| When Animals Attack |
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Last fall, I spent two days in Guerneville, a small town an hour outside of San Francisco known as a seasonal resort area for hedonistic gay men. Luckily, autumn was off-season and the only people around were locals… consisting mainly of grey haired hippie ladies and pockmarked meth addicts. Sitting within the town’s lone coffeehouse, the Coffee Bazaar, I really took in all of Guerneville. It was like some strange twist on the small southern town’s along the Pearl River I spent time in as a child hunting with my father. Yet, somehow all the stuffy primitive Southern values of those places had been erased. At the coffeehouse, icky memories of hunting as a child came flooding back to me. Often, my father and I would sit silent for hours in the woods atop a deer stand. I had no real desire to kill cute furry animals but I took the opportunity to bond with dad. If I’d had it my way, the time would have been spent playing video games or shopping with my mother. I really hated hunting. But, in a town like Guerneville, you can almost imagine the locals doing a bit of animal outreach; petting an elk or leaving leftovers out for raccoons. They are champions of the forest creatures. Comparing them with my dad and his hunting friends, the ultimate switcheroo occurred to me: What if the animals of the forest decided to turn the tables on the hunters?  Ode To Forest Friends was written at the Coffee Bazaar in Guerneville. The story was inspired by childhood hunting excursions with my father, Walt Disney’s Bambi, and George Orwell’s satirical allegory, Animal Farm. I’ve always been fascinated by Animal Farm’s use of animals as veiled references to Stalinism and the book’s escalating sense of dread. I used the book to foresee how animals would go about declaring war on a group of hunters. Forest Friend’s links together songs from a mixtape I made called Mount; a selection of hunting and animal related pop tunes. The idea here was to take the tone and lyrics of the songs from Mount and use them to tell a short, simple story. Though the songs have little in common stylistically, their differences hopefully aid story progression. The first few songs on Ode To Forest Friends bring to mind a fun fairy-tale, but about half way through things become much darker. When the Eastern Bluebird questions his livelihood, the nightmares begin. I used several of my friends to voice the show’s hunters including Sam Sharkey as Cody, Bobby Barber as Cody’s Dad, and my boyfriend Joshua Grannell as Ed. The format here is a progression on the type of show I’ve done before (Happy, Happy, Happy) where music and dialogue mingle together. It’s also the type of show I’ll be doing a lot more of in the future. With any luck, my next Guerneville getaway will inspire another story based on long forgotten childhood memories.  |
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