone was waiting to read this!

And tomorrow: Dickens Fair Opens

Kage Baker liked quiet Thanksgivings at home. Or said she did. How she decided this I have never figured out, because she never had one in her life.

She was the eldest of a huge brood of children – which included several strays and foster kids – and most of her siblings promptly bred. All holidays were held, by official fiat and ancient custom, at Mama’s while that wonderful lady lived, which meant that the crowd just got bigger every year. It reached the point where a buffet was the only answer in the 1980’s, and people ate perched everywhere in the house. It was wonderful.

Sometimes we had small private Thanksgivings at our own house. But those happened the day before or after the official holiday. They were annexes, not the primal flash-mob. But, you know, you simply cannot have too much stuffing or pies around the place, and not having to share them with The Boys at Mama’s meant we actually got some.

The last 10 years, we have worked the Great Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco. It always opens on the Friday after Thanksgiving, for a three-day holiday extravaganza. For several years, this meant we drove up on Thursday night after the feast, but it only took a couple of years of mall traffic in Gilroy to show how insane that was. We tried arriving late on Opening Day, but that’s not optimum.

We finally started driving up on Wednesday, and having Thanksgiving with a friend’s also fabulous and open-hearted mother. More flash-mob! On time for Opening! No traffic! And the wonderful company of Steve and Carol Skold, who are probably the most generous people now in captivity. (We have lots of Carol’s furniture and rugs in the Green Man Parlour. Plus two of her daughters, 3 of her grandchildren and an endless supply of gingersnaps.)

I will be driving up to the Skolds happy riot tomorrow morning, nephew and parrot in tow. (They invited the parrot! You have no idea what nobility this represents …) But since I now live in Los Angeles with my insanely patient sister Kimberly, we will  also have a Thanksgiving dinner tonight. Pies are perfuming the house even now and the turkey is about to go in. It will be full-on Thanksgiving for two days, which is a wonderful prospect for a wanderer like me …  and we are already planning the leftovers, too. (That’s where Kimberly and I will have our parsnips and rutabagas on the side, since her husband and son are heathens and won’t eat them.) I can even eat pumpkin scones on the road tomorrow. And I will.

So today I am cooking. And packing. Tomorrow I will drive, and hopefully arrive in time to help set the table at the Skold’s. I will do my very best to overdose on pie and turkey. And then I will embark on 4 weeks of Extreme Christmas at the Cow Palace.

I roasted several small beef roasts for luncheons last night, and the way-back of my Cruiser is full of cookies and candy. I have found all my bloomers and chemises and stockings and hair pins and jewels and gloves and caps … my actual gown is only the outer layer, the rind of the ornate pudding I play at Dickens, and is supported by enough ancillary clothing for three modern women. I think I even remembered to pack some night clothes and clean T-shirts …

And in the 30 minutes breaks where nothing is coming out or going in to the oven, I can write. Which is what Kage did on these busy, crazy, crowded, noisy, happy holiday weekends – she cooked, she packed, she chased babies and defended pies and ran to the store to get whatever had been forgotten (this year’s list is, so far, plastic wrap and mushroom soup): but mostly she wrote.

And so will I.

Tomorrow: Five hundred miles on the road and it’s Christmas Eve!

Kage Baker loved tea. Not the drink, so much – she tended to have Coke in her teacup, possibly with a nice jot of rum – what she liked was the practice of tea.

The afternoon rituals attendant upon the genial beverage delighted her. Especially sweet teas, with a variety of interesting biscuits and sweeties. Long ago, in our very early adulthood, we found a kind of English cookie that now seem to be extinct: Toybox Biscuits. They were a moderately good sugar cookie, square, carefully frosted in tidy pink, blue and white. On each gleaming tile-like biscuit were stenciled classic Victorian toys and alphabet letters. It was like the best set of blocks ever, but you could eat them. Many weekend afternoons were enriched by a pot of Earl Grey tea and a tin of those biscuits.

What Kage loved about afternoon tea was the little details – special creamers, tiny little dishes for sugar (always in cubes) and condiments, wee faerie tongs. Using dessert forks and demi-tasse spoons. Slicing the lemon thin enough to see through, and removing the seeds before it went to table stacked like glass wagonwheels on its own special plate.

My dear bar staff keeps a teapot full of Earl Grey available at all time; I run on tea during Dickens. I have a sacrosanct pot and a special tea cup; so do the Queen and Mr. Charles Dickens, whenever they visit. I’m not sure how the staff differentiates which is which, but I do know my goddess parlour maid Rose will glare at anyone who grabs the wrong one.

Today I went shopping for goodies for tea. Also our daily lunch – the gentlemen do love their mustard, and we usually serve out 4 or 5 kinds every day. There’s an amazing number of speciality mustards out there – it’s entertaining trying them out. Though the grocery clerks do sometimes look at your order a little oddly when you’re buying 6 kinds of mustard, along with spearmint, orange spice and Earl Grey teas. And your sister is asking thoughtfully, “Did we get the shortbread petticoats?”

Very few American know what a shortbread petticoat is.

We do a version of a tea in the Green Man Parlour every afternoon – it concentrates on sweets, so I suspect what it really is a sort of over-grown nursery tea. It’s for my staff and cast, and anyone they invite – we make most of the goodies from amazing secret recipes, and then fill in the corners with the most interesting chocolates and cookies we can find. It’s loud and rowdy and tastes like heaven – the purpose is to fuel everybody up for the last couple of hours of the performance day. We choose to do this by seriously overdosing on sugar.

Social strictures go by the board; Kage, as my housekeeper, often presided and was not above slapping my hand for sneaking gingerbread cake out of turn. Mr. Dickens tends to eat with his hands as he is running out the door. A certain amount of fencing goes on with pirouette cookies and cake knives, and I have seen people drinking the rum sauce. Which, I must say, is worth the  excoriation such a blatant social solipsism occasions …

Kage loved it. I love it. I am looking forward to it enormously. And I will raise a glass of rum sauce to Kage.

Tomorrow: Eating Thanksgiving dinner, packing for Dickens Fair

Kage Baker worked Renaissance Fairs as both a performer and a stage manager.This is the (abbreviated) week before we open on the day after Thanksgiving – traditionally known, in just about every theatre on the verge of opening, as Hell Week. Since we build our venues from the ground up, our version is not just backdrops and painted curtains – it’s more like Hell Week in Brigadoon, with us laboring to get the entire city of London in miniature up and running before this Friday morning.

The Green Man is 99% constructed – one wall of deco to finish, and a new bar to install. But then Friday morning we have to get the kitchen up and running – dress the Parlour for the day (Where are the white candles? Whose Doc Martins are sitting on the dining table? Why is there a banana on the mantelpiece?) – and be actually fully dressed and in character when the customers walk in. Opening morning is an exercise in adrenaline.

In our little corner of the historical recreation biz, stage managers take an active role in actually constructing their stages – Kage’s experiences ranged from building canopies to painting to dressing the set. And of course there was our environmental stage to build as well, the Green Man Inn in the oakwoods. That ordinarily stood empty for 9 months in the woods between Faires, or stacked in a warehouse – the necessities involved in refurbishing it included squirting out the raccoons and wasps’ nests with a high pressure hose. That had to be done delicately, though, so you didn’t wash off the patina of dried beer and termite spit that actually held the Inn together.

The Green Man Tavern at Dickens is altogether a more civilized venue, and me and mine have laboured mightily to get it up and running. We shall spend this week doing last minute sewing on costumes, finding last-minute props, and grocery shopping: because we serve two luncheons and a sweet afternoon tea every day, plus keep a sideboard of sweets and savouries going all day to keep our wandering brethren fed. When someone has 30 minutes to go from being the Captain of the King’s Musketeers to playing standing bass viol in Mad Sal’s, it’s nice to make sure he can grab a sandwich on the way.

Back in the Cow Palace, though, there are crews working 24/7 to finish the City. Fezziwig’s Warehouse was  empty yestreday: it needs to be lit, dressed, and then over-dressed. The Absinthe Bar is a mere green shell of itself – it is possible that the faeries may come and finish the place, but I bet it’s just really tired humans doing it. There is last minute plumbing to do in every drink stand; there are prosaic necessities like folding chairs and toilet paper to lay in. Frantic vendors are bringing in all the shiny, glowing, rustling, gleaming, fragile and expensive wares they were too worried to bring in before this.

Someone is counting trash bins and hoping we have enough. Someone else is counting trash bags, of which we need 3 or 4 times the bins every single day. Someone is making sure all the encouraging and/or discouraging signs are up in the right places: No Smoking! Handicapped Only! Restrooms This Way! MEAT PIES! CHESTNUTS! BEER AND CHAMPAGNE! Because it wouldn’t do to send people out to the chemical toilets in the breezeway when what they are looking for is the popcorn cart.

Most – but by no means all – of our workers will be home on Thursday afternoon to celebrate Thanksgiving. But some of the stalwarts, especially among the crews rigging lights and stocking ale stands, will essentially be there all night. For them, our producer Kevin Patterson usually lays on a feast – very like Mr. Fezziwig in Christmas Carol, clearing away the bolts and bales and putting out pies and turkey and dressing. There will be camaraderie and laughter and elevated blood sugar. In an I’m-so-tired-I-am-walking-into-walls-way, it’s fun.

On Friday morning London will awaken and find itself  at sunset on Christmas Eve. Hell Week will transform into Extreme Christmas. Ghosts will walk the streets. The Queen will visit. Carolers and faeries will be everywhere. I will turn and call for my housekeeper, Mrs. Drumm … it should only take me 5 or 6 times to realize she won’t answer, but I will hear her caustic remarks in my mind anyway.

And now, I am going to go find some last necessities – like my jeweled combs and the paper towel dispenser …

Tomorrow: Shopping for Christmas and Thanksgiving simultaneously

Kage Baker took it as her responsibility to keep me awake on the road on Sunday nights coming home from Fairs. She told me stories – she played spotter for High Weirdness on the road – she made custom music mixes designed to keep me singing. She used to include the occasional unexpected selection on extreme volume just to startle me awake when needed.

Without her – well, my nephew has been a great help. But he had to tend to some school work this weekend, and so I was flying solo. And Sunday nights, after a weekend of Fair, are always harder.

Tonight I lacked any copilot at all, as I traveled to and from Dickens Dress Rehearsal alone. I had various of Kage’s music mixes, though, which helped a lot. And the full moon rising above the eastern mountains in the San Joaquin Valley was magnificent. The Rabbit in Moon was as clear as daylight, leaping up the side … what, you don’t see a Rabbit in the moon? I always do. He was an especially frisky Rabbit tonight, too.

Sometimes the music made me cry, without Kage to harmonize. But I could hear her voice in my mind, and the tears are beginning to be a slight relief instead of unrelenting acid. Time is passing. I am getting – maybe not better, not yet, but more used to being alone. And it was a lovely night …

But I am worn right out now. Made it home, have managed to distribute the luggage so I could find my jammies and access my bed, have checked my correspondence and hit my mark at least slightly on this blog. Time for bed.

Tomorrow: Final Countdown to Dickens!

Kage Baker loved the San Francisco Bay. She loved crossing the bridges and looking down over the Golden Gate, the expanse of the Bay and the Pacific beyond it, the white caps and white sails and white birds that stitched across it.

Unless it was raining. Or the wind was up. Or, worst case scenario, a Pacific gale was coming in off the ocean and we were crossing the Bay Bridge. The last time we did that, it was in a VW van that swayed back and forth like a clipper ship. Kage managed a Perfect Act of Contrition for every mile of the Bridge between the Ferry Building and Oakland. She made me swear never to do that again.

Well, the storm is up tonight, as well, and it was either brave the Bridge in the rain or sleep in the Cow Palace. We left after dark, having completed most of our deco in the Green Man Inn; we left a gorgeous Parlour behind us, a Christmas fantasy. We thought the booming noises through the walls were trucks, or power tools … But when we left the shelter of  our private London, we found it was raining like hell.

In the real world, it was a special effects festival. Lightning was flashing in the sky continuously, lighting up San Francisco like a blue-white sun: winter thunder, an old English saying goes, is the world’s wonder – and when it is  illuminating the Bay Bridge in strobed waves, it’s a wonder indeed.

We made it back to Vallejo, my good friend Neassa and I, with no worse effects that getting wet. But 6,000 people or so are without power in the Tenderloin (which sounds romantic but is really, really not) and there’s an urban flood warning here in the Bay Area. And when you consider that most of the place is only a few feet above the sea that pretty much surrounds it, urban flooding can seem a bit more than inconvenient.

I’m grateful to be safe in a friendly house in Vallejo, listening to the thunder boom and the rain pour down and the water rise gently over the curb … we have microwave pizza and Hostess Cup Cakes, and all is right with the world.

Kage would have hated the ride over the roiling bay, but she’d have loved this part. She’d have a glass of Coke and rum and she’d toast every peal of thunder. She’d be telling us stories of pirates rising up from the bottom of San Francisco Bay, storming the rocky edges of Treasure Island to find their way to the darkened – but still enticing – Tenderloin. Booty and beauty and rum, by the powers!

World’s wonder indeed.

Tomorrow: the road back to LA, and a perfect Christmas Parlour

Kage Baker was a professional passenger. Partly this was because she couldn’t drive. Partly it was because she paid attention to the scenery. In fact, she paid so much attention to the scenery that it was a highly moral decision on her part to not learn to drive: it doubtless saved countless lives.

Besides, all that staring out the windows (all of them, all the time) led to Ideas. She was an acute observer of details, and perfected the art of really seeing oddities we would pass on the road. Then she’d tell me about them. Then she’d speculate on what they were, or meant, or did when no one was looking. Stories were born of this.

I-5 was a fertile source of these ideas, because it is one weird road. Even though she hadn’t driven it, when she died, for more than 20 years, it had stayed in her mind as a source. Now I am driving it, and I remember everything we saw – I remember how to look, and how to notice, and I guess at what Kage would have noticed. Not as much (because I am driving the car) but enough to entertain myself.

Today I made the drive alone. My usual companions of nephew and parrot stayed in Los Angeles, so I had nothing to amuse myself but what I could see. And what I could imagine reporting to Kage.

For instance, the trees around Lost Hills appear to have been painted orange. Elsewhere the fall foliage has turned gold and scarlet; the willow trees are silver-gilt, the cottonwoods bright yellow. But in Lost Hills – they are freaking orange. I don’t stop in Lost Hills due to conflicts with its moral atmosphere – one dark night returning from a Renaissance Faire, I found a hare’s head impaled on a gas pump handle … the orange trees make one wonder agsain: What is leaching out of the ground there?

Just north of Kettleman City, a row of  seven bulls was walking along the highway, nose to tail, placid as a line of cows. They were, however, extravagantly bulls, which was especially obvious in the rear view mirror. What made it odd was that they were all filing past a standing fan in a field – an ordinary, living room fan. The wind was rotating the fans in a blur: at least, I think it was the wind. Maybe it was plugged into a tumbleweed.

I saw a field evidently planted in Russian thistle- rows of tumbleweeds, all growing in tidy furrows deliberately ploughed into the earth. Who grows tumbleweeds? Why?

I saw a field of harvested cotton, with a wall of several huge bales neatly lined up at the side: all burning. They were each larger than my car, and burning merrily in total solitude. I suspect the shepherds from over on Highway 1 were involved …

Near Gustine, someone is putting up Burma Shave-style signs in their orchards. They extol the health benefits of eating citrus fruit.

Someone had TP’d the freeway overpass at Highway 41. That’s a heck of a lot of toilet paper. The kids around there clearly do not have enough to do.

I saw a tanker truck that claimed to be full of coffee (the second one I have seen, by the way): not coffee beans but actual, hot coffee. I saw another that claimed to full of barbecue sauce. I passed a cattle truck – frequent sights on I-5, but this one had its back open and was clearly stacked roof high with … eggs. Cardboard flats of eggs. Genetic engineering must be making great strides.

The soundtrack to this excursion beyond the Fields We Know was the Beatles’ White Album. Not to everyone’s taste, I know; a friend of mine, Mr. Scrymgeour (not the Minister of Magic; the real one) quite hates them. But the White Album is different, Scotty, it really is – it starts out normal but then segues through demonic rock and roll into dementia of the purest ray serene. It does things to my ductless glands and punts my brain off at a tangent 90 degrees from everything else. Really, man – it’s drugs from the gods.

Is it wise, is it proper? Is it even good music? I don’t know. I only know that while I was listening to it and seeing odd things by the road – I was 20 years old again, singing in banshee harmony with Kage Baker, and that highway was the Road of Dreams.

Tomorrow: decorating the Parlour

Kage Baker was always in charge of packing for our trips. It was my job to get the bags in the car and us to our destination – but packing was her forte. I would have arrived a lot more places with a lot fewer clothes, otherwise.

Only once did she forget something major – which was all her formal clothes for a World Fantasy Awards convention – but that was in the last few months of her life, and she was distracted. Even so, she figured it out before we got there, somehow.  I don’t know how,  because her suitcase was in the trunk and she was in the front seat when she suddenly exclaimed, “Get off in Gilroy; I forgot all my clothes.”

She must have been going through lists in her head. She was a great believer in lists, and made them for all occasions. Grocery, laundry, prop, paint and luncheon lists; and what she called “stuff” lists, which were the lists of whatever stuff had to be in the luggage for a trip. That ran from socks to drugs; toiletries and the parrot; spare UCB drives, and one more day of  underwear than you think you’ll require. It was the stuff you needed, the stuff you wanted. The stuff that couldn’t be found in the hotel lobby shop, because the only good stuff came from Home.

We are now at the stage of Dickens Build where the stuff includes carriage lamps, batteries, doilies, lemonade dispensers and parlour maids. I have to make most of my own lists now, although my invaluable and unique staff is doing a wonderful job as well. But I need to pick up tea. I have to remember to get the palm trees. And no one can pack for me, alas, which is how last week I ended up with the correct number of socks – but no two of them matched and they were all ugly.

I am largely on my own in the stuff  department. My solution is always to just do without, then, but there is a certain crucial minimum of stuff below which one does not wish to fall … without those lists I am at dire risk of finding I have no corsets, or that the only shoes I brought are multi-coloured huaraches. Believe me, no matter how long and full your skirts are, multi-coloured huaraches are going to show and ruin the Victorian ambiance. I suppose I could just wear my Italian lace-up ankle boots with the 3-inch heels on the road, so I don’t forget them … but do you know how the truckers stare at you in Gustine when you’re wearing those?

The right stuff is situational. That’s why you need lists. And why I must go now and make some – I don’t even know where my reticule is.

Tomorrow: another brief dispatch from the Road To London

Kage Baker was a hands-on writer, artist, performer – as much as she could, she tried to be capable of taking care of her tools herself. Being a tool-user is vital in any creative effort: it’s all very well to have marvels of beauty and poetry in your head, but not a lot of use if you can’t get them out so others can see them.

Once you’ve got them out, they have to be maintained, too. Nothing teaches you this faster than live theatre. There, the sets and props are subject to the same wear and tear as the actors – also, they are subject to the actors, which can often prove fatal to a fragile prop. And while you can send the actor home to heal (nature having kindly made them self-repairing) the prop is not going to do that. It’s dead, dead, deadski.

And yet, it cannot be! It’s still needed! No one thought to hire a stand-in custom palanquin! And it’s gonna take a week and $1,000 to build one, and we need it by 2:30 this afternoon, and who had the stupid idea of seeing how many people you could cram into a palanquin anyway?

Enter zombie props. Or maybe just disabled props, but the bottom line is: they have been not so much repaired as … augmented. Every show has them. They have been glued (unevenly) nailed (badly) repainted (poorly) and otherwise given prosthetic aid even more uncomfortable than Robocops’s. Kage, though, was an expert at this, and could improvise a revision to a prop that would last at least the rest of the weekend on a moment’s notice. She carried her little red tool box everywhere, and it held miracles.

Her main weapon was duct tape – or, as it was known in our movie-studio family, gaffers tape. A wise and talented prop man once told us: “You want to destroy the arts in America? Invent a chemical that dissolves gaffers tape.” It is the dark matter of the artistic universe. It’s an icon in any working person’s pantheon, of course: but in the arts, it is A GOD. No live theatre can survive long without it.

I was reminded of this as we put the walls of our Dickens Fair set up last week – there are panels in our Insta-Parlour Kit that have several years’ worth of gaffers tape holding them together. There’s a peek-through in the wall behind the bar, covered by a panel of burlap and gaffer’s tape. There are wreaths and mirrors and bits of fireplace and shelves full of bric-a-brac (and shelves themselves for that matter) held together in some vital manner by a strip of gaffers tape.

Hell, we hold down the rugs in the Parlour with it, so no one will trip over the edges.

The list of things Kage and I repaired with gaffers tape range from weight-bearing walls and entire wheeled stages (pulled through the streets by actors – we were young, once), to the Master of the Queen’s Revels – whose ribs we once taped with gaffers tape, to get him through a crucial pageant after a blow-back accident with an electric saw and a chunk of maple. Numerous boots and shoes have been saved with it, and not a few corsets – wrap a few yards of gaffers tape around a lady, and absolutely no stays will pop. I guarantee it. Personally.

Kage bound books with it; patched tents and sleeping bags with it; applied it as metal trim, window leading, and scale armour. Everyone did; everyone does. It’s one of the staples of live theatre, and its uses and mysteries are passed down to young apprentices in backstages everywhere. Usually some harried stage manager hands a kid a broken spear and a roll of gaffers tape and says: “Here, you! Tape the ends back together and paint the thing brown!” And then that kid is an initiate. Within a week, she’ll be taping up the cables that hold the flys in place.

It’s how you really support the arts.

Kage Baker was an artist. Well, yes,  Dear Readers may well say – tell us something we didn’t know. But Kage did not consider herself an artist. Of all the things she did, art was one she felt she had put aside as a thing of childhood – putting, in its place, writing and acting and general world-building.

She painted for years: water colours and inks, mostly; she loved the transparent colours of inks. She loved calligraphy and fancy lettering, steel nibs and tiny brushes and gold leaf. She illustrated a lot of her own stories in her teenaged years  – she eventually developed a cartoon-like style that would fit right into anime today, had she pursued it. But she stopped painting in her early 30’s. She had been writing more and more, and that was when she got serious about it – so all the sketch pads went into storage.

Her urge to sketch went into set design – for the Renaissance Faire, for the Dickens Christmas Fair, for various one-off events we’d show up and do for a weekend here and there. (She designed a pirate pawnshop in a tent for a pirate festival one summer; that was neat.) Her Tudor Inn set is in pieces in a warehouse on Mare Island, but could spring again to life at the first hint that our favourite production company would put on another Renaissance event.

And, of course, we are even now working on the Dickens Christmas Fair set. The Parlour of the Green Man has traveled through many, many minds and hands to achieve life: but it started as a picture in Kage Baker’s imagination. I don’t think we have quite produced what she visualized – we’re not steampunk enough, and I don’t let the bar staff mount Gatling guns on the bar. We don’t really go up the 7 stories she calculated we needed to actually hold all the stuff we say we do (the Pickwick Club keeps rooms with us, and I think there is a private dock off the cellar) but we are bigger on the inside than the out.

You can see it happen as we build, space/time warping to provide us with a larger interior than exterior. When we first arrive in the Cow Palace, and find our designated patch of asphalt – I stand in the center and usually wail, “Oh my God, we shrank! I’ve lost 15 feet! Someone stole part of my footage!” This is both untrue and immediately verifiable, as my clever minions mark our corners on the floor with paint each year. So they ignore my hysterics (which are also being duplicated in every other space in the Cow Palace, by every other director) and proceed to raise our walls.

And that’s when the fabric of the Universe convolutes itself, like a chambered nautilus turning inside out.

With every panel of wall, the space inside expands. When the fireplace goes in the corner, that corner obligingly retreats 10 feet; when the chandelier is hung, the ceiling rises into space, and the ghosts of our other 6 stories appear mistily through the spot lights. And as soon as the furniture arrives, the single plain space becomes three or four rooms, all separated by plush chairs and screens of firm make-believe.

Kage loved this miracle. She watched it every year in childish delight, as if it were happening without her participation or design: a magic trick produced for her especial delectation. Bit by bit, this room in her brain expanded past the confines of her skull until – like a Klein bottle – it contained her. Each year’s subtle differences and changes were just natural evolution, the proper alterations of a living space. She’d look around when it was all finsihed, and sigh, and say, “Well, here we are again.”

This year has the biggest change to date. Kage is not there. But the space between the green walls does contain some pale spirit flame, that is her memory. Like the 6 stories above us, where the Pickwick Club is ordering another bowl of punch; like the secret panels in the walls, where Lords of Faerie and lost chimney sweeps are likely to be lurking; like the submarine in the cellar, bringing us a smuggled shipment of rare wines.

Bigger on the inside, you see.

Tomorrow: supporting the arts