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.
Hands On Display
“I need not go into any particulars about Helen Keller. She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.”
-From Autobiography of Mark Twain, March 30, 1906
Mark Twain is a known exaggerator, and so if we discount him thirty… Read more
The Sea Spells
AT the end of each vaudeville act Helen and Annie allowed for questions from the audience. They ranged from the schticky:
Q: Does talking tire you?
A: Did you ever hear of a woman who tired of talking?
To the political:
Q: What do you think of President Harding?
A: I have a fellow feeling for him. He seems as… Read more
THINK!
The second startling Helen Keller quote I stumbled across lo those many years ago when I was a star-struck grad student taking classes with Derrida himself (really!) and thinking that being an academic was the shit, was also from the Story of My Life:
“A day or two afterward I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups- two… Read more
Everyone Has Heard of Helen Keller
Of course everyone has heard of Helen Keller. She has about as recognizable a name as anyone who has ever lived. Mark Twain, the most quotable of all Americans and the friend credited with giving Helen a lifelong taste for whiskey, said of her that she is “the most marvelous person of her sex who had existed on the earth… Read more
The Helen Keller project genesis
By consulting my journal, I find that I mention Helen Keller on Vaudeville for the first time on February 4 2009, nearly two years ago. Sad. Sometimes it takes me so long to get things going that it almost doesn’t matter by the time I do. Furthermore, I’m not proud of the fact that the mention of it is tucked… Read more