The . Hours . Festivals

Made in a Trailer Park

I remember the broken years you lived
in that rumpled land submarine
someone else had run aground at the park
behind the drive-in. The faded
green trim. The once upon a time
white, a wind-buffed shade of bone.

I remember how we would make up
stories of all the lives given to it, lost
to it, as if that dented trailer
were a ship night-mangled on a reef
of failed dreams, again and again,
over the years before you and your mom
pieced it together for your own doomed
voyage, which seemed destined
to leave you stranded there.

I remember the way your mom rigged
up that shower out back. Those three shivery
buckets. The way you squealed
from the cold, even in summertime.

I remember the way she would rinse
between double features. The glow
from the giant screen filtered
through the two small windows
of your home, brightening her shoulders
as if she did have stardust,
as if she might have been
a washed up, washed out, shooting star.

I remember all those movies.
The hollow sound of the tin roof
beneath our feet as if the world might
swallow us whole. The day
that hail storm pinned you
down for hours, as if trying
to break through, trying to break you.

I remember how you swore
you’d get out. You’d wash your hands
of that place, of that life.

Here it is all these years later,
someone else catching sight of you
from that not quite collapsed abode.
A girl, maybe, on the one-eared
rocking horse you left behind,
corralled in the stony yard. A mom,
or dad, or aunt, maybe, looking up
from a feeble kitchen chair
plunked by the new water hookup,
watching your massive face,
that long ago ache in your eyes
something you have turned to gold.
No one even noticing the rotted corner
of the big screen. Peeling layers of paint.

All they see is the tear you have trained
to run down your right cheek. As if
you have channeled some part of you
that never got out, that never truly got away.


​by Lafayette Wattles

Video by Meg Willing

**Special note: Sarah Foster chose to be both a writer AND a collaborator, so it made sense to layer these collaborations together as follows:

Megan Grumbling, writer + Sarah Foster, collaborator (dancer)
​Sarah Foster, writer + Simon Bjarning, collaborator (musician)

Starlight: A Choreographic Soliloquy


The essence of the dance is mint.

The dancer enters, on finger-points, from above the trailer.

A cool, shivery touch. Optimism and goosebump. Innuendo.

The dancer’s fingers ever so lightly graze the surfaces – trailer, broken chair, rocking horse. A quivering bourée downstage.

Peppermint, wintergreen. Starlight. Stella. Stella! 

The dancer gives a quivering shake.

A beautiful, scintillating shudder. Like jazz hands. Like Pentecostalists seized with God. 
The shuddering is meant to express mint. The flash of her hands, palms open, Starlight. 
The sudden stoic whites of her eyes. Highway and Canyon. Her character lives in the trailer, waters the stones, checks the mail, paints peppermint stripes on the yard’s breakages and ends. Horizon.

Her stoic whites of eyes, of course, are off-stage. The meta-proscenium. But it’s a distinction without a difference. Highway and Canyon.

Off-stage, above the proscenium, the dancer widens her eyes. Horizon. Winks.

That wink is not in the choreography. And yet it is true to the spirit. Mint. Optimism, innuendo, Highway. She is a good dancer. She can improvise.

The dancer delicately spider-crawls up the trailer wall.

And though the dancer has her choreography, the rules are loose. She has choice in her fingers. Even in her eyes. I've written it in, her choice. She can elect to wink. She is not a tiny dancer. She is quite tall, actually. Her hands in the yard. As tall as the trailer. When she reaches down into the yard, it is not like the hand of god; it is better: the hand of a dancer. 

The dancer improvises, with one finger, against the rocking horse.  

She does not ride the horse but rocks it. One finger. It conjures a certain kind of cowboy, a certain kind of yeoman farmer. Bootstraps, Fruited Plain.

This choreographic theme is called Hope:

The dancer stands two fingers on the chair and raises her pinkie and thumb.

The dance is all about conjuring. Discovery. Optimism. See, how she checks the mailbox.

With one finger, the dancer taps the mailbox, three times.

Three times, like a knock.

From her palm, magician-like, appears a small stone. She puts it with several others on the ground.

She is building a wall with the stones. A sort of wall, anyway. Really she just waters them.

But now it is tomorrow, and something changes in the dance: Today, no stone will come in the mail.

The dancer taps the mailbox, reveals an empty flash of palm.

Not a pebble, not even gravel. And the next day.

Taps, flash-of-palm, empty. Beat. Again.

Not even sand. Nothing to put in the wall. Nothing to water. Every day until now there's been a stone come in the mailbox.

And so is it a kind of a political show I have choreographed, a political dance?  How the stones keep arriving until they don't? The wall that is sort of a wall? How only one dancer can ride the rocking horse at a time, and even then, only with one finger?

Both the stones and the dance seem so much smaller onstage. And bigger. The grandeur, the squalor.

I’ve written dances for a lot of shows – music boxes, grange halls, but this one I can't quite get a handle on. Comedy or tragedy? You can't tell from the music; such a pastiche.

Maybe it's not really a political dance at all. Maybe it's all about the body. The body in space.  
 
The dancer traces a finger up the stage-right wall, then leaps her palm to the far wall, clearing the horse.

She dances it well, with abandon, minty ecstasy. Starlight Optimism. It's not easy. The syncopation, the compartmentalization. But it's beautiful, too, and when she hits it just right – the leap, clearing the horse, the gas tank, the grandeur, the squalor – stones or none, well, it just must feel so good in your body to pull off that kind of leap. 
 
And this set she’s leaping over, the setting of the dance.

This trailer, that is. A trailer, wintergreen green.
A symbol? A screen? A scrim?  
Perhaps the dancer herself is uncertain.
Is the trailer a grotesque or an idol? Perhaps it is Schroedinger's trailer: Until you open it up, it is both. 

This choreographic theme is called Cognitive Dissonance.

She moves on a line. On a point. Spins.

Is she an electron? An angel? 

You can see from the candor of her dance that the dancer doesn't want to condescend to the trailer. She doesn't want to be precious. She doesn't want to use fairy dust. Everyone involved in the dance has had to contend with the problem of representation of the trailer.  
 
Is it a symbol? A scrim? A jack-in-the-box?
The secret passage? A pasteboard mask? 


At some point, someone is going to have to knock on its door.

The place I live, it's small too. Doesn't everyone live in a small place? It's called a body. 

A Body, this choreographic theme is called.

The dancer moves at a slow 3. In a wave.

This one, Society.

She moves at a 6. In a writhe.

This one, Grief.  

She moves at a 1. Limp.

Her character has heard that the stones are really pebbles.  
That the stones are only gravel. 
That the stones are sand. 

Will the stones come again?

The dancer holds her fingers poised near the mailbox, waiting for the next bit.


I'm not sure I remember this next bit.

The dancer starts to tap the mailbox, but hovers. Gives a quivering shake. Grazes the surfaces of trailer, broken chair, rocking horse.

I have choreographed her movements. But she must dance them. Her fingers, her hands. Her lips, brows, eyes, high above the proscenium. The moon of the dance, so to speak. The stars. A kind of Starlight. A most beautiful light. Horizon. Even when it is only on a stage, only a dance.

This whole show, truth be told, is more than a little hypothetical. A work in progress. Let's call it an experiment. Horizon. She widens her eyes. Tingling with spin, gravel, and mint. Optimism Like jazz hands seized. An unpredictable experiment.  A knock on the door. But maybe, possibly, a great one. 



by Megan Grumbling

Reader: Douglas Milliken
Dancer: Sarah Foster

Original music, "Ours" by Simon Bjarning
in response to:

Maybe I should just sit here.  Maybe I should just wait for it to happen. I stop jumping. I mutter under my breath words I wouldn’t say in front of my mother. My not-so-carefully chosen clothing barely covers my thighs.  I become acutely aware of a sticky film of sweat underneath my knees.  

Water starts to drizzle through, under the edge of the window grate. The overhead florescent lights flicker and make an intermittent buzzing noise. Like the sound of distant cicadas on a dewy night, somewhere in the South where the trees are bigger than they should be, with low hanging arms covered in lace. My arms feel heavy. I’m too lazy to hold them up.

Maybe if I had done it differently. More determined - or from a different angle.  This would have gone by faster. If wall clocks were still a thing, I’d watch the passing of the seconds. Every new moment eats up the past. Like a sewing needle poking through tough fabric, over and over again. Poke. Poke. Tick. Tock. But I don’t have a clock, just a ventilation pipe. My jaw tenses.

I plunge my weight into the chair and push it to the corner. The back fell off months ago.  That’s one of the reasons why I did what I did and why I’m doing what I’m doing.  Too many broken things here. I tried to repair this sad little chair the way I repair everything - with candy cane striped tape and a good pun. I have many years of experience with inanimate objects - and the one thing that I know for sure is that they appreciate levity.

Then I remember Pone, my beloved rocking horse. He sways reluctantly in the corner. His mechanical black eyes speak of many lives lived and his rusty joints squeal of abuse. I know he wants to know why we’re sinking.  Why I allowed a perfectly fine mint and white motorhome to slide into my neighbor’s lake. Why I avoided Charlie and Yvette’s dinner invitations. Why I stole so many wrenches from the local hardware store. Why despite the tape, and the wrenches, and the jokes, and the fake repairs, we are still sinking.

But it’s too soon to explain anything to anyone, especially a rocking horse. For all I know, we will be floating here forever in an endless circular river. I tell him, in my most caring voice, “don’t spell part backwards, Pone. It's a trap.” That’s one of his favorites.  His laughter echoes against the outer walls, waves striking a tin roof.

I read once, in a very smart-seeming book, that you can control your emotions by controlling your face.  If I hosted a dinner party, that’s what I would talk about to entertain my guests. Then I’d make everyone at the table experiment with it. I’d tell everyone to make angry faces, and Charlie and Yvette’s brother would start screaming at each other.  I’d tell everyone to make frowny sad faces, and Joelle would sink into her chair, watery-eyed. I’d order a chorus of hyena laughs and we’d all be best friends forever.  I smile at the thought. I smile hard. And not just with my lips, but with my chin, and my eyes, and my teeth. Especially my teeth.

To match my body to my face, I take a wrench in one hand and walk around the perimeter of the room, slapping my bare feet on the linoleum and lifting my knees high like a soldier. A joyous dance to match a joyous face. I bang the wrench on the hot water tank and I spin and hop and spin and hop. I shimmy left  - I shimmy right.  Joy boils in my flesh.

Then the floor drops below me. The walls moan around me.

I crouch down and back up against the wall. I drop the wrench. I insert my index fingers into the creases of my knees. I find comfort in the slick proximity of skin on skin. The small window by the ceiling has darkened. Water seeps in along the upper edges. A pool of liquid creeps up from the lowest part of the floor. I hear it coming.

I wait. And smile.


​by Sarah Foster

BONUS! Sarah also brought a version of her writing with a short set of instructions for a willing volunteer to improv a short piece. Rhonda Morton (also a writer) volunteered:

Twilight at Dawn

1. Late Night Letter
Jay, you know I never watched the news
—Afghanistan, Iraq, I couldn’t point either out--
so when you went, it’s like you were lost.
Or no, it was like I couldn’t follow.
No, I was lost.

I can’t write it all in one place
so I spread it out and know it less.

Do you think your mother thinks I’m dead?
Even if she’d give them to me,
any stars of yours would be dark--
dark stars are useless. I want to shine.

2. At the Laundry
Heavy load of sweatshirts and stuff rolls up;
eventually though, they tumble, the basket turning,

working and working just to dry the clothes.
And I watch the whole pointless cycle
start again. Then it stops, jeans soaked.
No more quarters. I never have enough.
They gave us grades all through school--

math, social studies, even gym.
I mean, there’s got to be a way to know,
now, as adults, if you’re doing it right.
Even how straight our letters were got grades.

3. Another Letter
We had extra-curricular priorities, you and I;
Elle’s almost twelve, proof of that.

We had to hide from your mother back then;
even now, she can’t seem to find me.
Reality star, Elle says. Or some days,
Engineer for NASA. So I’m taking classes

on loans I might not ever be able to pay back.
Now I get what a thesis is, and I’m learning
elementary algebra. And what I’m made of.

We do homework in sync, mother and daughter,
each in silence, becoming what we can’t yet know.

4. Cleaning Up and Homing In
The laundry’s in its basket still, days later;
heaped up junk mail layers the kitchen table.
Elle’s shoes make walking the hall a hazard.
Yelling does no good. I begin with the clothes

then work my way back to the table. Then sit.
Objects finding their place eases me, even if
order’s hard to achieve and doesn’t last long.
Kitchen ready, I put on the pasta water.
Home, the fact and feeling of it, is a softening
I can make for Elle. It has to happen every day.
Memories, mom used to say, won’t cook the sauce.

5. Starting Homework in the Gloaming
I tower my textbooks against the window.

Sunset’s long over, fireball gone, but
above the black bulk of the hills
yellow highlights the important edge.

Gloaming, my new vocab, refers to being in-between.
One word embodies many meanings. Twilight,
on one hand, is darkness shouldering into
day; on the other, light blooms on the stem of night--
betweenness means living the transition.
You can’t trust words. So I start with math.
Equations. Proofs. Let’s see what x is this time.

6. Last Late Night Letter
In the small quite hours, I wake, and,
magically, feel cozy in my trailer, in my life.

Elle snores, but gently, the sound a comfort.
Let me go, Jay. Let me live, and I’ll, I’ll, I will
let you die. It’s been eleven years,
eleven years, six months. Through my window

a star I think is Venus gleams like a jewel.
Night-time is becoming my friend again.
Daylight’s no longer drudgery. I whisper

Move on, move on, only partly to you.
Embraced by star-shine, I snuggle in to sleep.


by Edward Dougherty

"Desperation" by Mary Weatherbee