Category: The Star of Happiness and the Helen Keller Project Blog

The Star of Happiness was first performed in July 2011 at the Under St Marks Theater as part of Horse Trade’s miniFRIDGE. Developed as a research and performance project, this one woman, two voice, three act play is a strange and wonderful amalgamation of my academic and performing lives, inspired and informed as much by books as by the mad mad artists of the East Village and Lower East Side.

The Helen Keller project Blog was conceived of in a conversation with the inimitable force that is Mark Fullmer who, when I said that I had done so much research on the subject that the performance could only hope to engage with a tiny portion of all the crazy shit I’ve learned since that fateful day when I happened to find a tiny paragraph that mentioned and then quickly dismissed Helen’s time on vaudeville, suggested that I create a blog. So, here it is the loosely autobiographical and quasi philosophical history of an idea.

Helen Keller on Smell, The Fallen Angel

[“SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL” is Chapter SIX of The World I Live In (originally published in 1908), a magnificent book that tells of sensations beyond seeing and hearing. It is also the book from which I took the heartbreaking preface that ends Helen Keller Tries To Tell You Her Story. This has been gently edited for apparent scanning errors and… Read more

Helen Keller Tries To Tell You Her Story (Despite Your Helen Keller Jokes)

On to the black stage she steps. You believe you hear her cane tap tapping, then stop. Papers rustle. Suddenly you are blinded by a brilliant light. The light, emanating from a lamp on her head like that of a miner, creates dark smudges of her facial features. Under the brilliant light and shadow face, you see what appears to… Read more

THE HAND OF THE WORLD: Helen Keller on Social Blindness

[From Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (1913). This text has been lightly edited for apparent scanning errors and hyperlinked by me] As I write this, I am sitting in a pleasant house, in a sunny, wide-windowed study filled with plants and flowers. Here I sit, warmly clad, secure against want, sure that… Read more

Helen & Friends @ Zuccotti Park: Occupy Wall Street 5-year anniversary

“ASK ME WHAT I THINK OF CAPITALISM” That was the sign I made and carried with me to Occupy Wall Street Sunday. We finally made it to Zuccotti Park, after the fact from the standpoint of many who think the movement of the physical place is dead. But it was exhilarating for me and my companions nonetheless. Besides me and… Read more

Helen Keller’s Vaudeville Q & A

  What is Miss Keller’s age? There is no age on the vaudeville stage.   Does Miss Keller think of marriage? Yes. Are you proposing to me?   Does talking tire you? Did you ever hear of a woman who tired of talking?   Do you close your eyes when you sleep? I guess I do, but I never stayed… Read more

The Play World: Helen Keller Writes About Vaudeville

[“The Play World” is Chapter 13 of Midstream: My Later Life, 1929, in which Keller describes her experience of vaudeville and the circumstances that led her to it. I lightly edited and hyperlinked it from a scan of the original.] THE picture was not a financial success. My sense of pride mutinies against my confession; but we are the kind… Read more