Part Four from Twisting in the Wind: A Memoir of Ken Kesey at Naropa University 1994 by Keith Kumasen Abbott
Sitting at the dining table, Kesey continued to drop pleasantries about my book, praising Mordecai of Monterey. I was starting to feel a little sour at the situation. Kesey could have written something to my publisher to promote the book. Around me the conversation was tinged with nostalgia. Kesey’s old pals from Oregon talked about their local state news, focusing on whose farm had been sold out to developers. Reminiscences of picking beans and berries as kids shifted into a discussion of what a great democratic leveler field work was to society. The same tasks were forced on everyone. Plus the earning power of farmwork “energized” farm kids. This took me back to my Northwest youth. Growing up near the Puyallup valley in Washington, fieldwork picking strawberries and raspberries provided my generation with the bucks for fashionable fall clothes, a necessary margin for social status.
But even through the replaying of bygone times and opportunities, Twister kept haunting the discussion. Aside from Kesey’s Oregon buddies, a few young Kesey fans and the members of the Twister cast were present at the table, as well as Emily’s female boarders and her son, Will. Kesey was not a man who accepted losing willingly, especially not in public, not after his phenomenal success with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Due to his notoriety and fame, Kesey presumed that he had only to shift his attention to the audience at the workshop and his abilities would carry the day. It seemed to me that Kesey and his pals were returning to their younger days to find some connection, some clue, to their debacle.
What baffled me is why Kesey and his gang imagined that a thirty-second sound byte generation would fall for a three hour play based on an old MGM movie. Over the years of reading the student surveys, I typically came across feedback that Naropa students had never before encountered Jack Kerouac as a writer and/or they only recognized his name in song lyrics by Ten Thousand Maniacs.
As it turned out Kesey had never given up on his Twister project, and tenacity was one of his habitual strengths. Only after Kesey and Babbs expressed their complaints and analysis at the dining table, did the younger cast members speak. They recalled previous performances and compared those to the Boulder show which they thought had gone smoothly.
This information gave me pause.
If a show starts over an hour late, then stalls for another half hour, and then clocks a running time of three hours without intermission, how is it possible to come to the conclusion that the Boulder performance went smoothly? However, taking into account the exclusion of competently run rehearsals, both technical and staging, plus the green actors, then perhaps the Boulder performance had been less problematic than other nights.
The cast’s comments kept circling back to Boise, Idaho. The production experienced its best reception in the potato state. At the table it was being inferred that the Idaho audience had been made up of Deadheads, Back to the Land refugees and likeminded people with very unique community standards. I knew that Boulder, with its Birkenstocks, Tibetan Turquoise, Volvos and Brie Trustafarians, was nothing like Boise.
The talk at the table shifted to book reviews. Again, I thought of the second printing of Mordecai of Monterey and how the novel never quite got the boost it deserved. But the conversation about book reviews was slanted towards the familiar complaint that the East Coast establishment ignored Western writers. Ken asserted that he shunned reviews and never read them. When his latest novel Last Go Round, a collaboration with Ken Babbs, had been reviewed in the New York Time, bookseller Ken Lopez called to warn him not to bother reading it. Kesey habitually complied. That night Kesey paraphrased the writer’s reality mantra for reviews: if you believe the good ones, you will have to believe the bad ones, too. This was a professional piece of advice and it was sharp.
Kesey’s comment produced a silence around the table until the conversation again returned to the performance of Twister in Boulder. The actors took to replaying their individual triumphs of the night and examining how they had engaged in interactive exchanges with the audience, hence the reinforcement of the belief in the billing of Twister as a collaborative production. The cast extolled the notion that the audience had arrived in costume and joined the show on stage for the finale. The expectations were that this was proof that a revival of a Sixties Happening was underfoot. Ginsberg’s role as Buddha was also counted as a success. No one in Twister had registered how fragile Allen was or acknowledged that a Naropa staffer bodily removed him because of poor health. And no one in the cast could fathom why the audience was so hostile to the black crow shadow puppets when those old Terry Toon Technicolor Magpies were still being shown on television.
Kesey regarded each speaker at the table, appraising them. They were blowing smoke up his ass because they cared for him and didn’t want to admit that he, along with all of them, had pulled a classic boner. Theater has deep-sixed more than one novelist in public. Still, in Kesey’s eyes, I knew that the proverbial bullshit meter was on, and the pointer was laid flat on the right hand peg. Kesey was not buying the versions presented to him at the dining table.
Rick Jaynes, who had worked as a journalist, contributed to the conversation by speaking on the demographics of the Boulder audience. The Naropa participants came from all over the United States and were mostly college grad students or working folks on a summer vacation. The core of the MFA students were active in the arts and came from a broad spectrum of cultures, places and backgrounds. Rick’s implication was that the audience was not bozos.
As a response, Kesey refused to engage in Rick’s comments, speaking mostly to Babbs.
Despite his best intentions, culturally Kesey could be said to be out of the loop. This loop actually had little to do with political correctness. How public discourse was conducted over the past twenty years had changed. My intuition told me that Kesey knew this; those hesitations about word choices betrayed his uneasiness, his own self-awareness and also doubt about his inability to fit into this current altered discourse. But within his court an admission like that was not allowed.
As an older woman and student of the workshop observed, “I thought it sad that he didn’t have a way to talk to the students.”
At the dinner when Kesey and his pals were reminiscing about summertime in Oregon, bean picking, bean field romances circulated through their stories, Kesey joined in with a story about “a girl”. Then he let drop that “this girl” was a woman who was fifty years old. The moment he admitted this, his head dipped for a quick glance around the table. He was aware that the women at the table, Emily’s boarders who were older ladies, might find this characterization annoying. Not that any of them had been included in the conversation up to that point, and only the delayed entrance of Emily Hunt changed that dynamic.
A close friend to both Ken Babbs and Kesey, Emily possessed a coolness and unruffled demeanor when under fire that inspired confidence. With her calm acceptance of the situation at hand, after all she was heading Naropa’s Development Office, she ran down the pros and cons of the performance of Twister and summed up the personal attacks on her and her administration for hosting Twister. Her continued placidity about the episode caused Kesey to indulge in a rant that the whole uproar was a personal attack on him, his writing and an attempt to censor him while forcing him to change. I enjoyed this: it was a classic writer’s tantrum.
Around the table Babbs and the others took up Kesey’s complaint, elaborating how Kesey had sunk his own money into Twister and how actors, such as the woman who played Dorothy, had come all the way from the East Coast and how the audience was too seduced by political correctness to respond to anything done in such a free-wheeling spontaneous fashion.
Emily replied to these remarks with a story about a ceremony she participated in with Choygam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan founder of Naropa. The event was an empowerment (abhisheka) ceremony marking the passage of certain senior meditation students into another level of Buddhist practice. The students were all simultaneously relieved, grateful and proud to have achieved this plateau, but pride apparently overcame their gratitude. As the event progressed Trungpa got more and more irritated with the students’ behaviour. He made it a point to tell them that nothing had actually occurred. There was no place to indicate where all their study was stored and nothing had been gained by the ceremony. No one and nothing had fundamentally changed. Their next moment would be a further test of all they had already practiced.
Emily’s point of telling this story registered with Kesey. Shortly after dessert Kesey bolted from the table and disappeared. His actions made him more human to me. As there was no party left to defend, the evening came to a close.
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