Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved driving Highway 101, because it was a familiar, family road. Most of her life, she lived within sight and sound of its roar, literally on the edge of the road. It ran to her front doorways. And it is rich in restaurants and bathrooms.

She was fascinated by the I-5, for its immensity and weirdness. The Company stories were born on that road; Mendoza first came walking into our world somewhere around Lost Hills, through the Russian thistle and salt flats. But the 5 scared her, too, since anything could – and often did – happen there. Many of you, Dear Readers, are too young to remember life without cell phones: but when we began our long treks through the San Joaquin Valley and associated dimensions, there were no personal phones. There were also no emergency phones beside the road. If you broke down, you broke waaaay down.

Kage always swore she would never drive it by winter, either, when the tule fog rises and black frost can form on the road. Nor did she: we did 10 years’ worth of Dickens Fair on the cozy Highway 101. But the 5 has its charms, even by winter and dark…

Aside from the brevity of the trip (I can do it in 6 hours, barring disasters), it is a sea of mystery. Strange buildings, stranger ruins; animals both dead and alive and equally unidentifiable by the road – also, lots of cows, which get amazingly interesting in large numbers …really weird gas stations, with really weird snacks in them, obviously being run by either goblins or bandits. Do not try the off-brand jerky.

One of the great mysteries is what only appears after dark: cities.

They are made all of light, and run in unsuspected angles and lines all the way to the mountains that rim the Valley east and west. By daylight, there is no sign of them. There are roads that run off, yes, but no sign of habitation. Signs reading Three Rocks and Pumpkin Center may point you off the 5; but if you follow them, you eventually reach a cluster of two hamburger joints, a closed hair salon and a gas station. Green metallic beetles obscure the half-dozen working street lights and there are no houses; Kaspar Hauser is working behind the fast-food counter, and you will end up with pickle relish as a garnish on your cocoa’s whipped cream. (True story.)

By no stretch of even Kage’s imagination are these cities. They are barely ruins. As a friend has recently observed, the motto for these places is No One Lives Here. And yet, and yet … when darkness falls, the lines of white and gold spring up, burning away across the miles. Intersections, grand concourses, squares and walls and towers spring up on every hand. If you follow them (perhaps running desperately on a spare tire or with steam jetting from your dying radiator) you find no towns or even farm houses: just long, well-lit empty roads.

At some strange hour of the night or season, something must rise up in these places, into the urban footprint prepared for it. Shangri-La? R’lyeh? The suburbs of Crow Landing? I have evidently never been late or lost enough to catch it. That may be just as well, though, since I would hate to have dawn rise in that golden wilderness and find that the I-5, too, has vanished …

So I’ll continue to admire the night cities from the dubious safety of the road. I have a nephew and a parrot to think about, after all. Not to mention the memory of my red-haired navigator, eyes wide and sparkling in the dashboard lights, warning me not to seek the fata morgana off I-5.

Tomorrow: adventures in set building

Kage Baker, for all her love of Dickens Fair, always worried about our getting home once Sunday had ended. She would agitate to leave early, or at least on time; make sure we were packed and ready to go, so that as soon as the performance ended we could race down the road for home.

The last 10 years, we lived in Pismo Beach – a 5 hour drive down Highway 101, and she was always afraid I would fall asleep somewhere around Prunedale. This year, though, I have returned to Los Angeles: and so it is a different drive all together, on a far weirder road: 6 hours on I-5, culminating in the Grapevine and the long descent into the L.A. Basin.

If I leave Fair at 6 PM, I can hope to get home by midnight – if I don’t throw a rod, lose a wheel, or get lost in tule fog or get run over by a truck full of tomatoes or get abducted by UFOs predating on the Sea of Cows at Harris Ranch … today, though, it being still rehearsals, I left at 3 in the afternoon. Made it home by 9, with nothing more alarming than the usual fevered glow of the turning windmill at Gustine, and seeing a Delorean being towed backwards up the Grapevine.

My co-pilot is currently my nephew Michael. He used to travel this road twice a weekend, for Renaissance Faires; of course, he was in a baby seat in the back of my van, gurgling with delight at the truck lights on the road. Now he is 19, moustached and protective, and tonight he got his first conscious impression of a night trip down I-5. I think he liked it. It certainly fascinated him – the empty-ballroom darkness, the vast flat valley floor by starlight, the mysterious lights off on the side roads.

I will speak more of this, but for now I want to get this in before midnight so I don’t lose a day. We built the Inn and we made it home alive while it was still Sunday! A win on the I-5 by any standards.

Kage Baker usually spent Dickens Build in her red camp chair with the built-in drink holder, consulting the holo in her head that showed her how the Parlour was supposed to be constructed. From time to time she would rise and stalk through the extension cords and pallets of lumber, making tiny corrections to details.

She would alter that holo (a little) to accommodate missing pieces, broken flats, inexplicable bits from other sets, the brand new bits of furniture that absolutely had to be fit into the room, and the markings on the floor where we had painted round the corners of last year’s walls. In the meantime, carpenters wise in the ways of Kage would be building the walls anyway, so they actually stood up and functioned. They were all well aware that Kage might very well be consulting a plan 6 years old. Or of a pub in some other city and century … it all worked eventually.

Today our crew outdid themselves – not only got the walls of the Green Man up in our bay of the Cow Palace, but got them repaired, straightened and painted. The kitchen (authentically narrow, dark and badly plumbed) is in place; there are the customary hollows behind the walls, where chimney sweeps and Fagin’s boys can creep (and where we hide the boxes the china was packed in), and our enormous Inn sign is up. At the moment it is proudly proclaiming our existence to all the other frantic performers and vendors likewise building their bits of London: but soon, soon …

Kage would be pleased. We’ve gotten this far in one day, and tomorrow we can begin moving in the furniture: the several, gloriously mismatched Turkish carpets; the carved tables “borrowed” from our various mothers, the gorgeous bar back found in a Vallejo antique store during the Farmers Market … the Welsh dresser and the sideboard and the white mantlepiece. All the lovely, homely jigsaw pieces that make a proper Parlour out of a 25 by 50 foot stretch of asphalt between concrete walls.

In only three days more of work,  we will open. The day after that most American holiday, Thanksgiving, we faux Londoners will be here in our hoop skirts and top hats, eyes sparkling with jolliness and Christmas cheer. The crowds will  pour into London, I will set the hands on the mantlepiece clock, and it will be Christmas Eve, of all the good old days in the good old world!

Kage would, I hope, be proud.

Kage Baker really loved the Great Dickens Christmas Fair. It was, she said, the Fair of her dotage – indoors, tidy, civilized. Chairs! Hot food! Flush toilets! Nearly everyone had manners (and, truth to tell, even Bill Sykes will give one a surly nod if one has beer and sandwiches waiting for him on break …)

The Green Man, our mad lovely Inn in the woods of Renaissance Faires, became a cozy Parlour in Dickens Fair London; though the sign still states it was founded during the reign of Elizabeth 1st, Live Forever Noble Queen!  It started out in Kage’s head, of course – half the settings of my life began somewhere in her head – and has gradually come into focus over the last 10 years. It’s desperately respectable. It’s incredibly cozy. It is rich with doilies, hand-coloured prints (we made ’em ourselves), hilariously atrocious knick knacks, Turkish carpets, lace curtains, upholstered furinture designed to accommodate skirts 3 feet wide. There are palm trees in pots at the front door, and hat stands so full of top hats they look like mushroom trees.

We have painted walls, wallpaper, crown molding; holly and tinsel and swags of flags; two goose-feather Christmas trees; a fire place. This place is Extreme Christmas – it’s always 5 PM on Christmas Eve, a Victorian fantasy come to life.

My Parlour maids and “daughters” move through this holiday card like a flock of  swans, serene and smiling, bearing plates of food and steaming teapots. My barmen are, very possibly, the jolliest and most sinister barmen in London, and will happily serve ale or fleece victims at cards simultaneously – while filling teapots with hot water and keeping the local kiddies full up on lemonade.

We hand out candy canes and feed the helpless – technically, we only provide lunch for ourselves, but every member of my staff has some other feckless actor they bring home for tea every day. We’re not a food booth or a restaurant – we’re a stage – but our settings are so splendid-looking we spend all day apologizing to customers that no, we are not taking reservations for the next seating – that turkey is not only real, it’s ours – and there are lovely meat pies two doors down …

If you come to visit Dickens as a customer – and I do hope you do! – you may come sit in the Parlour of Kage Baker’s mind regardless of who you are. Bring a pint and a pie.  Mr. Charles Dickens himself reads there 4 times a day, and there are usually sweeties on the table for his audience (that would be you).

Tomorrow we start The Build. Early Saturday morning we shall assemble in the icy confines of the Cow Palace in San Francisco – smelling authentically of cattle, and hence 19th Century London -and confront a stack of wooden panels 6 feet high, 8 feet wide and 8 feet long. We will pry them apart (they’ve been in storage for a year) and start putting up the walls of the Parlour. It will initially resemble a hunter green cracker box. We will go off once or twice to trade mis-assigned walls panels with Cuthbert’s Tea Shoppe and the Three Cripples Ale House. We will find one doorway in Mr. Fezziwig’s Warehouse, and one of our signboards in a head-high crate of tinsel garlands.

No one knows how this happens; it’s a miracle. I suspect portions of the stage leaked through Kage’s minds into and out of other dimensions; how it will happen this year, I do not yet have an inkling. But it will. That Parlour shining in her mind will rise and stand as surely as if she were directing it from her wheel chair – as she did last year. We’ll all see her there while we build.

It’ll be good to live in her mind again.

Off to London!

Kage Baker was the daughter of a soldier. That was important to her, though she had no personal memory of his service. She was born long after he fought in the Burma Theatre in WWII, after he was part of Winston Churchill’s honour guard in Cairo, after he snapped a photo from a plane that shows a small section of lost Ubar in the Sahara (Anne still has it).

Nor was he the sort of man who told war stories. We knew what he had done, but what little he told us was on the level of a history lesson – things we needed to know. In my experience, the men who have the real stories are the least likely to talk much about their wars. It wasn’t an adventure, it wasn’t fun. Real soldiers don’t boast much.

But growing up in the 1950’s, as we did, WWII was as pervasive in American culture as Betty Crocker and baseball. We knew all about it. Television was new but universal in our childhood, and it was full of WWII.

In fact, Kage and I thought Walter Cronkite’s 20th Century television show was a live news program. It took the nuns in grammar school to convince us that WWII was actually over. This despite the fact that I was born on the day the Korean Armistice was signed, and so current events were much fuller of Korean aftermaths than German or Japanese … I just thought it had all run together, and everywhere else in the world was a black-and-white nightmare of bomb shells and ruined buildings. (There has not been peace in the world since that day, incidentally  …)

Kage seemed to have inherited Daddy’s memories somehow. WWII was much more real and immediate to her than other, actual news. Shows like 20th Century undoubtedly played a part in that, but Mr. Cronkite never talked about shore leave in Singapore, or what it was like to walk home from the souk in Alexandria keeping an eye out for antagonistic Russian sailors, or the St. Loyola scapular Daddy found on a dead Japanese soldier … Kage knew things. She was his first born, and more seemed to have come down to her than her Iroquois cheekbones and black eyes.

She was born with a portion of 1944 playing in her head, and grew up slightly adrift in time. This was so natural to her that it was unremarkable. She was used to chronic immersion. She drifted more and more as she got older – as I said, I was sometimes unsure what city she was walking in beside me, or when – and finally she regarded time as a single broad spectrum of energy: she tuned in like a radio to whatever program she wanted, and was fascinated as well by the occasional ghostly voices that wailed out from between the station ID’s.

So Daddy’s soldier days were real and immediate to Kage, though she was born a almost a decade after his gut-shot exit from Burma. She knew what it was like to wait for a soldier. She knew what it was like to welcome back a man, or a corpse, or  broken and brittle fragments in a box. When we were young women and our age-mates were coming back from Vietnam in all those states, Kage  … remembered what should be said and done. Our school mates held protests and shouted petitions to the government; on the day of the student strike, Kage wore black ribbons on her sleeves and defiantly read out “Flanders Fields.” She abhorred the war; but she loved the soldiers.

She always wore a poppy on this day. They were easier to come by when we were kids; old men with scars and pieces of uniforms handed them to you at bus stops. Kage got a new one visiting Daddy in the Veterans’ Hospital some years back, and kept it. I have it now. I found it in her desk drawer.

I wear it for the dead, all the dead. The honoured, beloved, much-missed dead.

Tomorrow: heading north to build London

Kage Baker got migraines sometimes. Poor Kage would suffer excruciating pain, tunnel vision, kinesthesia, and what she described as  “My thoughts hurt.” What this meant, we were never sure as she could not remember the sensation afterward. But it stopped her in her tracks.

I get them, too. (Another sister of ours only got them when she was pregnant; yet another only got them when she was not pregnant. Yes, there a lot of us, and we are all wired funny.) But I don’t get pain: just amazing visual distortions. I see a glittering silver and black Art Deco pattern; it starts in the corners of my visual field and gradually webs over everything I see. Oh, and my depth perception program pretty much crashes, and is replaced by one apparently intended for someone 9 feet tall with one eye in the middle of her forehead.

It doesn’t hurt, but it still leaves me incapable of just about anything.

It’s starting now. The Art Deco shiny is beginning to frame the world. I must go lie down for the duration of the neuron storm.

This blog will resume tomorrow, when my nervous system gets over itself.

Tomorrow: neuronormalcy, or as close as I get.

Kage Baker was of an indomitable character. When she had an idea, nothing stopped her. She would plan, nag, scheme and plot for as long as it took to get what she wanted accomplished. Years, sometimes.

She never forgot. She never gave up. She never compromised. Neither did she bully or throw tantrums, though, and so most other people did not  notice that she always got her own way: but she usually did. And when she could not, she quietly withdrew from the competition; if Kage couldn’t get what she really wanted, she honestly did prefer nothing. It was just very, very hard to convince her that there was no way to get what she wanted …

Despite this adamantine determination making her friends and family often insane (I have driven miles in pursuit of extinct foodstuffs and out-of-print books), this was also the power source for her prolific writing. She always started a new idea because that was just what one did – one devised plots. Then she wrote and wrote and wrote until it was done. And then she started the next.

But even she sometimes hit a wall. Her determination never failed  – hell, she was dictating plot details to me the day she died – but her strength sometimes did. Sometimes, too, circumstances would prevent her from accomplishing what she meant to do. She would wait, recoup her energies, wait for the waves to recede – and leap for that rope hanging from the stern. Then it was out swords, boots first through the stern windows in the Great Cabin, and on with the attack!

I was usually mooring the long boat.

I’ve been the Support Staff all this while, and it’s hard to gear up to a Kage-worthy level obstinancy. Today has been especially difficult. I made a long trip across town to see the haberdasher on Melrose but he was closed due to a water main breaking: his steam machine wouldn’t work. (What, doesn’t everyone have a regular haberdasher?) Three freight trucks in the last twelve hours have crashed at the same place on the Pomona Freeway, converting part of the eastern freeway system into a Circle of Hell. All the pets have the vapours and megrims, and I suspect the hairballs the elder cat is coughing up may be the younger cat. Though it’s probably a sock. There was an inexplicable bowl of mashed potatoes in the middle of the kitchen floor, and I stepped in it.

And while I wish this litany of woes were a comic invention – more of Kage’s famous wry wit, perhaps! – the sad fact is, they are all factual.

Consequently, this sad report has taken two hours and is all I have written today. But I owe the Fates and Kage’s Muse 3,000 words in two other places. So I must go drag that Muse of hers out of whatever metaphorical bar he is encamped in, pour us both some good strong coffee, and do what Kage would do. Write. Write like my life depends on it, write because it’s what I’ve decided to do and nothing else will suffice, write like nothing else matters.

Because nothing else does matter. Except the work.

Kage Baker enjoyed traveling. Especially by car. It was fast enough to move us hundreds of miles in a day, and slow enough so she could see what was out there. She was a landscape aficionado.

She was also a connoisseur of High Weirdness. And you get a lot of that by the sides of interstate highways. They are designed to cut a straight unnatural line through everything in their path – biospheres, rivers, mountain ranges, dimensions. The traveler who pays attention gets a cross-section of parts of the world whose innards were usually not meant to be on display.

Example: have you ever noticed the layer-cake strata  making up a roadside embankment? It’s often very pretty. Have you ever noticed that sometimes it is  … bent? It does up or down at angles; it breaks and doglegs and bits of it seem to have fallen out or been paved over – have you ever stopped to wonder what did that to the ground? When those pretty stripes besides the road were laid down, they were the surface of the ground; things walked on them. Now they look like the broken pretzel pieces at the bottom of the bag. Bears thinking about: what happened? When? When will it happen again?

Driving through Missouri, what most astonished Kage was that the strata exposed by the highways were straight and level, as tidy as garden walls. Missouri is mostly flat and has been pretty quiet for a long time. In California, our strata regularly get up and run around; that contrast between the active and sleeping earth was what caught Kage’s eyes.  But most travelers don’t notice it; our hosts, native Missourians, never ever had. And roads are rich with even weirder stuff if you keep your eyes open.

One of the weirder roads in California is the I-5 through the San Joaquin Valley. I don’t know why. The sky over that place is larger than normal, and inexplicably burns with isolated rainbows at all seasons of the year. The valley is huge and strangely empty, being mostly given over to agriculture. The landscape is immense; the towns are few and far between, and most of what  lies beside the road is not real habitation but only gas stations and fast food. These die and are abandoned in cycles, like the fields, and so you never know quite where the next bathroom or hamburger is to be found: where you stopped a year ago may now be the lair of tumbleweeds and broken glass.

We used to drive the I-5 many, many weekends of the year, commuting between Los Angeles and the Bay Area for Renaissance Faires. Then we moved to Pismo Beach, and the softer, more civilized Highway 101 was our regular road. This March, though, I moved back to L.A. – and now that it is time for the Dickens Fair, I need once again to be driving to San Francisco every weekend. But now, after a 16 years absence, I am back on the I-5.

It’s as weird as ever. Some stops have grown, acquired motels and more fast food and even a few amenities like car washes and Starbucks stores. Nothing that really says: “People live here” – no supermarkets or laundries or bookstores or video rentals. Just mini-marts. You can buy some soft porn or a bad cover CD there, or laundry soap, or a newspaper (maybe) but it’s really a case of “everything for the traveler”. And only the traveler. Because no one really lives there.

Kage believed I-5 to be the ultimate road. Everything that could happen, she said, would and did happen beside it. You just had to keep watching. Sometimes you had to interpret just what that strange light off the road was,; or why an electrified fence 20 feet high had been been erected over one short week around an empty field; or how and why a cow could lie by the road – alternately swelling and then deflating in interesting decomposition – for three whole months and never get picked up or eaten?

What lives beneath the surface of the California Aqueduct? (Near Gustine, something large enough to leave wakes visible from the I-5 moves through the water.) Why are there always sundogs over the Diablos?  Does the ghost of the ancient Pleistocene sea rise when the rains flood the Valley? Or it that just the tule fog?

Kage speculated for years as we drove up and down that peculiar road, dodging tomato trucks and looking for clean bathrooms. Many of her ideas mutated into bits of her books. I have custody of the rest, along with whatever may be born of this coming winter’s perambulations …

Adventure is out there still. I’ll be driving through it every weekend. Kage’s spirit will be looking out the window, exclaiming at what she sees; missing our turn-offs, mixing up right and left and directing  me to wonders.

What a time we’ll have.

Tomorrow: rehearsing London

Kage Baker always worried about being benighted on the road home from Fair. Especially if the weather looked bad.

We drove a lot of nights down I-5 with lightning flashing continuously to the east across the width of the San Joaquin Valley. It was like skirting the edge of a huge holodeck, close enough to see where the special effects kicked in. She always worried the storms would sweep west and catch us, like the ghost of the inland sea the Valley once was.

So when I woke up this morning in Vallejo and found it was pouring rain, I called a personal rain-out. I decided to display a rare moment of common sense, and head home by daylight before the rain could spread all the way to Los Angeles. I loaded up my luggage, my parrot and my nephew and we headed home.

The wonderful friends who open their house to me during Fair live in a magical part of Vallejo: near their house is, on one lot, a gas station AND a McDonald’s AND a mini-market AND a drive-through Starbuck’s. It was probably Kage’s favourite comfort stop in the entire state;. One can get anything one needs there, and a wide variety of things (mostly chocolate) that one has never imagined one needed but which one desires as soon as one lays eyes on them …

We ran through rain half way to Los Angeles, and just before it the rest of the way. Now the wind is rising, and it’s clear the storm has followed us over the Grapevine. Had we  stayed, I would be somewhere near Gustine about now – searching the darkness through the rain for the glowing arms of the Pea Soup Anderson’s windmill, and cursing the windshield wipers I forgot to change last week.

Instead, I’m home in the warm and dry, the parrot is grooming on his perch and all is well with the world. I can imagine Kage saying, “Told you so,” and actually sounding pleased instead of disapproving: since I’m not, after all, upside down in a wet ditch off the I-5.

Comfort and self-satisfaction.

Tomorrow: more about I-5 and Dickens Fair.

Kage Baker was my designer for Dickens Fair. The Parlour of the Green Man was formed in her mind. We’ve been working on it for 10 years now- this is the 11th year beginning right now – and in a week’s time we will start putting up the walls again.

Today, though, was for paperwork and renewing friendships and finding all  the props and clothes and actors. It was about getting new gloves, finally indulging in that satin bodice, learning to waltz. It was about starting the three weeks of juggling stage gigs and street gigs and visits from wandering Queens and who will or will not eat hard boiled eggs, so I can fit 3 sit down luncheons, 4 visits from Charles Dickens and a Royal Progress into one Parlour during a single afternoon.

Was a long crazy day. Lots of hugs, a few tears, the hundreds of familiar faces with whom I spend my Extreme Christmas. As the inestimable Mr. Grimaldi would say for the Christmas Panto, Here we are again!

And glad to be so.