Projects and plays

Play about suburban Jewish boys who go on a camp with some of their male teachers and the kind of revelations and bondings they all have - where the sluice gates of love and support for the slightly reserved and afraid teacher is opened, where boys learn their big lesson (ask David Camp about his interaction with Yitzchak Notoledo). "Go for it sir"; "come on sir you can do it" and so on and so forth. Creating a space where we can turn and face our fears, and young boys can be initiated into their roles as men.) [ See my non-existent article: on changing the Bar Mitzvah into a meaningful - and demanding - right of passage. Also see Reviewing-age-of-bar and bat-mitzvah] About finding your authority, or your 'power animal' as Carlos Castenada called it??

There could be some nice role reversals in it, like when they're crossing a raging river and "the master" gets swept away and is rescued by some of the boys; perhaps some love or lust interest, with a female teacher there that a master (and several of the boys) have a crush on; perhaps a scene where two boys in a tent are having a midnight torchlit chat and the one boy tells his tent mate that he has a crush on his sister and peeks at her undressiing and the oyther boy says sies, that's disgusting, but once his tent mate has gone to sleep he masturabates...a sweet ultra truthful slice of life, one religious boy who is wrestling with many things, need to set up each characyter in the school environment early on, to establish what their issues and wants are, before we take them out of their environment into the wild, where stuff can get fluid and there are some breakthroughs, even if afterwards the old patterns will close in on them again, like water that's been pushed out of a place that keeps flooding, and it slowly trickles back in till the possibilities are back underwater....

Could have one teacher who has been "forced" to come on expedition and hates it, they're physically frail and naarfi, but strong in other ways, a strange combination of weakness and strength, the strong person whose afaraid of their weakness and has over compensated, the strong person who is just strong, the physically strong person who's exposed as weak - reversals and ???? ( forgetting my script writing theory)...you know who this is based on, right, the humerlous "leader" etc etc.

A meditation on the different kinds of strength there are, on Israeliness vs Diapora Jewishness for example,

See Dr Tim Hawkes article "Educating for Adulthood on p. 27 of Independence Vol 34 No 1, also appeared in SMH on 8 September 2008. See also "Growing adolescents into adults" by Andrew Lines, about his "The Rite Journey" program on pg 31 of Independence Vol 34 No 1. See www.theritejourney.com.au and Steve Biddulph Manhood, 1994. Hopefully my desire to connect and be of service will make some of this grwow and blossom.

Interesting permutations of the question "what is it to be a man" especially the Jewish baggage where so many of the experiences we have had have been emasculating. Could bring Laurence Price in on this, David Bilchitz (one of the characters could be gay), Marc Radomsky. Could have a teacher like Mr sak, brittle? militant? blind? physically incompetent? hurt? (combo of Mr Sak and Mr Mink) the boys laqugh at his incompetence, explore the peer dynamic of the boys and how it fades and alters as the masks come off and people cannot hide any more...either cos things go wrong or because it is designed to challenge them...

Young precocious boy with beret who brings teapot and Jack Kerouac books to read - on the road - also sporty boys 0f- different kinds - different abilities.

They're lying on their sleeping bags near the dying embers looking at the stars
wow....
right wow (remeber adolescents aren't great with silences)
Do you think we are inside the universe, or the universe is inside us
whadya mean
I mean, like,

They daven ??? - some of the boys come, some don't - some tension betwen the different teachers about the different offerings
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There used to be a fat butcher in Rocket Street Yeoville (Johannesburg, apartheid South Africa, a famous street lined with Bohemian eateries, music venues, ethnic shops) who had fat sausage fingers and a blue apron with white stripes and blood stains on it and white clothes on underneath it and probably gum boots on his feet - and he would stand behind his metal and glass display fridge with the boerewors and pork chops and T bone steaks and rump steaks, and behind him was his plump immigrant wife, probably with a hairy chin, and behind them on the old style white tiled wall were pin ups from Scope magazine - busty blondes and brunettes in stars and stripes bikinis, because in prudish South Africa you couldn't have full nudity or even toplessness, even in men's magazines - and I always wantd to get a photograph of him staring blankly into the camera - perhaps he had cold shark eyes - with the pin ups behind him an the dead muscle in front of him - and call it "meat."

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Make a clay statue of my wife as earth godess, with me and the boys clinging to her hips and breasts and legs like the tiny pygmies we are, or become, in her presence.
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