“You have a watch repair appointment tomorrow night.” That’s the first cryptic message slipped through my cyber-mail slot by The Speakeasy. It’s a reminder that this is Prohibition we’re stepping into. From 1920-1933, buying drinks in a nightclub wasn’t just breaking the law but the Constitution. Shh! If the feds find out what we’re up to, we’re history.

We’re history anyway, since The Speakeasy’s immersive theater starts with period costumes. If you can’t deck yourself out in a flapper’s beaded dress and headband or a natty suit and fedora, you may be re-togged at the club.

But first we have to get in. Step One: meet a woman in red trenchcoat on a certain North Beach street corner and ask her a certain question. She directs us to a watch-repair shop nearby, where a surly bouncer guards the oh-so-secret entrance.

And suddenly it’s the Roaring ‘20s! Scantily clad girls are prancing behind ostrich-plumed fans on a cabaret stage, while roulette wheels and card games get under way in the casino, and dramas erupt in the bar. Through windows in the hallways of this maze we peep and eavesdrop: In the office, the club owner and his wife are arguing. In the dressing room, the star singer threatens to start a slapping match with a chorus girl.

The joint is jumping! Cocktails appear and disappear. So do gamblers, showgirls, and customers. An emcee tells punchy jokes, a jazz combo plays, drunks lurch, a reporter gets the boot. Sandwiches? No thanks. We watch the show for a while in the cabaret, stroll through the casino, and almost get caught up in a bar fight. The only thing missing is a cigarette girl.

My involvement in theater and storytelling goes back to childhood; I vividly remember my sister and me acting out our own version of the TV show The Roaring Twenties, singing about Prohibition and bathtub gin long before we had any idea what they were. Now that it’s almost a century since the U.S. passed the only Constitutional amendment it later repealed, The Speakeasy has a slightly different role from its namesakes. This is storytelling in action — a grownup version of the make-believe history my sister and I performed for our stunned parents. 35 local actors are paid (yesss!!!) to steer a nightly crowd of participant-spectators from the arm’s-length entertainment in the cabaret to the hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye action in the casino. I was fascinated by the 4-D script: how does each actor know when to move from one scene to another, with so many going on at once? How often does someone from the audience step into the drama, and then what? Crucially, can this crossover between theater, gaming, and 3-D real-time reality become as engrossing — even addictive — as its virtual counterparts?

What do you think?

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Every other time Roo and I have watched a movie together, I’m in the rocking chair and she’s on my lap. Our priorities — our interests in this pastime — barely overlap. Not this time. Kedi is a delightful documentary about the cats of Istanbul: not quite feral, not quite tame, they survive between the cracks. It reached out from the screen and grabbed her.

I wondered if Roo would be curious. I didn’t anticipate she’d be transfixed.

As soon as the meowing started, Roo hurried over to the screen: What’s going on? I, a creature of words, needed subtitles to understand the often profound observations and insights of the people who care for Istanbul’s cats; but evidently cats all speak the same language. When kittens came on, with their urgent baby mews, Roo craned, searching: Where are they?  I was reminded of my sister and me when our family got its first television, peering around the dials looking for the tiny people who must be inside.

Kedi is a pleasure whether or not you live with a cat, but if you do, it may be a unique domestic adventure.

As one Istanbul cat fan observed: Cats know there is a God. Dogs think people are God, but cats understand people are only the middlemen.

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The pen is mightier than the sword. As a writer, I’ve always loved that idea. Not that either swords or pens carry much weight these days. Even Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr used dueling pistols. Is Microsoft Word mightier than an automatic rifle?

The marchers against gun violence last weekend were hoping the people with pens in Washington are mightier than the people with swords. But those pen-wielders haven’t shown much respect for words. It’s ironic: here we are at the epicenter of English, the most universal language ever, and what are we doing with it? Advertising. Tweets. Cell phones that finish our sentences. A president with a third-grade vocabulary who uses language as a weapon. It doesn’t have to be true; just keep shooting. Like the slogans in George Orwell’s novel 1984: War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. In 2018, all of those contradictions are realities. Dystopian is the new normal.

Make no mistake about it: language matters. Last week when one GOP senator promised to hold a fulsome hearing, I wondered: Does he know that fulsome doesn’t mean full? It means stinky, or disgusting, or excessively flattering. Was he telling the truth on purpose? Language is often used as camouflage. Look at an academic journal article or scientific report. Is there information in there, or just hedging of bets? Look at our June ballot proposals. Is this a subtle form of voter suppression? I have to laugh when I hear the White House deny that the Russians hacked into our election results. Why would they bother, when they can get such a huge return on investment posting fake news on social media? Fluency in language is essential for critical thinking — Step One in telling fact from fiction. You know Facebook now has a link in those dots in the upper right corner where you can flag a story as fake news. The problem is our yearning to believe any story that confirms what we already think.

Paying attention to language is work. “Use your words” is not a skill humans are born with. We have to be taught to communicate by speaking, instead of hitting and hollering. Recently my friend Felix Justice asked some of us to remember being four years old. The memory that called up for me was, what a savage I was. My sister and I constantly tried to kill each other. Not that we understood killing. What we understood was power. Control. Just like the self-described grown-ups who run governments and gangs. There’s equality: In this economy, the White House, the Mafia, and the drug cartels speak the same language. Not English, to communicate. Money. The 21st century’s lingua franca for power. If you have it, you’re a winner. If you don’t, you’re a loser. When people squeeze the universe into a ball, as TS Eliot said, when they reduce the interactions between humans and all forms of life and energy into slogans, there’s no middle ground. No negotiation. No reaching across the aisle. For that, we need language.

A lot of outstanding writers came to English as a second language. Vladimir Nabokov. Joseph Conrad. Or because a band of conquerors forced their ancestors to learn it. I’m working with an Italian immigrant to North Beach right now, a retired restaurateur who’s turned to writing; he’s having a ball with English, piling up adverbs and adjectives and circumlocutions like frosting on a wedding cake. It’s a wonderfully rich tool. Many of the great bilingual Nigerian, Indian, and South African writers, among others, chose English so they could reach the widest possible audience. Some point out that it’s a double-edged sword: a gift of oppression. Some are amazed that we who were born with this gift appreciate it so little.

My favorite comment about that contradiction, that irony, that paradox, is by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. He was writing about Spanish, but as part of the international brotherhood of writers, I suspect he was thinking of English, too.

What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors . . .
They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then . . .
They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks . . . Wherever they went, they razed the land . . . But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here . . . our language. We came up losers . . . We came up winners . . . They carried off the gold and left us the gold . . . They carried everything off and left us everything . . . They left us words.

—    “Lost in the City,’ Memoirs, 1976

Originally presented as a meditation at the Church for the Fellowship for All Peoples, San Francisco, March 25, 2018.

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Along with the cold spell in San Francisco has come bad news from everywhere, it seems. This morning I ran across a poem that impressed me back in 8th grade and has stayed with me ever since: a useful reminder that a sense of proportion can be a lever to move the world.

Interlude III by Karl Shapiro

Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail
 
 And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing
 
 Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail
 
 And exquisite, I saw in it a thing
 
 That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote.
 
 It hung upon my finger like a sting.
 
 A leg I noticed next, fine as a mote,
 
 'And on this frail eyelash he walked,' I said,
 
 'And climbed and walked like any mountain goat.'
 
 And in this mood I sought the little head,
 
 But it was lost: then in my heart a fear
 
 Cried out, 'A life—why beautiful, why dead!'
 
 It was a mite that held itself most dear,
 
 So small I could have drowned it with a tear.

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My longtime friend Bob Whipple is a corporate consultant (and ace musician) who specializes in an often overlooked cornerstone of productivity, success, and satisfaction: trust. In his role as “The Trust Ambassador,” Bob makes a point of keeping up with research on his topic. If trust doesn’t sound to you like a topic that calls for much research, take a moment to think about our federal government, or international diplomacy, or how the TSA has changed air travel. Think about closed-circuit TV cameras, e-mail phishing, Internet passwords and retinal scans. Think about this photo, which I recently received from another friend, unfortunately with no source ID.

So I’m grateful to experts like Bob, even when he’s the bearer of bad news. His e-mail last week was full of disturbing data and observations. Here are his musings about recent trust research, reprinted by permission, with a link to the findings he cites. (Just one chart is reproduced here, since although the Edelman site enables sharing, the material is copyrighted.)

* * * * *

Every year at the end of January, Richard Edelman puts out his “Trust Barometer” which is a huge study of trust in 28 countries around the world. The actual report is something like 70 pages of data.

This year, as I read the comparison of trust in the different countries, I was hoping an oxygen mask would come down so I could breathe. There are hundreds of interesting and some very frightening statistics as you review the data. I will be sharing the information with my leadership class because trust is the most important part of leadership (IMHO).

[Edelman’s findings] show trust in 28 different countries as measured at the start of 2017 (end of 2016) and the start of 2018 (end of 2017). [If you compare] data from “Informed publics” . . . with the entire population, including uneducated people, . . . you can see the incredible drop in trust that occurred in the year 2017 in the USA. It was by far the greatest decline in any country they have ever measured in the history of Edelman’s work for the past 17 years. (Incidentally, the numbers given are a combination of trust in Business, trust in Government, trust in NGOs, and trust in the Media.)

From “2018 Edelman Trust Barometer” https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer

It is interesting to note that while trust declined in all four categories they measure in the USA, in China trust went up in all four categories. Here is the data for the number of percentage points lost or gained in the USA and China for 2017. As you read, keep in mind that changes in trust (up or down) of less than 5 points are routine and not worthy of explanation, but changes above 5 points have a specific cause that should be identified. Changes in the double digits are very rare and indicative of something major going on.

Business – USA lost 10 points while China gained 7 points

Government – USA lost 14 points while China gained 8 points

NGOs – USA lost 9 points while China gained 5 points

Media – USA lost 5 points while China gained 6 points

For informed publics, the USA was 6th from the top rated country out of 28 countries at the end of 2016. (The actual survey was taken from October 13 to November 16, 2016.) By the end of 2017 we have fallen to dead last in the world (normally Russia and Poland duke it out for the lowest trust country) and China is the highest rated country in the world for trust.

I am still trying to fathom the magnitude of the changes. I have been studying the Edelman data each year for the past dozen years. Every February I spend about 20 hours drinking in the data and updating my presentations on trust and leadership. This year, within the first 20 minutes it was obvious that we are living in a very different country now than we did in 2016.

So my friends, we still have much work to be done and some interesting times ahead as a nation. My best description to one of my cronies is that it feels like a toboggan ride down a mogul-infested slope blindfolded.

— Bob Whipple, “The Trust Ambassador” https://thetrustambassador.com/

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Incorporated, an organization dedicated to development of leaders. He speaks on leadership topics and the development of trust in numerous venues. He also teaches leadership and business classes at graduate universities. As a leadership coach and business consultant, he works with individual clients as well as large organizations such as government agencies, corporations, and The Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce. A highly successful leader at a Fortune 500 company for over 30 years, Mr. Whipple accomplished revolutionary change while leading a division of over 2000 people through the application of outstanding “people” skills.

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Did 2017 spit you out feeling demoralized, angry, confused, and/or frustrated? Quick, go see Man of La Mancha! Custom Made Theatre’s production of this marvelous show by Dale Wasserman (book), Mitch Leigh (music), and Joe Darion (lyrics) is much more than a nostalgia trip. It’s a rousing cheer for the bright side of humanity: not just love but honor and aspiration.

I had qualms about revisiting a show I’d loved 50 years ago when Richard Kiley first rode his imaginary Rosinante into New York’s Circle in the Square. When I saw Man of La Mancha again, decades later, at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, a thunder and lightning storm lit up the climax. Could a small local company do justice to a picaresque full-size musical on a stage the size of a San Francisco apartment, broken up by wooden beams, with the actors playing all the instruments?

Yes. Custom Made’s staging is a surprisingly good fit for this play-within-a-play set in a Spanish prison, where the Inquisition is breathing down Miguel de Cervantes’ neck and his manuscript for “Don Quixote” is a hostage. On the last preview night, the house was full, and so were our hearts. We laughed, we cried, and I can’t have been the only one itching to sing along with long-forgotten gems like “Little Bird” and “Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” as well as the now-legendary “Impossible Dream.”

OK, the production is a bit rustic. Not every supporting actor is excellent, although each of them excels at something. But Edward Hightower was born to play Cervantes/Quixote — swelling each moment with drama, pivoting in a breath from the mad old knight to his pragmatic creator. As the innkeeper, Anthony Aranda also is outstanding, and Rachael Richman makes a convincing Dulcinea. Best of all is the show itself: an inspiring, energizing reminder that human civilization has been stumbling over itself at least since Cervantes wrote this pioneering novel 400 years ago.

Life is not about winners and losers, Man of La Mancha reminds us. It’s about being true to our bravest, most generous selves:

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause.

Read about, or buy tickets to, Custom Made’s production here — running now through Feb. 17 at the Shelton Theater.

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For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

That line from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians has always haunted me. I can vividly remember lying awake when I was young, wrestling with my brain to know more: Who am I? What am I doing here? and What is God?

Now that I’m at the other end of life, I understand a truth I’ve learned from science as well as from just plain living. Human understanding is limited by human physiology. What a piece of work is a man, said Shakespeare, and it’s true. But what a piece of work is a dog’s nose. A mosquito’s flight. A whale’s sonar. We know in part, because part of existence is all that our human senses can detect, and our human brains can process. They’ve evolved to cope with the fraction of reality that’s essential to our survival.

We feel like we know and understand the world. But in fact, we live in metaphors. In fact, the sun and moon are not the same size, and stars are not candles in the sky, and a piece of wood isn’t solid. It’s mostly space, dotted with atoms flying faster than a mosquito. We treat it as solid because that’s how we perceive it, and because we have a practical need for it to be solid, as furniture or fuel or whatever.

As the world has become more global, I’ve been trying to be aware how different people’s metaphors are, according to the person, and even more, the culture. Westerners think villagers in country X are backward because they believe diseases are caused by demons, whereas we know they’re caused by germs. The villagers think we’re backward because we’re always washing our hands, when we should be praying or casting a spell. What matters more? If a metaphor is true, or if it works?

I spent Thanksgiving week in London and Barcelona. London is gearing up for Brexit, to leave the European Union, and Barcelona’s preparing for an election following the recent vote for their province of Catalunya to secede from Spain. I worried it would be crazy over there, maybe dangerous. But after the US, I felt like I’d left a place of chaotic insanity for a healthy safe atmosphere that I used to define as normal.

But my chaotic insanity is some people’s normal. Apparently there are American citizens who felt as threatened by President Barack Obama, or almost-President Hillary Clinton, as I feel by the current occupant of the White House, who to me is so threatening that I can’t call him the president of my country. I watch him gleefully dismantle economic recovery measures, and environmental protections, and just about every strand in the social safety net, and I see a crazy dangerous man who is deeply hostile to the values of community and justice that for me define my country. My expat friends in England told me that most of the world sees him, not me, as an accurate representation of my country: it’s not about community and justice, but warfare and profit, oppression and exploitation.

And I look at my cat, fighting the imaginary mice under the living room rug; and I wonder: Are they imaginary? Maybe in her metaphor, she’s keeping me safe from deadly demons.

So here we are, preparing to celebrate Christmas. The birthday of a man we know was not born on Dec. 25, whose coming was probably not announced by a new star, whose humble manger was not surrounded by adoring cows, donkeys, shepherds, and wise men, much less by falling snow; whose mother was probably not a virgin, nor visited by an angel. We celebrate a metaphor. You could say Christianity has perceptively linked the values of Jesus, from rebirth to nonviolent resistance and love, with the winter solstice, when the sun turns back in its path across the heavens, and daylight stops getting shorter, and we can trust that warmth will soon return, and lakes will thaw, and crops will grow, and life will be safer again.

I still hope that someday I will know and understand a larger reality than this. But right now my job is to be human, and I have to live by a metaphor, not a full knowledge of truth. And since this metaphor is incomplete, I cherish the values we celebrate at Christmas: the brave generosity, the community, and the commitment to justice which offer our best hope of keeping us, and life, and our world, safe and healthy.

Meditation for the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, San Francisco, December 10, 2017

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