Locals
Where we talk to people who are... well... local.
Locals
Laurie McCants, theatre, travel and Joe the Fix
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Laurie McCants has had a life. Fortunately for her and others, it's not over yet but her story so far is quite interesting. Let's let her tell it.
Welcome to Locals, the podcast in which we talk to people who are, you know it, local. Laurie McCance is a friend, has been a work colleague, she's a local who clearly and dearly loves this community, but is also an okie at heart. Laurie helped to found the local Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble, but has also had a career that has taken her across the world. She is, I think, the person most mentioned by other people whom I've interviewed. If you haven't met Laurie, you should. And you are about to. Here is Laurie Kathleen McCannse. Well, welcome, Lori. It's nice to talk to you. Not that we haven't before, but it's really nice to talk to you. Thinking about this interview, I actually had a bit of a harder time in ways than I did with other interviews. Because we've known each other so long, we have such shared lives, and you have such a career.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Your experiences, both personal and professional, are really quite something. They span the globe, they're local. You're another person, like I mentioned about Luann Keller, you know. You reside in Bloomsburg, but I think you're a person who lives in the world. Let's just start with you early on. Tell me about your earliest life, what you feel shaped you.
SPEAKER_01Chapter one.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01I am born. Yes. I was born in Rochester, Minnesota. My dad was doing an early stage of doctoring at the Mayo Clinic, and we lived in an incredible neighborhood, which I really think led me on the path I've taken since, because it was a neighborhood of young doctors at the Mayo Clinic and their families, and they were people from all over the world. The neighborhood was very unusual in that it was a cluster of Quonset huts, leftover Quonset huts from World War II. So Quonset huts are kind of shaped like half-cylinders. So my early drawings of houses were not the usual child drawing of a house with a peaked roof. They were half cylinders. It was wonderful. We lived there for three years. My brother was born there. And then we moved to Topeka, Kansas, which was another really interesting place to live. As it turns out, I only realized this just a few years ago. The elementary school that I went to was the Brown versus Board of Board of Education School. I'm not kidding. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And so that would have happened in the 50s, am I correct? And you were there in the early 60s.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, or it would have been 1959, 1959.
SPEAKER_03Well, so not not that long after.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And I don't think I was aware of that at all. Some of my fellow students were children of color, you know. Um and I love Topeka and I I could walk to school. When my dad got another job in Athens, Pennsylvania. Um at first I was I was really mad to be torn away from Topeka. Then I grew to love Athens so much.
SPEAKER_03Um it's a beautiful little community, a nice little community. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I love the northern tier. And again, I could walk to school. I would walk to school with my friends, walk to school and walk home, and those were those were really important walks. We would talk about the state of the world, you know. We would compare our ideas of God, and I loved Athens. Loved that town. So when we moved from Athens to Tulsa, once again, once again, I was so mad to be torn away from this little town that I love so much. And I grew to love Tulsa. I grew to love Tulsa. Went to Robert E. Lee Elementary School.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01They've only recently changed the name of that school. All right. And once again, you know, made deep, deep friendships. Once again, walking to school and walking home from school, the conversations that we would have, hanging out on the street corners. Do you believe in God? I don't think I do. Well, are you the devil? No, I'm not the devil. I'm just not sure I believe in God. Conversations like that.
SPEAKER_03Wow. You know, those are big conversations.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, big conversations in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which it was only years and years later that I found out about the event that makes Tulsa infamous in American history. Um I was I was in college and I I heard about it, and I was visiting, I was back at home on a school break, and a friend of my parents who worked on the newspaper. Oh God, I'm blanking on her name now. But anyway, she was born and raised in Tulsa, and she wrote this the society column for the local newspaper. And I remember saying to her, I'm hearing this thing about Tulsa, that there was this they called it a riot then, a race riot. And she said, Oh, that never happened. That's a lie. I am actually proud to say that Tulsa has lived up to its history, and that there is there's a commemoration center there.
SPEAKER_03I went there on your suggestion. It's really wonderful. And again, wonderful that it is powerful, not wonderful in that it needs needs to exist.
SPEAKER_01The acknowledgement. The acknowledgement, yes. Yeah, yeah, the recognition. Yeah. And Tulsa is still quite a divided city in terms of white and black, you know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, not hugely south of Tulsa. It was the same thing. There was the white side of town and the black side of town. Then you were in Tulsa for how long?
SPEAKER_01Um until well, I got married there the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I went to college at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. After college, my then husband and I went to Chicago and I got my graduate degree at Northwestern. And that's when we met at Northwestern, yeah. And then a couple of years after I got my degree, lived with my then husband in Delaware for a little while, and then I found out that Alvina Krauss was considering the possibility of teaching acting classes in her home in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, and that we were to write a letter to her, and that she may or may not accept us as students. So I wrote the letter and I was accepted.
SPEAKER_03Oh, I remember my letter too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's go back, uh retract a little bit because you're also shaped a lot by your parents, and I knew both of your parents. And uh talk about where that part of who you are came from in terms of just your family and your upraising.
SPEAKER_01Well, my dad was born in Oklahoma, um the southern part of Oklahoma, near Ardmore, in what had been Indian territory. I mean, Oklahoma wasn't made a state until 1907. My my dad was born in 1920. His father, my grandfather, had moved from Tennessee into Indian territory, and he bought 40 acres each from two black women who had been formerly enslaved by the Chickasaws. The Chickasaws had been pushed into Indian Territory from, I don't know, Georgia, Alabama, somewhere there, pushed into Indian Territory and given land. Um, and the Chickasaws sided with the Confederacy because the Chickasaws were slave owners.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the Chickasaws were slave owners. We called them the five civilized tribes, Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Creek. Um, those tribes were had all been pushed into Indian territory, and several of those tribes sided with the Confederacy because they were slave owners. It's an it's an incredibly tangled American story. So after the Civil War, the Chickasaws had to free their slaves and give them something, and they gave them land, and that's the land that my grandpa bought. The land where my dad grew up. And the hired hand on the farm was a gentleman that my dad really considered as his second father. He was a black man. He didn't live on the farm but lived nearby with his family. And I got to meet this gentleman when he was when he was an older man. And my my dad adored this hired man. His name was Columbus Bonaparte Nero.
SPEAKER_03Oh my.
SPEAKER_01And there is a Nero family cemetery that a few years ago my brother and I drove down to southern Oklahoma with my dad's ashes. And we poured some of the ashes on Columbus's grave.
SPEAKER_02Oh my.
SPEAKER_01And we poured some of the ashes on the creek, which was right behind the graveyard. This is the creek where my dad would tell stories about Columbus teaching him how to how to fish, how to swim. And my dad, my dad made sure that Columbus had a headstone. So I think the stories of the farm from my dad and also from his older half-sister, Hildred, was her name.
SPEAKER_03I think I met Hildred once on a trip. They came out to Bloomsburg and they got one.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. One of those trips that my dad didn't tell me he was coming. They drove all the way from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, and I had no idea. Actually, that was that was something. I'd been working probably out at Buckhorn, I'm not sure exactly, but it was late at night, and I I was living on the third floor of Jim Slesser's house on Fifth Street. It was late at night, and I I drove home from wherever I was working to park my car, and I parked my car and I saw this car with Oklahoma license plates. I was like, what? And my dad comes out of the car and I said, Dad? And he said, Well yeah. Well yeah. I was like, you didn't tell me you were coming. He said, yeah, and I got Hilbert in the car. Hilbert was in her 90s.
SPEAKER_03I remember she was old.
SPEAKER_01She was in her 90s, and they had driven from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, never telling me they were coming. And I was like, okay, we're going to the Hotel McGee because Aunt Hilbert can't get up the stairs to my third floor apartment. Oh my God. Yeah. He was something. I'm very proud of Aunt Hildred, actually. I've been going over her memoirs because, and she left really detailed and wonderful.
SPEAKER_03Oh, did she?
SPEAKER_01Kind of s I'm not gonna say spicy, but they're they're full of pungent details about growing up in Oklahoma and then going on to become the first female district attorney in all of Oklahoma. She became a lawyer.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01That was her second degree. She went to college first for physical education, and boy, she walked like a man, she talked like a man. Um she was physically like spry up until up until her last days. Um she had a pecan farm.
SPEAKER_03Oh sure.
SPEAKER_01You know, and she would she would go out to the trees and knock down the pecans.
SPEAKER_03We had like seven pecan trees in our yard in Texas, and I remember the one that shocks I got to Minnesota was that people paid for pecans. I just went, wait, you sell these things? Because we would just do that, knock the tree, crack them with our heel on the sidewalk. They were phenomenal.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. She made the best pecan pie. Unbelievable. But she was really, really interesting and had a led a fascinating life. Um she drove her mother, my grandmother, and I think her aunt, from Oklahoma to California and back in the 30s just to visit somebody out there they wanted to visit. And her first degree was in physical education. She went to one of the Oklahoma state schools for physical education. She was going to be a gym teacher, which she did for a while before she went on to law school. And family, friends, and neighbors would say, We we hear Hildred's going to college. What's she studying? And her stepmother, my grandmother, approved of her going to college, but did not approve of her choice of major, which was physical education. Well, what's she studying? And so my grandmother would say, Oh, I don't know. Jumpin'. But anyway, I'm I've been pouring over her memoirs now because I'm going to use, I'm putting together a storytelling piece about my Oklahoma stories. Right. And um, you know, also pulling in Oklahoma history, which is, of course, tangled. Um, and and my own family is very deeply connected with that. Yeah. My mom grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and she loved that town. Oh, did she love that town? And she has Kansas City stories. One of them is when she and my dad were first married. They were living with my grandparents in Kansas City. Again, he was doing some early stage of doctoring at a hospital in Kansas City. And they had a friend who was a journalist on the newspaper in Kansas City. And Kansas City was and still, I think, is a big mafia town. And this journalist friend said to my parents, I've been invited to a mafia party. Do you want to go? And they were they were like, uh yeah. And it was being held on the third floor of some fancy Italian restaurant in Kansas City, which I guess was a front for a character named Joe the Fix. And my mom said, We got there and it was this big party, and and Joe the Fix was sitting at at the bar at the end of the room. And she said, We were sitting seated at a table with this other couple, a gentleman who who stayed silent through the whole evening. And I found out weeks later he was found dead in a car trunk. And his companion was a much younger lady who was very chatty. They were both wearing party hats. But the very chatty lady filled us in on why Joe the Fix had been was throwing this party. It was because he was finally getting over the love of his life who had left him for a pipe organ repair man. But he was finally over her. So the the lady in the party hat had just finished telling that story when who should appear in the doorway of the room but the former girlfriend. And she was already drunk. And silence falls over the room. And the former girlfriend says, Isn't anybody gonna get me a drink? And Joe the fix at the bar says, Get the lady a drink. So she stumbles over to the bar, she gets a drink, she sits down at a table and she starts talking very loudly. And of course, everybody in the room's got their ears toward her, and she's complaining about her husband, the pipe organ repair man, because he's too conscientious, he's too much of a perfectionist, he spends too much time on each job, and they don't make enough money. And finally, Joe the Fix stands up at the bar and bangs his his fist on the bar and he looks at her and he says, Money? Money's the easiest thing in the world to get. When I was a kid and we needed money, my mom gave me a gun. I got the money. But integrity. Your husband has integrity, and you should be proud. And after my mother finished telling me that story, and the reason she was telling me that story was she was looking at the paper that morning and she said, Oh my god, Joe the Fix got busted. And I looked at her and she said, Oh, you're old enough, I can tell you this story. Um, but she said, I've always had a soft spot for Joe the Fix.
SPEAKER_03And is he the one who ended up being killed?
SPEAKER_01I don't know. I I tried to find out who this Joe the Fix was, really, so I dug into the history of mafia in Kansas City. They're all named Joe, so I don't know what you know which one it was. Anyway. That's a great story. I think that I think that both my dad and my mother were great storytellers. Great storytellers, and that's one of the things that I I got from both of them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03How did you end up doing theater?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that was my mom's love. She read plays to me. She read plays to me at the kitchen table. Um and when I was four years old, we went to the Kansas City Starlight Theater, which is an open-air theater, it still exists, to see Peter Pan. And they had trouble getting me to leave the theater. Um, because I just stood there, stood there in the aisle looking up at the sky, thinking that Peter Pan might fly again. You know? That's where I was bit with with the love for theater. And just a few years ago, my friend Larissa Fasthorse, who is a native playwright, she'd been commissioned to rewrite Peter Pan to deal with the with the really problematic American Indian that are in Peter Pan. She rewrote the play and made the Lost Boys, each from a different tribe, and they were all played by by native, young native actors. Oh, cool. It was beautiful. I went back to the Starlight Theater in Kansas City to see Larissa's production. Oh, it was a good. It was brilliant. It was brilliant. I was so happy. It made me really happy. Oh, that's great. That's great.
SPEAKER_03So you got to Bloomsburg, you found the Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble. Since you have done puppetry, you have toured to Egypt. And I was so fortunate to be able to join you on that trip. You've been in Africa, you have you have worked with people all over the world. What is that journey for you? How did you I mean, you are such a local person. You deeply care about Bloomsburg. You are so deeply embedded. In fact, Lori, I was thinking about it. I think of this podcast as like a a series of webs uh of connecting people that are connected geographically and you know, through experience and and connections and socially. And you connect, I think, to more than anybody. Steve Gillill and John Whitespun or Lou Ann Keller, Kenny Rodemoyer, who was Roadie the bartender when you and I worked at the Buckhorn Crossing restaurant. And I I uh and more and more I have to go back and look at all the ones, but you are like connected to more of those people than anybody else I think I've talked to. So you're intensely local. And yet you also exist oh Justin Naylor. You visited Italy with Justin on his cooking trips. So what's your journey to live so intensely in Bloomsburg and also in the world in which you live?
SPEAKER_01I love when I visit places talking about my small town, you know, how wonderful it is, and how connected my theater company is with the town itself. One of my favorite connections was the Connection that we made when we went to Egypt with the Egyptian puppet theater artists there. And I was able to line up grants so that these young Egyptian men who had single-handedly revived a form of Egyptian puppetry that was dying out. They purposefully went to visit with the last hand puppet masters and the last shadow puppet masters in all of Egypt and learned those crafts from these elderly gentlemen and carried on a craft that they were proud of, distinctly Egyptian, and wonderful stories. They perform in an Ottoman-era courtyard in downtown Cairo, just down the street from the Khana Khalili, the bazaar. But you walk into this courtyard and all of a sudden you're transported back in time. And these young men formed their own puppet theater company. They do both shadow puppetry and hand puppetry, and they revived both of these forms. They named their theater company Wamda, which is an ancient Arabic word. That means the sudden flash of light in the dark desert that fully illuminates everything. Oh it's like heat lightning. Yeah, right. Heat lightning. And so they are illuminating their past and their present and maybe their future by telling these stories and keeping them alive. The stories are always, have always been, like in the tradition of Punch and Judy, the little guy, the little guy who who fools the emperors and the kings and so on, the little guy who sort of pulls the rug out from under the leaders. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Aragost is the name of the character in uh Aragos, Aragos is the name of the character in the Egyptian stories. And it's so wonderful to go to their place in this beautiful courtyard because all the neighborhood kids come and they know the stories backwards and forwards, and they can chant along with the puppeteers. Artaghost, Aragost. It's so beautiful. And I was able to bring these Egyptian theater artists to Bloomsburg.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I remember.
SPEAKER_01And we created a bilingual play based in their stories that we toured to all of the rural schools surrounding Bloomsburg, all over Pennsylvania and into New York, little tiny schools, little big schools to, and it was what the Iraq war was going on then? It was some war, you know, where Americans were wreaking havoc in the Middle East. It was a healing thing to tell these stories in both Egyptian Arabic and English, and have little Pennsylvania kids cheering along, articles, articles. And the Egyptian puppet artists had no idea that towns like Bloomsburg exist because what they know of America is New York and Hollywood. And they were just so delighted with Bloomsburg and the other little towns and the other little schools that we went to. They came to love Bloomsburg. And I'm happy to say that through Facebook, I'm in almost daily contact with my Egyptian friends. And they are still making their plays. Oh, that's great. Still making their plays in the parks and in that courtyard. They've been through incredible upheavals in terms of Egyptian politics and ins and outs and revolutions and all kinds of stuff. But they're still making their plays.
SPEAKER_03You are also a member of a Native American tribe in Alaska. Am I true? Am I correct?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm adopted. You adopted that story. There's a wonderful theater company in Juneau called Perseverance Theater. What a wonderful name for a theater company. Started Molly Smith. Yeah, and they're kind of sister theaters with Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble, our paths across in many ways.
SPEAKER_03Elizabeth taught up there. We were up there for a few, two summers.
SPEAKER_01And their then artistic director, Art Roach, had commissioned a playwright to create a trilingual play about the conflict between the Russians, which you know once ruled that area, and the Klinkits, which were the native tribe of the area. It's really important Alaskan history, and it's really important American history, actually. And a playwright had been commissioned to create a trilingual play in Russian and Klinkit, with English sort of being the hinge language. And because he knew about all of my experiences working with the Egyptians, and that I had managed to dance around a lot of cultural tripwires and become an accepted and beloved friend and fellow artist that he thought, I think she will be able to dance around these cultural tripwires. I'm the outsider. And if I don't get it, I'm in big trouble. Because it was a really important, difficult story to tell, the story of this conflict. Luckily for me, there was a whole contingent of Native performers that had been brought on to the piece. And there was an elder who was brought on to be a performer in the piece to play the part of his own great-great-grandfather. Ray Wilson was his name. And Ray had never been in the theater at all. I mean he'd never gone to a play. But they had brought him on as the elder, as the as the revered expert in terms of all the cultural things that we had to deal with in the play. And luckily for me, Ray didn't drive. So I drove him back and forth to rehearsals. And in Klinkett culture, it is considered very rude to look each other directly in the eyes.
SPEAKER_02Oh, really?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I had to learn about that. Um, they don't look each other directly in the eyes. It's considered invasive and rude. But here I am driving, and Ray is sitting beside me in the passenger seat. Perfect situation for Ray to open up to me and start telling me the stories, right? Because we're not looking at each other. And the opening night, there was a whole contingent of Clinkett clans people who came to the theater. They were there at the theater for the first time ever, and you could tell they were being very, very defensive and worried and fearful, and maybe a touch angry. How are they going to do this? How are they going to tell our story? How are they going to deal with this? Let's see what they had to say here. It was a really tense atmosphere in the lobby. The play was beautiful. The native performers were amazing. The music was amazing. It was gorgeous. It was a beautiful production. And at the curtain call, they called me down and I thought, oh, they're going to give me flowers. That's nice, you know, which they did. But then Ray, who was in his full regalia in his grandfather's robes and fur hat and everything, Ray stepped forward and something happened in the room, and I realized, oh, we're in a council meeting now. Ray has called a council meeting. And he adopted me.
SPEAKER_03Did you expect that?
SPEAKER_01No, I had no idea. I had no idea. He adopted me and named me after his auntie, Kachgun. I asked him later, what does Kochgun mean? He says, I don't know. I don't know if it means anything. It's just Kochgun. But I wanted to give you her name because just like her, and he said this to the audience, just like my auntie, Kachgun, this is a woman who knows her own mind.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's Ray.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I'm sure Ray is no longer with us. Um, I mean, he was he was old when we did the play. However, I am in, again, Facebook, for all of its tangles, right? I'm in constant contact with my friends up in up in Juneau.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That's great.
SPEAKER_00Perseverance is persevering. Yeah, they are.
SPEAKER_03They are. Let's wrap up with what you're doing now. You're retired from BTE, still engaged in the some national theater organizations, and you're still working as an artist. What's your project now?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm putting together a storytelling piece about my family's Oklahoma history, drawing upon my Aunt Hildred's memoirs and the history of Oklahoma itself. And actually, at the end of the month, I've been very honored to I've been asked to speak at a memorial concert for our dear friend Guy Klusevik, who was a world-renowned avant-garde accordionist who ended up writing a lot of music for me for my projects, and became a dear, dear friend. And so I am going to be part of a memorial concert for him. They'll be playing some of the music that he wrote for me. And I'll be able to give my memories of working with this incredibly wonderful, incredibly funny, incredibly gifted, dear, dear friend. That's what's coming up for me in the immediate future. Oh, that's wonderful.
SPEAKER_03Well, thank you so much, Laurie. And as I said, we barely touched on what you've done in your career. So thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you.
SPEAKER_03That's it for locals, the podcast in which we talk to people who are well local. Join us next week for a talk with Steve Wright, the last hiker. The voice you hear is Rand Whipple. The editor you do not is Elliot Dorschler.